More than 20 years ago, when I started building websites, we kind of already had an idea that it was good to have some very important pages around your main topics, and then sub-topic pages linked to it, covering a more in-depth specialised content.
Then Wikipedia was created and suddenly got the best google ranking for many keywords. Many companies saw that and got very jealous of this success, especially when they realised they could not easily create wikipedia articles for self-promotion purposes. I guess pillar pages are like a wikipedia for capitalists: the goal is not to inform you in un unbiased way, it’s to get the best indexation on google, get more readers than unbiased wikipedia content, and use this as a lead-generation, printing money machine.
To explain pillar pages, I inspired myself from this page: “Which of These 3 Content Pillar Types Should You Build?“, who segments pillar pages into 3 categories:
- 10x pillar page
- resource pillar page
- service pillar page.
But first, let’s see what is the difference between gated and ungated content. Quite often on websites, you see the cover of an ebook and a form next to it asking you to give your personal information to be allowed to download an ebook. This ebook is therefore a gated content, because there is a form protecting you from reading it. The form is the gate. Ungated content means you access it without giving personal data.
- gated content:
- pros: you don’t give away great content without asking for personal data or money in exchange of access
- cons: search engines won’t be able to discover the content, possibly less websites will link to it, nobody will discover your content. Your content is safe, but undiscovered.
- ungated content
- pros: search engines can index all the content you created, readers stay a long time on your page, which means google will understand that people like your content and therefore will index you well.
- cons: people enjoyed the free lunch, but they left without paying or giving personal data, the conversion rate from reader to lead will be very low, but hey at least you’ll get more readers.
Now let’s go back to our 3 types of content pillar pages:
- 10x pillar page is like an ungated e-book. It should be educational, people like to learn new things, I LOVE to learn new things. And to remember what we learn, we love to bookmark or… want to download a PDF of the great educational content we discovered. So a 10x pillar page should ALSO display a cover of ebook followed by a call to action (CTA) inviting the reader to download the pdf of the page in exchange of some personal data (from email to way more). The long term effect expected is that not only will Google rank this exact page higher, it will also rank your home page and other pages of your website higher. You won a medal one good page, and it shines over other pages.
- resource pillar page is mostly a list of bookmarks, recommending users to visit external links or internal links.
- For an external links resource pillar page example, this page https://www.helpscout.com/customer-acquisition/ has hundreds of websites linking to it, although it’s basically a curated list of external links, and now they’ve won one more inbound link with the post you are reading linking to them, well done!
- For an internal links resource pillar page example, this page https://www.campaigncreators.com/lead-nurturing-masterclass does a good job helping you learn useful insights by recommending you to visit more internal links to read more.
- service pillar page is focused on a service you propose, it describes everything about it and answers the frequently asked questions (FAQ): how will the setup work, how much does it cost, what benefits can I get from this service… It’s a very different approach to the 2 other pillar pages and is more dedicated to the decision making phase, when the customer already discovered you and is about to decide to buy or not to buy your service.
Obviously the best is when you have more than one 10x pillar page and they link to one another. For example https://mailshake.com/masterclass/ .
Resources about the topic:
https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/pillar-page-examples
https://medium.com/@mainstreethost/creating-killer-content-pillars-9b79e229f1bb
Example of pillar page about SEO:
https://moz.com/beginners-guide-to-seo