How to Create Cornerstone Content and Why

Content has the power to make or break your online marketing strategy.

Creating useful and engaging content for your potential and current customers shows you value their attention. When it comes to increasing traffic to your website, you can't ignore the importance of creating quality content that meets the wants of your customers.

There are several ways to increase organic traffic to your website; one of them is mastering the creation of "cornerstone" content. 

In this post, I will show you the benefits of cornerstone content and how to go about creating it. 

Let's dig in and with understanding what we mean by cornerstone content?

What is Cornerstone Content?

This form of content is used by various websites, and many consider it as crucial for their content marketing strategy. 

If you look at the dictionary meaning, the word "cornerstone" means foundation stone. And that's precisely what cornerstone content is; the core of your website. 

Also known as "Pillar Content", it refers to high-quality content that covers detailed information related to your product or services. Great pillar content is a fantastic way to educate your audience about your resources.

It is the essential content, which you want your website visitors to go through.

Benefits of Cornerstone Content

Increasing organic traffic for your website is not easy. But, epic cornerstone content definitely helps. 

Let us discuss some of the benefits of cornerstone content. 

More Backlinks
When your cornerstone content covers comprehensive details that helps solve problems, it is the obvious choice for other content creators to link to.

Captures Subscribers
According to many studies, relatable, in-depth content has high viewership. People love to read content that adds value to their lives. If you can equip your content with personalized value and usefulness, your visitors will happily subscribe to your site for future content notifications.

Provides Value to Your Audience
Pillar content can help function as a landing page when visitors come to your site. From this page, they can also move to other topics that interest them. It helps your site visitors find value with an easy to understand the structure.

More Accessible
Cornerstone content pages are an excellent way to move traffic to the other relevant pages of your website. With the help of these pages, additional pages or posts become more accessible. 

Attracts a Lot Of traffic
Pillar content tends to rank well for short-tail keywords, meaning they will show on search engine search results against terms people often search for. It will help you create a good flow of traffic at the top of your website's marketing funnel.

How to Create Cornerstone Content?
Time to dive in and check out how you can create fantastic Cornerstone Content.

Step 1: Decide a Topic 
When choosing a topic on creating cornerstone content, consider the overall theme and mission of your website. 

For example, if you own a car dealership, you don't want to create content related to Super Bikes. It may attract people interested in bikes, but the overall traffic will not be valuable. However, you can create a post such as "How to Find the Right Car For You."

A better example - Agility CMS chose Headless CMS as our cornerstone content topic. Our cornerstone piece of content is "What is a Headless CMS?" and "How to choose the best Headless CMS".


Step 2: Target Effective Keywords
As mentioned earlier, cornerstone content is the core of your website. 

Search engines rely on keywords, so you have to be smart in choosing them. If you can match phrases and words on your site to the ones used by searchers, you can get more traffic to your pillar pages.

Dig deep and find the right keywords. You can use different tools such as SEMRush or Ahrefs, to target the right keywords.

Step 3: Create a Comprehensive Well-Written Post
Once you decide on the topic, it's time to research on providing helpful information to your target audience. 

Pillar content is usually lengthy, as it carries detailed information about your topic. In my opinion, the word count doesn't matter too much. However, you want to create a post that is well written and covers detailed information related to the topic. 

The easiest way to create pillar content is by upgrading your existing content. If you add a new product or service on your website, you should include relevant information about it on your pillar page.

To improve the quality of your post, you should consider leveraging content marketing platforms. They can help you optimize the content by making it easier for you to plan it and also by suggesting changes to make it grammatically correct. 

Here are some content marketing tools recommended by Shane Barker that you can use.

Step 4: Include Relevant Videos & Images
An image is certainly worth a thousand words.

According to stats, using images in posts gets up to 94% more views. Including multimedia helps in viewership engagement. But, of course, your pictures and videos should be relevant and must be used in the right place to convey your message. 

You can find relevant images from various stock photo websites. And in case you need to edit a photo to add text or enhance its look, you can do it with the help of an online image editor.  

Step 5: Optimize for SEO
Making content SEO friendly is essential. Make sure that you include headings and related keywords in your pillar content. Here are some tips:

1. Make your title easy to understand and compelling
2. Use one or two keywords in your Meta description and add captivating information about your pillar page. 
3. Use short-tail keywords in the first and last 100 words of the page. 
4. Make sure your website is responsive to mobile devices.
5. Link your pillar content page to as many other pages as possible. 
6. Continuously update the content on your pillar content page.
7. Use a keyword-focused URL

Step 6: Connect other Posts to Cornerstone Content 
When you consider new topics for regular blog posts, relate them back to pillar pages. It is vital to link your pillar content from as many pages as possible. This tells search engines that your cornerstone content is the most important page of your website.

PRO TIP:

Use a Headless CMS for Your Cornerstone Content Needs

Traditional CMS's were built for the websites. They gave us the comfort of having all the content the editing interface, templates, and custom code in a single environment. 

But, now, that's no longer enough. Today content can be displayed on any device using any format. However, traditional CMS's were never designed to cope with that. 

We need a new breed of CMS, one that can make the content available through any channel. Here's where headless CMS comes in. 

With headless CMS, it always allows you to focus on what's important - managing the content and delivering it to any channel, including social media.  

And at the same time, it doesn't try to control your presentation. It only provides the content through its application programming interface, and that makes it so much better. 

When it comes to choosing headless CMS, pay attention to EX friendly features  - Editor Experience is key here.  Agility CMS undoubtedly has great EX features and you don't want a Headless CMS without Page Management.

Conclusion:

To sum it up, Cornerstone Content is equally significant as your homepage, services, or about us page.

Creating epic cornerstone content takes time and effort. And it supports other content on your website. Keep your content related to each other and practice internal linking as much as you can. 

Keep Reading  

If you want to learn more about why Agility CMS is faster, make sure you read these articles:

What is JAMstack and Why Should You Care as an Editor?

What is a Headless CMS: Coupled vs Decoupled CMS Explained

Traditional CMS vs Headless CMS – Explained