Have you noticed that the way people interact with search engines has changed quite a bit over the last couple years? Not only have people transitioned from traditional search to voice search, but searches have also become more specific and conversational. Instead of typing something like, “restaurants in New York City”, we now use voice search and instead say something like, “What’s the best restaurant for steak near me?”
With thousands of search term variations that all mean the same thing, it can be difficult for marketers to pinpoint the keywords that will attract their target audience. With many marketers and companies still writing content based on exact keywords, they’re falling behind the way people are actually using search.
Marketers are realizing that in order to attract the right visitors to a website, they must establish authority on topics and move away from using broad keywords.
This means creating one piece of authoritative content on a topic in your industry and developing a pillar page with supporting content. Once the pillar page is established, supporting subtopics can be created. This will ultimately help your website not only attract more traffic with less content, but better quality leads.
Let’s explore four fundamentals of modern SEO and how HubSpot’s new Content Strategy tool makes the process extremely easy for marketers.
Additional benefits to creating content based on topics will bring success by:
In the past, HubSpot has recommended researching keywords, developing blog posts around them, then directing visitors to a landing page to download a piece of content.
The new structure suggests creating several blog posts surrounding and leading to a core topic.
What has changed?
To begin, create a short term between 2-4 words for the core topic. Next, you’ll choose subtopics and attach a related blog post according to what Hubspot recommends. The tool automatically looks for a link between the pillar page and subtopic. In our example below, you can see there are three subtopics showing broken links, meaning that we would need to add links in our blog posts to the pillar page.
Once you’ve created a topic cluster, over time you will be able to see data for:
Remember that pillar page content is not hidden behind a form and may seem extremely long compared with the type of content you’re familiar with creating. Since the content is more extensive, you should include shortcuts at the top of a page and can also include a CTA to the traditional PDF download that links to a landing page.
Ready to get started with your content strategy? Visit your Content Strategy tool to get started.
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