3 Types of Pillar Pages to Help Catapult Your SEO Rankings

When researching and learning more about an unfamiliar topic it usually helps to find a resource that one can go back to every now and again. Think about how Wikipedia pages are structured, wherein you can read about a specific topic, and then come back to it later to delve deeper into the subject.

In the world of content marketing, that’s where Pillar Pages come in. PIllar Pages are content hubs which are sort of a mix of a book’s table of contents and glossary.

When you’re learning how to build and design a website, for example, you’ll likely need some help going through each step in the process. That’s where a content hub can be helpful. It serves as a resource for visitors to your website. Plus! It’s also a great way to get Google’s attention and have your site get place higher in their rankings.

That said, here are 3 types of Pillar Pages that you can explore to help you improve your search engine rankings.

 

Ultimate Guide Pillar Pages

Remember all those “For Dummies” guides that came out in bookstores in the early 90’s? The Ultimate Guide pillar page is basically the online version of that. Ultimate Guide content hubs work similarly to your typical Wikipedia page wherein you have one page that serves as the central hub for a specific topic, and then links throughout the page that lead you to other content pieces that contain more information about that subtopic.

These work really well in terms of lowering your site’s bounce rate, as well as increasing average time spent on your website. And if you’re able to increase those metrics, that signals to Google that your webpage and your website are both relevant and authoritative enough to merit a higher ranking.

A well-conceived guide pillar page can help you increase traffic, attract backlinks, and build an audience that is more likely to convert to subscribers in the long term.

One very good example of Ultimate Guide Pillar Pages include Typeform’s Brand Awareness: nearly everything you need to know.

 

‘How to’ Pillar Pages

Although they’re of a similar vein to the previous type of pillar page, ‘How to’ pillar pages focus, instead, on more specific types of tutorial content made to help your target audience solve a specific problem.

Step-by-step tutorials with relevant illustrations work well for these types of pillar pages. For Software as a Service (SAS) companies, these pages would be ideal to help promote your product or service by telling audiences something like, “Building a website is much easier when you use our tool.” Similarly, it’s a great place to also make comparisons between your software and a competitor’s and inform audiences that “Our tools are a lot easier to use.”

 

‘What is’ Pillar Pages

The last type of pillar page is the ‘What is’ pillar page. Here more focus is placed on educating one’s audience rather than the focus being on teaching and guiding people to perform certain tasks.

These types of pillar pages are perfect for entry level or top-of-the-funnel audiences. They help educate the audience about your industry or product category so that should they decide to invest in a software or service in the future, your company first comes to mind.

A good example of how you can create opportunities with these types of pillar pages would be something like, “What is keto diet?” or “What is intermittent fasting?” You could start off by defining the terms, inform your audience as to how they work and why they might benefit from these types of diets, and then perhaps eventually introduce them to a nutritionist program that your company offers.

Content marketing is one of the most important tasks you can do to improve your search engine rankings. About 83% of business to consumer marketers make use of blog posts and articles in their marketing strategy, and according to SEMRush, long-form content (3,000+ words) get more traffic shares, backlinks than articles whose average length is around 1,000 words.

If your goal is to increase your traffic and your rankings in the long-term, then it might be worth exploring how your company can work on building pillar pages to catapult your SEO to the next level.

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