What Is a Content Pillar?

The main goal of a website is to show users how your business can meet their needs. By writing articles following the guidelines of Google’s algorithms, also known as SEO (Search Engine Optimisation), users searching keywords related to your business can see your website on search results.

However, when you’re writing content every day, sometimes you need help to come up with ideas. Today we’ll introduce content pillars, a tool to help you organise your brand’s communications, generate new ideas, and produce engaging content for your readers. 

What Is a Content Pillar?

If you are part of a small team, you’re likely to be responsible for many marketing tasks that must be completed simultaneously. When your time is limited, a content pillar strategy is the key to making your job easier. But what is a content pillar?

A content pillar is a tool to help organise your marketing communications by creating clear guidelines or directions for the story your brand wants to communicate. Simply put, it is a content strategy that involves planning the topics related to your brand that you want to share with customers. You may also study your competitors to see which content gets the most engagement and which gets less. Doing so allows you to see what types of pillars other businesses use and in what proportions.

What Are the Different Types of Content Pillars?

Before we go through the types of content pillars, let’s clarify here that you may sometimes feel that you should refrain from reposting old content, but in fact, it’s likely to still be new for many readers. Content like FAQs, for example, can be posted more often so that new customers can easily find important information about your products and services as they search. Therefore, you don’t need to avoid posting duplicate content; you can simply adjust the original content to make it look new.

So, now that we know what a content pillar is, let’s look at the types of content pillars and what you should do to make your content plan as organised as possible.

In general, content pillars can be divided into 5 categories as follows:

1. Gags: daily quotes or messages that are fun for readers to engage with.
2. Trend/Occasion: a trend or special occasion. This may involve performing real-time marketing or picking up on current trends.
3. Entertainment: for example, engaging games or quizzes.
4. Brand: presenting stories about the brand and its products or services. 
5. Campaign: information about campaigns, promotions, or activities.

Once you have the content pillars that suit your brand, you can decide what category you should post the most and in what proportion; for example, campaign 50%, brand 20%, trend/occasion 10%, and gags 10%.

With the appropriate proportions, you can then plan how often you will post in a month or on what days in the week, e.g., if you plan to go with 20 posts/month, you need to decide how many to post per week, as well as figure out the best day and time to post.

Content pillars can be adjusted as appropriate depending on your focus. For example, high-end brands may focus on brand content 50% of the time to showcase the beauty and luxury of their products, while other pillars would be posted less.

Create Pillar Pages for Better SEO Ranking.

A pillar page is a web page of content covering a particular subject, with links to related content on your website. Once you have decided on your content pillars, you can create pillar pages so that users can access more content through the links on the page more conveniently.

Pillar pages help organise your content. They are the central web page of a topic cluster and outline the topics the brand wants to communicate. The pillar page aggregates internal links to various pages within the website related to the main topic.

Creating a pillar page benefits you in terms of enabling your website visitors to have a clear overview of the content you want to present. And if they need more in-depth information, the pillar page allows easier access to that content.

Not only do pillar pages benefit the business, but they also significantly impact SEO. A pillar page allows Google’s algorithms to see the connection between the content on your website and the topics you want to present. This connection boosts the website’s credibility, which makes your website rank higher on the search engine results pages.

There are 3 common types of pillar pages: 

1. Topic Pillar Page

These pages gather a list of content and internal links navigating to other related articles. They look like a box where users can click to read more interesting content. This design creates a visually appealing website.

2. Product & Service Pillar Page

This pillar page showcases the brand’s products and services and primarily focuses on providing links to promotional content.

3. Guideline Pillar Page

This type of pillar page provides knowledge for the readers, such as how-to guides or a content summary that is directly or indirectly related to business. This kind of content usually receives a positive SEO response as it provides value to the reader.

Summary

Content pillars allow you to create interesting and valuable content for readers while helping you achieve your brand’s goals. Content pillars help you effectively plan your content and make it a powerful medium to convey your values to your target audience. In addition, a pillar page increases the chances that Google will push your website to the top of the first results page.

If you need help designing a content strategy or with any other aspect of digital marketing, contact Primal. We are a leading SEO company in Thailand with a team of marketing experts ready to help you achieve your business goals.