The SEO Pillar Page Strategy
So, everyone has been telling you for ages that you need to do this thing called SEO on your website in order to get found on Google. Maybe you’ve hired a company through fiverr or Upwork in the past to work on your website’s SEO, or even tried it yourself, but nothing has worked. You think to yourself, there has to be a better SEO strategy out there! I hate to break this to you, but doing some keyword research is not enough. And even worse, many “SEO experts” that you can find for cheap online will build tons of spammy backlinks coming into your website. While relevant backlinks can help increase your website’s authority, building too many too quickly or links that come from spammy websites can actually hurt you more than help! Focussing on a comprehensive SEO pillar page strategy is going to be FAR more effective in helping you to get leads, because it focuses on the customer!
What is a Pillar Page?
Pillar pages are also known as content pillars. These are core service or product based pages on your website designed and created to provide as much information and value on that specific core “pillar” as possible. Pillar pages are often used as a broader category that you can later create sub category pages under called “cluster pages”.
The SEO pillar page strategy has been around for years and is widely considered the most effective SEO strategy from a content perspective. Pillar pages provide you with a comprehensive system to easily outline everything that you offer as well as provide easy website navigation once fully executed.
Examples of Pillar Pages
You will see examples of pillar pages on most established service based businesses’ websites. Let’s outline a few examples. Let’s say you are a drug rehab center. One example of a pillar page may be “detox”. In this case you would want to create a very detailed and informative website page about your detox program, how long detox takes, how much detox costs, anything your client should know before attending a detox program, and all of the individual types of drugs or alcohol that you can help people detox from. These individual pages are what’s known as topic cluster pages, but more on that later! Another example of a pillar strategy would be if you are a dentist or orthodontist, you may offer dental emergency services. Create a very detailed page outlining every FAQ about emergency dental work.
Why Pillar Pages Are an Effective SEO Strategy
The SEO pillar page strategy is so effective because it systematically provides an outline for every service that you offer. By creating these pillar pages for your products and services and then breaking them down further into cluster pages, you are creating high quality educational content around everything that your customer is searching for online! I like to think of these pillar and cluster pages as employees that work for you 24/7 for free. Your customers are searching for your help around the clock. If you don’t create specific pages that are designed with your customer in mind around everything that you offer, they will not be able to find you!
How To Outline A Pillar Content Strategy For SEO
Outlining a pillar content strategy for your website can be a very fun process! Not only will outlining this help you to have a much more clear understanding of how to organize the content on your website, but you can use this strategy to create content for video platforms like TikTok and YouTube as well as images for social media. Here are a few questions from our onboarding process with new clients that you can use to outline your own for your website.
- What are all of the services/products that you offer?
- What are all of the reasons that someone would come to you?
- What are the pain points that your customers struggle with?
- What location are your customers in? (City & State)
- What are the top 25 most frequently asked questions that you get about your products/services?
- What sets you apart from your competition?
Turning Your Pillar Pages into Cluster Pages
After all of your pillar pages have been created, it’s time to break them down further. This process is called cluster pages, and essentially we’re creating individual pages or sub categories that fit within the main pillar. In the image example, you can see a very detailed pillar and cluster strategy that we created for this client. In this example, “drug rehab” was our initial pillar page. We then broke that down into individual clusters.
Depending on your industry, this can be broken down several times. For instance, drug rehab is a very general term. This could be broken down into individual categories of drugs like Benzodiazepines or Opioids. You could also consider these as sub clusters. Each of those sub clusters, could then be broken down even further.
Internal Linking Is The Cluster Page Strategy’s Secret Sauce
So now that you have outlined and started creating your pillar and cluster pages, you need to tie them together! Internal linking is a very underutilized aspect of SEO that is very important. Within each of your pillar pages, you should link to all of the related cluster pages using the target keyword for that individual page. For instance we have a detailed resource on drug rehab SEO that you can click to learn more. All of your cluster pages should also link back into your main pillar page. These internal links pass page authority and relevancy from one page to the other. It also makes for a very user friendly experience which keeps your customers on your website longer.
Where to Promote Your Pillar Pages and Cluster Pages
After you have created a new page, you’re going to want to promote it! Promoting these pages will not only get more eyeballs onto the services that you offer, but it will help to get your new page indexed faster on Google. You can learn more about how to do this in this video.
Best places to promote a new website page:
- Your Google my business
- Your email list
- Social media pages
- Relevant Facebook pages
- Relevant Subreddit communities
- Quora questions
- Promote the pages with Facebook Ads
Contact Socialty Pro for Nationwide Website SEO services
At Socialty Pro, we take content marketing to a whole different level. Our mission is to take the tedious task of of search engine optimization for you and turn it into an essential and fun asset that works for you 24/7! Our team has years of experience with search engine optimization and have taken businesses from zero to generating leads daily. We’re a team that is truly passionate about SEO and digital marketing that know exactly how to get you results. Contact us today for a free SEO consultation to discuss how you can grow your business online.
