The Pillar Strategy is a Powerful Tool for Content Marketing

A gold standard SEO method for your website.

Every website content strategy needs a strong sense of purpose and direction.

Otherwise you just flail around like one of these dancing inflatable balloons.

Enter the pillar strategy!

This gold standard SEO method for websites uses content pillars and topic clusters to give your site structure and makes it easy to navigate.

And my favourite part of this strategy? You don’t have to be a content marketing expert or writing extraordinaire.

Anyone can use this method to have their websites ranking on search engines.

This is especially useful for time-poor small biz mums, like me! 🙋🏼‍♀️

What is the pillar strategy?

You have a “pillar” piece of content. It is a centralised hub that every other piece in your topic cluster will point towards.

Topic clusters are all the subtopics based on that pillar content piece.

This pillar and topic cluster strategy provides a clean structure to your website that search engines love!

Google (and other search engines) can easily crawl your site and identify your niche. This tells them that you are providing value for readers and are an authority in that area. Which means…..🥁drum roll….you will rank on search pages!

How to use the pillar strategy.

A pillar piece of content provides a broad overview of your topic using a short-tail keyword.

Let’s use “Fit Mums” as an example (this is a fictional website).

Crystal of Fit Mums has a wellness program for postpartum mums that she wants to sell. It focuses on the physical, emotional and nutritional wellbeing for new mums.

She has developed several “pillar pieces” of content for her website, that all point towards this exercise program.

Fit Mums Pillar Content:

• A page on postpartum exercise. (postpartum exercise is the short-tail keyword)
• A page on the importance of nutrition in the postpartum period.
• A page on emotional and mental wellbeing in the postpartum period.

Crystal from Fit Mums has created informative and engaging pages on these topics that sit in her website’s menu. But she could have just as easily published these as long-form blog posts. Either option works for the pillar strategy.

Side-note: if you use long-form blog posts for pillar content, you can use the short-tail keywords to create categories for your blog. For example:

• postpartum exercise
• postpartum nutrition
• postpartum emotional/mental wellbeing.

The next step is to develop topic clusters.

Topic clusters use long-tail keywords to create content that supports your pillar piece. Think of them like subtopics all pointing back to your hero content piece.

Let’s use postpartum exercise to brainstorm a topic cluster.

Because we know all about our ideal customer, where they hang out and what they need we are able to come up with a gazillion ideas for our topic cluster.

The easiest way is to identify any questions they would have around that topic.

We are looking at new mums and exercise…so what would they ask?

• When is it safe to return to exercise after having a baby?
• What precautions do I need to take when exercising postpartum?
• How can I exercise when breastfeeding?
• Tips on fitting in exercise around a newborns schedule?
• What sports-bra can I wear for exercise that I can easily breastfeed?
• Can you return to running after having a baby?

There are so many more questions! Each answer can form one or more blog posts, each linking back to your main pillar piece — the page on postpartum exercise.

And remember, each pillar piece of content is leading directly to the product or service you want to sell. Cha-ching! 🤑

There you have it. A simple and powerful strategy that is gold-standard SEO practice for your website.

Quick, easy steps to a compelling content strategy!

• Develop your product or service sales page.
• Create 3–4 pillar pieces of content that point to the sales page.
• Brainstorm your topic clusters for each pillar piece.

Bonus tip

Repurpose your amazing content (pillars and topic clusters) into social media posts, videos, podcasts, emails, guides and so much more.

Seriously, repurpose! It is the best time saver ever.

Rachel Maree is a content specialist helping small biz owners master their content marketing strategies, content writing and more! You can learn more or hire her here.

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