Pillar clusters and pages can be a turn-around content strategy for you and your site, but it’s hard to get it right. The goal of a steady stream of organic traffic is something all types of businesses in different sectors are trying to achieve using all kinds of content marketing strategies. Companies in the fields of e-commerce, tourism, services, etc. always try to appeal to Google’s content interests to rank high in the search engine rankings. They want to make sure their content:
- Track a specific summary of high demand
- Easy to understand and informative
- Valuable to readers, making them want to revisit and stay longer
- Position them as an authority on the subject
All of this is possible with the use of topic groups and pillar pages.
What is a Topic Cluster or Pillar Page?
Essentially, topic groups are the result of evolution in the way people search. When people search for a topic or answer to a problem, they ask for that topic by a thread of conversation rather than just keywords. If they’re looking for a particular store or restaurant, they won’t just type the word “supermarket” or “coffee shop” into the search engine. Instead, they will specify the search in such a way that a person can ask a question. They type “organic supermarket near me” or “cafe with live entertainment”.
Search algorithms have changed to reflect this change. Now, the algorithm not only looks at the keywords of the topic, but even looks at related topics or queries about that topic. Different types of supermarkets, restaurants, features and geographical locations will fall under this theme. And that’s where topic groups come in. A topic group is a collection of knowledge under one umbrella. For example, if a website has a category for IoT, it will have subpages and content dedicated to different aspects of it. In this case, everything from connectivity to failover will be in the same thread group.
Let’s say a user is looking for an IoT management platform. In this case, the search engine will go into the site’s topic group and return search results specific to the management topic, as well as other related pages.
How to create a topic group
Step 1:
Choose a topic (content marketing)
2nd step:
Identify and choose your keywords
Step 3:
Choose your topic titles and make sure they match search intent
Step 4:
Define the theme of your pillar page
So, looking at our example below, we can see a potential pillar page for “content marketing” with 4 related subtopics forming a cluster that can be internally linked. from the pillar page
What is a pillar page?
On the other hand, a pillar page is the core of this knowledge forming a thematic grouping. Take a SaaS website as an example. A mainstay site would be retail software. The surrounding pages that will flow from this pillar will form topic groups with their subcategories – Ecommerce, CRM, and more. Imagine the pillar as the trunk – the clusters would be the branches that grow out of it, creating their own smaller units. Pillar pages are often much larger than topic groups. And this pillar will cover the central theme or concept of your website. This pillar will be the foundation for building better authority for the website.
How to build a pillar page
Your pillar page should be decided once you’ve done your initial keyword research. Your pillar page should be your overview of the main/essential topic. Usually this means
