What’s this pillar page of which we speak?

A pillar page is a place on your site focused on a primary “pillar” topic. This could be covering a good or service you offer, or be about background information that’s helpful and relevant. No matter the specifics, it acts as an educational tool for users on your site.

The pillar page then acts as an information base from which people can access more specific resource pages.

Essentially, it’s a central hub that further links to pages on related subtopics. The pillar page is the umbrella; pages on relevant subtopics all relate back.

Another analogy for pillar pages and their subtopics is that it’s a “hub and spoke,” with the pillar being the hub and the subtopic clusters branching out on their spokes that lead back.

Image Source: wordstream.com

So… how does this “ultimate guide” pillar page help SEO?

One helpful way of thinking about this is that pillar pages are geared towards broad target keywords; their branched out topic clusters target more specific long-tail keywords.

Because of how this model targets both by providing readers with centralized and easy-to-navigate information, it naturally helps improve your engagement rates. This means users stay on your site longer, look at more pages per session, and bounce from your site less often. The organized nature of this model also tends to be extremely helpful for users (assuming you’re filling it with quality information and not just crap), making them more likely to return.

Furthermore, by providing the internet with a high quality, navigable resource, you’re increasing your odds for others to organically link to you. This added credibility from others linking to you — both in search engines’ eyes and just considering natural social dynamics — helps improve your visibility and search engine ranking.

This straightforward site structure also allows Googlebot and other search spiders to more easily crawl your site versus if you were to include the same information in a less organized format.

All together, this quality information that’s easily navigable increases your EEAT while growing your visibility and your positive reputation, both in the eyes of search engine crawlers and “just” the human beings visiting your site — who are, after all, the ones who really matter.

Common types of pillar pages and how to make one

You can generally (ish) divide pillar pages into either “resources and educational topics” or “products and services.” Of course, those can bleed into one another so it isn’t perfectly binary and clear cut.

For the latter, this can be helpful for explaining services or products you offer that people are less familiar with. Alternatively, if your business offers variations in a product line, a pillar page can be a good way of centralizing that information.

As far as purely educational resources, a pillar page could be formatted as a “how to” guide, an in-depth primer on a topic, or something else entirely.

Crucially, regardless of what your pillar page is discussing, make sure it’s written by someone with expertise in that subject matter; alternatively, if your expert at hand isn’t such a great writer — that’s not too rare, in our experience — have a professional write it but make sure it’s still informed by expert background.

When planning a pillar page, consider what topics to discuss: Are you qualified and knowledgeable enough to actually write regularly on this topic? And, while this might be a given, we’ll mention it anyway — does this topic align with your site’s offerings? Your answers to both of these questions must be “yes.”

During this time, you should also consider the following:

How broad are you making the pillar? While it obviously covers a broad topic, it shouldn’t be too broad — it should still be focused on a thing. For instance, “digital marketing” is way too broad a scope for one pillar page; Google Ads, SEO, or social advertising on the other hand are all topics you can dive into without being such a huge scope that it’s impossible to tackle everything necessary therein.

Is this topic something people are searching for? This is related to the above because people generally search for some level of specificity. Subsequently, users often have questions that are more niche than you might think. For you, this means don’t automatically discard a pillar page topic idea because you think it’s too niche — but it also means you might think of something without intuitively realizing that fewer people than you assume are looking for it. To cover your bases, do keyword research on your subtopics to confirm (KW Research hyperlink insert to previous FM blog post).

This might sound like a given, but because some people want to cut corners: Know that a pillar page isn’t just some little blog post. A good one is generally gonna be pretty darn long. In fact, you’ll likely want to make yours a few thousand words long — that’s a few thousand good words. Not a few thousand words of drivel. A few thousand words that are in-depth and comprehensive. After all, no one’s gonna read through much of those words if they get through a couple hundred and decide it’s garbage — they’ll just leave. On the other side, if it’s not in-depth enough, it will probably just get overshadowed on Google by other, deeper diving pieces out there.

Other key details include remembering to link out to your subtopics — the spokes of this model — when appropriate. With how long pillar pages are, it could be easy to forget to include each of these links as you’re in the zone. So, when done, give it a double-check to make sure there aren’t any references to other subtopics that you neglected to link to. (Granted, you should be re-reading all your work before publishing it, but this is just another reason to do so.)

Lastly, invest your time, energy, and other resources into promoting a pillar page. This could be on search or social media — whatever you determine is most effective and efficient for you. The current media landscape is very focused on “pay to play,” which means just relying on Google’s site crawler to organically rank you well from the start isn’t usually enough. A little bit of extra work promoting your pillar page will go a long way.

All in all, pillar pages — particularly with their tendency to be varying levels of evergreen — are a fantastic way to build up your site’s reputation both with internet users and subsequently search engine crawlers. Providing people with high quality literature improves their experience with you, increases their time on your site and likeliness to return, and subsequently tells Google through proxy that you’re a trustworthy authority on the matter. This in turn makes your page more likely to rank highly than others, get in front of more eyeballs who find it useful, and so on.

So, what expertise do you have that can benefit people, who will in turn help your site benefit as well?