Pillar and Cluster Content and What They Mean for SEO

It seems like every single time Google changes its algorithms, new nomenclature comes out regarding SEO strategies. There are some tactics that are purely reactionary—throwing that spaghetti up against the wall and hoping that it sticks. Some, however, are smart, purposeful ideas that, when executed properly, can positively impact your visibility within search results.

What makes this SEO strategy the right one?

Whether you’re in this industry or not, you know that the internet is changing. New data regulations, compliance ordinances and algorithm changes all point to an internet authority (hey, Google) that is demanding authenticity. What that means is that a transactional mindset of creating unappealing content for the sake of keeping your blog updated and stuffing “keywords” in it for hopes Google will care, is dead.

In the past, we’ve been able to write blog contents that are keyword rich, post them up and see the impressions and clicks come in via organic search traffic. Now, because that has become the status quo, marketers are pressed to innovate and do something better than the status quo to get their content out to the masses.

Enter: Pillar and cluster content. Pillar and cluster content is a way to arrange and optimize content for search engines.

These days, Google is looking at more than just the keywords utilized on your website or within your posts. It’s looking at the overall structure and hierarchy of your website. It takes into account backlinks coming to your site, how easy it is to find content within your site and a host of other factors to ensure that what you’re serving up to visitors is clear, easy to find and really helpful. Structuring content this way, give search engines an eye into what the overall architecture of your website is and your ability to help a visitor solve their pain point (ie. why did they land on your site in the first place).

What is pillar content?

A pillar page is a comprehensive resource page that broadly covers information about a core topic or theme, and provides links to other quality content for supporting subtopics. Examples of great supporting content includes eBooks, videos, in depth subpages, reports or guides—anything that does a deep dive into a specific topic, with plenty of breakout sections and opportunities for someone to dive even deeper.

While pillar content isn’t new (it became a thing around 2006 when people started realizing they needed to write more than 500 words in a blog post), a lot has changed since that time—including the average length of blog articles. Today, it’s recommended that pillar content be anywhere from 2,000 to 10,000+ words in length.

It’s important to note something here: Pillar content shouldn’t be stretched to meet a word count goal. The key with pillar pages is informative, valuable content. In fact, when content is valuable in solving a visitors pain, word count does not matter. We share an example of a blog post below from one of our clients, that is short but covers a topic so well, it generates almost 10% of their monthly traffic.

How to write pillar content

We get it, 10,000+ words is a lot of words. In fact, the Content Marketing Institute reports that producing enough quality content is the single largest challenge that B2B marketers face in the industry today (and that’s saying something). On our end, it takes us two to three hours to create an outline for a pillar page —and significantly more to build out the actual contents of it! For a busy marketing director or someone wearing a marketing hat as part of their day-to-day job, that time commitment can be much more.

Plus, there’s a huge difference between content that is dull, but word-heavy, and content that is chocked full of valuable content that draws in readers.

There is a bit of back work involved in creating pillar content at first, and it starts with truly understanding an audience.

Identify a customer audience

While pillar content is uniquely a business or marketer’s endeavor, it isn’t solely about that business or marketer. Pillar content exists to be as helpful and informative to a visitor or audience as possible. Because of that, an audience must be understood completely so that the content speaks directly to them.

Social media analytics tools, Google Analytics, customer databases (CRMs) and any other tracking or analytical tools attached to a website are the first platforms marketers should research when working to understand an audience. Those tools will provide a high-level look at the age, gender, location and interests of an average user

That high-level information will become the basis of a buyer persona. A buyer persona is a detailed description of a target customer. A fully fleshed out buyer personal includes everything from demographic information to hobbies, and from career history to family size. The buyer persona should be written as if the persona were a real person—because, at the end of the day, they are. Buyer persona information should include:

• Buyer Persona Name (i.e. Buyer Barbara)
• Background
• Challenges
• Demographics
• Common Objections or Perceived Barriers
• Goals
• Biggest Fears
• Hobbies and Interests

With the analytics data as the foundation, marketers can then have one-on-one or more intentional group surveys with individuals who are already customers to begin filling in the blanks of the buyer persona.

Identify the buyer persona’s needs

Once the buyer persona is established, it’s important to then address what that individuals needs actually are. Again, the key with pillar content (and all web content in general) is that it’s informative and valuable to the customer audience. Because of that, pillar content should address specific needs that customers have addressed.

Don’t worry, identifying buyers’ needs isn’t mind reading. Through this up front research, there are simple steps that can be taken to identify what those common questions or issues are.

• If the person writing the pillar content is a member of the target audience, he or she can have a basic authority to determine what those needs are. For example, if the individual writing the content is a 30 year old female living in the state of Virginia, and she is writing specifically for 30 year old females living in the state of Virginia, she will likely have an idea of the types of questions or needs that demographic group may have. While this is the easiest way of identifying what a buyers’ needs are, it’s not always the most accurate.
• Tools like Google Search Console give glimpses into the type of keywords or key phrases an individual is searching for. While Google Analytics blocks most reporting on keywords that are driving traffic to a website, Google Search Console gives an overview of the queries that are driving both clicks and impressions. Even queries that are just driving impressions should be considered as it’s a clear indication of what the average buyer is searching for. Below is an example of what 434’s current top queries for clicks and impressions are. What that information tells us is: We need to write an article on SEO Ranking Reports as it’s a top query driving impressions to our site. Because we want individuals to actually click through to our site to learn information, even just the impressions matter.

To access Google Search Console’s search reporting, simply log in to Search Console, click Search Traffic and then Search Analytics. On the new dashboard view, simply click Performance then Queries.

Write pillar content

Armed with the right topics, the next step is to take the plunge into writing the extensive pillar content. The content creation process looks different for everyone. However, with content of this length and nature, we recommend starting with an outline.

When creating an outline, it’s important to understand how Google searches through the hierarchy of a website. A website can be broken down into:

• Main homepage
  • Top level categories
    • Subcategories
    • Detail pages

Google and other search engines work to understand the hierarchy of a website and then assigns importance to where the content is located. Its search crawlers slowly lose interest as they dive deeper into the architecture of a website, which is why pillar pages are so vital to the search viability of a website.

The pillar page should be:

• Broad, but not exhaustive
• Evergreen
• Optimized for questions
• Updated consistently when appropriate

Knowing this, the pillar content outline should begin with the questions frequently asked about a topic (remember, Google Search Console is helpful here). Those questions, with some slight tweaks as necessary, can become the subheadlines of the pillar article.

From there, the subheadlines can dive even further into additional categories that explore the answers to those questions. An example of a pillar content outline, based on the current Search Console report for us at 434, is below.

Blog Topic: SEO Ranking Reports

1. The importance of SEO ranking reports
   1. Are ranking reports still relevant?
      1. Subcategory 1
      2. Subcategory 2
      3. Subcategory 3
   2. What additional information is important to know?
      1. Subcategory 1
      2. Subcategory 2
      3. Subcategory 3
   3. How should SEO ranking reports match with key performance indicators?
      1. Subcategory 1
      2. Subcategory 2
      3. Subcategory 3
2. What can SEO ranking reports actually tell me?
   1. More traffic to a website
      1. Subcategory 1
      2. Subcategory 2
      3. Subcategory 3
   2. Increase in overall sales
      1. Subcategory 1
      2. Subcategory 2
      3. Subcategory 3
   3. Improvement in rankings
      1. Subcategory 1
      2. Subcategory 2
      3. Subcategory 3
   4. Ranking for specific keywords to break into a new market
      1. Subcategory 1
      2. Subcategory 2
      3. Subcategory 3
3. What other data should I be looking at for SEO?
   1. Visits referred by specific search terms and phrases
      1. Subcategory 1
      2. Subcategory 2
      3. Subcategory 3
   2. Conversion rate by specific search queries
      1. Subcategory 1
      2. Subcategory 2
      3. Subcategory 3
   3. Keyword visibility
      1. Subcategory 1
      2. Subcategory 2
      3. Subcategory 3

Within the outline, it’s important to also identify areas where cluster content (more on that below) already exists that can be linked within the pillar page.

The following checklist should also be considered, once the content writing phase has begun:

• Inclusion of the core topic in the page title
• Inclusion of core topic in pillar page URL
• Include top navigation or a jump link table of contents
• Inclusion of core topic in the H1 tag
• Definition of the core topic immediately under the H1
• Conversion focused landing page elements (i.e. bullet points)
• Images with core topic reference in the alt text tags
• H2 tags for section headers
• Reference of the core topic throughout the page
• Internal links to relevant resources
• External links to relevant resources

How to create cluster topics from a pillar article

Once the pillar article has been written, the work isn’t quite over. Linked into the pillar content should be a range of information that covers individual, more specific subtopics, otherwise known as cluster content. Each cluster topic page for pillar content should focus on providing more detail for a specific long-tail keyword.

Cluster content can be significantly shorter than a pillar article. In fact, cluster content can be as little as 350-400 words, as long as they are well-thought out, informative and unique.

Cluster content is important and helpful because the cluster articles directly speak to the way that users search today. Here’s why:

• We search the way we talk. In fact, natural language search is more likely to deliver quality results than exact match keyword terms, including using voice
• Search engines are getting better at recognizing semantically related concepts
• Search engines add context based on where users are when they search, the time of day, how users format the query, what device they are using and more
• The search engines want to deliver the most relevant and authoritative results possible—including images, graphs and featured snippets

What this all means is that businesses and marketers can no longer stand out with individual articles.

To brainstorm cluster ideas, marketers should look at the analytics of their website, as well as Google Search Console to determine which content and keywords are currently performing the best. From there, if a high-volume keyword is identified, a cluster article can be written.

With that topic in mind, other matching blog posts and pages can be identified or brainstormed. When brainstorming these ideas, it’s important to:

1. Analyze the differences between the pieces of content
2. Determine if a cluster article is actually necessary based upon the differences noted

It is recommended that no more than 20 subtopics or cluster articles point back to a pillar article, with a minimum of at least 8.

For help organizing pillar and cluster content, utilize this chart:

How to write cluster content

Writing cluster content is a similar process to writing pillar content, as it starts with truly understanding who a target buyer is, what their needs are and what questions they have. With the pressure off to not create so much content, however, marketers have the freedom to experiment a bit with cluster articles. Within cluster content, different keywords can be put on trial to determine their viability, and different calls to action can be tested to determine how audiences respond.

Begin with research

As always, content should begin with research. The first step in creating a content cluster is to conduct keyword research. The key with keyword research is to understand what queries have a high search volume, what keywords a website is already ranking for and what keywords a website can rank for.

Google Trends is helpful free tool for understanding how the world is searching for specific content. Google Trends gives researchers the ability to explore specific search terms to understand the interest over time, as well as make comparisons of those search terms against other related terms.

This comparison can be helpful in determining the best way to position content with a cluster article.

Keyword Tool is another free tool that can be utilized, if access to Google Search Console isn’t available. With Keyword Tool, researchers can search for a specific topic and receive hundreds of keywords that are similar to the topic searched. There is a paid version for Keyword Tool, which will allow access to search volume, trends, costs per click and competition, however, the free version is a great place to start.

The goal with this process is to identify keywords that connect with a brand, have high search volume and that the website is able to rank for.

Write cluster content

Google doesn’t care if an article contains 3,000 words over 1,500 words, if the content isn’t relevant or doesn’t bring value to readers. SEO content strategy is typically more successful of presented as long-form articles that are 2,000+ words however, if the content covers all the information in just 700 words, then the content can remain shorter.

Here is an example of a top performing page that draws almost 10% (2,000 visitors) per month for one of our clients. The total word count on the page is 649 and the screenshot below visualizes the amount of time being spent on this page as a user “mouse reads” through the entire article, spending an average of 4:30 minutes. The article comes from a place of authority and efficiently answers the questions a visitor is looking to answer. When folks mouse read, you know you have done something right!

Once the content is written, internal linking strategies can be employed. Internal linking strategies can make or break a content cluster in that the links point back to how Google filters through the hierarchy of a website (as discussed above).

Each article in the content cluster should link to each other with specific anchor text. To make the strategy even stronger, the anchor text should be the same in each article and heighten the chance that the anchor text will rank for that article.

How to measure the success of pillar and cluster content

Because the process of creating pillar and cluster content is so time intensive, it’s important that businesses and marketers get an accurate representation of the success of their efforts. Tracking keyword growth can give a clear month over month report on how keywords are improving and trending over time. Tools like SEMRush are incredibly valuable when this sort of reporting comes into play. While it is a paid service, SEMRush’s insights can be invaluable and save a lot of time.

Additionally, a segment can be created in Google Analytics to isolate and dig into a specific cluster of articles. A custom segment like this will show exactly how topic clusters influence the journey of a user through a website. To set up a custom cluster, follow these steps:

Step 1: Toward the top of any report, click +Add Segment, which will bring up a screen to create a new segment.

Step 2: Navigate to Sequences and select the topic cluster as the first step (this assumes that each cluster has been given a group already in Google Analytics, which can be accomplished in the Admin area of Google Analytics under Content Grouping).

Step 3: Change the sequence start option to “Any user interaction”

With the segment created, this content group can be applied to any report in Google Analytics and the results will be restricted to that specific pillar and cluster content.

By analyzing the outcomes of the pillar and cluster content, the impact the content is having on organizational goals and time investment will become clear. It will also help improve the effectiveness of these efforts, in that businesses and marketers will begin gaining a better understanding of what is and isn’t working from a content perspective.

As always, 434 Marketing is here to help. For more information on pillar and cluster content and how this SEO strategy can be applied to your specific business or organization, reach out to us today. Request a consultation with us today.