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. 
• 
  
• 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.
• 
  
• 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.  

What Is a 10X Pillar Page?

That old “content is king” thing is so over. In its place are pillar pages. It means creating a content pillar page strategy. It’s both a methodical and creative approach to content development. I believe that organizing information is a creative process, so once I started creating a pillar page strategy for my own digital marketing content, I found that I loved the symmetry of this.

Let’s start by defining pillar page content

It starts with a single page of substantive content that’s an in-depth overview of your business—or if you’re doing multiple pillar pages—of one topic. This will be comprehensive and authoritative; generalities drill down to subpages with more details or illustrations.

Your goal: Create a 10X content pillar page

A 10X pillar page is a single webpage that is ten times better than any other resource out there covering this topic. This is the motherload. More creative, informative and easier to access. This means that it can be seen across devices and it offers solutions. When I write about a topic, I think in terms of providing information that helps people do their jobs—new tools and insights, better approaches to old dilemmas. This 10X pillar page has to be strong, standalone content around which you can build the rest of your website’s content.

One more thing to keep in mind: Word count

Part of this exercise is about ranking in search engines, and search engines need content so they can start indexing the content that we’re uploading to our websites and social sites. Your pillar page needs to be in the neighborhood of 3000 words. Sound like a lot? It is, but remember that you’re providing comprehensive information about which you’re an authority.

Creating topic clusters, or subpages that roll up to pillar pages

Once your pillar page is in place, it’s time to start developing the topic clusters, or subpages and blogs, that will provide more details about that topic. These are supplemental materials that support your pillar page. A subpage provides the opportunity to expand on what you’ve highlighted on your pillar page. It also needs to be fairly comprehensive—think 2500 words. These subpages take the form of text, infographics, videos, a guidebook or ebook. This is where you get creative and attract your users. They can be fun and entertaining, and tell a story.

Creating another layer of content with blogposts

Blogposts are another layer of content that link to the subpages of your pillar page strategy. These can be very specific to one topic. Blogs are informal, temporal and can be extremely topical. They can also be shorter than pillar pages and subpages, at 750 words. None of those 350 word blogs—those just don’t provide enough words for Google to chew on. Blogs should link to subpages. You should also be creating an inner linking strategy that helps keep users on your site, drilling down to read more content. Look for content or topics among your pages that is relational and create these inner links.

Subpages need to link back to the pillar page, strengthening value for both the user and search engines. Internally linking your supporting material to your core pillar creates the organizational structure that search engines like.

Subpages: What goes on a pillar page?

An estimated 84% of internet users are looking for content that provides a solution. Our attention spans are pathetically short. We want something that is personal, that reaches us on an emotional level. We love stories and want to be drawn in. Think about how you can work yourself into your descriptions. Provide case studies where appropriate.

Getting started with a pillar page strategy: Evaluate existing content

It starts with some analysis. Take a look at your Google Analytics account to see what pages your audience is coming to most often, paying attention to your bounce rate and where they’re entering and leaving your site. Look for drilldown through your site.

You don’t have to start from scratch. Do you have existing content that can act as either the pillar page or subpage content—or at least the starting point? I reorganized my own site and realigned the content. I also hunkered down and did some serious content development, which is going to be the case with most people who are adopting a pillar page strategy. Those word count requirements mean that content needs some beefing up.

Review your blogs; keep the good stuff and sunset the dated posts

Identify those blogposts that can be redirected and linked to your pillar subpages and those that should be either updated or sunsetted. I had some old blogs that went back for nearly ten years and many were dated and stale. I dumped these, and kept others and incorporated them into my pillar page strategy.

Share your expertise on social media

So now you’ve got this great content but no one knows it’s there. Start using your social media sites to share your expertise! Post to your Linked, Facebook and Instagram sites. Social becomes part of your overall pillar content marketing strategy.

Take the time to develop your pillars

Rethinking your goals, reorganizing and retrofitting content is a process. Take your time and do it right. Once complete, you will have created a stronger foundation for your website that will allow you to keep growing and building out your content.

Once you’ve created one pillar page strategy, you’re going to find that you will want to create more—further breaking down your authority into another grouping with a new pillar page hierarchy. Now you’ve got the tools and expertise to do this.

Ask us about developing a pillar-page strategy for your website. Contact Top of Mind Marketing. We’re writers and content marketing specialists.

What Are The 4 Pillars Of Content Marketing Success?

Content marketing success is choosing the right topic for the perfect audience on the best distribution channels.

Remember that you’re publishing content that informs, that helps people do their jobs. If people are looking forward to your email blasts and blogs, you’re doing a great job. You should be thinking about where these people are in the sales funnel.

1. Understand your audience

Before you start creating your content, you need to understand your customer. Ask yourself who is your:

• Current customer?
• Potential customer?

Who would find your content useful?

Creating a customer or buyer persona is a valuable exercise. This is based on demographics and behaviors of the customers you have--and those you want to have.

Creating segmentation so you’re marketing differently to each unique group

Let’s look at a couple of customers in your database.

• One is your desired customer—smart, tech-savvy Chloe who totally gets everything the first time and is eager to see a preview of the next software rollout. Chloe has purchased your software for her company and understands the software’s potential and loves the way it integrates with other applications. 
• And then there’s Helen. Helen is a potential client who works for an IT manager. She’s in a strategic position as an influencer and could be making important recommendations, but prefers not to. Always expect Helen to call and ask for more instructions on how to use the new enhancement. You can send her a link to the excellent video tutorial that your tech team totally nailed, but you know it won’t be enough. Helen is always going to be very high maintenance. She may or may not ever become a client.

Just as Helen and Chloe are two separate segments in your database, they’re at different places on the sales funnel. Think about how you will market differently to them. You’ll want to include Chloe on new products/updates and invite her to your spring gala fundraiser. Helen will receive only the most general information. If you can’t get past Helen and build a relationship with someone else in her company, this relationship may not be worth more effort.

2. Map the content to the sales cycle

Could this example be any clearer? The scale and cost of the commitment drives the content

• If a buyer is considering a one-time license fee for software that costs $50/year, you might detail the software’s benefits in two-three paragraphs and include a few customer testimonials. 
• However. if a buyer is purchasing several hundred licenses for software that cost $100,000, this is getting into some serious money, and the content totally needs to step up. This calls for case studies, product sheets, a video and integration guides. 

Let’s break it down so you can see exactly what type of content to produce

• Awareness phase of sales funnel. Content to increase your brand awareness by promoting your brand. Blog posts, white papers, webinars and infographics. These will still be at a pretty high level.
• Evaluation phase of sales funnel. Content that will increase the marketing qualified leads (MQL). Buyer’s not ready to make a decision but understands that your brand is a leader in this field. Provide case studies, webinars, video and tech guides.
• Purchase phase of sales funnel. Content that will turn a marketing qualified lead into a sales qualified lead (SQL). Getting closer to a decision, so the content should make it easy to choose your product over that of a competitor: Implementation guides, free trials, and live demonstrations.

3. Create the content @ 2 thousand words/article

You now understand the customer and know what type of content goes with each stage of the sales cycle. Now it’s time to create different types of content that decision-makers want to read before making an important decision. 65% of B2B buyers value research reports and studies compared to any other content type (followed by technical guides, insight, white papers, and articles). Despite user-content protest, longer content ranks higher than shorter content. Remember that Google needs words in order to go to work. The number of words you need to write to rank in the top ten? It’s 2,000 words.

To increase traffic and show that your content marketing efforts are adding value for your business, those cheesy little 400-word posts are simply not good enough. Longer content is also shared more on social networks. Content that’s 3 thousand words is shared 2-3 times more times than 1-thousand word articles.

I have an ongoing battle with my clients because they never want to include more than a few sentences per page on their websites. I argue that “you consider yourself an expert and you sum it up in two sentences?” They insist that no one will read it--and they may not. But if someone wants more information, it should be there for them. We can frontload the important information. What they don’t understand is that Google needs that content in order to go to work. It’s content that will help their websites show up in search.

To clarify, longer content will help you:

• Rank better in Google
• Get more social shares
• Get more inbound links

4. Promote content

You have to remember that content marketing is part content, part marketing—you’ve got to step up and promote it.

The most fundamental way to promote your content is to publish it to your website

• Create a blogpost and publish that blog to your blog, LinkedIn and other blog sites. 
• I always post blogs to Google’s Blogger. It’s never a bad idea to be posting to a Google product. 
• Once you’ve posted your blog, post an excerpt with an image to your social media sites—Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, TikTok, etc. 
• Use that blog in your email marketing blast. I love blogs because they’re the workhorse of a content marketing program. Post part of your blog to your email, then link to the blog on your website with Read more. 
• Google AdWords campaigns: If you’re promoting a new white paper or eBook, you can create display campaigns to raise the visibility.
• Start using remarketing that will retarget abandoned visitors. 
• Consider creating an ebook. Use this as intellectual property that users can download with their email address. 

5. Get to know and understand your data and make adjustments

Did the content perform well? Did the content perform as you expected? You need to measure how well your content performs and analyze its progress.

To measure the content marketing success metrics, ask yourself these questions:

• How many page views does the content receive?
• What type of content is shared the most?
• What type of content is read the most?
• What keywords do people search for to find my content?
• How many leads did my content generate?

Remember that you’re generating data as you go along to help answer these questions. I use my own blog posts as content marketing case studies by analyzing the data of what topics/keywords work well.

Contact Top of Mind Marketing. We’re writers, digital media specialists.