Pillar Pages – How can they benefit the SEO of a website?

Pillar pages play a critical role in driving traffic, improving SERP ranking for a wide range of keywords, facilitating internal linking, and offering other SEO benefits. Hence, businesses must create pillar pages that guide users to other related pages or topic clusters on the website. Doing so can help increase user engagement and reduce bounce rates. You can get help from an SEO Agency in Ontario to develop effective content strategies involving pillar pages and topic clusters for your website.

Pillar Pages and Topic Clusters

A pillar page is created centering around a single topic, product, or service related to your business or niche. Usually, it is long-form content that includes SEO topic clusters to provide in-depth information about a specific topic. These pages can help drive significant web traffic through consistent and strategic SEO efforts. Further, these pages help improve site structure through internal linking.

While the pillar pages provide a broad overview of a core topic, topic clusters discuss specific sub-topics. These pages are interlinked with the pillar page to create a network of content.

7 Benefits of Pillar Pages for SEO

Now that you know what pillar pages and topic clusters are, let’s discuss in detail their benefits for SEO.

Improve site structure

Grouping pillar and cluster pages by topic helps create a clear and logical website structure. It makes it easier for search engines and users to understand the relation between different pages on your website. Besides, it helps Google determine your expertise and present the best URL for specific search queries.

Easy to rank for high-volume keywords

As pillar pages cover broad topics, they are likelier to rank for competitive keywords with high search volume. Usually, when searching for information or an overview of a topic, searches use general terms. As a result, creating pillar pages can help you rank high for these high-volume general keywords.

When users become familiar with a topic, they will likely narrow their searches to specific long-tail keywords. Creating topic clusters will help you rank for these long-tail keywords. As pillar pages cover many sub-topics and link to them on the website, it will encourage users to spend more time on your website consuming your content. It can help increase dwell time, which further can contribute to improved SERP ranking.

Further, as pillar pages are comprehensive, they will likely receive backlinks from many authority websites. Since these pages link to other pages on your website, both pillar and cluster pages will likely start ranking high on SERP for relevant queries.

Create backlink opportunity

Earning backlinks from authority sites is crucial to boosting the credibility of your site and improving its SERP ranking. As pillar pages provide an overview of the main topic and related sub-topics, they are likely to attract backlinks from other reputed websites. An increased number of backlinks will help improve your website’s authority and SERP rankings. Thus, they can help improve your overall site’s performance on SERP.

Better internal link-building

Creating internal links is essential to boost audience engagement. It shows how different pieces of content on your website are related. As a result, it will help search engines understand your website structure better and the context of each page. It further prevents your pages from becoming orphaned or unrelated to other pages, which can make it difficult for audiences to reach. Internal links help create a hierarchy on your website, through which it distributes link equity. Pillar pages are informative and well-structured pages. They act as a source for other related pages. They share link juice with the cluster pages and improve their ranking. Further, cluster pages can help improve the authority of the pillar pages by providing detailed content on the main and sub-topics.

Improve customer engagement

When users want to get familiar with or understand a topic, they will likely use general terms. Upon landing on your page, they might get interested in the sub-topics highlighted in the pillar pages. Creating links to related cluster pages will allow these users to visit other pages following the internal links to learn more about them. Thus, the pillar page and topic cluster strategy can help you keep your users engaged. It will further signal search engines that your site is relevant, which will help boost its SERP ranking. On your end, you need to provide as much information as possible in both pillar and cluster pages to encourage site visitors to explore your site further. Increased dwell time on your site can also help you earn more clicks on your internal links. Besides, providing in-depth information can help you earn audiences’ trust, which might help improve lead generation and business conversion.

Showcase your expertise

When you build a network of content covering a specific broad topic and related sub-topics, it will help improve the authority of your brand. Both your users and search engines will likely consider your brand to be credible and an expert in the field. If search engines recognize your website to have a topical authority, they will likely rank high on SERP for related searches. The reason is that Google wants to display the most relevant information to the users based on their queries.

Lead generation

The more time your audiences spend on your website, the more you can create opportunities to obtain them as leads. Besides, when prospects consider your website as an authority on a particular topic, they will likely remember your brand when looking for similar content in the future. It is crucial for branding. Further, with effective lead nurturing strategies, you can convert these leads to paying customers.

Therefore, to experience all these benefits, you need to develop an effective content strategy involving pillar and cluster pages. HireH Consulting offers comprehensive SEO Services in Ontario. We can help develop effective pillar and topic cluster strategies to boost your website’s organic ranking and traffic.