What Are Pillar Pages?

Date: 11/10/2024

Long-form content marketing

So, think of the wheel of a bicycle just for a second, you have a lot of spokes, all leading to a central hub to support the wheel on the bike.
Well, this is a bit the same for “pillar content marketing” in that it’s the central hub, the part to which everything connects.

Now, suppose you hire the right web developer and SEO team- in that case, you will use on-page SEO methods, including internal links, to ensure your website is optimised for the keywords your business wants to improve its organic search engine optimisation for.

Reaching the top of Google.co.uk

It used to be, let’s say, seven or eight years ago, that a website designer could sometimes design a website for a business that’s operating in a low-competitive business sector and, with no ongoing SEO work, reach the top of Google.co.uk within a few months.
So, why did that happen?

Well, often, it’s because the business operates in a low-competition sector, meaning that not many businesses have invested in SEO services for that industry.

This means that, let’s say, a well-designed WordPress website, with well-written content marketing and good on-page SEO, could sometimes cut through straight to the first page of Google.co.uk.

Fast forward to 2024

Now, things are much different; across the U.K., countless web design businesses and digital marketing agencies work for their clients to help get them onto page one of Google.

Years and years of SEO graft have therefore, gone to improving the on-page and off-page SEO for many businesses.
This means that the bar, which is the standard of SEO to beat, is now much harder and to get any business on page one, whether a solicitor or a hotel is now hard work.

This is where many businesses have developed marketing strategies that now involve using “pillar content”.

This is to clearly demonstrate to Google’s algorithm that business are the experts when it comes to talking about that product or service.
Businesses all over the U.K., therefore, if they want to get on page one of Google.co.uk, must now produce work that clearly shows they know about “Google E-EAT” and how to write white hat content marketing.

Google E-EAT
Expertise, Experience, Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness

It’s essential that when a business produces a piece of evergreen content marketing or produces a piece of pillar content, their work is top quality; that an expert has written it. The work must, therefore, demonstrate Google E-EAT.

To do this, leading web design agencies must work hand in glove with the experts within the client’s business. Suppose it is a solicitor practice, just as an example- in that case, the web developers and the copywriters must now work with many of the most experienced solicitors within that business to produce good quality content marketing.

If you want your business to rank higher than a direct competitor, then Google’s algorithm must deem your business’s content marketing to be better.

So, work with the company’s experts to add high-quality and useful text to your website.

Google and the first index of a new company website.

Walk into a new shop or restaurant; it only takes a few seconds to get a first impression of the business, are we right?

Well, this is how the search engines work. Google will crawl and index your company website, and the first indexation of your website by Googlebot is very important.

The reason is that this is where Google will then decide where to rank the business. Is the website excellent and should, therefore, rank on page one of Google.co.uk straightaway after indexation?

Should the business be ranked on page 7?

Or is the website entirely made up of duplicated text and poor on-page SEO, so it shouldn’t be indexed on Google at all?
These are the questions that Google’s algorithm will ask.

This is why it’s important to hold off on launching your website until you know you have put in your best effort in terms of writing the text for your new company website. So do make sure that your web designers write white hat, high quality content marketing.
One way of doing this and improving your business’s on-page SEO from the get-go is to add quality pillar content.

Pillar pages and cluster pages

So, it’s important to create evergreen content marketing, or “pillar pages,” and then link related blog posts to that page.
For example, your main piece of pillar content might be 7,000 words and take a very long time to create.

You should aim for you Google Analytics account to show a low bounce rate, high on-site time by shoppers.
Then, you might write a blog post about a similar topic, say once every month, and then internally link back to the pillar content marketing. Just make sure that all of this work is done in a white-hat way.

Covers a topic in-depth, very different from a main product page or landing page

So, a company website’s main page advertises a product or service you sell. It doesn’t need a high word count; it just needs to describe the product or service accurately.

However, a piece of pillar content marketing is different; it’s your business’s opportunity to show that you are the experts at what you’re talking about and that you know your stuff. Google’s Knowledge Graph will be used to see how well-written the article is.

Google RankBrain

Then, Google will use “Google RankBrain” and its AI to see how engaged the shoppers are with the work.

• Are they spending a long time reading it?
• Are they clicking to read more pages?
• Is the shopper engaged?

You can monitor these statistics using Google Analytics, which will tell you how high the bounce rate is and what the time on site for each page is —these are really useful metrics that your web designers and SEO company should monitor.