Basic SEO pillar content strategy for blogging

How you can strategically use your blog on your Squarespace 7.1 website to boost website traffic.

This video covers:

what is a content pillar strategy?
how to plan your content pillars
choosing blog post topics
blog copywriting best practices

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT

 Blogging is one of the best ways you can attract new visitors to your website and grow your website audience. But you want to be strategic about how you're writing your blog posts so that you're targeting helpful keywords that people are actually searching. We've already talked about optimizing the core pages on your website with SEO keyword research, but a pillar content strategy is going to help you develop a strategic blogging strategy that will build upon these keywords and help you grow layered content on your website.

 Again, when you're just starting out and getting your website up off the ground, you don't necessarily need to focus on this.

I don't want you to end up feeling overwhelmed or burnt out with your business or your website. But, if you are in a season of your business Where you have time to devote to blogging, and you want to build your presence on Google to get more organic search results, utilizing an SEO pillar strategy is really helpful.

There are tons of resources where you can deep dive into exactly what a pillar strategy is, and there are tons of SEO experts that know way more about this than I do, but again, this is the quick and dirty version for just getting results as quickly and simply as possible. A pillar content strategy can be used to structure any of the content on your website, but I specifically like to use it for blogging, because there's a bunch of different ways to layer content.

The overall goal is to create layers of content that deep dive into content to build an interconnected web of internal links and pages on your website filled with related SEO keywords. It also gives your audience an ability to deep dive into topics and spend more time on your site.

This is a simplistic visualization of what pillar strategy looks like in practice on your website.

Your pillar pages act as your main pages that are going to cover a topic broadly enough that it can then be segmented down into individual related topics.

You'll then want to link these pages to each other through hyperlinks in each of the related blog posts, so that, for example, if someone lands on this blog page and they want to learn more about this topic, they can click a hyperlink that takes them to the second blog post. If they land on this blog post, they can see a hyperlink at the bottom that takes them back to this pillar page that has more information. You'll also want to include links within your blog posts to core main pages on your website.

To give a specific example, let's say you're a beauty brand and you have a blog post that's talking about anti aging practices. Some of the related blog posts could be talking about natural sunscreens, moisturizers, And various serums. Then these blog pages could link back to your product page that sells a sunscreen, and your collection page that sells serums.

Ultimately, the blog posts that you write should be based on two things. Knowing your audience and exactly what information they need and related keywords within your industry.

For more information on keyword research, see my previous video that deep dives into that, because you're going to want to start there first.

You'll also want to make sure that when you're writing your blog posts, you're writing them to be engaging, informative, and entertaining. Sorry, but there's not really a workaround for this. I'm looking at you, ChatGTP. You can use AI for sure to help you out with your blogging, but at the end of the day, most of the blog posts, if not all of them, that are generated exclusively by AI end up just regurgitating information that's already available, and they sound really robotic.

Your blog post shouldn't just be a container to host keywords. You should also be focusing on how to write the information from a unique perspective or with a unique spin that's different from what your audience can find on a million other generic blog pages.

You'll also want to choose pillar page topics that are broad enough that they can be then segmented down into individual blog posts, like the skincare example I just gave.

To give you a real time example, let's break down this page on one of my client websites, Enuf Period. This is a core page on her website, but it's actually specifically designed to be educational and it's filled with a bunch of really valuable keywords that are related to her audience and the informational details that they're searching for about her industry.

So while I usually recommend using blog posts as core pillar pages, this could actually act as its own stand alone pillar page because of the nature of the content.

So if this page is acting as our main pillar page, we'll want to decide what specific topics we can pull from it to deep dive further into the subject.

So this page gives us a lot to work with. We're talking about the differences between marijuana and hemp, tHC versus CBD, and then, of course, the different types of CBD products. Isolate, broad spectrum, and full spectrum. It also deep dives into how this is helpful for natural pain relief, and then reminders about what to look for when you're shopping for CBD products.

There are a ton of options that we can pull from to use as topic cluster blog posts, that can then be linked to from this page, and vice versa.

For example, we could do a blog post all about marijuana. The origins of the term, the details of the plant, those could even maybe be broken up into their own individual blog posts. Then we could do a separate blog post about what hemp is and how it's different from marijuana.

An additional blog post could break down the differences between THC and CBD, going into more detail.

And we could even do blog posts related to the rise in popularity of CBD, how CBD can be used, and what exactly CBD is. And that's not even getting into the individual blog posts that we could do to deep dive into what CBD isolate is, what broad spectrum is, and what full spectrum CBD is.

Then you could even do blog posts related to natural pain relief for period symptoms specifically because that fits with this brand and detail exactly how CBD fits into the mix.

Honestly, that page gives us so much to work with. As you can see, I outlined, I don't even know how many blog posts there. You could probably even segment it into different pillar pages. For example, that particular page could be one of our pillar pages, and then maybe we could have another pillar blog post that talks about the difference between CBD and THC, and we could have another pillar page that talks about the differences between CBD isolate, full spectrum CBD, and broad spectrum CBD.

Then, we would want to make sure we're linking each of these individual pages. Including even our pillar pages to core website pages like product pages, product collections, and our website homepage.

And of course, we want to be filling our blog post headlines and body copy with our selected keywords that are related to those topics. Making sure to put our most important keywords in our headings and our related keywords in our body copy.

The added benefit of blog posts on your site is that it's that much more content for you to link to from your other marketing platforms. Think creating Pinterest graphics to link to your Pinterest account so that people can find you through that platform, or posting on Instagram about a particular topic and then saying, click link in bio to read more on the blog.

All of these things help build backlinks as well as site traffic and build more credibility and trust for your brand. Keep in mind as well, you don't need to be blogging all the time.

If you're wanting to just get started, I recommend doing research to create one pillar blog page, and then creating three topic cluster blog posts. That way you have four blog posts right there which could theoretically be four months worth of blog content.

If this is still feeling overwhelming, click the link below and I'll send you my Pillar Content Strategy Guide that breaks this down even further and gives you real time examples of what different blog posts could be and how to structure your keyword research within those blog posts.

Again, this is dependent on doing your research first, so if you haven't done that yet, see my previous video on keyword research.