What are pillar pages and why do you need them?

Pillar pages have been a mainstay of content marketing strategy for many years. They are used to educate and inform your audience but also to demonstrate 'topical authority' to the search engines and AI platforms that increasingly control the flow of traffic to our websites. Here’s what you need to know about pillar pages and how they work.

What are pillar pages?

Pillar pages are pieces of long-form content on your website intended to act as the ultimate guide to  'core topics' of central importance to your customers and your business.  

They contain the kind of information and insight you regularly share with prospects and customers to help them with their buying decisions.

Packaged into dedicated pages, supported by clusters of blogs they provide more information about the topic to further educate your audience.

How do pillar pages help form topic clusters?

Pillar pages form the heart of different ‘topic clusters’ on your website.  These clusters are there to  demonstrate the range of your expertise you bring to your customers and help them with their decision making. 

Typically, a business will choose around 6 or 7 central topics that they want to own as a business and be 'found for' online.

If you look in detail at this website, for example,  you'll see the central topic clusters that we think our prospects and customers are looking for help and advice with:

• Marketing for B2B Manufacturers
• Brand Positioning
  
• Content Strategy
  
• ABM
  
• Sales Enablement
  
• Inbound Marketing

What's on a pillar page

Pillar pages typically include video, infographics and written content.  They should be easily scannable by the reader exploring your site or landing on your page from a specific search query.

Uncluttered and simple to navigate, they contain bi-directional links to those supporting clusters of related content.

Above all, they should give your customers accessible answers to all  the burning questions they have about the core topic in hand, sharing your expert knowledge in a helpful and comprehensive way.

But, remember, this is NOT a sales pitch or a brochure for the services you offer.

How long should a pillar page be?

In the early days of content marketing, pillar pages were often chunky bits of work totalling anything between 6,000 and 10,000 words - but in this age of content overload - experts say they can be much shorter than this and still have the required effect.

As Samuel Schmitt of the AI company Thruuu points out:

"The recommended word count for a pillar page is 2000+ words. Note that word count is not a ranking factor. The length depends on the topic and the kind of structure your pillar page has."

Nowadays, successful pillar pages are often relatively short, hitting the key points of a topic, as an introductory primer for an interested audience, and then linking off to more detailed blogs (sometimes between 1,000 and 2,000 words) if the reader wants to explore further.

Can you give me an example of a great pillar page?

Yes.  Here’s one of ours, based around the core topic  ‘Marketing for B2B Manufacturers’.

Our rationale for choosing this as a pillar topic is clear, it's a subject that's central to our business offering.

We know from keyword research there are 100s of professionals, like you, who are searching for help with this specific topic and related subtopics every month.  And we believe we have the expertise and insight to support them as they persuade the C-Suite to invest in marketing.

To help with this we built a pillar page that covers that topic broadly, but with links out to the web pages and blog posts on our site where you can explore the different areas of that topic in more detail.

These clusters of blogs include titles like: 

• Tapping into growth opportunities: Market sizing for B2B manufacturers
• 24 ways to generate great blog ideas for manufacturing

And, of course, the blog post about pillar pages that you are reading right now!

Think of the original pillar page as a tree trunk from which various branches—smaller, more specific pieces of cluster content (like this one) —extend.

And, to push the metaphor even further, think of your visitors and web crawlers as squirrels using the central tree trunk and branches to navigate the entirety of the ‘tree’—gathering the information they need as they explore its furthest reaches.

Maybe that's a bit much.  But you get the point.

Here's a less fun image, that illustrates the same point:

This image is from HubSpot’s own site, part of a series reproduced in this blog, demonstrating how their own approach to pillar page creation has changed over time.

Why is topic clustering important?

Organising content topic clusters like these with pillar pages at the centre of them makes it easier for site visitors and search engines to access your expertise and find answers to their questions in the fastest way possible.  

Pillar pages and topic clusters are great ways of consuming content

Pillar pages and topic clusters are great for improving user experience by organising content in a way that’s easy to navigate.

They group related topics together, making it simpler for users to find all the information they need in one place. By including different kinds of digital content—like videos, infographics, and blogs—these pages can become more engaging and interactive, offering a richer, more interesting experience that keeps users exploring and sharing content.

How do pillars and clustering help with SEO

Have you noticed? Internet search has changed. 10 years ago we searched with single keywords and long-tail phrases - as though we were asking a foreigner the way to the beach.

In the old world, content was added to your website in a linear way with blog posts and pages written and optimised around specific keywords. 

As they were not linked together by anchoring, topical pillars, results from these blog posts matched our keywords but not always our intent.   We'd often have to trawl through search results to filter results for greater relevance.

Nowadays, Google has become capable of dealing with semantic complexity just like a human being does. AI powered search intelligently interprets what we are looking for and crawls sites for blogs and pages that most precisely answer that intent.

As a result, Google says, businesses shouldn’t just focus on keyword optimisation but on the overall quality of the content they are producing, ensuring web crawlers can see the relevance and depth of a site’s expertise when searching for answers to specific queries.

The internal links from pillar pages to related questions and sub-topics, show Google that your website possesses a whole network of knowledge in this area.  They offer the search engines the fastest route to find important content, relevant to specific topics.

This kind of web structure, together with Google's advanced semantic understanding, makes the search engine capable of ‘snippeting’ the most relevant answers from the most authoritative sites in response to our queries in their SERPs. 

It makes them capable of picking out related questions, which they can offer to you in the ‘People Also Ask’ section.

Now, Google is also creating its own AI overview of certain topics at the top of its search returns, creating mini-pillars in its own words, but citing and linking to the websites that demonstrate that expertise.  

Pillar pages are going to be very important in helping with AI-assisted search.

A final thought

So, that’s our brief introduction to pillar pages, their purpose and function in the user experience and the SEO landscape. Pillar pages continue to satisfy not only our customers need for the knowledge of experts, but the electronic brains of the search engines and AI platforms that bring traffic to our sites.