Why and how to create content pillars to boost your content strategy

Do you find yourself banging your head on the wall every week trying to plan out your content calendar? Content pillars can make the planning process much easier, and spare you a whole lot of headaches.

They make your life easier, and they also reassure your boss that the right content will keep rolling out at the right time.

What is the content pillar approach?

The content pillar approach is a content marketing strategy in which you identify a few core topics that your brand’s content is going to revolve around. While following this approach, you create one thorough, exhaustive piece of content that explains one of those core topics in great detail, then you go on to create smaller pieces of content by breaking the overarching topic down into subtopics and ensure that each of those smaller pieces of content link back to the main one, which is known as the content pillar.

The content pillar aims to cover the main topic in as much detail as possible, answering any questions that someone could have about it. You then dissect the pillar and create a cluster of pages that go into greater detail about the subtopics. Links flow both from the main content pillar to the cluster pages and back from the cluster pages to the pillar page.

When you decide on a set of pillars that your brand will focus on, you can keep breaking them down into subtopics to create content on, which will practically give you an unending supply of topics, so that you don’t need to waste too much time trying to figure out what to write or talk about.

Content pillars are generally created in the form of blog posts, long form webpages, reports, etc. and are broken down into shorter blog articles, ebooks, infographics, videos, etc. These subtopics can then be used to create social media posts, email campaigns, and even webinars, which eventually drive viewers to the main pillars, and ultimately to your sales pages.

What is the purpose of content pillars?

The main purpose of content pillars is to make content planning easier. Once you’ve established your pillars, you don’t need to break your head spending hours figuring out what to write about or create videos on every week.

Your planning process gets substantially simplified, you just need to pick a subtopic from each of your pillars and you’ll have at least 3-4 topics to develop content on for that week.

Using this approach enables you to streamline the content creation process and make it more efficient.

Why are content pillars important?

Content pillars are extremely important because they bring numerous benefits for your content strategy. Some of these include:

Authority

Developing content pillars helps you establish your brand as an authoritative figure in your niche. When you’ve got several posts and pages that cover a range of topics in your domain, your visitors and readers will start looking at you as a thought leader and will turn to you for all the advice they need regarding those topics.

SEO benefits

When you create pillars of content and establish your brand as an authority in the subject, you’re going to see your posts and pages ranking higher in the search engine results pages (SERPs). That’s because Google and the other search engines tend to rank sites more favorably when they demonstrate expertise in specific domains.

You’d also see improvements in your SEO results because when you connect the content clusters, you’re working on interlinking, which works magic for your SEO.

Balance

When you have your core pillars defined and pull subtopics from each of those pillars during each content planning cycle, you don’t need to worry about all your content focusing on just one topic. It will automatically get balanced across the various pillars that you have decided on. If you intend on focusing on specific pillars to a greater degree, you can assign a greater weight to those pillars, ensuring that a certain percentage of your subtopics come from there.

Content repurposing

The pillars make content repurposing much easier. You can take the subtopics and use them for blog posts, social media posts, infographics, emails, YouTube videos, Instagram reels and much more.

Audience targeting

You can design your content pillars according to the needs of your customer personas, enabling you to keep creating content that targets all your personas, instead of just one of them.

Efficiency

As we mentioned earlier, content pillars make the planning and strategizing process much quicker. You don’t need to spend as much time brainstorming on a weekly basis.

What are the types of content pillars?

Content pillars can be classified into 4 types, based on their format:

Resource

This type of content pillar tends to look a bit like a directory. It contains a lot of information regarding the topic, but also has a lot of internal and external links that guide you towards educational content related to the topic as well as products and services that tie into the core topic. Basically, resource content pillars are created in a way that enables a visitor to find any information, product, or service related to the main topic that they might be interested in.

How-to

A how-to content pillar page takes your readers through a process in great depth. It explains every single step of the process in detail, empowering readers to solve specific problems and get things done. Such a pillar is crafted in the form of a tutorial.

When you create a how-to pillar, you can include a CTA that focuses on how your products or services make the process much easier.

What is

A What Is content pillar defines a specific topic, describes it minutely, and answers any questions that a reader may have about it. Generally, this is top-of-funnel content and is created for readers who are novices to that topic and have just started exploring it.

It is very easy to divide these pillar pages into subtopics and clusters, which sends readers down a rabbit hole exploring the topic. They’re also great because searchers tend to type “What is…” when they use Google, which could get them directly to your page.

Guide

Guides can be a bit like a cross between a “What Is” and a “How to” pillar. They start by giving you an overview of the topic, then they get deeper into it, and you might get a tutorial on how to go through processes related to it as well. However, these pillars usually don’t go into too much detail with the how-to sections. You’d usually find another smaller page or article that dives deeper into the processes. This is generally top or middle of funnel content

How do you create a content pillar?

There's a 10-step process to creating effective content pillars that drive tons of value for your business as well as your audience and customers.

1. Understand your target audience and their needs

Before you start building the actual content pillars, you need to conduct audience research and create customer personas. This will help you define whom you are writing the content for and what their pain points and needs are.

2. Compare your organizational goals with their needs

Be clear about what you’re trying to achieve with your content pillars - which products and services you want to promote and get conversions for. Now you can pick the right customer personas whose needs match your offerings.

This is going to enable you to make a list of topics that you can consider focusing on for your content buckets.

3. Explore your analytics

Go through your existing content to see which topics get the most traction from your audience. You could build on those topics in your cluster, or you could turn one of your existing pages or articles into the pillar piece and create smaller pieces of content around it.

4.Check out your competition

Look at what your competitors are doing. See what’s working out for them and what they write about the most. You can also see which keywords they are ranking the highest for and work on poaching those keywords from them.

5.Prioritize the right core topics and subtopics

After you’ve created a list of topics that you could consider building your content pillars around, you need to decide which ones are the most important for you. Your business goals will help you understand which topics will drive the most value for your brand and you can go on to craft your content buckets around them.

6. Conduct keyword research

Analyze your topics to see which keywords have the highest search volumes with the lowest competition. This is extremely important while framing your content strategy. You’ll be able to see which keywords you need to include in your pillar pieces, and the process will also help you pick more topics for your cluster pages and articles.

7. Define the structure of your pillar page

Decide what kind of pillar page you want to create. Then map out an outline for it. Your keyword research comes in handy here. But you need to use your own brains to figure out which pieces of information you’d want to place higher up on the page, and which ones are fine lying lower.

8. Build the main pillar and a few of the subtopics

After defining the outline for the pillar page, all that’s left for you to do is develop the content for it. Publish it, and create the first few pieces for the cluster of subtopics. You’ve now got your basic content bucket set up and you need to keep expanding it over time.

9. Interlink across the cluster

Link to the main pillar page and other directly related pages across the cluster. You’d also want to be linking from the main pages to the subpages at places where readers could want additional details and guidance. This works magic for your SEO efforts and also shows the search engines that your brand is an authority on the subject and has a lot of content related to it.

10. Repurpose your content

You can now take content from your pillars and use it to create images, videos, infographics, social media posts, email campaigns, webinars, and much more. This helps you get the most value from your content, and you don’t need to waste time building new content from scratch for each of these formats.