Pillar pages have been an effective way of grouping and presenting website content to users and search engines for some time.

In this post, I’ll define what a pillar page is, how it can support your SEO efforts, and share some examples of pillar pages in action.

So let’s start by defining pillar pages.

What is a pillar page?

A pillar page is a goal on your website that focuses on a key topic, resource, product, or service area.

It allows users and search engines to quickly access lots of topic-related content.

The depth of the pillar sides depends on their purpose.

Some are more of a shallow introduction to get quick access to other content (a bit like the role of a content page), while others are more comprehensive and offer deeper standalone value backed by related content elements.

Logically, if you list all of your company’s core topics, each of them could become a pillar page.

Pillar Pages provide users with one-stop access to a variety of related content in an easy-to-use way.

They also provide search engines with logically organized content that can be quickly crawled, understood, and therefore ranked effectively in search.

You may have heard of cornerstone content, content hubs, content clusters, or pillar pages on various forums, and effectively they all represent nuances of the same approach.

If you imagine a wheel of a bicycle, in the middle you have the hub.

From the hub you have many spokes.

In the case of pillar content, the hub is the pillar page (the central topic or topic) and the spokes are the related content areas that link to and from the pillar page.

A single pillar page can have many pages and other content types, all of which link to the pillar page, either directly or through other subtopics, which then link back to the main/pillar page.

The basic interaction remains the same – the centralization of all related thematic content from one main target (the pillar page).

I’ll provide some examples shortly to illustrate this principle so you can visualize Pillar Pages in action.

How Can Pillar Pages Help Your SEO?

Before we move on to some pillar page examples, it’s helpful to learn a little more about how they can help your SEO performance.

There are many benefits to creating Pillar Pages on your website, and I’ll cover a few of them below.

Strengthen current signals of authority

Expertise, Authority, and Trustworthiness (EAT) underpin Google’s policies and are a key factor in assigning overall quality scores to any website.

Simply put, Google uses EAT as a benchmark to decide whether content is rated as high quality – and if it is, it is likely to be consistently rated higher.

Because it applies:

• Helpful and useful for people.
• Created by proven experts in the subject area.
• Placed on a relevant website that has the necessary signals of authority.
• Present positive user experiences and expected trust signals.
• Provides comprehensive thematic reporting that is expected to fully meet the user’s search needs.

By grouping content in a simple hierarchy, you make it easy for search engines to identify, understand, and rank your content.

Your current signals are provided clearly to support broader Google policies like EAT.

This means you can shine light on the areas you want your business to be closely related to the internet and make the ranking for those topics more consistent and streamlined.

In contrast, consider a website where most of the content is competing against itself.

Where there is no clear segmentation or hierarchy of topics (or columns) and every time you add a new blog post or article to your site, the noise for search engines and users increases.

You can quickly see why pillar pages add value.

Learn more about EAT and why it matters here.

Faster, easier and more complete user experience

For many years, Google has been increasing the impact of a positive user experience on SEO profits.

Core Web Vitals (CWVs) are a more recent manifestation of this.

Another example of this is the devaluation of websites and content that erects barriers between the user and their intended target, such as interstitials or websites that appear to have little content.

Page speed and mobile-friendliness as ranking factors are other examples.

By using pillar pages, you can introduce people directly to the topic that interests them.

By providing rich and meaningful content, you can send clear signals of trust.

You can showcase your experts through the content they are linked to and house them in one central resource.

You can improve user engagement signals by making related content easier to access and encouraging them to go through the information search and purchase cycle sooner.

Additionally, by focusing your resources on specific key landing pages, you can ensure that they load quickly, are intuitive to use, and are easy to navigate.

They also simplify the ongoing, iterative changes you make to keep improving with new datasets.

Learn more details on how to improve SEO with user experience here.

Natural, values-based, link building

Of course, when you provide a one-stop shop for people to easily resolve a variety of related questions, wants, needs, and pain points, you can gather external trust signals including links.

Think of all the repeated social listening opportunities to share your comprehensive pillar pages with your audience.

With your Pillar Pages, you provide free, easily accessible, shared, and promoted content resources perfect for link acquisition, branding, and PR.

Added SEO benefits of Pillar Pages

There are many additional SEO benefits of using pillar pages, but typically this would include:

• Identify (and fill) content gaps more consistently. are displayed for larger amounts of search terms.
• Improving the internal structure of your website and associated link signals (and values) pointing to key content pillars.
• Link your brand and your experts to dominant commercial themes likely to support conversions and traffic from SEO.
• Reducing bounce rates and improving other metrics such as time on page/site and other content quality signals.

Examples of different pillar pages

Pillar pages have many different uses and to wrap up this article I thought it would be useful to share a few here.

Product pillar page

This sample segment from Foresters Friendly Society shows how a single pillar page can provide:

• Trust signals from third-party reviews.
• Content page with a theme and access to dominant user themes.
• Interactive content to support trust signals and values.
• Broader brand signals.

Image from Foresters Friendly Society, December 2022

theme column page

In these sample snippets of University of East Anglia (UEA) life at the campus landing destination, you can see how a single pillar page provides the user and search engines with:

• Quick access to core content for an easier user experience.
• Distilled and visual content highlights for quick content digestion.
• Mobile-friendly content segments for information search on the go.
• Thematic content signage to allow the user to continue learning without having to search for information.
• Storage to support the association between the user and the brand.

Image from the University of East Anglia, December 2022

Image from the University of East Anglia, December 2022

Image from the University of East Anglia, December 2022

Conclusion

Pillar pages are not only an effective way to organize your website’s content, they can also have significant benefits for your SEO.

By leveraging Pillar Pages, you can create a faster, more streamlined, and generally more user-friendly experience on your website – making it easier for both users and search engines to interact with.

If you want to increase your SEO efforts today, use Pillar Pages!

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Featured image: Oatawa/Shutterstock