Cornerstone content is perhaps the most important part of your website SEO strategy. A cornerstone piece covers a topic or concept completely. This essential piece of content should be informative and timeless, so it retains its relevance. You may need to update it from time to time to keep it up to date. A cornerstone article will be long and informative. The intent is not to sell products, but rather it plays a huge role in your SEO strategy and helps to drive traffic.
What is cornerstone content?
An actual cornerstone is part of a foundation for a building. It is in place before the construction of the building. It’s a valuable part of the structure. Knowing what an actual cornerstone is helping with the understanding of what cornerstone content does for your site. It’s a piece of content that has high value and creates a foundation other content can be built upon. The goal of cornerstone content is to help build traffic and brand awareness. It should align with and be relevant to your business goals. Cornerstone content helps establish you as an authority in your industry. But it also helps bring visitors to your site who are likely to be interested in your products or services at some point along the way.
One thing to understand about cornerstone content is that it is at the top of the sales funnel. It should be easily accessed and not hidden behind a registration form or paywall. The primary goal of these types of articles is to provide a great first impression and a lot of information to your readers. It’s designed to support the structure of other content and perform as a traffic base. It can function as a blog post or be a page on your site.
How to Choose Topics and Create Cornerstone Content
Like a cornerstone is essential for keeping a building together, cornerstone content is something you can hand your whole content strategy on. It’s an epic piece, an incredibly useful resource for your business and site visitors. But how do you know how to choose a topic for a cornerstone piece and then build it out so it’s most effective? Remember that this piece must be seen as valuable to site visitors. Here are some steps to help you choose a topic and create stellar content.
1. Find a topic. You’ve done keyword research and evaluated your audience, take that a little further. Look for a topic from your area of expertise that people are searching for. Think of your content as the answers or information they want or need. Use relevant keywords to plan the article.
2. Choose a format. All cornerstone content doesn’t have to be a blog post or article. Even though most of the time it is in long-written form, there is no hard rule that it has to be. Your audience might prefer a how-to guide or a video series. You may want to create an infographic, a searchable database, or a free tool or app. Finding the right format is crucial to engaging your audience. Just remember that even if you choose videos or other non-textual-based content, you’ll need plenty of text to go with it.
3. Create the content. If your site is content-rich, you may have content that can be repurposed. You may want to combine and update some of your present content to create a cornerstone page. If you do not, you can create original content that is well-researched and thought out.
4. Optimize the content. Optimize your cornerstone content by including a solid header structure, alt text for images, metadata, and an internal linking structure. And always include social share buttons so it’s easy for your audience to share with a single click.
Why is Cornerstone Content Relevant to SEO?
High-quality, unique content is an essential part of a successful SEO strategy. Cornerstone pieces offer a great foundation to build on when it comes to SEO. Here are five reasons it is relevant to SEO.
· Keywords – After keyword research, you’ll know which terms your audience is using for searches. You can drive traffic by answering the questions people are already asking.
· Title Tags & Headlines – While SEOs may argue about exactly how to optimize the title tag, it is definitely an opportunity to speak to your readers in the words they chose. Wrap the exact question searchers used in their query for the best results.
· Internal Link Structure – Cornerstone content is designed to help with your site’s internal linking structure. While the content is not necessarily salesy, it can be used to link to relevant products and services you are trying to sell. Google also likes to see solid internal linking.
· Header Structure – Search engines like to see content well organized by well-placed headers. They are ideal places to put primary keywords and longtail keywords.
· Stellar Content – Engaging content is the powerhouse that other SEO elements are hung on. It’s most important to create articles and posts that answer user’s questions and provides them with valuable information while focusing on the keywords and phrases already being used in search queries.
How to Promote Cornerstone Content
Promoting cornerstone content is about the same as promoting any of your site’s content. You may promote it using Facebook Ads, Google Adwords, or ads on Instagram or Twitter. Of course, they should be incorporated into your social media strategy and shared on the platforms you use. They can be a part of your next email campaign or incorporated into any unique marketing strategy you presently use. Using white-hat strategies to acquire backlinks to your content is a huge ranking factor.
Conclusion
At first, creating cornerstone content may seem a bit daunting. While it does take some effort, it’s not much different from creating other forms of valuable content, and then building linkable content to support it. Remember that quality is better than quantity, especially when you want to reach your ranking and marketing goals.
