What is a pillar site and what relevance does it have for your seo?

Understanding the rules of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is not always easy, especially because the algorithms of search engines are constantly changing. 

But it's important to stay on the ball here because this is the only way you can ensure that your blog posts achieve a good ranking in the search results. 

One current trend that you should pay close attention to is theme clusters and content strategies designed to build authority for such clusters.

The search behaviour of users has changed, as well as the technologies used to interpret and generate the search results. 

So far, long tail keywords have been the focus of most SEO strategies. But here a lot has changed, and new approaches come to the fore, which also affect the structural organization of your content.

In this post, we'll look at how users' search behaviour has changed, the benefits of SEO strategies that focus on topic clusters, and what Pillar sites are all about.

What are topic clusters?

The use of search engines and the way in which search queries are formulated and entered has changed. 

And this change is now slowly mirroring the way bloggers and lincoln seo experts create content. Below we have summarized the most important information for you.

Users enter longer, formulated search queries

Imagine you were looking for a sushi restaurant. Just type "restaurant" in the search box or rather a longer request like "Japanese restaurants near me"?

A majority of users choose the second variant: 64% of all search queries contain at least four words. Also, more and more users are entering phrase sets as search terms, as they can get the most appropriate search results.

This is partly due to the increasing use of voice input. Thanks to Siri, Google Assistant and Co., 20% of all Google searches made on mobile devices are voice-activated. 

And with the growing popularity of Amazon echo and Google Home devices, this number is expected to continue to grow.

But this is not the only reason for the longer search queries. The amount of content that flooded the Internet today also plays a role here, because quantity is not always the same quality. 

So users with more targeted searches are trying to circumvent the barrage of useless information and restrict the results from the outset. 

Furthermore, more and more users go on to only to the Google search results about flying and focus on the headings of blog posts and the highlighted snippet from Google. Because these often provide rough answers to their questions.

On the other hand, the search engines are getting better at filtering out the most relevant results from thousands of content.

The quality and accuracy of search results is increasing

Google continually optimizes its algorithm to improve the relevance of the search results continually. For example, Google is working against the excessive use of irrelevant internal links by no longer checking out-formulated search queries for individual keywords. 

Instead, they are now interpreted as one unit. Also, the company uses artificial intelligence to interpret certain search terms more precisely.

In other words, Google helps users find exactly what they were looking for - even if their query was not well worded. 

For example, if you enter "running shoes," Google will now also see "sneaker" results. For bloggers and SEO experts, this means they need to be even more focused on creating content to close any gaps that might prevent their content from ranking well.

To cover as many variations of search queries as possible on a specific topic, it is advisable to structure your website about various core topics. 

This core content is then hyperlinked to more specific blog posts about specific long tail keywords (in a formulated form). And with that, we would have arrived at the topic cluster model.

Theme clusters provide better rankings and more relevant search results

So far, most bloggers and SEO experts focused on achieving a high ranking for specific keywords with individual blog posts. 

However, with such an approach, content is usually poorly structured, and users have difficulty finding the information they want. Also, this approach leads to their contributions to similar topics competing with each other regarding ranking.

However, if you want to get a high ranking today and seek the best answers for searchers, then you need a new approach: the theme cluster model. 

You first select the topics for which you want to achieve a good ranking in the search results. Then, build the content based on specific keywords that are relevant to the topic and that are related. The goal is to cover a topic in their content comprehensively and thus to build SEO authority. 

With the transition to this model, our blog structure is now designed so that many different posts arranged around a theme (cluster) and hyperlinked to other content in the cluster:

At the heart of this model is an optimized page architecture, designed to arrange and link URLs to make multiple sites on the Google Ranking site - and help users find the content they want faster. This architecture is built around three components - pillar content, cluster content, and hyperlinks:

Pillar Content is the theme for which bloggers and SEO experts want to get the best possible ranking, which is done by creating more specific cluster content.

What is a Pillar site?

A pillar page (pillar) is the core of a topic cluster. This page briefly discusses all aspects of a particular topic. More detailed information on individual aspects is then provided as cluster content (usually in the form of blog posts), which are hyperlinked to the Pillar site.

So, on the Pillar side, users get a rough overview of a specific topic (like content marketing). In clustered content, on the other hand, you will find detailed information about a specific keyword (such as blogging) related to this topic.

Since Pillar pages cover all aspects of a topic, they are usually much more comprehensive than the individual cluster content items, but they are less detailed. 

So be sure to clarify some, but not all, questions on the Pillar page, leaving enough material for your cluster content.

Among other things, this includes a contribution to which mistakes companies often make on Facebook. 

In this case, we are therefore concerned with achieving a good ranking in the search results for Facebook marketing. 

The Pillar site provides an introduction to marketing with Facebook, and cluster content provides detailed information on specific aspects of the topic, such as common mistakes.

To create a Pillar page

First, you should break away from your focus on keywords. Instead, first focus on the topics for which you want to achieve a good ranking. Then search for suitable blog topics based on relevant keywords.

Take into consideration what your target group is most interested in and what challenges it faces. Your topic should be wide enough that there is room for further contributions, i.e. more cluster content. But be sure to choose it so that you can address all aspects of the topic on a single page.

To return to our previous example of "Facebook marketing": Here, the topic of "social media" would have been too vague, while "common mistakes in Facebook marketing" would have been too specific. 

"Facebook marketing" provided a theme that we could easily present on one page, while at the same time opening up numerous opportunities for complementary blog posts.

A Pillar page should provide an answer to the questions people type into Google search. This, in turn, should make them decide on your content for any further information, including any other results. 

So, after visitors have read your Pillar page, they should be able to learn more about hyperlinks to more specific cluster content.

And that's how it looks in the case of Pillar page on Facebook marketing :

The main text deals with the topic of Facebook marketing in general, with hyperlinks to specific cluster content in appropriate places, providing further information.