Have you heard the term “pillar content” in several contexts and felt totally confused about what it means? Let me help you with my full guide.

The term “pillar content” has a variety of explanations in content marketing. It can refer to critical pages on your website, the elements within these pages and blog posts (for example assets like images, videos and other media), as well as the topical categories of blog writing, social media creation and even email marketing.

Depending on which part of content marketing you serve, SEO, copywriting, or otherwise, the term can not only have a different meaning but also be measured in different ways.

Let me show you what I mean.

Let’s make it simple and break it down into 3 clear definitions.

Pillar content: critical web pages

When marketers talk about pillar content in reference to critical web pages on a site, they refer to the key navigational structure. These include:

• Primary navigation pages

  • Home page

  • About page

  • Ecommerce, or service category pages

• Secondary navigation pages

  • Landing pages

  • Sales pages or product pages

  • FAQs

  • Terms

These are the most important pages you need on your website to be able to generate leads, progress leads through a sales funnel and convert them into a transaction.

You will find that both SEO experts and copywriters view your website as an online sales rep for your business and their focus is to create a site that reaches more leads and converts better. Performance in reach and conversion is how these pages are structured and tracked.

Pillar content: assets within a page

Each web page needs to be made up of several elements, or assets to prime it higher engagement with your audience. These are:

• Keyworded headings, that allow for skim reading and focusing attention

• Descriptive and compelling copy

• A call to action

• An image, video or media asset that adds value, increases audience dwell time and can be used in other SERP snippets (video, shopping, etc.)

• Internal links (for improved SEO)

All of these individual assets work together to further your leads through their buyer’s journey and convert on specific calls to action when needed. And whilst not every asset type is needed for every page, you will find a mix helps to pull a page together based on the goal of the intended content.

It’s really important to say that not every page is about conversion, sometimes pages are purely an informational tool for your prospective clients. That doesn’t mean they don’t have a transactional call to action though. The call to action on informational pages is about engagement and offering more pages to view (just as I’m doing with the backlinks in this blog post!)

Pages and sometimes individual assets like videos can be tracked using Google Analytics.

Both SEO content marketers and copywriting content marketers measure performance using tools like heatmaps and A/B testing to increase engagement or calls to action conversion.

Pillar content: blog writing, social media and email marketing

Most content marketers use the term “pillar content” to refer to the theme of your website, social, or email content.

What do I mean by “theme”? That’s pretty ambiguous, right?

When I create content for clients what I’m looking for is to tap into key categories of discussion.

Let’s look at my client, EcoDrift. Antoni is in facilities management, offering award-winning cleaning services to major commercial buildings in the Hampshire and Berkshire areas. In being tasked to create content for his blog, it is my job to understand his buyer’s persona, their needs and showcase our expertise to generate compelling content they will want to read.

I also need to understand EcoDrift’s services and their values as a business, because these will inform the content topics I choose to write about within each category. They help frame the tone of voice I need to use when writing each piece too.

In putting all of that information together, you can see that I might well feel overwhelmed in the writing process. Where do I start and what do I say?

Creating content buckets, or categories (as content pillars are often referred to) in this context is helpful to keep me focused.

As a rule of thumb, I tend to pick between 4 to 5 themes to write about.

For Antoni, these are:

• Choosing facilities services

• Office cleaning recommendations/tips 

• Germs and disinfection

• Sustainability

All serve as great leads into topics for clients, as well as cementing our expertise in specific areas.

What's more, they give me an endless resource to create content around.

If you need a copywriter to create compelling copy, someone who understands the customer journey, fill in the project brief form below!