Content marketing for healthcare software companies is an essential part of a successful B2B marketing strategy. According to research, content marketing brings in three times as many leads as traditional marketing and costs 62% less.
Blogs typically make up the foundation of a solid SaaS content marketing strategy. While they are still the primary medium for sharing content with your target audience, search behavior is changing to include other types of helpful, long-form content. Today, blogs alone won’t suffice when marketing for healthcare software companies.
A reputable SaaS content marketing agency understands that pillar pages are the new cornerstone of a strong content marketing strategy. With a firm grasp of SEO and the topics your buyers are interested in, an agency can develop strategic blogs that form the basis of a pillar page, providing content that attracts leads and converts prospects.
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Search engine algorithms are constantly evolving. That’s because how people search also changes constantly. In recent years, marketers researched relevant SEO keywords to attract visitors and incorporated them into blogs, website pages, and other content. However, this has become less effective because people have changed how they search. For example, they are now searching with longer, more conversational queries.
As search behavior has changed, technologies have begun to evolve as well. Rather than rewarding search results only based on specific keywords, search engines like Google are aiming to provide people with results closely related to their search.
For example, Google recently launched a “helpful content update” to improve search results. The new effort means that Google will drive people toward more original, helpful content written by people (rather than AI) for people (not search engines) in their search results. This doesn’t mean that SEO best practices can be discarded; they are still essential for providing searchers with value, but the kind of content that’s prioritized is different.
Understanding these types of changes in search behavior is central to content marketing for healthcare software companies. It’s also useful in understanding why pillar pages are indeed a“pillar” of effective healthcare digital marketing services.
Pillar pages are a more effective way of creating content. Rather than writing a blog post about one unique keyword, pillar pages enable you to write several blog posts about one core topic with related keywords that can be combined into a long-form guide.
A pillar page is an authoritative piece of content that resides on your website. It’s designed to deliver the type of content search engines want to serve (i.e., the best, most accurate information). It contains a deep dive into a specific topic and is more informative than an individual blog post. This fits how people are searching, as search engines deliver the best results for search requests.
Pillar pages enable you to organize content on your website by strategically designing your blog content architecture. Each pillar page provides an overview of all aspects of a specific topic. Each blog post on your website covers each of those aspects in more detail, linking back to the pillar page. This enables visitors to learn everything they need to know about that topic.
Rather than writing an ever-increasing number of blog posts using specific keywords, an agency can partner with you to develop a pillar page that focuses on your expertise in a particular industry topic. To ensure that the pillar page covers that topic most comprehensively, Spot On uses HubSpot’s Content Strategy Tool to create a topic cluster. This tool:
A topic cluster uses a comprehensive pillar page to anchor one topic to more in-depth blog posts on different aspects of that topic. Each pillar page serves to organize your site infrastructure, as they tie together the blog posts on different topics.
Creating pillar pages and topic clusters enables you to broadly and definitively cover a specific topic. Linking all topic content to a pillar page enables search engines to scan and identify a relationship between all the content. Due to the breadth and depth of the content, the pillar page is given more authority on the topic. This results in higher search placement.
As stated, pillar pages are effective for healthcare software companies because of their high search placement. However, there are other reasons why they work so well. They enable you to optimize your website content for search engines while also increasing opportunities for visitors to convert to leads on your website. While they can be used on-site to attract inbound traffic, they may also be promoted as a gated resource, allowing you to capture more information about leads.
Pillar pages also increase engagement. Because the content is well organized and covers a topic in-depth, it’s more user-friendly for website visitors. This results in increased numbers of visits and longer visits to your website.
Longer visits are the key. Topic clusters bring visitors using different search terms to a singular location. While the visitor might have come to learn about one specific topic, they will often stay to keep reading about other related topics. This keeps them on the site longer, increasing engagement and page views.
First, decide on a topic. Focus on a broad topical theme rather than specific keywords. This theme should be general enough to require multiple blog posts, but not so broad that it’s impossible to cover.
When creating content marketing for healthcare software companies, Spot On will work with you to research topics that appeal to your audience. We’ll analyze trends and ensure the topic has enough search volume to support the creation of a pillar page. Researching buyer personas will help with determining your audience. This will then enable us to identify what they’re searching for and select topics for your pillar page.
You can create a new pillar page or turn existing blog posts into a pillar page. It depends on whether you’ve already covered the topic in question.
Your pillar page should include:
Do advanced keyword research within the framework of your main topic. Cover as much as possible of what people search for within the topic cluster. A good starting point is to focus on questions that people ask when searching for a specific topic. The most-asked questions and keywords with the highest search volume and lowest difficulty will, in most cases, become part of the titles for your blog posts.
First group your keywords into blog posts. Keep in mind that the keywords should be relevant to your audience, not chosen only for SEO benefit. Determine an overall structure for your pillar page outline that would be helpful to a reader and then fill in any gaps with blogs that are missing. Write blog posts that fit into each topic cluster. Then link those blog posts to your pillar page. Update your pillar page when adding new blog posts and topic clusters, if necessary.
Keyword and topic research are the keys to creating strong pillar pages. But you must also validate your pillar post’s topic before writing it. A topic might seem interesting and have good SEO. But it might not necessarily appeal to your audience. That’s why it’s important to validate the topic first.
To validate a topic, consider:
How do you know if your pillar page is working? You’ll need to examine the metrics.
Your healthcare digital marketing services should include measuring your content marketing ROI. This involves subtracting your content creation and distribution costs from the sales generated from that content. The goal, of course, is to bring in more money than you’re investing.
There are other ways to measure the success of your pillar pages. For example:
These results will tell your SaaS content marketing agency how well the topic cluster is working. From there, it can be tweaked and improved to ensure your content is being viewed, converting visitors to leads and leads to customers.
Spot On specializes in content marketing for healthcare software and SaaS. We focus on understanding your customers’ needs and expectations and helping you to create content that pulls them to your website.
Healthcare SaaS content marketing doesn’t simply mean creating more content. It involves developing a plan to create the right content. Spot On will help to develop and execute a plan to increase recognition and drive sales. For example, we’ve helped other healthcare SaaS companies to create content that gets found on the first page for organic searches, as well as realize a greater than 1,600% increase in deals.
Interested in working with our SaaS content marketing agency? Schedule a time to chat with us for a free consultation.
