Is your message reaching the masses, or are you getting lost in the noise?
When it comes to publishing content for your website, you don’t want to trial-and-error it. A much more effective strategy is to thoughtfully develop a content plan that helps you rank in SERPs. Cornerstone content is arguably the most important component of that content strategy.
This content category includes the best pages and articles on your site–the ones you want search engines to notice. It also enhances the user experience by creating hubs or pillars that make it easier for your visitors to find the information that they want. Here are four tips for ensuring that your cornerstone content works as hard for you as it possibly can.
1. Steer clear of content overload
Your cornerstone content is like a work of art: it’s important to know when to stop developing it. You want to update these pieces regularly with new content, but content overload is a real risk. You’ve wasted your time if your visitors bounce quickly because they can’t find what they want.
To overcome this issue, be intentional about what any given cornerstone piece includes. Look out for tangents or delving too deep into a subtopic or niche. Be very deliberate with what you include, and cut out overly-tangential subtopics liberally.
2. Consider your readers first
The idea of cornerstone content is to answer your customers’ basic questions. That means that you should optimize based on keywords–the questions readers ask and how you choose to answer them. One strategy is to write for the reader first and optimize for SEO afterwards. When you write for your customers, you’ll find that many of your target keywords appear in your content naturally.
3. Publish evergreen content
You might refer to a cornerstone content strategy as an evergreen content strategy. Evergreen content is timeless–it remains relevant for a long time regardless of the season or year. Basically, it involves creating and publishing a set of long, engaging, and informative pages for your site that are related to the keywords and topics for which you want to rank and won’t decay with time.
4. Think outside of the blog post
Your cornerstone content strategy is an exercise in card-sorting. It’s a review of the architecture on your site. The objective is to ensure that search engines and your readers alike can find related pages for a topic and easily navigate between them. As you group your pages, you want to consider all the content on your site–not just blog articles. Understand how Google interprets the intent of different keyword searches to determine the types of pages you should create, such as product landing pages.
Experts all have different ideas about how to create and enhance cornerstone content. However, one thing that they all agree on is that you should make your audience the priority.
Think about how readers will find your content and how that content leads them to other content on your website. Any good content strategy aims to build trust and move prospects down the funnel to becoming satisfied customers. Cornerstone content will help ensure that people can find the content you create.
