Aug 27, 2018

What Topics Will You Own?

By: Josh Dougherty

Content Inbound Marketing

"Topic clusters aren't just a nice, clean way of organizing content that brings glee to the most Type A of marketers (me, for instance). It also keeps Google happy. As it turns out, the search engine giant has changed its algorithm to favor topic-based content, making pillar pages a requirement for content marketers who want to maintain a high SERP ranking." Excerpt from 7 Pillar Page Examples to Get You Started With Your Own

Creating high-quality content requires significant time and effort. That's why it's essential that your site plays by Google's rules. Otherwise, your hard work will be for naught. Enter pillar content.

Read Next: Generate The Right Leads. Build Trust. Achieve Breakthrough Growth.

As Amanda Zantal-Wiener writes, today's Google algorithm focuses on topics. What does that mean for your business? If you haven't already, you need to determine which topics you want to own. Then, you should build out pillar pages (also called cornerstone content) for each topic. Each pillar page should serve as the center of your content efforts around a specific topic. Back to Zantal-Wiener:

"Think of this pillar page as a topic's mother ship, and your blog posts are all smaller soldier ships that give and receive support from this mother ship. This organization offers greater search engine authority because it tells Google you've dedicated a certain amount of digital real estate to this topic, and are to be considered a reliable answer to users' questions on that topic when they conduct a search."

Zantal-Wiener's piece also includes several great examples of pillar pages to inspire you as you get started.

As you begin your journey towards owning all the topics, don't get discouraged. Build out your content infrastructure at a pace you can sustain. It's better to maintain forward movement rather than flaming out after a few short weeks (I've written about the value of consistency in blogging and staying focused on an achievable goal in the past).

We advise our clients to start with one topic. Only move onto the next topic once you've built a pillar page and some high quality blog content for the first topic. It's better to cover one topic well rather than five or six poorly. Keep your eye on the goal. Before you know it, you'll have all your content pillars established. You've got this.

P.S. You know that producing great content isn't just for fun — it's to generate leads for your business. If you want to learn more about how to generate the right leads, check out this free guide here (you don't even have to fill out a form to download it!).

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