Using Pillar Pages to Make Old Content More Accessible
We’ve always pushed that real estate agents should have a solid blogging strategy in place — but that doesn’t mean that more content is necessarily better.
Simply having a lot of content on your website isn’t necessarily the best strategy to take (especially if it’s hard for your users to find). In fact, if you have a lot of posts that don’t get any views at all, it can actually negatively affect your overall SEO strategy.
If that’s the case, you may think you’ve wasted a lot of time over the years writing pages upon pages of content; but if you have a lot of good, useful content, then you haven’t wasted your time at all.
You just need to spend some time reworking your older content to make it more accessible to your visitors. After all, it’s possible that you have a lot of great content — users just might not know it exists because they can only access it by going page by page through your blog posts.
★ Want to learn more about building a quality content strategy? Have a look at these posts:
- Writing Successful Real Estate Content that Converts
- Optimizing Your Content for Humans (And Not Just for Search Engines)
- How to Plan Content that Attracts and Engages
How Do You Bring Old Content Front and Center?
One way to resolve this is by building out a pillar page.
A pillar page is a long-form piece of content that broadly covers a main topic (pillar content), while offering a breakdown of supporting content (cluster content) with links (hyperlinks) to access that content, plus links from the content pages back to the pillar page.
Basically, a pillar page is broken down like this:
- Pillar Content (Your Main Topic)
- Cluster Content (Your Supporting Content)
- Hyperlinks (Your links to the supporting content and vice versa)
For example, I could have a main topic of “Everything You Need to Know About Selling a Home” (Pillar Content). My supporting content would then be all of the blog posts I’ve ever written about that topic (Cluster Content). And finally, all of my embedded links (hyperlinks) would take you to the cluster content topics directly, and vice versa.
There are 2 main reasons to create a pillar page:
- As part of your internal linking strategy to build upon your SEO strategy.
- To organize your content strategy and make old content more visible and organized.
Here on Views, the Artifakt blog, we’ve built out pillar pages a few times to highlight some of our older content. Here are some examples to check out:
- The Philosophy of Inbound Marketing, and Why it Works for Agents
- What To Do If You Have a Real Estate Lead Generation Problem
- Optimizing Your Content for Humans (And Not Just for Search Engines)
As you can see, the possibilities are really endless if you have a lot of content on your website. There are several creative approaches you can take to building out pillar pages in a way that makes sense to your visitors and gives them a lot of value.
So, if you want to create your own pillar page, how do you get started?
How Do You Do a Content Audit?
Just because you have a lot of content, doesn’t mean it’s especially good or effective at bringing people to your website. So the best place to start is by doing an overall audit of your website content to determine:
- What gets the most traffic.
- What gets the least traffic.
- What’s still relevant and what isn’t.
You can use Google Analytics to accomplish the first 2 points by looking at which of your content pieces get the most views/visits and which get the least. If some of the content you have doesn’t get any views at all but is still really relevant, or rather, you can make it relevant using a pillar page, then keep it. If you have content that isn’t relevant anymore, then as difficult as it may be, you should consider deleting it.
A good example of mostly irrelevant content that most real estate agents have on their websites is market reports. A lot of agents write them each month, but when you think about it, market reports from 5 years ago probably aren’t getting any views and they’re not very useful to anyone anymore. So as part of your content audit, you should consider deleting that type of content.
★ Want to learn more about auditing your content strategy, have a look at this post called: How (and Why) to Audit Your Real Estate Website’s Content.
Make Your Old Content New Again
Pillar pages are a great way to make old content more useful for your visitors. Start by considering your overall topics and what content you have to support them. Then build out your pillar pages and watch your old (but still useful) content rise in views and get in front of more people.
Want to improve your content strategy? Download our Content Strategy Guide for Real Estate Agents. It has practical methods on how to plan, implement, market, and audit a successful real estate content strategy that will deliver results as part of your overall inbound marketing strategy.
