When developing content for your site, you don’t want to throw things up the wall to see what sticks. Instead, you want to develop a content marketing strategy thoughtfully to help your website become SERPs.
Content is arguably an essential part of your content marketing strategy. Cornerstone content consists of the best articles and pages on your site that you want search engines to see and consider. And in terms of user experience, a content cornerstone is the mechanism to “flatten” your website by creating pillars, clusters, or hubs that make it easier for readers to find related information and content.
When someone asks you to describe yourself, what do you tell them? You probably list some of your innate, best, right? Things you want people to know about you.
In marketing and advertising, your cornerstone is based on the same principle and is just as important. You tell people what you want them to know (what they should know or need to know) about your business by creating excellent cornerstone content.
What Is Cornerstone Content?
Posts, or pages, are the cornerstone content defining our brand and sustaining our websites. It is content that consumers will quickly read and recognize as the central theme that represents and markets your business. Therefore, your website should have about 3-5 cornerstones pieces that link to other posts on your site, creating a funnel with the cornerstone content at the top.
Although the funnel contents are usually at the top of your funnel, it doesn’t need to be gated, and you shouldn’t expect everyone to buy something or otherwise convert. Keep in mind that the primary goal is to create a positive, lasting first impression, so when people are ready to convert, they are much more likely to turn to your brand.
There are many benefits to cornerstone formation, including:
- Establish authority and trust
- Increase brand awareness
- Make a positive first impression
- Feeding your funnel
- Repurposing it in other formats
- Increase relevant website traffic
- Make natural links
Types of Cornerstone Content Pieces
You can use all kinds of content as cornerstone content pieces:
- eBook or an entire library
- Simple pdf’s
- A series of podcasts
- A set of videos
…or simply a collection of your best and most strategic content pieces.
For example, Neil Patel provides some invaluable guides on his blog. In addition, they are involved in online marketing, SEO, and content marketing, among many other things.
If you look at the topics of the guide, you will see that they are directly related to his business.
It is a crucial feature of a cornerstone content piece; it is very relevant. So, here are four strategies that we’ve found helpful when developing cornerstone content and getting it to rank well.
1. Mind Map Your Cornerstone Content
Take a blank piece of paper and write the name of your website in the middle of a mind map/spider diagram.
Draw an arrow from your website title and recognize the first topic on paper.
Do the same for all your essential topics.
For each subject:
- Find out which articles you have already written.
- What do you need to do to fix them?
- Which articles do you still need to create?
- What Cornerstone content brings all the posts together?
- What keywords can you list??
Depending on your niche, it can be pretty challenging to grade your cornerstone posts, but it’s always worth a try.
2. Avoid Content Overload
“The main challenge for cornerstone content production is knowing when to stop adding more and more material under a single umbrella. In addition, of course, it is essential to update these pieces with new content regularly. Still, we risk ruining the viewer’s experience with the content if a cornerstone piece ends up being content overload.
“To overcome this issue, we suggest you be intentional about what you include in any cornerstone piece. It’s easy to go off on a tangent or go a little too deep into a specific niche within a topic, so we recommend being very deliberate about what you want to include and being liberal with cutting if the post’s subtopics within feel too tangential.
3. Content (SEO) Landing Page
If you’re going to be ambitious in the scope of your content, it makes sense to make things easier for the reader in terms of usability.
A landing page is designed to quickly describe what happens to visitors as they arrive and act as a table of contents (via links to each section) that increases clarity.
Here are some of the benefits of the landing page method:
Retention: Preventing a reader from pressing the back button is essential to nearly every aspect of successful cornerstone content. You may not score readers, customers, or links if the resource benefits are not communicated quickly.
Links: Your work can immediately impress a visitor and contact you based on the benefits and coverage stated on the landing page. The faster you can influence a potential contact source, the easier you’re making it for them to follow through.
Optimization: Tweeting a copy to a page can promote your site after attracting those links, so a landing page is a significant advantage.
4. Do Promotion
It would be insane to put so much effort into one content piece and then rely on its hype. You want it to make a splash. It takes time for new content to be listed in organic search (especially if you’re a new business!), so you’ll need to follow other lines to get your content in front of people in the meantime.
Email promotion: If you have an email list, use it! Send a bespoke email announcing your excellent new content to your database. Top-of-funnel emails like this often show perfect open and click-through rates.
But don’t stop there – do some targeted email outreach, write personalized emails for people that you believe would be interested in reading your new targeted content, sharing it, or – best of all – linking to it.
Social Media Promotion: Organic social promotion is a no-brainer. Of course, you must post your new content on all of your social networks, but it will take a little more work than that:
Customize Your Text, Image Etc., for Different Social Networks: Different content succeeds on different-different platforms. For example, videos certainly do well on the Facebook platform, so you can create a video version of your content for FB and then link to the complete guide from there.
Share More Than Once: Keep your content rotating to come in regular contact with more, different, new people.
Focus on the platforms that work best in your industry: You need to focus on the best platforms in your industry. Choose a platform that best suits your content niche.
You can contact us to grow your business through Cornerstone Content. Our experts are here to help you. Call now!