Pillar Pages & Topic Clusters: Everything You Need to Know

Pillar pages differ from landing pages in that they contain navigation and more text. A landing page is designed with a high conversion rate in mind, which dictates its design, copy, and highlighted CTAs. Whereas a pillar page is often designed to be an educational or informative tool.

Types of pillar pages

Resource pillar page 

This pillar page serves as an educational tool around a specific topic. It can take the form of an ultimate guide, what-is, and how-to structure that contains internal links to its supporting cluster. 

The resource pillar page can also be a collection of externally collected resources with supporting information to help the reader make an informed decision around a topic. For example, 25 digital marketing tools every marketer should know or 100 content marketing statistics.

10x content pillar page

The 10x pillar page has a specific strategy; be 10 times better than anything else out there. 

This page should have unique elements to help it outshine the competition in the form of interactive content or original research. The cluster supporting the 10x content pillar page can come in many forms (blog posts, ebooks, YouTube videos, etc.). 

The 10x content pillar page can also serve as a lead generator when paired with a content upgrade – ie. downloadable templates. 

Service or product pillar page

A service pillar page provides an overview of an organization’s services. 

Marketing agencies use service pillar pages to showcase their range of services, which can link to articles that then discuss those individual services at length. 

SaaS companies benefit from blending resource and product pillar pages through ultimate guides that actively promote and educate the reader about their software.

A product pillar page can function similarly to the service page, showcasing: 

• all products available
• category pages of an ecommerce website
• single products 

A great example of a single product pillar page is Apple’s iPhone page. 

Product and service pillar pages can serve as the first point of contact with potential customers. Create these pages with that in mind. Offer a tasting menu of your best products, features, or services.

Elements of a successful pillar page

Even if there is no one way to build a pillar page, there are some best practices to help make it more successful. The following elements will help your pillar page to be more engaging. 

Digestible - Present the information in multiple ways while avoiding walls of text.

Shareable - Your audience is looking to share useful information, to raise their own profile. Give them something to talk about. 

Original research - original research will help you stand out from the crowd by presenting a new story. It is also a great strategy for getting backlinks.

User-friendly - Core Web Vitals are going nowhere. Make sure the page loads quickly and is easy to navigate. Remember to check it on desktop and mobile!

Concise - Avoid the 10k word guides. A pillar page is an overview of a topic so aim for around 2000 words.

Interactive - Break up the page with videos, quizes, sliders, or other interactive elements.

Table of contents - Help website visitors navigate your pillar page easier by providing a table of contents with jump links.

CTA - It doesn’t need to be a sales one. Lead your reader through your cluster by linking to more content, or a free trial. 

What are topic clusters?

Topic clusters are the pages that support your pillar page. They target secondary keywords and long-tail keyword subtopics at length. 

Topic clusters are subtopics that are strong enough to stand on their own (i.e. blog post, video, etc.), but have a common connection with the pillar topic, and can be clustered together with other subtopic content to help tell a story.

Connecting these pages provides a positive experience for website visitors, as they’re easily able to find the similar-themed content they’re looking for – and what pleases users, pleases Google! Making this an extremely valuable strategy from a search engine perspective. 

Search engine bots crawl through content like a human reads it, and recognizes the connections between all of these similarly themed pages.

How to identify topics for cluster content

Choosing a topic for your pillar page should come fairly easy, as it should correspond to your business niche, but how do you identify topics for supporting cluster content? And how many pieces of content do you need to form a cluster?

Do a content audit

The first step you’ll need to take is to audit your existing content. This will help you identify the pages that can potentially support your pillar page.

You can audit your content easily in BuzzSumo, with a domain search in the Content Analyzer.

This will give you a top-level overview of your published content, so you can work out how to categorize it.

If you have cluster categories already in mind, you can also see what content you've already published on that topic.

For example, imagine you work for Wall Street Journal, and want to create cluster content around the topic of "Marketing".

All you’d need to do is search the keyword “Marketing”, and add a domain filter to find all of the existing content published by the WSJ around that topic.

Then simply rinse + repeat that strategy for your other topic clusters. 

You can get ideas for topic clusters in a bunch of other ways in BuzzSumo. 

1. Enter your pillar page keyword in the Keyword Tool and browse related or similar, high volume keywords for cluster content ideas.
2. Enter your pillar page topic into the Content Idea Generator and subtopics from trending content, customer questions, and SERP data.
3. Discover the most popular social media topics related to your pillar page, in the Topic Explorer. 
4. Get ideas from your competitors’ content, and validate your topic cluster ideas with engagement trend data, in the Content Analyzer. 

From your research, try to identify at least five subtopics that can support your pillar.

Consider the marketing funnel, and try to choose topics that will satisfy each step of the customer journey, or different types of search intent.

How many cluster pages should link to a pillar page?

There's no hard and fast rule for how many pieces of content can link to a pillar page. In the examples later on in this blog, some pages have over 200 internal links, while others have less than 60. 

The pillar and cluster content strategy is meant to support website visitors from start to finish in their journey for information. This is an opportunity to build trust and value while nurturing a potential lead.

How to set up pillar pages and cluster content

Pillar pages are intended to be top-level navigation pages. If you remember in the types of pillar pages, many of them are naturally top-level (category page, service page).

But, this doesn’t mean that it is absolutely necessary.

Pillar pages can be:

• A stand-alone page
• A subcategory page
• Or even a blog post

What’s important is that it can be found. The single most important aspect to a pillar page and cluster content strategy is internal links.

Don’t forget to provide internal links within the content (when relevant) to all supporting pages, posts, videos, etc. 

Overthink Group illustrates the different ways to organize pillar pages and cluster content which are more realistic in practice.

SEO benefits of a pillar page and topic cluster strategy

Improves site architecture

Pillar pages create a hierarchical structure around a specific topic while improving internal links. This is a great signal to search engines that you are an authority on the topic.

Satisfy search intent

Because pillar pages are typically informative, they help answer queries that are questions. If the pillar page and clusters are built to answer all possible questions around a topic, then the reader should be satisfied with the content. Of course, don’t forget to make it engaging and original! 

Long read time

Because your pillar pages are long (at least 2000 words) and have a strong internal linking structure, this helps to increase the average time on page, and even the number of pages a visitor is viewing. 

Authority

The structure of pillar pages and topic clusters signals to search engines that your website is an authority on a topic. This strategy also helps to satisfy E-A-T for Google. 

Increased engagement

A user-friendly pillar page that is easy to navigate and matches user intent will naturally increase engagement for that page. 

Rank for high volume (broad) keywords

If you create one piece of content around the keyword “content marketing” it will be incredibly difficult to rank. If you create a pillar page around “content marketing” that is linked out to a wealth of information around this topic, then your chances increase to rank for these difficult high volume keywords.

More backlinks

Due to the nature of pillar pages, they’re a natural fit for backlinks, and who doesn’t want more backlinks?

10 real pillar page examples we love 💙

Distribute your pillar pages

Content marketing doesn’t stop once you hit publish.

Distribution is a key element to its success. Share your pillar content pages far and wide via newsletters, social media, or any means necessary. 

Try a free 30-day trial to BuzzSumo to help you identify the best places to share your pillar page for engagement and which influencers can help you amplify your content.