Say you’re building a new house. Would you start trying to put up the drywall before you’ve poured a foundation? No way – and the same applies to your website!
The foundations of your website copy should be something called cornerstone content, which has plenty of benefits for both SEO and for your audience. So what is cornerstone content?
Essentially, this is your brightest and best – it’s the core pages of your website that contain the most important information you want to convey to your readers and to search engines. The copy on these pages should be your most relevant and essential information that, if all goes well, comes up first in Google.
Here’s what you need to know about cornerstone content.
Should my blog have cornerstone content?
Yes, 110%! Every website or blog worth its salt needs to have well-optimised cornerstone content.
For your readers, these are the pages that readers will go to first to learn about your brand; from an SEO perspective, these pages are great for link building and provide juicy real estate for placing core keywords about your industry, brand and services. You want Google to find this content and identify it as the foundations of your website.
What type of articles are cornerstone content? This will vary based on your industry and type of business, but could be an ultimate guide to your industry/services, a comprehensive blog post on your speciality, or another relevant page or post.
If you already have an established website and have neglected (or didn’t know about) cornerstone content, don’t stress! It’s never too late – you can always update or create cornerstone content to add to your existing site.
Just like a skyscraper depends on its foundation, the strength of your website rests on the quality of your cornerstone content.
How do I write cornerstone content?
OK, so you’re ready to put fingers to keyboard and create or update your cornerstone content – great! First things first: how long should cornerstone content be?
Think long. Ideally, 1500–2000 words, as this stuff needs to be comprehensive. It’s your website’s foundation, remember? So spend your time on it and make it your best content.
Cornerstone content should definitely be well-optimised for SEO too, so invest some time into doing keyword research, ensuring you know what keywords to include. Your cornerstone content is also awesome from a link-building perspective, so use it for internal linking (you can also include valuable external links to other useful resources, as long as they’re not direct competitors to your site).
It never hurts to scope out your competition, having a look at how they’ve created their cornerstone content (peering into your neighbours’ backyards, if you will). That way, you can learn from them and make yours even better. Hey, all’s fair in love and SEO!
Oh, and when it comes to link building – as you identify link-building opportunities, you want to direct those links back to your cornerstone content, as this will help increase your backlinks: a win-win for increasing your SEO.
We get that creating cornerstone content is a big (and important!) task, so if you could use some help with the keyword research or the writing, we’re just an email away.
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