What Are Content Pillars & Why Are They Important?
A robust digital content strategy is vital for every brand, whether selling luxury skincare products or B2B industrial services. Organic content is key to improving your search rankings, attracting qualified leads, becoming a trusted industry resource, and scaling your revenue.
But far too many brands treat content as an afterthought, creating one-off blog posts without much purpose or strategy.
That’s where content pillars come into play. They’re the backbone of every successful content strategy and help streamline the content process from ideation to publication.
What are content pillars, and how can they help drive Organic Search success for your brand? Here’s what you need to know.
What Are Content Pillars?
Content pillars are the structure of your digital content strategy. They provide support and guidance for everything your brand publishes.
Pillars are the topics you want your brand to own online. They’re the topics your brand knows the most about, and they establish your brand as a trusted resource for shoppers. They should address key product themes, customer questions, and the benefits of your products and services.
Once you’ve defined your brand’s content pillars, they act as a hub for related content, and you can dive deeper into these topics over time, strengthening your topical authority, which is crucial for improved Organic Search rankings.
The best part is content pillars work across various formats and platforms, so you can use them to create blog posts, landing pages, FAQs, product descriptions, and even social media posts.
Why Should You Utilize Content Pillars?
You’re not running a newsroom, so you can’t sit back and wait for the story to come to you or spend weeks investigating a topic.
Instead, you need a structured, goal-oriented digital content roadmap that you can follow to consistently produce top-quality content. Content pillars are especially powerful in this respect.
Content Pillars Provide Direction for Your Content Strategy
You know you should publish more content on your site, but you’re not sure what to write about.
If you’re like many e-commerce brands, writing blog content is a secondary responsibility, so you don’t have the luxury of spending a whole day coming up with new ideas. Naturally, the blog becomes an afterthought and is rarely updated.
Content pillars help eliminate writer’s block and make it much easier to create a cohesive roadmap months in advance.
Once you’ve established your pillars, all you need to do is identify supporting topics. This helps streamline your entire content strategy, and you can then repurpose different pieces of content for other platforms, such as gated landing pages, eBooks, social media posts, and more.
Content Pillars Help Build Your Topical Authority
Topical authority is crucial to demonstrating E-E-A-T (Expertise, Experience, Authority, Trustworthiness), which is one of the key drivers to improve Organic Search rankings.
Content pillars allow you to dive deeper into your core topic areas. Rather than taking a scatter-shot approach to content creation, trying to say a little about everything, you can focus on a small handful of your most valuable areas of expertise.
By demonstrating E-E-A-T effectively and providing genuine value for users, Google and other search engines will view your site more highly and reward you with better rankings. This also improves your chances of appearing in AI Overviews and other SERP features.
Content Pillars Keep Your Content Consistent
Consistency is key to building authority in your niche. This applies not only to brand voice and tone, but also quality and publication consistency.
For your digital content strategy to succeed, you need to post often to build up a catalog of content while remaining at the forefront of your industry. Content pillars allow you to maintain focus on your brand’s most important subject areas so you don’t stray too far from the path.
Of course, you can always post one-off blog posts outside your pillars, but most of your content should revolve around these core topic areas.
Content Pillars Allow You to Scale Your Content Strategy
To rank highly in Organic Search, your site should be full of high-quality, user-friendly content. This extends beyond your blog and product descriptions; your site should feature buying guides, FAQs, and other helpful content.
This content gives users something to read and search engines something to crawl, which is a win-win for your brand.
But creating content at scale isn’t easy and takes a ton of legwork. Beyond writing the content itself, the ideation process can be challenging for many brands.
Again, content pillars help center the content on your site and make it easier to scale your strategy as your brand grows. With a core set of established pillars, you can quickly produce helpful content and post it everywhere, from your product descriptions to your social media feed.
How Do You Create Content Pillars?
Since content pillars will be the structural foundation of your strategy, you want to take your time when identifying your core topics. Here’s a broad overview of what goes into identifying content pillars and leveraging them to create content moving forward.
- Audit your content: Whether intentionally or not, your content follows certain themes and topic areas. Evaluate your performance in GA4 and on social media to identify themes and topic areas that resonate the most with your audience.
- Identify 3 to 5 content pillars: Based on your audit, come up with a core list of topics and themes you think best represent your brand’s strengths with plenty of potential for future content.
- Perform keyword research: Keywords still matter for SEO, so you need a list of seed keywords that complement your content pillars. By focusing on high-value keywords and creating content that matches user intent, you can gradually improve your Organic Search rankings.
- Create pillar pages: These will be the pages that best represent each pillar, and are almost like a “home base” you can internally link to in your on-site content. Think of these as definitive guides or content “hubs” for a given subject area.
- Optimize for AEO and SEO: Your content should be informative and useful first and foremost, but don’t let SEO and AEO fall to the wayside. Make sure you’re targeting relevant keywords and optimizing the content for AI Overviews and rich snippets.
- Create a publication schedule: Once you’ve built a content foundation, create a calendar and publication schedule. You can never have too much content on your site, so continue publishing consistently. Additionally, periodically audit your site’s content to ensure it’s up to date, factually relevant, and optimized.
The most difficult part is getting started, but once your pillars are established, your site’s content is built out, and a calendar is in place, filling your site and social media with helpful, high-quality content will feel almost automatic.
What Are Some Mistakes to Avoid When Utilizing Content Pillars?
Whether you’re starting from scratch or simply optimizing your strategy with new, redefined content pillars, make sure you avoid the following mistakes.
- Going too broad or generic: To be a trusted resource in your industry, you can’t churn out generic content someone could find on a competitor’s site. You need to offer unique perspectives on specific topics to build trust.
- Writing for keywords, not readers: It’s all too easy to write for a set of keywords and lose sight of the reader. Keywords are important, but Google uses many other signals to determine rankings, including quality and relevance. Focus on providing tangible value to your audience first, and the rankings will follow.
- Not formatting for AEO: It’s no secret that AI Overviews and ChatGPT are becoming increasingly intertwined with traditional SEO. Make sure you follow AEO best practices like implementing lists, using clear subheads, answering direct questions, and implementing structured data and schema markup. This ensures your content appears for voice search and zero-click search results.
- Not internally linking: Connecting one piece of content to another is crucial for both users and search engines. Internal links help search engines identify the relationship between topics, while providing a helpful next step for users.
- Writing for only one or two pillars: Even if you only sell one product, you have more than one or two things to say about it. Focusing on a single pillar won’t be enough to drive sustainable Organic Search growth. Instead, a diverse set of connected content themes ensures you capture a wider audience at nearly every stage of the buying journey.
- Not tying content to products or conversions: You don’t need to choose between educating and selling. At the end of the day, increasing conversions is the primary goal, so be sure your content is naturally tied to your products and services. Clear CTAs and links to product pages help move shoppers through the funnel.
The bottom line: Quality, authenticity, and trust should be at the heart of every piece of content you create. With a consistent publishing schedule and some optimizations along the way, you can lean on your content pillars for years to come.
Work with the Content Strategy Experts at VELOX
Need help revitalizing your brand’s content strategy? Partner with VELOX. Along with our award-winning paid media, technical SEO, and Organic Search services, we also help brands develop and optimize their content strategy with original, human-written content.
Our content strategy experts (https://www.veloxmedia.com/services/content-strategy) can help your brand with everything from buyer persona development to copywriting to ensure your messaging remains consistent and impactful across all platforms.
Get in touch with VELOX today to learn more about our unique revenue-focused approach to digital marketing and Organic Search.
