If your goal is to rank well for one or two topics your business centers around, one of the best strategies you can use is creating cornerstone content. In construction, the cornerstone is an essential, indispensable, and basic component that will serve as the foundation for a building. This is also what cornerstone content should be.
It could be an infographic, how-to guide, or a FAQ page. The most important is that it’s highly relevant and is a proper introduction to what you’re truly about while showcasing other important pieces of content you may want to share. Let’s take a closer look at what cornerstone content is along with a few tips on how to create it.
What is Cornerstone Content Exactly?
Cornerstone content should be an introduction to you and what you do, but it’s more than that. It should encapsulate your business’s whole essence. When people are done with a cornerstone article, they should know exactly what you’re about and if you can help them.
Cornerstone should also help spark interest in other subjects. You can use cornerstone content to introduce ideas, tools, and concepts your readers may have not heard of or know about. Ideally, you can then use supporting content you will redirect visitors to so you can create a funnel. When used efficiently, cornerstone content should help boost engagement for multiple pages on your site.
Cornerstone content should also be highly shareable and link-worthy. This is what will ultimately allow it to rank, though many other factors must be considered as well.
Now that we know a bit more about what cornerstone content is, let’s look at why it’s so important for your business.
The Benefits of Cornerstone Content
Some of you may be wondering why they need cornerstone content in the first place and if it’s worth the time, money, and effort. We say that you shouldn’t start an SEO strategy without a cornerstone piece of content. You might be sending a lot of visitors to your site, but it will be unfocused and scattered once they’re left to their own devices.
With cornerstone content, you can direct their actions. You can have some other pieces of content that are just as important, but more specific. Sending traffic to these will help you further convince visitors and turn more of them into buyers while boosting SEO for the pages you send them to.
In addition, cornerstone content is great for building awareness, organic links, and attracting highly relevant visitors. It will also help you become an authority in your niche, boost your site’s overall SEO, and feed your funnels. It could be a great tool to build your email list, for instance. So, this is something that should be a priority for anyone who wants to build an SEO strategy on a solid foundation, no pun intended.
Now let’s look at how you can create great cornerstone content for your website.
Come with the Right Optic
While you ultimately want people to opt-in, it shouldn’t be your main goal when building cornerstone content. Your priority should be to show your expertise and help. You want to build authority and be remembered for being a valuable resource. You should aim at making a solid first impression and building a positive connection with your readers. Once you have their trust, they are much more likely to convert when it’s time.
Choose the Right Length
Cornerstone content tends to be lengthy with plenty of sections and sub-sections. So don’t expect to get a massive response from a 500-word piece of content. Ideally, the piece should have at least 900 words, but bigger is usually better as long as the content is engaging.
Is it possible to rank well with a short article? Sure. In some cases, all people need is a simple explanation. But if you want this page to rank well, it will need links from other authoritative sites, and these will usually prefer well-detailed, impressive pieces that are wide in scope.
So, try to see if you could create a compelling manifesto or a multi-part tutorial. Or you could simply focus on answering your readers’ questions more efficiently and extensively than the competition.
Have Supporting Content
Having cornerstone content without supporting content is a waste. This is why we would suggest that you have a blog set up with substantial content before you get started.
Google loves websites that have lots of fresh, relevant content, and a blog is the best way to do it. Active blogging is also a great way to get attention through social media and build organic and highly authoritative links. Not to mention that you can use your blog posts to delve into specific topics or reference back to your cornerstone content.
Keywords
The role of keywords has been greatly diminished in SEO over the years, but they’re still very important. You will need to have at least one appropriate title phrase to tailor your content around. If you want to find the best one, we suggest you see what questions people are asking and are expecting your content to answer. Also, ask if answering the question will benefit their experience and if it’s searched enough to warrant the effort.
Headlines and Title Tags
You might hear conflicting opinions about many things in SEO, but never on the importance of title tags. Title tags are the first thing people will see when you appear in search results and Google wants these to be as relevant as possible. So, consider adding your core keyword phrase in there if it’s natural. And, since it’s a headline as well, you need to make it professional while promising to answer the searcher’s exact question.
If you didn’t know what cornerstone content was and how it can help your business, we hope we were able to clarify a few things for you. It should play a central part in any business online marketing strategy and could be the key for greater engagement, and subsequently, more conversions