When you’re choosing topics for your business blog, it’s important to keep both your readers and search engine algorithms in mind! Your content needs to be genuinely helpful to your audience, but it also needs to reach the right people—which means optimizing for SEO. This is where content pillars come in!

Let’s talk about what content pillars are, why they’re important, and how you can choose the best pillars for your business.

What Are Content Pillars?

Content pillars are core topics that are highly relevant for your business. They’re broad, overarching themes that guide all of your content creation.

This is different from a topic cluster, which is a set of related topics that link to one another. You can have several topic clusters under one content pillar.

Let’s give an example to illustrate this. Imagine you’re a vet with your own small animal practice. Your content pillars might be (1) dog and cat wellness, (2) emergency care, and (3) pet behavior.

Under the pet wellness content pillar, you might have a topic cluster on preventative care with articles on routine checkups, vaccinations, and flea and tick prevention. Another topic cluster under the same pillar might cover pet nutrition with articles on food, supplements, and maintaining a healthy weight in your pet.

Why Are Content Pillars Important?

You can’t possibly cover every keyword and topic that might matter to your audience, right? So it’s important to focus your efforts in a way that will help your audience while optimizing for SEO.

Content pillars help you do this. When you choose content pillars that will engage your audience and then cover those topics in a strategic, organized way, you set yourself up to be recognized as an authority on those topics. Your customers will learn they can come to you for trustworthy information on specific topics—and you may get backlinks from others in your industry who start to see you as a resource, too!

Having a defined structure for your topics helps ensure a clear and logical website structure, which is beneficial for SEO. Additionally, focusing on the most relevant and important topics sets you up to show the “Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness” that Google E-E-A-T defines. All of this can improve your placement on search engine results, which means more organic traffic and eventually more conversions!

Tips for Creating Your Content Pillars

When you’re ready to use content pillars in your digital marketing, here’s how to get started:

·      Use buyer personas to think about who you’re selling to, what their pain points are, and what they might search.

·      If you already have a blog, look at your best-performing content for clues on what might resonate with your audience.

·      Do keyword research for different potential pillars. Consider search volume and how difficult it might be to rank for each keyword.

·      Limit yourself to 3-5 content pillars so that you have a focused and strong content strategy.

·      Map out potential topic clusters for each content pillar, keeping internal linking in mind.

Though we’ve been talking about blogs here, your content pillars will affect your social media, bulk emails, and anywhere else you like to reuse content. Content pillars can truly guide your whole content strategy.

Get Started Today

If you need help choosing content pillars that will boost your business with your customers and with search engines, 2XM is here. We’ll get to know your business and your target audience and make suggestions tailored just for you! Contact us for a FREE 60 minute consultation today.