If you’re trying to make your mark online, ranking for in demand search terms isn’t easy. Thankfully, cornerstone content offers a cost effective solution.
While many brands and businesses now understand the importance of SEO, learning how it works is a whole different kettle of fish entirely. Between buzzwords like link building, meta descriptions, H1s and more, it can be tricky to know where to start.
Regardless of whether you’re a budding blogger or a veteran content marketing whiz, one of the most important pillars of mastering SEO is the inclusion of keywords. If you had to boil all of your website’s content or social media down to just a handful of simple phrases or words – and this includes all of the images, videos and text copy – these should be your primary keywords.
However, it’s inevitable that there’s some keywords that are more popular than others, and are in turn much harder to rank for. While it’s easy to feel demoralised if your website or blog isn’t ranking for in demand keywords, the magic of cornerstone content offers an alternative route.
Understanding How Cornerstone Content Works
By definition, the very word “cornerstone” is a term used to describe an item as essential, indispensable, basic, or the main foundation upon which something is constructed. When applied to the online arena, cornerstone content consists of content on your website that serves as a focal point for any visitors to your website.
Essentially, it’s the content that features specific keywords that you want to rank for above all else, and what you would ultimately like your brand or business to be known for. Cornerstone articles are usually relatively long, evergreen articles that combine insights from different blog posts whilst covering everything that’s important about a certain topic.
An example of cornerstone content at work could be high-value blog posts that offer readers a wealth of information which centres on your core keywords, area of expertise, or a blog that performs exceptionally well in regards to inbound traffic. These types of blog posts act as “pillars”, and their key theme can often be expanded on in multiple articles that dig deeper into the topic or keyword. To encourage the original blog to become a piece of cornerstone content, related posts are then linked back to the dominant article.
In turn, cornerstone content is also essential for link building. While it may seem counterproductive to steer your hard earned web traffic to another source, the theory behind adding backlinks to your website, blog or content, is that Google and other major search engines consider them to be “votes” for a specific page.
For those in need of a good metaphor to grasp the importance of cornerstone content, grab yourself a map of a state or country. To the naked eye, small towns and big cities are often connected by road, but the latter will almost always have several main arterials that lead to the centre of the city. In the world of content, those major cities should be your cornerstone blogs, while smaller towns will be more specific topics. Above all, the small towns and cities need to be connected, so make sure you bury some links – or roads – that connect them.
Needless to say, producing content that’s both user friendly and SEO friendly is hard. Even the most gifted of in house marketers usually identify as either technical wizards, skilled visual gurus or natural born writers, but rarely ever is it all three. If your brand is struggling to produce top notch content that Google deems worthy enough to showcase, it might be time to consider outsourcing.
The Key To Good Marketing Is Great Content
Producing quality, consistent and on brand content takes time, effort, experience and resources, but avoiding these responsibilities altogether may actually be doing your brand a disservice. Thankfully, investing in a solid content marketing strategy has actually never been easier.
Here at Content Hive, producing top quality digital content is exactly what we do best. We have itemised a list of digital content services, and allocated credits next to each of these. This means that each month, you can use your credits with us to produce digital content such as blog articles, social media posts, videos and even animated Instagram stories. By using this model, we believe that it enables us to produce high quality content with faster delivery times.
If you aren’t quite sure where to start on your digital marketing journey and would like to speak to a professional, why not book in a free discovery call with us at Content Hive today to discuss how we can get your brand buzzing online.
