What is cornerstone content, and how can it help improve your SEO?
You’ve likely heard the term “cornerstone content” being thrown around as you look for SEO and content marketing tips. But what exactly is cornerstone content, and why is it essential for your SEO strategy?
In this article, we will explain cornerstone content, why it’s important, and even show you how to create it!
What is Cornerstone Content and why it’s important?
Cornerstone content, sometimes called pillar content, refers to the foundational set of web pages or articles on your website. These are typically comprehensive, in-depth, and highly informative, covering core topics central to your site’s overall subject or theme.
Creating cornerstone content is a powerful content marketing strategy with phenomenal results.
Cornerstone content serves several important purposes in SEO and content marketing. Typical examples include:
- Authority and expertise: Cornerstone content helps you establish topical authority. It also helps you better showcase your expertise. Both are important elements
- Improved crawling: Creating cornerstone content helps you create a more optimized internal linking structure. This improves crawling by search bots and boosts your SEO.
- Improved indexing: When search engines identify your cornerstone content, they can better index it for relevant search terms.
If you want to up your SEO game, then cornerstone content must be part of your Digital Marketing
Characteristics of Cornerstone Content
Before you create your cornerstone content strategy, it’s important to know what type of content constitutes cornerstone content. Here are a few characteristics of cornerstone content:
- Relevant: Covers a topic that is central to your niche or industry.
- Comprehensive: Provides in-depth information, often serving as the ultimate guide on the subject.
- Evergreen: The content remains relevant and valuable over time.
- Naturally connects to other pages: Cornerstone content often links to and from other related articles on your website, creating a web of internal links.
A closer look at the site will show that each of the topics covered is an individual blog post. They all form a cluster around the primary article.
The Importance of Cornerstone Content for SEO
The important role of cornerstone content in SEO can’t be overstated. Here are a few reasons why it’s crucial:
Improved Search Rankings
Well-structured cornerstone content can boost your site’s search engine rankings, especially for competitive keywords. One reason for this is that cornerstone content often covers a topic comprehensively.
Another reason is the strategic internal links built to and from the content. These help search engines better understand the relationships between different pages.
Enhanced User Experience
Cornerstone content provides visitors with comprehensive information, making their experience more valuable. This can lead to longer visits, reduced bounce rates, and increased user engagement.
Authority Building
Cornerstone content provides the best opportunity to build topical authority. It’s an excellent tool for establishing your website as a go-to source for information in your niche. This results in your brand gaining the trust of both users and search engines. It also boosts your brand awareness.
With authority and trust being the currency of the internet, gaining these is crucial to your success as a publisher or business owner.
Internal Linking: The Key to Optimizing Cornerstone Content in WordPress
Cornerstone content never stands alone. It should have other smaller pieces of content linking to it. Called topic clusters, these are articles that each focus and go in-depth on each subtopic covered in your cornerstone content.
These links must not be random but strategically built.
Here are 2 of the most common ways you can build links to your cornerstone content:
Manual Internal Linking
The first way to create cornerstone content is by manually creating links to and from your cornerstone content.
Google can be your ally here as you can use the site search operator to find relevant URLs right on. To use this tool, go to Google and search for “site:example.com.” This will show you all the indexed content on your site
You can also refine your search by adding a relevant keyword to your search criteria.
This helps narrow down your search to articles relevant to your cornerstone content.
Once you’ve identified your target articles, you can insert a link to your cornerstone post. To do this, open each article in WordPress’s editor mode, go to the section you want to add the link and highlight the anchor text. Click on the link icon:
Clicking the link icon will open a window where you can paste the link you copied.
You’ll also be given internal link settings options that include:
- Open in new tab
- Add “nofollow” to link
- Add “sponsored” to link
- Add “ugc” to link
- Add title attribute to link
Once you’ve selected your settings, press Enter to add the link. And your link will be added.
Repeat this process for all the articles you want to link to your cornerstone content.
As you can see, manually creating cornerstone content is laborious. That’s why we would like to show you an easier way.
Please see our sample websites:
Morning Lee : Realtor | Mortgage Broker | Business Consulting
Vancouver Sign Post Installation
EstateDetect – Property Detective – Real Estate Due Diligence Expert
WealthDao Consulting – E-Commerce | Digital Marketing | Affiliate Marketing | Online Store
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