Pillar pages have been an effective way to combine and present website content to search engines and users for a while now.
Today I’ll discuss what a pillar page is and they can help to boost your SEO rankings.
Let’s get into it.
What Is A Pillar Page?
In short, a pillar page is a landing page (or destination) on your site that focuses primarily on a key topic, service area, product, or digital resource.
They grant users and search engines quick access to a large amount of topically relevant content, but the depth of a page will vary depending on their purpose.
For example, some pages may offer a small introduction to other content, whilst other pages may be more in-depth, providing great value, and perhaps supported by related content assets.
If you think of all the core topics connected to your business, these could perhaps all lead to becoming a pillar page on your website.
Not only do they provide online users straightforward access to a range of related content in a way that’s user-friendly, but they also help search engines too. Logically organized content can be quickly crawled by the likes of Google, understood, and therefore moved higher up the rankings.
A pillar page acts as a hub (of a central theme or topic) and this is then enhanced by other avenues of related content areas linked to and from the pillar page.
However, the fundamental interaction will always remain the same – combining all of the related topical content through one main landing channel (the pillar page).
How Can Pillar Pages Help To Improve Your SEO?
Before you go about actioning your Pillar Pages, let’s take a closer look at how they can improve your overall SEO performance.
Providing A Faster, Easier, More Fulfilled User Experience
For a long time, Google has been working to increase the impact of a positive user experience on SEO results. Core Web Vitals are a recent showing of this.
If your website is lacking in thick-content value or puts a barrier between you and the user, it could impact sitting highly in the rankings. The same goes if you have a low site speed or if your site isn’t mobile-friendly.
Through using pillar pages, you are able to reach the people at the core of the topic they are interested in. It’s all about providing clear signals of trust, and comprehensive, meaningful content.
Showcase your expertise in content associated with your core topics, and house this in an easy-to-reach location. This can then be amplified by providing access to related content and could move them from being a user to a customer faster.
By focusing your topical resources in one specific place, you can also make sure they are quick to load, easy to interact with, and easy to navigate.
Strengthening Topical Authority Signals
Within Google guidelines, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness (E-A-T) provide a key insight when it comes to assigning overall quality scores to any site.
E-AT is used by Google to simply decide if the content should be considered of high quality. If so, it will rank much higher for one or more of the following reasons:
- It is deemed helpful and useful to people.
- It is created by demonstrating experts in the chosen topic area.
- It is showcased on a relevant site that shows the necessary authority signals.
- The content displays a positive user experience and the expected trust signals.
- It provides comprehensive topical coverage suited to satisfying the user’s search needs.
By compiling together content into a simple hierarchy, you are making the tasks of identifying, understanding, and ranking content easier for search engines.
You want your topical signals to be led by Google guidelines, including E-A-T.
In contrast, if you were to have a website where the bulk of the content offers no value or is fighting for the spotlight, you will rank lower in the searches and won’t be able to fight against the noise of other businesses.
Natural, Value-Based, Link Building
When providing a hub to resolve and answers people’s questions, wants, needs, and pain points, you can naturally gain trust by using in-linking signals.
Consider the endless social listening opportunities to share your thorough pillar pages with your target audience.
Pillar pages are seen as free, easy-to-access content resources that can be shared and promoted, leading to link acquisition, brand building, and PR.
Other Added SEO Benefits of Pillar Pages
There is a wide variety of additional SEO benefits acquired when using pillar pages, but this would mainly include:
- Identifying content gaps and filling them correctly to appear in wider volumes of search terms.
- Improving your site’s internal structure and its related link signals (and values) pointing to key content pillars.
- Associating your brand and expertise to dominant commercial topics that are guaranteed to bring in conversions and SEO traffic.
- Reducing your bounce rate and improving other site metrics, such as the time spent on your site, and other content quality signals.
In Summary
Looking at the insights above, it’s clear that pillar pages aren’t just a great way of organising your website’s content, but they can also help boost your SEO.
By actioning the creation of pillar pages, you can create a faster, streamlined, and overall more user-friendly experience on your site – meaning both users and search engines can interact with it easier.
Reach out to me today to discuss how can I can support your build of yours.
Thanks for reading,
Myk Baxter, eCommerce Consultant
