How to fast-track your content strategy with pillar pages featuring James Scherer

Episode Summary

Content marketing is a key component to your overall marketing strategy. And getting your content in the right hands is always a challenge. But most businesses really struggle with creating content that will rank high in SERPs.

Therefore, companies must invest more time — not just money — to determine how to create content that will bring value to their target audience, promote their brand without being too pushy, and follow SEO rules (even though they are constantly changing).

In this episode of Content Logistics, our host Camille Trent chats with James Scherer, the VP of Growth at Codeless, about pillar pages. James breaks down the content creation process, emphasizing the synergy between people and tools, and explains what every piece should contain to rank high on the SERP. He also shares real-life examples of the effective use of the pillar post structure.

Guest Profile

Key Insights

Think about images when creating a blog post. Although images rarely appear on SERPs, having high-quality visuals is of the utmost importance if you want Google to recognize your post as valuable. ''Content images are a core component of that, but so too is the font you choose, the font size, and the white space on either side of the body text. All of this stuff does matter, even if your page is cluttered with a bunch of sidebar stuff and CTAs popping up. That stuff matters just as much subconsciously as it does actually with Google.''
Pillar post structure allows your piece to rise above other content on the web. About seven years ago, Brian Dean presented the Skyscraper Technique, a link-building strategy based on finding high-ranking content, establishing weaknesses, and creating a better piece. As James explains, this strategy focuses on massive articles, and companies need a lot of time and money to produce them. Still, that doesn't guarantee a piece will be successful, and a company may end up spending thousands of dollars without getting anything in return. On the other hand, you can use smaller pieces and see how they rank. If any of these grow, they can help other pieces grow too. ''The pillar post strategy increases the possibility of one of your seeds sprouting. And once it does, you can flag it, pay attention to it, nurture it, help it grow, and then, see if it helps other things grow.''
What do I need to create a high-quality piece? A common misconception around content writing is that it starts with a talented writer. Although content creators are a fundamental part of it, producing a written piece that will rank high on a SERP requires a synergy between people and tools. So here's what you need to create valuable content: ''[You need] a good editor, and you need three or four good vertical expert writers unless you're a massive business and you want to do 20, 30 pieces of content per month. You need a project management tool to coordinate the production process. You need an SEO tool like SEMrush or Moz to identify topics and determine whether or not they're good opportunities for you. You need to coordinate it all within the content planning sheet; we use Google Sheets. [...] Once you've identified the topics, put them into the content planning process, the production process. You want tools to make sure the content is good. These tools include Clearscope. You also need to make sure the content itself is just good. Tools like Grammarly, the Hemingway app, and writer.com can help with that.''

Episode Highlights

Identify Your Categories Before Your Pillars

”First, categorize — what do you want to be known for? […] Then, with each category, you identify the pillars.

The pillars are the high search volume, high competition, and competitive keyphrases that you want to be found for. They’re also your pie-in-the-sky searches in that if you are found on the first page of Google for this search, your business sees bottom-line growth. But, what constitutes a pillar is going to be different for each business.

[…] There are other kinds of one-tier down pillars, not as highbrow, maybe more attainable, but still high. So you identify those topics, create them first, get those articles live, make them amazing, and then get those URLs indexed so Google can see them.

They have more organic traffic to a certain extent, but in the early days, it’s just going to be newsletters, social media, and you promoting them. And then, you support them with other posts that are directly related within that category of content to the pillars. You do internal backlinks to those pillars, and slowly but surely, if you do everything right and the content’s excellent, you can start building momentum with those posts. They start ranking on the first page, and as soon as they get higher rankings, the value of the internal links goes up.

So you build the mountain with those posts and then eventually those pillars rank, and then in a year you’re targeting whole other pillars.”

The Traps Companies Fall into When Creating Content

”The first is trying to do it too slowly and not producing enough content, which is, I know, weird because there’s the whole quality versus quantity conversation in content marketing, which is a valid one to have.

But, we all have to be aware that SEO is about creating something and throwing it against the wall of Google and hoping that it sticks. And nine times out of ten, it doesn’t. And the one time that it does, you’re not entirely sure why. […] All you do is follow all the best practices, and you create content as well as you possibly can and hope.

[…] The second is not investing enough in each content piece. […] People still create mediocre content, target a keyphrase, and don’t optimize particularly well or don’t do high-quality images. They just use stock images or poor, uncompressed screenshots that aren’t optimized for page experience or search.

They still do massive paragraphs that don’t bring the reader down the page. And then, they still don’t promote their content, and they still don’t include the number of semantic keywords you need to compete on a SERP. There’s a lot of stuff you need to do to create optimized content.”

Balance Between Providing Value and Promoting Your Brand

”I think it’s entirely legitimate to say, ‘This thing you want to know about is complicated, expensive and time-consuming. Our software legitimately does it more easily. And if you want to spend some money on saving yourself time, here’s our service.’

I think that’s a legitimate thing to do. Doing it well can be a bit challenging because most writers either err on the side of, ‘I just want to educate, I don’t even want to mention our brand,’ or on the side of, ‘Let’s exclusively use our brand examples. Let’s never mention the competitor.’

Okay, these two extremes need to have a baby. And that baby needs to not only promote your brand but also provide value clearly so that when you promote your brand, they trust that you know what you’re talking about and that’s the core.”

How to Create an Engaging Piece

”If your piece is over 2,000 words, you should have a table of contents that links to the headers and have an introduction that hooks them. Tell them what the article’s going to be about.

What we do is hit home on the pain point that the article is addressing, agitated slightly with an additional sentence or short paragraph, and then we talk about the solution and beneath that add, ‘This article will walk you through everything you need to know about whatever.’

And then do a TOC — which is relatively straightforward CSS that many CMS have now — that navigates to the headers. So that if there is a specific section that people want to know more about, like the actionable tips section or the ‘what is’ section or the example section, they can head straight to it without having to read the stuff in the middle.”