Creating a pillar page is an essential part of any content strategy. It is a comprehensive piece of long-form content that provides an overview of a key topic and links to related cluster pages. Pillar pages should be specific to your industry and support one of your products or services in the awareness stage of the buyer's journey. They should also be perennial and wide, but not too wide, so that they can be divided into several supporting subtopics.
The first step in creating your pillar page is to choose a central theme. Conduct keyword research using a platform like DemandJump to identify your main topic and related keywords. Then, brainstorm blog topics based on more specific keywords related to the broader topic. The thematic group model, introduced by Hubspot, is particularly useful if blogs are an important part of your inbound marketing strategy.
Topic groups are groups of related content tightly organized around a central topic in a hub-and-spoke model. Each group contains a center pillar page (the center) and is surrounded by group pages (the spokes). Think about the main interests and challenges of the people in your core audience to give you ideas for the content of the pillar page. However, sometimes both support and support pages can rank for the same target keywords if the quality of your content is significantly better than that of your competitors or if there is a lack of competition in your niche. The basis of a topic group is the pillar page, while all related subpillars and supporting blog pages link to it.
The cluster pages that the column page links to should also link back to the column page. The pillar pages should be exhaustive in their explanation and should be framed as an initial piece of content. The final step is to promote your pillar page by defining your content marketing tactics to gain high-quality backlinks. This can help you get more backlinks as people share the content of your pillars and link back to your web pages. Now that you understand how pillar pages and topic groups work in SEO, let's see how you can apply this model to your content strategy. Check out this quick guide to Hubspot for some great visualizations.
