A pillar content strategy is a system where a core piece of substantive content (the pillar) is created to share expertise with your audience.

Next, a distribution system is planned to utilize pieces of the pillar content to share across social, paid media, and video outlets. These support pieces are called micro content.

Types of Pillar Content

Pillar content can be created in many forms including:

• Long form blog posts
• Landing pages
• eBooks
• Whitepapers
• Infographs

How to Create Pillar Content

When setting out to create content that will drive traffic, build email databases, and create new leads, you have to be aware of what your audience is searching for and how those searches relate to the keywords within your content. Here’s how to create pillar content that matches your audience’s needs.

1.  Keyword Research is Key

Through keyword research, you’ll be able to identify trending keywords that matter to your audience. Keywords with a medium to high search volume are the targets you want to include into your web copy. While you may be able to rank, the low to no search volume means you won’t be maximizing the current search trends. Competitive keyword research can also reveal a great deal about the strength of your keyword research. Through competitive keyword research, you can identify what keywords your competition is weak in, providing you with an advantage. Integrating those keywords into your strategy means not only will you be able to gain positions, but also push your competition down the search engine result pages (SERPs).

A few tools we use for keyword research include semrush.com, Google Search Console, and ubersuggest.

2.  Find the Right Topic

Now that you know what your audience is searching for, you’ll be able to take advantage of that information and craft your content pillar. An easy way to come up with a topic is to use your keyword research to create a question around information where you can share expertise. Another way to think about finding the right topic would be to create a type of listicle. Whatever you create as your pillar topic, be sure it begins with a strong call to action (CTA). That hook will be the first tool used to begin to meet your primary objective, whether it’s a download, signup, or sale.

3.  Create the Content

We have research and a great topics, so the next step would be creating the content. When writing for SEO, an important technique to remember is the EAT principle. EAT is a Google directive to ensure your website, and its content provides Expertise, Authority, and Trustworthiness around the topics within your site. These factors build your page quality which will factor into your domain authority, which will help you trend to the top of the SERPs.

To learn more about EAT for SEO, check out this great blog from our partners at Semrush.

4.  Micro Content

Now that we’ve done the research, settled on our topic, and created the content, it’s time to drive traffic. SEO takes time so as your new pillar content gets indexed and crawled, and you can jump start your incoming traffic with referral traffic from micro content. This means you’ll need to create a social media content schedule and utilize all the platforms at your disposal to create strong CTAs and teasers to get users and readers excited to click over to your new pillar content.

Paid media micro content can also be an important tool to turn your content pillar into a conversion funnel. Here’s a case study how all of these strategies created strong results for our client Window World. 

Put it all together and your pillar content strategy should look similar to this content strategy map.

If you’d like to learn how Infinity can help create a pillar content strategy to improve your lead funnel, we’d like to hear for you!