What is Cornerstone Content? A 6-Step Guide to Rank It Quickly

Learn How to Create Great Cornerstone Content to Benefit from What It Has to Offer

Content marketing is one of the most popular strategies in a marketing professional’s arsenal. Yet, while many are aware of how content can help an existing marketing campaign grow, they are unaware of its true potential. And cornerstone content creation is just one of many such underrated techniques.

Now, whether your cornerstone pieces are in the form of articles or web pages, you need to ensure that it is of a good quality, and update it from time to time to keep it relevant to the current context. And whether you implement your marketing strategy yourself, or have hired professional article writing services, keeping your content up to date is essential to maintaining and improving your rank.

So, without further ado, let’s take a look at how you can create great cornerstone articles and pages, that not only attract readers, but rank high as well.

What is Cornerstone Content?

Cornerstone content, essentially, is a core part of your website’s content. It is made up of some of the most comprehensive and extensively covered articles. These articles aren’t just long in length though. They cover their topic extensively, offering new insights and information that is hard to find elsewhere.

And while they focus on providing a complete picture of a specific topic, they still need to convey your brand’s message to the readers. That is why you will often see that many sites have one or more articles that aren’t just long in length, but are linked extensively to both internal and external resources.

These articles or pages are designed to hold a reader’s attention, and establish yourself as an authority on the subject in order to convert them. But in order to do that, these pieces of content need to be visible on search engines.

That is why it is important to have your cornerstone content rank well, as once it ranks high, it will drive traffic to the different articles and webpages with links to it.

Cornerstone Content and Their Importance to Your SEO Content Marketing Strategy

As we’ve discussed, cornerstone content examples are essential to a marketing strategy nowadays, due to their ability to attract and engage consumers. While it can be a bit difficult to rank well for some of the most competitive keywords, a cornerstone strategy can help you do just that for a lot less effort.

That is because while you may be covering a lot of related topics in separate articles, without structuring your links properly, you will be reducing your chances to rank. With Google or other search engines unable to identify which of your articles is the more important one, it will be very difficult to rank well.

Therefore, for an effective content marketing plan, it is necessary to single out specific articles and pages, and properly link them internally for an effective ranking strategy.

Identifying Your Site’s Cornerstone Content: How to Find the Right Articles?

Choosing the right content pillar structure is essential to an effective internal linking strategy. You need to identify the few pages or articles you want a new consumer to read when they come to your site. These pieces of content will be your cornerstones.

Now, the pages or articles you choose should be special in some way. They could be covering a topic extensively and deeply. Or they might be targeting the right keywords. They might even be important for your brand in some other way.

As your site grows larger, you might find that you’ve got additional opportunities for new cornerstone content. That will allow you to go for a broader cornerstone coverage, with select pieces of content from each category of services you provide.

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How Can You Structure Links Within Your Cornerstone articles?

Now that we’ve discussed how cornerstone content can help your SEO strategy, let’s discuss one of the most important steps to this whole process. You know that your cornerstone is a page that you want your consumers to read, both new and old. But for that to be true, it should be accessible from all over your website.

Your related topics should all link back to the relevant cornerstone content examples, thus needing a proper internal linking structure. That is because as time goes on, you will create new pieces of content that will link back to its relevant cornerstone, thus boosting their Google rankings.

Why Is It Important to Pay Special Attention to Your Cornerstone Content?

Nowadays, with so many businesses incorporating content marketing within their strategies, a company needs to showcase its creativity, and the expertise of their copywriting services and design skills. That is because there are a lot of people who can write. but not everyone can write content that attracts and converts its readers.

Now, the reason you need to pay special attention to your cornerstones compared to your general content, is because that is intrinsically the difference between the two. A piece of content you choose as cornerstone needs to be evergreen, while other articles may become outdated over time. And if you write it in a way that makes it hard or impossible to make changes over time, then it will fail in its purpose as a cornerstone content.

However, one of the best ways to ensure that your cornerstone is designed well, is to form a prewriting strategy and structure that is followed for every article you write, short or long form.

Creating The Perfect Cornerstone Content and Ranking It: A Six Step Guide

Knowing how to write an article that can act as a cornerstone to your content marketing strategy isn’t easy. It takes a lot to be able to write and structure your piece of content in a way that attracts readers and addresses their pain points.

Let’s take a look at how you can produce the perfect cornerstone content for your site, or optimize your chosen piece of content to be the perfect cornerstone.

Step#1: Choose Your Keywords and Content Format Carefully

Choosing the right keywords is very important. High ranking keyword usually have high competition, which makes it harder to rank for them. That’s where cornerstones come into play. By using these keywords for your cornerstones, you can easily ensure that your content becomes such an intrinsic part of your marketing strategy, that it links to a number of your articles easily.

Secondly, the format of your content also plays a huge part in ensuring the success of your cornerstone. If you use the chosen keyword in a way that does not fit with the user intent, it will fail to have the right impact, no matter how well its written.

That is why it is important to search what style of content currently ranking articles have produced on your keyword of choice, to get an idea of user intent. Because only by making content that is relatable to the reader will you be able to ensure that people will read it, thus increasing its chances of ranking high.

Step#2: Research and Plan Your Content Topic

No matter the types of copywriting or content writing you do, research is an important part of that process. Researching the topic in detail helps you get an idea of what you need to add to your own article, and how you can add a twist or something unique to set it apart.

Moreover, research also helps you plan your article’s structural. When we talk about cornerstone content, we have discussed that they are usually articles that cover a topic in detail. However, what many people do not know is that when you start to write a piece of long-form content, it takes more than just knowing what to write to create an engaging piece of content.

Long-form content requires a flow that makes it easy for users to move from one section of the article to the next smoothly, as well as allows for quick and easy skimming. That’s where planning your content comes into play. 

Step#3: Identify The Most Suitable Article to Link with or Create One from Scratch

Once you have found the right keyword and have researched the content needs for your cornerstone, the next step is to identify if you have an existing article that fulfills these requirements. If you have one, then you need to identify any modification needed to make it into the perfect cornerstone content example.

However, if you do not have an article for that keyword, or if your current article does not fulfill the requirements to make it into a cornerstone, then you may need to start from scratch. Your new article should be structured in a way that would make it easy and natural to interlink with other articles on your site.

Step#4: Give Your Chosen Article a Rewrite or an Edit to revamp It for SEO

One thing to remember when creating your site’s cornerstone, is that while it should be a good read for the reader, the content needs to be optimized for the search engines too. that is because without the right optimizations, your content will fail to register its impact on Google, thus affecting its potential rankings.

Now, when you write a fresh piece of content, it’s easy to include SEO optimization in your topic research. However, if you choose to use an existing article you need to revamp it for the SEO needs of today, such as adding currently popular LSIs or secondary keywords, and more.

Step#5: Optimize Your Related Content for the Top Long Tail Keywords

Long-tail keywords are generally less competitive, and are better able to help content rank well on Google. That is because long-tail keywords have a singular purpose – specify the topic rather than keeping it general. For example, let’s imagine that you are writing an article on freelance copywriting.

Now, there are many topics that derive from this, and that means that the keyword will have a higher competition, meaning a higher difficulty in ranking. However, you add long-tail keywords like how to hire a content writer, you will be able to leverage the comparatively less keyword competition, increasing the chances of ranking well.

Step#6: Interlink as Much as You Can Without Affecting the Narrative Itself

Finally, the most important part of this entire process, and the purpose you’ve created the cornerstone content for, interlinking related articles and pages. interlinking is an important part of content marketing. Not only does it allow your reader to have the option of browsing additional topics related to the one they just viewed, but also allows your convert them from anywhere on your website.

Once you’ve published your cornerstone, identify articles that are already published and could easily link back to it. Once you’ve done that, find a way to incorporate the cornerstone’s link in a natural manner. Moreover, when you write new articles on topics related to it in the future, make sure to link back to the cornerstone in them too.

Making It Easy to Create Killer Cornerstone Content Consistently

You’ll find many pieces of copywriting examples that businesses use for their cornerstone content. But not every one of these examples truly works as well as a cornerstone is supposed to. That may be due to a variety of reasons, including a lack of vision in their content strategy, or failure to choose the right cornerstone according to their niche.

Whatever the reason may be, there is a simple way to ensure that your brand creates killer cornerstone content every time. That way, is to research your cornerstone strategy. The right keywords can make or break this strategy. If you plan your strategy around high performing keywords that are important to your industry and business, you’ll be able to create content that is relevant to its readers’ every time,

Conclusion

In short, cornerstone content can be an important tool for a marketer, but only if it is used well. If your marketing strategy fails to create the right cornerstone for optimum inter linking, or the content itself does not fulfill the requirements of being a cornerstone, then your strategy will be of no use. However, if you follow the steps listed above, you will be able to create stunning cornerstone content examples that will not only be engaging for readers, but will also boost your site’s visibility.

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