Not to be confused with a landing page, a pillar page is much longer than your average blog post. More specifically, a pillar page breaks the content down by topic and allows readers to easily jump to the section they want to learn about.
We checked out dozens of brands that nailed the pillar page strategy and picked the ones we believe offer great examples. Let’s start with “the what” first.
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What Makes an Effective Pillar Page?
A pillar page answers questions about a specific topic. This topic is broken down into subtopics (topic clusters) that typically include the following properties:
- Long content (ungated)
- Long-term keywords
- Sections that are structured for readability and engagement
- Images
- Easy navigation
- External and internal resource linking
- Calls to action to a downloadable offer (e.g., eBook or white paper)
Here’s a short video that will help you understand the logic behind pillar content.
Why Should You Create Pillar Pages?
We’ll give you two reasons:
1. Google prefers a well-organized and user-friendly website experience. If you want to increase your ranking, the most important factors to remember are high-quality content and relevant links.
2. Your visitors can easily browse and consume your content. Think of a pillar page as a roadmap for your website, blog posts and videos, giving them all the information they need about a main topic.
The Best Pillar Page Examples in 2019
1. HubSpot: The Ultimate Guide to Customer Support
As a leader in content marketing, HubSpot is a great place to start. Their customer support pillar page is a basic example of how you can organize your content in a simple way.
Clocking in at over 2,500 words, it covers a number of topics outlined by a menu that helps you navigate faster. Sure enough, it’s optimized for SEO and conversion with links, calls to action and even social media icons to encourage sharing. Interestingly, you’ll notice a call to action at the top of the page to a relevant offer, which you might usually find at the end.
Blog: What's the Setup Process Like for HubSpot?
2. Help Scout: How to Talk to Your Customers
One of the main goals of creating a pillar page is to keep your visitor engaged throughout their entire reading experience. We all know bulky paragraphs of lengthy text can quickly turn a reader off. During a time when attention spans are at their lowest, there has to be a more visually appealing way to hold people’s interest, while also fitting in SEO strategy.
How to Talk to Your Customers does an awesome job in these areas. Everything about this pillar page shows that they took careful consideration of structure, use of images, video and more. We especially like how it feeds us with bite-sized information at every scroll.
3. Backlinko: The Definitive Guide to SEO in 2019
The tone and style of your website content is often reflective of the relationship you have with your customers. Your content can be insightful, helpful and playful all at the same time. If that’s what you aim for, this pillar page will inspire you.
Check out The Definitive Guide to SEO in 2019. In this creatively stunning piece, it has a fun introduction that also offers you a pdf version of the guide to download and read later. We especially enjoy its fun nav menu. From looking at their link building strategy plus the use of images and videos to help describe the information, it’s clear that the authors set out to be a definitive source for this topic. And they do it while managing to stay away from heavy-text content.
