Pros And Cons Of Pillar Content For Your Blog
When we talk about successful Blogging Strategies, Pillar Content is something that is bound to come up over and over again.
The simple reason for this, of course is that it works and we would be foolish to not to include it as part of our content strategy.
Pillar content is longer form content that is known to rank extremely well in Google. It takes a broad area or topic within a niche and covers it in great detail, allowing the reader to understand the entire topic in great detail by the end of the article.
You can rank for a great number of keywords with Pillar Content and it sets up a ton of other spin off articles to be written around it although it can take a lot of time and expertise to create it.
It is not just Bloggers and large websites that can benefit from Pillar Content, it is a strategy that can be used by local, national and international business alike and in this article we will look at the pros and cons of having pillar content for your website.
What Is Pillar Content
Pillar Content essentially takes an entire niche or a large category within that niche and explains everything a beginner would need to know about that topic in great detail.
If a standard blog post is 2,000 words, a review is 1,000 words and a Question Answer post is 1,500 words, Pillar Posts can range anywhere from 3,000 words to 6,000 words and even more than that.
Pillar Posts Often have Titles Including phrases like ‘Ultimate Guide’ & ‘Everything You Need To Know’ and that is precisely what a pillar post should offer to it’s readers.
Example Of Some Websites And Their Pillar Posts
Niche: Golf
Potential Pillar Posts:
Guide To Golf Drivers – Everything You Need To Know
Guide To Golf Balls – Everything You Need To Know
Golf For Beginners – A Complete Guide To Playing Golf
Niche: Marketing
Potential Pillar Posts:
The Ultimate Guide To SEO – What To Know And How To Do It?
Ultimate Guide To Facebook Ads – How To Convert Potential Clients
Online Advertising Ultimate Guide – Everything you NEED to Know
Niche: Travel
Potential Pillar Posts:
Ultimate Guide To Visiting Europe – Everything You Need To Know
South America Travelling Guide – Your One Stop Shop For Visiting The Latin American Countries
Travelling To Asia – Everything You Need To Know
Niche: Local Beauty Salon
Potential Pillar Posts
Ultimate Guide To Getting Your Nails Done
Ultimate Guide To Hair Treatment Options In Florida
Guide To Face Treatment Options Available To You
Niche: Solicitor
Potential Pillar Posts:
Ultimate Guide To Employment Law
Ultimate Guide To Litigation
Ultimate Guide To Planning Law
SEO Pillar Content Strategy For Your Website
The key to creating a pillar content strategy is to identify which pillar posts or pages you want to write.
Pillar Posts can be said to be the foundation or building blocks of your website as everything that comes after will be able to reference the pillar post for people who are looking for more information.
Break your niche down into the biggest areas, categories or sub niches and these are going to be your candidates for writing quality pillar posts.
Answer What People Actually Ask
Next you want to find the questions that people ask most commonly around these subniches and address them all in your article.
You can think about these questions from the top of your head or you can type the into Google and see the ‘People Also Ask’ Section.
You can also use a tool like Keywords Everywhere which will display related queries on the side of the page.
Create a template for your article by laying out all the headings you want to address first and then fill in each section one by one.
Pro Tip:
You content should not be text heavy and feel like the visitor to your site is reading a book.
The content needs to be scannable.
That means short paragraphs, tables, lists, pictures, videos and infographics that allow the user to quickly scan through the content and pick up all of the main points without having to read every little piece of text contained inside.
There Are Some Pros And Cons to writing pillar content so let’s jump straight into those no to see if writing Pillar content is going to be a great strategy for you moving forward.
Pros
- They Rank Really Well
- It Can Rank For A Ton of Keywords
- It Sets You Up As An Authority In Your Industry
- It Lays The Foundation For Success
- It Improves The Overall Authority Of The Websites
- They Work Passively
- Increase Your Own Knowledge On A Topic
- Introduce Customers To Your Marketing Funnel
- Email Marketing
Cons
- Time Consuming
- Competition
- Just Part Of A Complete Blogging Strategy
Pros Of Pillar Content
They Rank Really Well
Whether we like it or not, for now at least, Google ranks longer content better than it ranks shorter content.
If you have two posts around the same keyword that are both the same quality with all other things being equal, Google is going to rank to longer post ahead of the shorter.
Pillar Contents are meaty in nature and it allows us to create long form, nugget filled content that doesn’t have to resort to rambling to reach a certain number of words.
Long Form Content + Plenty Of Nuggets Per 1,000 Words + Attractive Scannable Content = Successful Rankings On Google
It Can Rank For A Ton of Keywords
The biggest benefit of writing Pillar content is simply the amount of traffic it can bring to your website.
If you do it well, you are not going to rank number 1 for the main keyword, you can also rank well for all the subheadings you have included.
1 post could be ranking for 50+ keywords and bringing a ton of traffic to your site.
You job is to make sure you convert as many of these potential clients or customers as possible for maximum returns.
It Sets You Up As An Authority In Your Industry
People are trying to learn about an industry or a certain subject and they keep seeing your website at the top of the rankings and you content gives them the knowledge they need in a pleasing manner.
They are automatically going to consider you as an authority in the industry simply because you are ranking number 1 and you have taken the time to create so much valuable content.
When it comes time to buy or to sign up for a course or to give their email address for more premium content, they are likely to engage with you as they know you aren’t going to spam them with crappy emails.
It Lays The Foundation For Success
After writing Pillar Posts and waiting for some time, they will start to rank.
If we then go and look in Google Search Console we will see all the keywords we are starting to rank for and we can get an idea for more stand alone blog posts that we can write.
We can then put a solid content plan together around spin off articles that will begin to cover the entire topic in even more details and start to address individual queries in more detail.
This can have the result of our Pillar post and secondary post both showing up at the top of the search engine and we can start to dominate the industry or the market we are in.
Pro Observation:
Avoid the scarcity mindset of thinking there is a limited number of blog posts we can write.
If you are in a decent sized niche, there should be no limit to the amount of queries that people have, products we can review and content we can create for our audience.
Having an abundance mindset around blogging can really set us up for success.
It Improves The Overall Authority Of The Websites
The topic of backlinks is one that divides the SEO community. Google is unequivocal when they say that Backlinking should be natural and not forced although it is undisputed that backlinks can cause your posts to rank higher.
Whether you want to follow a backlink strategy or not, one way to gain natural Backlinks is with Pillar Content.
When people are looking for articles to link to, they will often just google the term and link to the top post. If your post is top, you will get the link.
That ‘Link Juice’ will trickle down to every other article on your site and before you know it, your domain authority will have grown in a completely natural way.
They Work Passively
While a pillar post might need to be updated every now and again, generally speaking once it is done, it should be able to bring traffic to your website for years to come.
It should defer the many benefits of blogging and pillar posts for years to come and passively when done correctly.
Increase Your Own Knowledge On A Topic
Writing Pillar Posts is a great way to fill any gaps in your own knowledge about a particular subject or topic within your industry.
They say becoming a teacher is the best way to boost your own knowledge and that concepts fits nicely in here too.
If you are one of your subordinates writes the post, it is a great way to boost your own respective knowledge.
Introduce Customers To Your Marketing Funnel
As we’ve already touched on, increasing your traffic is the biggest benefit of creating Pillar Content followed closely by introducing new potential customers into your funnel.
There are two ways we can target visitors who come to our site via the Pillar the Pillar Post:
Remarketing & Email Marketing
Remarketing
The process of placing cookies on the internet browser of any body who visits our website to follow up with them continuously online to increase our brand awareness and to get as many of them as possible to convert into paying customers.
Display Ads
Display Ads are those that follow us around the web, popping up in the headers, sidebars and content of other websites as we browse around on the web.
Highly effective as user we can get back to our site a second time are far more likely to convert.
Youtube Remarketing
Video Ads on Youtube are one of the most effective way to increase our brand knowledge and drive conversions.
Social media Remarketing
Facebook & Instagram are places where our potential customers spend a lot of time and remarketing to anybody who visited our site on these platforms allow us to build brand awareness, Show our business in a different light and again, drive conversions to whatever product or service we are offering.
The greatest benefit of remarketing across these platforms is that is extremely cost effective. We have done the job of putting our unique audience together so the platform doesn’t have to do the work and we don’t have to bid against others on that audience, just the positioning.
Email Marketing
When people visit our pillar posts in number, we have an excellent opportunity to capture their email addresses.
Email Marketing is one of the most powerful, if not the most powerful tool for increasing our brand awareness and generating conversions.
A person may be on our list for years before actually being ready to buy, seeing a new email coming a converting straight away with no hassle.
Having and building our email list with pillar content is another great way to boost the value of that traffic to our business.
Cons
Everything in life has a downside and that is also true of Pillar Content although the pros surely outweigh the cons when it comes to this form of content.
Time Consuming
Creating Pillar content takes a lot of time and if you outsource it will have a significant cost associated with the writing.
Obviously this is time that could be spent elsewhere in boosting your business but if your strategy is to increase your traffic, putting the time into creating Pillar Posts should be time well spent.
There Can Be Competition
Just like in any other area of business, there can be considerable competition for the top spots with Pillar Posts and this competition is likely to increase over time.
There is no guarantee that you are going to rank number 1 with your pillar posts but if you create quality, long form content, you should certainly rank for a ton of keywords anyway.
Pillar Posts Are Just The Start Of A Complete Blogging Strategy
It is not just a case of writing the pillar post and you never need to create content again.
Pillar posts are just the beginning of a complete Blogging strategy and once complete you should immediately start planning for additional blog posts to build on and supplement those pillar posts.
FAQ
How Many Pillar Posts Should I Have?
The amount of Pillar posts you create will depend directly on the amount of categories in the niche or industry you want to cover.
The amount of Pillar posts would be unlimited if you were covering Pets or Sports but it may be 10 or 20 if covering an area like Golf, Soccer or American Bulldogs.
It really depends on the Industry but wherever there is a broad topic that you can comfortably write over 2,000 words on, it is a contender for being a pillar post.
A Pillar post is a topic that can be broken down into many smaller topics that could all be individual blog posts.
How Long Is Pillar Content
Pillar Content is generally going to be between 2,000 and 6,000 words but there is no hard and fast rule.
Keep Writing as long as there is ammo in the gun and new headings to write about.
Make sure your paragraphs are two sentences long at most and that the content is scannable with plenty of lists, pictures and infographics to give the user the maximum amount of knowledge even if they only want to scan the article.
How To make Pillar Posts That Google Loves
There are three things to Keep in Mind
- Longer form content ranks better
- Your content needs to be scannable
- Cover headings that people are actually searching for.
Conclusion
Pillar posts should be a central area of focus for creating a successful blog or website of any kind.
Maximizing the amount of traffic to your website is a obvious strategy and pillar posts are on of the absolute best ways to do this.
Create content you love and that others will love as well but just make sure it is not too text heavy and that your readers can quickly scan through picking up the main points of interest, especially on their mobile phones.
