19 Nov How to create your pillar page and topic clusters

Before creating our pillar page, we reviewed examples of others. The one we liked a lot was created by the online SEO company Moz. Their pillar page The Beginner’s Guide to SEO has been read over 10 million times.

Like the Moz page, ours provides a brief explanation of our topic—Pillar pages and topic clusters for healthcare content marketing—then provides a “table of contents” that links to our topic clusters that offer more information.

What about the length of your topic clusters? It reminds us of a quote from

Abraham Lincoln. He was once asked, “How long do you think a man’s legs should be?” Abe’s answer: “Long enough to reach the ground.”

In other words, your topic clusters should be long enough to communicate your content effectively.

Now, it’s time to design your pillar page and topic clusters

Just as you used a professional writer, use a professional designer to design your pillar page and topic clusters. Ideally, the writer and designer will work together as a team from the beginning, to help plan the program even before the actual writing and designing begin.

Your pillar page should be built as a separate webpage, with links to all your topic clusters. Each of the topic cluster pages should link back to the pillar page. Where relevant, topic cluster pages can link to each other.

Use visuals—infographics, icons, photos, illustrations, graphs—to add interest to your pages. Visual elements also break up the content into more digestible pieces.

And incorporate your branding hallmarks—your colors, fonts, graphic elements, use of white space—to ensure your pillar page and topic clusters are visually consistent with your brand.

Be sure to make all pillar page and topic clusters downloadable.

Last but not least…

Hire a proofreader! Typos and grammatical mistakes damage your credibility.