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Creating a family of content using pillar pages and topic clusters
Author : Andy Kehoe, Marketing Executive at Stone Junction
27 August 2021
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There were around 1.8 billion websites online when you began reading this article. By the time you finish reading it, there will have been another 550 launched. According to W3Techs, 62.3% of all of them are in English, with Russian, the next most popular language, only representing 7.5%. All this means that standing out is harder than ever before, explains Andy Kehoe, Marketing Executive at Stone Junction – the first PR agency for the Fourth Industrial Revolution.
Ironically, owned content is more important than ever, despite these vast numbers of sites; because the business that wins the battle for SERPs (Search Engine Results Page) domination also tends to win the battle for the customer.
As a result, the way you manage your position and appearance in SERPs is even more important than ever in attracting customers. Optimising your written content to rank for long-tail keywords isn’t as effective as it once was, due to the sheer amount of sites you now have to compete with.
A better to way to attract and convince potential customers is to use a pillar page and cluster system to shed light on your niche, allowing you to be found, trusted and chosen. But what does that really mean?
How Google search queries are changing
Generally, Google search is becoming more demanding – people want to find exactly what they’re looking for, even more quickly. For example, if you’re searching for an electric motor, you’re not going to type ‘motors’ into Google.
You might instead search for something like, ‘hazardous area IEC motors fast delivery’. You might even just type ‘W22Xec’ if you are clued up enough to already know exactly what you want.
This change in search habits is, in part, due to the sheer amount of content now available across the web. As users, we have to submit more accurate queries to find what we actually want, and filter out the riff-raff, leaving only the quality content that best answers our query.
Furthermore, 20 percent of Google searches are now conducted by voice. Clearly, these searches are primarily performed using a smart speaker or, sometimes, a phone when the user is on the move. Consequently, they are less likely to be B2B queries and more likely to be people looking for music or facts on a smart speaker or local shops and facilities on a phone.
But don’t let that fool you into thinking it’s not important to a scientific, engineering or technology business. You will be playing catch up on voice search in a couple of years if you don’t act soon.
What are pillar pages and topic clusters?
A pillar page promotes a core concept, such as a product or service, and you normally want it to rank for a short-tail search term. Your choice of pillar page and topic clusters should be keyword-led, to successfully rank for your topic.
So, say you want to rank for ‘3D printers’, because this is ultimately what you are selling, your pillar page might be focused on the keyword, ‘industrial 3D printers’.
The topic clusters would then be a series of pages focused on lower traffic, longer-tail keywords, branching from that core phrase, which would work to support your pillar page. For instance, you might choose ‘metal 3D printer’, ‘additive manufacturing’, ‘3D printing materials’, ‘commercial 3D printer’ and so on.
How to create a pillar page
Image courtesy of WEG
Because the pillar page is the anchor for every other piece of content you are going to produce, it needs to be a good, informative, and engaging piece of content. Think about Google’s guidelines for its human evaluators; the page should be beneficial to the user, and it should embody Google’s EAT acronym (Entertaining, Authoritative and Trustworthy).
This is especially true if the page is considered to be YMYL (Your Money or Your Life) content, which is to say one that could potentially impact a person’s future happiness, health, financial stability or safety. Among such pages, according to Google, are news pages covering science or business or technology. Sound familiar?
A pillar should have a strong introduction to what you are going to present and might even include a table of contents which delves into the different subsections of your niche.
You should view the introduction to the page almost like the hook in an article or presentation – it’s the thing that will convince your audience to view the rest of the content.
Pillar page design and content
As the inclusion of a table of contents suggests, your pillar page should have clear sections which are easy to distinguish. If this is not done using a table of contents, with the headings hyperlinked to each section, it should be done in a visual way that clearly tells the reader when they are entering a new subsection of your topic.
One way of creating a pillar page is to use the skyscraper technique, which means taking all the high-ranking pages in your niche and creating a new page which does everything they do, but better. So, include everything they have, obviously in your own words, from your own perspective and with your own insight and then make sure you add more.
If the top-ranking page has 600 words, go beyond that, and write 1000, crucially covering every possible angle on your topic that the original pages have missed and continually bringing focus towards your own USPs and offerings.
And don’t be shy when adding content to your pillar page. Generally, a pillar page with lots of heavily researched, accurate information will provide you with a higher rank and more opportunities to create content in the future.
Why pillar pages are effective
Pillar pages help Google to sift through the mountain of already existing content on your topic. Remember those 1.8 billion websites? Well, another 240 or so have gone online in the time it’s taken you to read this far. It’s not easy to cope with that much data, even if you are Google.
This means that it’s essential that you tell Google exactly what your page or your website is about. A pillar page presents a search engine with an easily crawlable topic hierarchy allowing it to determine exactly who you are and who your reader should be.
A pillar page also represents the ideal opportunity to create additional internal links, within your site. For example, for every smaller cluster page you write, you should always link back to the original pillar page – and from your pillar page to the cluster content.
Image courtesy of Nexa3D
What are topic clusters?
Cluster content focuses on narrower topics, or subtopics, which relate to your pillar page content. For example, a pillar page might discuss edge computing as a whole and then a cluster article might look at edge computing and 5G more closely.
Think of topic clusters like a tree – you have the big trunk, which is your main foundation, or pillar page. Then, you have smaller topic clusters and informational queries that branch off, all designed to boost your presence in the search rankings.
The most obvious way of achieving this is to include cluster articles about your products or services. But don’t forget that EAT acronym, it means these articles shouldn’t be brochures but rather informative and relatively unbiased pieces of journalistic content. So, contextualise the product content with thinking about the industry – imagine you are writing about your product for your favourite magazine.
That said, topic clusters don’t have to be directly related to what you’re selling, but they should stay in the same topic area and could answer smaller questions your audience may have about your niche.
By covering every base, you are more likely to show up in search when people look for the core phrases related to what you do.
How to find ideas for topic clusters
There is a plethora of keyword tools out there that you can use to find potential content ideas to build clusters around your pillar page. In most keyword tools, you can enter your main pillar page phrase and they will present you with hundreds of suggested semantically related keywords, questions and phrases each of which you can potentially write a whole article on.
Simply typing your pillar keyword into Google search will present you with a dropdown list of phrases that are regularly searched for. If you hit enter and scroll to the bottom of the SERPS, you will find even more related terms that that people have been searching for.
But, and this bit is crucial, remember that a search engine is a lagging indicator of human behaviour and thinking. This means that the experts in your business will know more about the bleeding edge of your industry than a search engine; because not enough people have yet searched for the truly innovative ideas to allow Google, or your search tool of choice, to understand and categorise them.
Consequently, if you want to show up higher in your niche than the 1.8 billion sites already online, you also need to apply real human insight and cutting-edge thinking in your content. In fact, if you want to beat the 550 websites that have gone online since you started reading this article, you are going to need at least a sprinkle of the same.
Andy Kehoe is a Marketing Executive at Stone Junction, a specialist technical PR agency delivering international and digital PR and marketing services for scientific, engineering and technology companies. He supports Everton, but don’t blame him for that.
If you email him and ask for a pillar page template, he will send you one – totally free. You can’t say fairer than that, can you? He might also ask for your opinion on Rafa Benitez, but you can’t win them all.
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