(Welcome to our three-part series on supercharging your small business blog. Today’s post, Part 1, focuses on “pillar content.” Stay tuned for weekly installments!)
In architecture, pillars support a building and keep the roof from crashing down on your head. In small business blogging, they … well, they kind of do the same thing, actually.
You have a blog. (You do have a blog, right?) You know that it’s a handy marketing tool that connects you to your audience on a more personal level, drives traffic to your website, and when used properly, can boost your search engine rankings.
In other words, you know how important it is to push out content on the regular. Thing is, you’re bound to run out of ideas sooner or later.
Enter pillar content.
A pillar post is a big piece of content that’s basically going to be the foundation for your other, smaller pieces of content.
What Does Pillar Content Look Like?
A pillar post is usually an in-depth guide to a particular subject. Let’s say you sell baking tools. A good pillar post would be something like “A Beginner’s Guide to Baking.”
Just from the title alone, you can already tell that pillar content is going to cover a lot of ground. Maybe you want to start with a section describing different baked products: cookies, cake, candy and pie. Remember: This is only one section, so you’ll want to keep descriptions short, and you’ll want to throw in classic examples that people will be familiar with.
In the next section, you may want to talk about ingredients. Let’s start with the basics: flour, sugar, fat, leavening and salt. Again, keep the descriptions short, tell your audience their different roles in baking and list a few examples for each.
You can see where this is going.
A Fountain of Blog Posts
Where you go after publishing your pillar post solves the problem of running out of blog posts.
Your next blog posts should be detailed expansions on all the content you’ve already covered in the pillar content. You could, for example, write next about basic types of cookies and how to make them. You could write another blog post about the 13 classic cookies that every baker needs to know how to make. After that, you can write about how to put personal twists on the classics, and so on.
Exhausted the cookie jar? Write about ingredients next. Let’s talk about sugar! What are the different types of sugar, and how do they function differently from one another? What are their special characteristics, and can you substitute one for the other?
As you can see, pillar content can set you up for a whole year.
The SEO Benefits of a Pillar Post
Pillar content is wildly shareable and a wonderful way to get backlinks. Do it right, and you’ll have dozens of bloggers reposting it on social media and linking to it on their own blog posts.
A pillar post is also a great way to automatically interlink your website, too. After creating expansions on each of the sections, you can write a little note at the end saying something like, “Click here to read our detailed guide on cookies/cakes/sugar.”
Just remember: Your expansion should also link back to the pillar post.
Last but not the least, pillar content is a great anchor for all those keywords you want to rank for. Remember that Google not only looks at specific keywords — it also looks at how many related, relevant keywords you have surrounding the main ones.
Ready to craft your content marketing strategy? Mischa Communications can help you build your brand from the ground up — supports included! Contact us today and let us know what you need.