Pillar pages were an effective way to group and display website content to users and search engines.
In this post, we’ll define what a pillar page is, how it can help your SEO efforts, and provide some examples of pillar pages in action.
So let’s start by defining the pillar page.
What are pillar pages?
A pillar page is a website landing that focuses on a major topic, resource, product, or service area.
This gives users and search engines quick access to lots of content related to the topic.
The depth of a pillar page depends on its purpose.
Some are shallow introductions for quick access to other content (a bit like the role of a content page), others offer a more comprehensive, deeper stand-alone value supported by related content items There are also things.
If you list all the major topics related to your business, you can logically justify each of these becoming a pillar page.
Pillar pages provide one-stop access to a large amount of related content in a user-friendly way.
It also provides search engines with logically organized content. This content can be quickly crawled and understood so that it can be ranked effectively in search.
You may have heard of underlying content, content hubs, content clusters, or pillar pages on various forums, but in effect they all represent the nuances of the same approach.
If you imagine a bicycle wheel, there is a hub in the center.
From the hub, there are many spokes.
For pillar content, the hub is the pillar page (the central theme or topic) and the spokes are the related content areas that reference the pillar page.
A single pillar page may have many pages and other content types all linking to the pillar page directly or through other subtopics that link to the main/pillar page.
Centralize all relevant topical content from one main landing page (pillar page) while keeping the basic interaction the same.
I’ll soon provide some examples that help reinforce this principle, allowing you to visualize how pillar pages work.
How Do Pillar Pages Help SEO?
Before moving on to the pillar page example, it’s helpful to understand a little more about how pillar pages can help your SEO performance.
Creating pillar pages on your website has many benefits. We’ll cover some of them next.
Reinforcing topical authority signals
Expertise, Trust and Trust (EAT) underpins Google’s guidelines and provides a key factor in assigning an overall quality score to any website.
Simply put, Google uses EAT as a metric to determine if your content is of high quality.
This is because it is considered:
- Helpful and helpful to people.
- Created by demonstrable experts in the topic area.
- Placed on relevant sites with the necessary authorization signals.
- Introduce positive user experiences and expected trust signals.
- It offers comprehensive topics that are expected to fully satisfy your search needs.
Grouping your content into simple hierarchies makes it easier for search engines to identify, understand, and rank your content.
Your topic signal is provided specifically to help with broader Google guidelines such as EAT.
This means that you can shine a light on the areas you want your business to be closely related to online and optimize your rankings for those topics more consistently.
In contrast, consider a website where most of the content is all competing.
With no clear segmentation or hierarchy of topics (or pillars), the amount of noise for search engines and users increases each time you add a new blog post or article to your website.
It’s easy to see why pillar pages add value.
Here’s a closer look at EAT and its importance.
A faster, simpler, more complete user experience
Over the years, Google has increased the impact of improving user experience on improving SEO.
Core Web Vitals (CWV) is a more recent example of this.
Another example of this in action is the value of websites and content that create barriers between users and their intended destinations, such as interstitials or sites perceived as low-value content. is to lower
Site speed and mobile responsiveness as ranking factors are other examples.
By using pillar pages, you can get to the heart of the topic that people are interested in.
You can provide a clear signal of trust through inclusive and more meaningful content delivery.
Experts can be featured through content with which they are associated and stored in a central resource.
By simplifying access to relevant content and encouraging users to move through the information search and purchase cycle faster, you can enhance user engagement signals.
In addition to this, by concentrating resources on a specific main destination page, you can ensure that it loads quickly, is intuitive, and is easy to navigate.
It also simplifies continuous and iterative changes to keep improving through new data sets.
Here are some details on how to improve your SEO with your user experience.
Natural, Value-Based, Link Building
If you provide people with a one-stop shop to solve their myriad related questions, wants, needs, and pain points in an easy way, you can naturally collect external trust signals, including links.
Consider all recurring opportunities for social listening and share a comprehensive pillar page with your audience.
Use the pillar pages you provide to share and promote your free, accessible, content resources, great for link acquisition, brand building, and PR.
Added SEO Benefits of Pillar Pages
There are many other SEO benefits of using pillar pages, but they typically include:
- Identify (and fill) content gaps more consistently Make it visible for more search terms.
- Improve the internal structure of the site Relevant link signals (and value) point to important content pillars.
- Associate brands and experts with key commercial topics More likely to support conversions and traffic from SEO.
- Decreased bounce rate and improved other metrics Time on page/site, other content quality signals, etc.
Pillar page example
Pillar pages have many uses and I thought it would be helpful to share some of them here as we wrap up this article.
Product Pillar Page
This sample segment from Foresters Friendly Society shows how a single pillar page can serve.
- Signals of trust from third-party reviews.
- Access to single topic content pages and key user themes.
- Interactive content that supports trust signals and values.
- Broad brand signal.
Image from Foresters Friendly Society, December 2022Topic Pillar Page
In these sample snippets from the Life at Campus Landing Destination at the University of East Anglia (UEA), you can see how a single pillar page can benefit users and search engines.
- Fast access to core content for simple user journeys.
- Distilled visual content highlights for quick content digestion.
- Mobile-friendly content segments for fact-finding on the go.
- Topic content signposting to keep users learning without searching for information.
- Storytelling to help connect users with brands.
Image from University of East Anglia, December 2022
Image from University of East Anglia, December 2022
Image from University of East Anglia, December 2022Conclusion
Pillar pages are not only an effective way to organize your website’s content, but they also offer great SEO benefits.
By leveraging pillar pages, you can create a faster, streamlined and generally user-friendly experience on your website, making it easier for both users and search engines to navigate.
If you want to boost your SEO efforts now, use pillar pages.
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Featured Image: Oatawa/Shutterstock
