What’s the Difference Between a Pillar Page and a Landing Page?

Pillar pages and landing pages have completely different functions, but they can work together to help generate leads and show up organically in search engines.

What is a pillar page?

A pillar page, or content pillar, is part of a larger pillar-page strategy that provides in-depth coverage of a topic. The pillar page strategy is supported by subpages and blogs that provide relevant information on the same topic. It’s hierarchical, with all content rolling up to the main pillar page topic. Search engine crawlers prioritize websites with this kind of topic-organized content. It can help you rank for important inquiries. 

What is pillar page SEO? 

Pillar page SEO means identifying keywords you want to rank for and using these throughout your pillar page strategy. This is what it’s all about. Use those keywords in your headings, subheads and other text. Be sure to assign H1 and H2 tags to these headings. Be consistent—use these words throughout all of your online accounts.

Landing pages focus on a single topic: Lead generation

Unlike pillar pages that provide comprehensive coverage of a single topic, good landing pages can focus on a single objective—lead generation. A landing page is a dedicated page on a website that you land on directly from an external source such as a paid ad or email. It’s highly targeted, persuasive in nature, designed to connect with a predetermined audience. Landing pages can be constructed for SEO purposes to capture organic search traffic. They can also be used with paid advertising through search engines or social media.

Landing pages in a marketing campaign

Landing pages are usually accessed by a link from a paid ad or email. Traffic from paid ads has high commercial intent and is usually ready to complete an action. The page must be ready to fulfill that need. 

A landing page should be providing:

• A unique proposition. Define what makes your product so appealing and enticing. Why should the user take action? Use the proposition in the headline to gain attention and encourage the user to read the supporting copy. Follow best practices for writing headlines and subheads. Short, crisp, attention-getting headers. Easy to read fonts. Use an image that’s descriptive, one that helps define your further your proposition. 

Just one thing. Make sure you’re promoting one thing. I see this a lot. It quickly becomes confusing and dilutes your messaging. Make sure you’re promoting one product or one service.

• Call to Action (CTA). The most important part of the page. Make your CTA button obvious and stand out. Include a CTA above the fold and repeat at the bottom of the page. 
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• Benefits of the offer. Don’t sell features, sell benefits. How will this make the user feel? How will it make their lives or jobs easier, save them money, etc. There must be a visceral appeal.
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• Social proof. Word of mouth and social approval offer trust. People are risk-averse and reviews are now a fact of life. None of us makes a purchase these days without reading the reviews. We’re reassured by others’ positive experiences.

Can a home page be a landing page? 

Theoretically, your homepage is a landing page. But it has too many functions to be focused on landing page conversion. The home page usually exists as the portal, enabling a user to navigate to other pages. Despite the trend toward minimizing navigation, I don’t get it. Why make it difficult for users to find what they’re looking for? 

Unlike your homepage, a landing page is designed to convert visitors into leads. Landing pages are the gatekeepers to your most valuable content offers. Landing pages map to the sales funnel. 

• Awareness
• Discovery
• Evaluation
• Intent
• Action
• Loyalty

Aside from delivering on the promise and intent of the query, the organic landing page must also make the brand and offer clear. 

Ask us about how a pillar-page strategy and landing pages work together to help improve your ranking in search engines. Contact Top of Mind Marketing. We’re writers and content marketing specialists.  

Case Study: Web Referrals Increase by 50%

Sometimes we forget how effective case studies can be

Rather than just telling your audience what you do, case studies are opportunities to actually demonstrate your ability to effect change, to showcase your expertise, to document how you’ve successfully helped your clients increase revenue.

An audit to understand marketing effectiveness                       

I’ve been working with one client for seven years. When we began working together, I did an audit to understand how they were spending their marketing dollars and how effective that investment was. They had a website and a presence on Facebook, Linkedin and Twitter, but posts were sporadic and haphazard. The person who had been writing blogs was neither local nor generating content that was relevant to their Bay Area clients. A monthly newsletter wasn’t showcasing their range of services.

Blogs became the workhorse of their content marketing program

My immediate goal was to improve the quality of their weekly blogs, which became the workhorse of our content marketing program. Well-written blogs accomplish a few things. They provide fresh content for your website and increase your SEO value, helping it rank in search engines. A blog is also an opportunity for you to share your expertise and position yourself as a thought leader. It doesn’t stop there. Your blog can be repurposed in your monthly newsletter. Excerpts can be used in social media posts. Add a link back to your website to drive traffic to your site. 

Increased web referrals by 50%

Over the course of the next year or so, our metrics showed that our steady efforts were paying off. Our website referrals increased by 50%. Since then, we’ve created a brand new website and rewritten the content, but we’ve continued to stick with our quality blogs, social media posts and monthly newsletter. 

Things that I do to help raise SEO value and clickthrough rates

• Create crisp, attention-getting subject lines for blogs and newsletters
• Identify and deploy keywords/phrases liberally throughout all content. 
• Write consistently high-quality content. 

What we’re doing during the coronavirus lockdown

This client has closed down one office, has most of his team working virtually and is expanding to new locations. Staying nimble and making critical business decisions as the economic landscape shifts is not something everyone can do. One thing I’ve always admired about this client is his ability to make decisions. No tortured conversations or looking back with regret. 

We’re also rebranding

We’re developing a new logo, which means new marketing collateral and a new website. In the virtual world that is the new norm—at least for the foreseeable future–we’re rethinking the way we’re perceived in the marketplace and the value we bring to our clients. Like every business owner these days, we’re identifying the pain point. When you break it down, it’s nearly always that simple. What is the problem that we can solve?

Now is the perfect time to work on your marketing! 

Is it time for a new or updated website or an expanded content marketing program? Contact us at Top of Mind Marketing. We’re writers and content marketing experts.

Want to Show Up in Search? Follow This SEO Checklist

Good content developers have learned to write both for people and search engines, using solid data to reach their audiences. 

But search engines have gotten a lot smarter. They’ve moved beyond individual keywords—they’ve learned to understand context. But writers still need to understand and deploy sound search engine optimization (SEO) principles. Apply this SEO checklist to every blog and landing page. 

Optimizing website content

To help your website show up in search engines, you need to optimize both content and select HTML source code. This includes page titles, metadescriptions, image alt-text, internal links, anchor text, URLs, etc.

The following checklist identifies those things you will need to address for every web page and blog. 

1. Metatitle. This is distinct from the headline on the page’s headline. It acts as a name tag for the web page.
   • It should in a keyword.
   • Maximum length: 50-60 characters.
   • Use your brand name. 
   • Use numbers, if appropriate.
   • Use how, what, why.
   • Provide useful info/create sense of urgency.

2. URL: This is what will show up in the page’s information bar. It’s important because search engines will be looking for this.

• Limit to 3-5 words.
• Include keywords.
• Try to avoid duplicating metadescriptions.

3. Blogpost. Search engines love fresh content, and writing and posting blogs are the best ways to keep your site updated with new content. 

• Use H tags for titles and subtitles: H1, H2 and H3.
• Add buttons and links to your social sites. 

4. Images: Label every image. Include name of your company and image description.

• Use alt tags: Include your company name plus description of the image.
• Use the correct size image for designated space—make sure images are not too big or your site will not load. Recommended sizes: 1500-2500 pixels. Those images you take with your smartphone? They’re generally huge files. If you plan to use these, resize them before uploading to your website.
• Each page should have an image. A carefully chosen, highly relevant image will enhance your story and provide visual texture. 

5. Body. Long-form content helps your site show up in search engines. Google needs words to rank. Think 1,000+ words. At the very minimum, 300 words. Frontload your content, with the most important information in the first paragraph. 

6. Keywords. Use Google’s keyword tool or others. Key in search phrases and see what words/phrases people are using to search for your term. Look for those with low-medium competition and bid price.

• Forget keyword stuffing. Good content is nonnegotiable. Use your target keywords in the first 100-150 words.
• Use semantically related words throughout body of content.

7. Internal Linking strategy. Create internal links among pages where there is a relationship. It encourages readers to stay on your site, drilling down through relevant pages.

8. Webpages:

• Check page-load time—if it takes too long, check image sizes. 
• Make sure your site is built with responsive design, adapting across devices.
• Avoid duplicate content. 

Do you need help optimizing your website? Contact Top of Mind Marketing. We’re writers and content marketing experts. 

Use the Power of Yoast to Optimize Web Content

WordPress’ Yoast is a plugin that can help you optimize your website content. Yoast creates fields on the back end of your website where you can identify keywords and write metadescriptions. Metadescriptions are the little narratives that show up on search engine results pages (SERPs) right below the link to your website. You can control these, so why wouldn’t you? Think of these as little customized promo spots. Make it easy for yourself and use the power of Yoast to optimize your web content.

Yoast will help you optimize your website content

After you’ve written your landing page content or blog, scroll down to the Yoast fields and identify your focus keyword and write a metadescription. Now scroll down and see how you did. Yoast rates your effort for its search engine optimization (SEO) value and readability. Green is good. Red sucks.

Now go back and make corrections. You’ll find that this gets easier. I generally write my content, then go back and retrofit it.

• Your focus keyword is critical.This word/phrase should be integrated throughout your page/blog. It should be in the page title, the first and subsequent paragraphs and in your subheads.
• No keyword stuffing allowed. Beginning with the Mobilegeddon algorithm change in 2015, you now have to have something to say. Google hates it when you fill a page with meaningless keywords.

Yoast doesn’t stop with keywords; it will also help you:

• Identify readability. For maximum understanding, we should be writing at a fifth-grade level. Yoast gives us a readability score, and most of us fail.
• Get in the habit of using short, crisp sentences. Break long sentences and paragraphs into short, crisp ones. Use short words and subheads. Make it easy for a reader to scan your subheads; together they should tell a story.
• Header evaluation. Yoast will let you know if your headline is wider than the viewable limit. If your title has a bunch of skinny letters, you can use more characters than if it has a lot of fatter, rounder characters.
• Metadescriptions. These should include your focus keyword and be within 156 characters.
• Internal links. Including an internal linking strategy on your website is a great way to encourage readers to stay on your site and drill down through your pages.
• Images. Every page should include an image. There are four fields that are associated with each image—title, caption, alt tag and description. Fill these in and use your focus keyword.

One more thing: Search engines love long posts

Keywords are about, well, words. You can’t rank if there’s no content. The longer your posts, the greater your chances of appearing in search engines—they have more clues to identify what your posts are about. An ideal blog post should have around 1,000 words to ensure  enough keywords for ranking.

Frankly, the prospect of coming up with a 1000-word blog on a regular basis is terrifying. But do think about 300-words as a minimum standard. If you’re writing something about which you’re knowledgeable and passionate, this shouldn’t be paralyzing.

Need some help getting started? Contact Top of Mind Marketing. We’re writers and internet marketing experts.

The Importance—and Evolution–of Keywords in Online Content

Strategically using keyword in your landing pages, blogs and social media posts is important, but just as important is understanding how keywords have changed. In the old days, people could get away with keyword stuffing—filling a page with their keywords, often to the point where the page’s meaning was compromised by repeated use of a number of keywords.

Google’s last few major algorithm changes, including Mobilegeddon, have made good content nonnegotiable. You can no longer fool or trick Google. If you’re filling your pages with nonsense trying to create keyword density for the sake of optimization, forget it. This is a bad strategy and Google will penalize you.  Some experts suggest that your keywords should appear in about 2.5% of your copy. But search has become much more intuitive, so it’s not just about your keywords.

As a general rule, it’s good to work your keyword into your headline and a few of your subheads (do use subheads—it makes it infinitely easier to read your articles), but you shouldn’t distort natural copy to accommodate a keyword. If you’re writing naturally, you’ll tend to use synonyms for your keywords and vary your phrasing, and Google and search engines have begun to recognize this. Here’s what’s really cool—search engines are getting smarter. They’re better at understanding context, and you can help them by using well-written, informative content that includes words they would expect to find within that context.

Semantic search is the concept of a search engine’s applying intent and context to the search results. Semantic search seeks to improve search accuracy by understanding the searcher’s intent and the contextual meaning of terms as they appear in the searchable dataspace.

Search engines able to identify contextual meaning

Google makes an estimated 500 algorithm changes/year, but some of these have more sweeping impact. With the release of the Hummingbird algorithm in 2013, Google became more able to analyze full questions, rather than relying on word-by-word search analysis. As a result of Hummingbird, any single word could have multiple meanings; it used context to discern which meaning might be accurate, often using a searcher’s own history to provide context. That’s one reason why you and I might get different results for the same search, or you might get different results if you’re using Chrome or Safari—the browser you’re using will affect your search results. It also takes in account what other people click on in search results using the same term.

Optimize everything . . .

Optimizing your content’s title by using H tags and keywords, your images with alt tags and using descriptive metadata are all part of what makes your content SEO-friendly. But creating great content that is meaningful to your online audience is the best way to ensure organic success for the long haul.

Do you need help with your content marketing program?

Talk to us at Top of Mind Marketing. We’re writers and internet marketing experts.

5 Things You Need to Know for Better SEO

1. Optimize metadata

Metadata helps organize and describe information on your site that search engines index your site. Search engine companies send programs called “spiders” out to gather information about your site and determine how to display it in the search results page (SERP). Metadata tells your users and the search engines what your site is about. If your metadata is consistent with the intended theme of your site, it increases your chances of ranking well in the search results and increases the odds of attracting qualified traffic.

There are three kinds of metadata: (1) Meta titles are the titles and subtitles on your landing pages and blogs. They should be identified with H tags—H1, H2, etc. (2) Metadescriptions are the 160 character descriptions that you identify on the backend that encapsulate the message of each landing page. A good way to think about a metadescription is that it’s like a little classified ad. It shows up on your SERP, and it helps promote each webpage. (3) Meta keywords aren’t visible to visitors, but they tell search engine spiders those keywords for which your site is optimized.

2. Page speed

No surprise here. Everybody’s in a hurry these days, and more than 60% of users are accessing everything from their phones, which can be challenging. As a result, web design has adapted and gotten simpler and more streamlined. Simpler code, design and navigation. If your site is taking too long to load, you’re going to lose your audience before they even get a chance to land on your homepage. Google has an easy page speed measurement tool that give you a quick analysis and recommendations for increasing your speed.

3. Duplicate content

Duplicate content is content that appears on the web in multiple locations. It could be content that you’ve repurposed on several pages on your own site—an easy thing to do, after all—the page that’s about the company and the one about you as a business owner could be duplicative in some places. But Google hates this—take the time to modify it.

Duplicate content confuses the search engines

If you’ve stolen content from someone else, that’s another example of duplicate content that Google dislikes. Search engines have to choose one or the other page to return for a query, so they are forced to evaluate which version or form is more credible/meaningful to that user who’s searching. A question comes up about content curation—what if you’re curating, or borrowing great content from another source, giving credit to the author, of course. I’ve begun curating content when I find something that I really like. But I never just copy and paste it into my blog and identify the author. I personalize this with an intro and a conclusion. Explain why this is a great article—the reasons for its insights and relevance.

4. Relevant content

Search engines have become more sophisticated. You can’t fool them anymore by keyword stuffing or filling up a page with nonsense just to create mass. (To rank well in search engines, we recommend landing pages and blogs be 300 words or more.) Google is increasingly intuitive; it seeks out high-quality landing pages, blog articles, videos, infographics, guest articles, forums, etc. Good content has become nonnegotiable.

5. Internal links

Create an internal linking strategy. When you post a blog or new landing page, spend another 10-15 minutes and create internal links—link key words or phrases to related blogs or landing pages. Use one relevant internal link for every 400 words. Internal links help encourage drilldown–people will click on the links and stay longer on your site.

6. Social sharing

If you’re not distributing your blogs and other relevant content across your social media network, you’re missing important opportunities to build your online presence. It just takes a few minutes to log in to your social sites and post a headline or brief description with a link back to your site to drive traffic. Do include an image—the chances of someone’s engaging with your post increases dramatically with a relevant image.

Are you thinking about optimizing your website to increase its SEO value? Talk to us at Top of Mind Marketing. We’re internet marketing experts.

Landing pages help promote your company’s products and services and encourage conversions from your web traffic. A landing page, officially any page on which you land, always has its own unique url. Landing pages can be temporary—thrown up as part of a campaign to promote a product or service. People will click on a call to action and land on this page; it’s generally taken down once the campaign is over. The messaging on these pages should be crisp, focused and direct. These landing pages are necessarily shorter.

Longer landing pages promote trust and credibility

The landing pages that promote your products and services need to have more substance—that means 300+ words. Longer landing pages generate trust and credibility, motivating web visitors to convert once they’ve learned more about you and your company. The user who scrolls to the bottom where the call to action is located and views all aspects of the page is typically a higher-quality lead—that’s the potential client who wants information about what you do. Don’t disappointment them by not answering their questions about what you do and how you work with your clients.

Short landing pages translate to missed opportunities

Longer landing pages: increased SEO value

As you increase the likelihood of conversion with longer landing pages, you also increase the SEO value of your website. Longer pages rank better in search engines. Use well-written, high-quality content that positions you as an expert.

• Think about using quality video that explains your product. If it’s a service, provide an explanation of how it works. Testimonials are always effective.
• Include images, a bulleted list of a product/service’s benefits and a strong call to action.
• Also think about leveraging internal linking strategies within the pages on your site.

These days, people seem to be text-phobic

I frequently find myself going to websites to get more information—and am rewarded with a few lame sentences that translate to missed opportunities. Whether you’re selling a product or service, why wouldn’t you provide enough information to fully flesh out your business? If you’re selling your products online, longer landing pages with plenty of description is always recommended. If people are spending money, they want detailed information about the product they’re about to purchase.

I became I believer in long landing pages

I finished a project a few months ago that made me a believer in longer landing page content. It was a website for a lighting manufacturers’ rep, and I had to write descriptions of the 90+ manufacturers with which this company worked. Our goal was to provide comprehensive information about each company because we wanted potential clients to come to our site and stay there.

I quickly ramped up to the fascinating and complex lighting industry. I wanted to find out a little bit about each of these companies—did they specialize in lighting, controls or daylighting? Were they family-owned, where did they manufacture their products, what was the time to market and what did their customer service ethic look like? The quality of these 90 sites varied dramatically. Some were beautiful, with comprehensive portfolios of their national and international lighting projects. Others were dismal. Some sites didn’t even have an About section—nothing but product info and numbers. Others had badly written information about the company, sometimes talking about the company’s founders some 80 years ago—in which I had no interest. I ultimately had to work with my client SME to get enough information to flesh out some of these profiles.

I learned a big lesson from this project: Provide the information that will answer people’s questions

• As a guide, think about your own questions when you go to a website looking for information.
• Frontload the important stuff so that it’s readily available in the first few paragraphs.
• Try providing a call to action higher in your page rather than burying it at the bottom. Convert people while you still have their attention rather than taking a chance that they’ll scroll to the bottom of the page.

Have questions about landing pages? Talk to us at Top of Mind Marketing. We’re writers and internet marketing experts.