Imagine two different people have identical niche sites.
They both target the same keywords and they both decide to write an article
optimized for it. They both build identical links.
But one of them ranks for more sets of keywords, pulls in
more long-tad traffic, and gets 5x more traffic than the other.
How is this possible? In the next few units, I'm going to go
over one of the most important strategies in this article. They're called
pillar traffic and pillar posts
They're the essential components that form the difference
between a site that gets thousands of visitors per month - and a site that gets
hundreds of thousands or even millions of visitors per month
It’s an SEO tactic
that I use that allows my pages to generate tons more traffic than a
competitors. The best part is: everything is strategically planned. Nothing
happens by accident.
It doesn't mailer it you have a blog, business website,
niche site, or e-commerce site. By incorporating Pillar Keywords and Pillar
Posts into your content strategy, you can significantly magnify your traffic
What's the different between. Pillar Keywords Pillar
Keywords happen during your keyword research phase. It’s essentially a keyword research strategy Pillar
Posts are the actual articles that you create using your Pillar Keywords. This
might sound a little confusing now, but bear with me. It'll all make sense in a
minute when I go through them both.
What is a Pillar Keyword?
Essentially, it’s the process of intentionally ranking for
every variation of your keyword through proper planning.
This is one of the biggest areas where I do things
differently with my niche site building and SEO
I remember when I first stayed my niche site, I learned from
really well known bloggers in the space
One of the times I had my “aha” moment was when even they were surprised by
how they started ranking for things they never even targeted.
Their main keyword jumped to the first page, and they would
say, What's interesting is that I'm also ranking for X, Y, and Z and wasn't even
targeting them.
They ranked for these terms by accident
By targeting a major keyword, creating a high quality
resource around 4, and building a bunch of good links, they got to #1 for their
main keyword.
However, because it was a high quality resource with a lot
of good links, they started ranking for other keywords. By having some of the
words in their title, headings, or body of the post, they were targeting them
without even knowing 4
And they probably could have done it for even more keywords
had they done the appropriate research
That's what Mar Keyword setup is
Even today, people are taught to target a single keyword and
build their page around it. They ignore the fact that if they build up enough
authority to the page to rank for their keyword, they probably could have
ranked for a handful of others in the process it they just targeted them in
some way
A powerful strategy
After seeing that, I started experimenting with it. And now…
it’s a MAJOR part of my niche site and SEO strategy In fact, I would NEVER
create a site where I don't use Pillar Keywords and Pillar Posts as my main
content strategy
It literally multiplies your overall traffic potential with
the same amount of work.
This is the mason my main niche site jumped up in traffic
all of a sudden.
Gaining enough authority that your site jumps to Ti for the
biggest keyword is a big boost in traffic. If you're targeting pretty much
every keyword with that post, they'll all rise to the first page and the
traffic boost is ENORMOUS.
Your page will get so much more traffic without having had to
do any extra work for it. It’s all just a result of smart planning. And I'm
going to show you exactly how it’s done.
Here's how to create your pillar keywords
I'm going to use Petty Training for this example again
because there are a lot of keywords I can work with to illustrate the steps.
I'll go step-by-step through this because this process is
very important for you to learn
If you master this
strategy, your niche sites will grow to a whole different level than it used
to.
Traffic is multiple times greater in the long run than if
you did the same amount of work without utilizing this strategy, so make sure
you read through it and understand it entirely It all starts during your
keyword research phase.
If you remember just a minute ago, we inputted some seed keywords into the Keyword Planner.
First, let’s take a look at the keywords
brought back from Google's Keyword Planner. So here's the first page of
results. Below are the seed keywords than we searched for
And here are some of the suggestions that Google Keyword
Planner brought back.
There are 800 results in total, and I can't post them all
hem so I'll do my best to forge an example with whets on the first page.
It should be more than enough. I'll usually only go through
3-5 pages.
So let’s go ahead and start forming our first Pillar
Keyword.
Organize the list
First, I'll take the biggest keyword I want to target and
list out all the relevant keywords that am DIRECTLY related to it.
What do I mean by this
I'll list all the keywords that are related to each other
where ranking for one of them will pretty much mean I can rank for the others.
They're just warded slightly differently
For example, tips for potty training, potty training, and
how to start potty training all fall under the same topic.
They ALL mean the same thing. Remember when we learned about
search intent?
They all have the same search intent. Anyone who searches
for any of those keywords are ALL looking for the same information.
The only difference is the wording. Each individual keyword
gets a good amount of searches per month. Th., from the fist that aren't
related are potty training pants and potty training toilet seat They fall under
the same topic of potty training, but they don't have the some meaning. Someone
who types in potty training pants isn't looking for a tutorial on how to potty
train their child.
So here's the organized list of all keywords directly related to "potty training".
potty training -74,000
potty training tips -
14,800
how to potty train- 8,100
tips for potty
training - 880
tips on potty training – 720
how to start potty
training -2,400
when to start potty training -8,100
when to potty train- 3,600
potty training boys - 18,100
potty training tips for boys - 2,900
potty training girls - 9,900
potty training tips
for girls 1,600
potty training for boys - 1,600
tips for potty
training girls -720
tips for potty training boys - 390
how to potty tram a boy - 9,900
how to potty tram a girl - 6,600
toddler potty training - 720
potty training toddlers - 480
baby potty training - 1,000
TOTAL SEARCH VOLUME PBR MONTH = 166,510
All of these keywords are related searches that have the
same MEANING tips about potty training Everything else from the list that means
something else, I didn't add it in. We can target all of these through a SINGLE
PAGE, and Chats 166,510 searches per month.
That is just calculating using the keywords presented on the
first page.
If we were to add up every hole keyword, it would get doser
to 200,000 searches per month. REMEMBER: This is only counting the keywords
listed in Google's Keyword Planner. It's not considering ANY long tail traffic,
so the actual traffic numbers will be MUCH higher.
Results of using this strategy
People today are
trained to look at that list and choose one keyword. Maybe they'll choose a
keyword based around potty training girls. Its a good keyword that gets around
20,000 searches per month if you add up all the variables. But look at what we
did here By taking the biggest keywords and combining them together, we put our
page in position to rank for ALL OF THEM instead of just one of them.
This magnifies the results of your link building efforts.
Instead of… “Hey I'm
finally ranking #1 for my keyword. That's a pleasant bump in traffic”
It’s more like “OMG I'm ranking for EVERYIHING I've become
the authority for this topic no matter how you input your search query, and my
traffic Just exploded to a whole new level”
And that's not an exaggeration. That's literally the
difference I've experienced between sites where I've used Pillar Keywords and
sites where I didn't.
In addition, our page is going to so much more jam-packed
with information and provide value to our readers. It’s a monster and we'll team how to create
content for these types of post in the next unit in what I like to call Pillar
Posts.
Pillar Keywords are the pillars of my authority site
strategy - hence the name
This is what I mean when I say authority sites don't rely on
single keywords to determine their success. I say that a lot, and people always
look at me with confused looks
Even if it takes a long time to rank #1 for a competitive
keyword like "potty training° this article wilt bring in a TON of
long-tail traffic long before you even reach the first page.
Remember, we're creating a valuable long-tear authority
site. It may not rank for all of these right away, but as we continue to build
out our sites and do proper link building, 4 will.
And when it does, it will be more traffic than you've ever
seen from any of your older niche sites.
Formatting the meta around our Pillar Keywords
You're probably wondering How do we even target all of them?
Are we mentioning them in our content? Are we creating a massive 100 word
title?,
It sorts wattle title and descirption elements
Title tags and descriptions are often used on search engine
results pages (SERPs) to display preview snippets for a given page, and are
important both for SEO and social sharing
Title tags are one of the most crucial components of SET and
is given a lot of weight by Google in terms of how you rank, and for which
keywords you rank for
Now let’s learn how to create one with the Pillar Keyword
strategy.
Writing Our Title and Description for this Monster Post
So now comes the part of smartly targeting all of these
keywords so that ranking for one of them = ranking for all of them.
What we're trying to do is make sure that we targeting every
single one of those keywords in the list we made within our site's Title and
Description.
Here's what I came up with
Again, here is the list of keywords we had selected earlier.
Try and find one keyword from our list where that title
isn't relevant. They're all targeted in one way or another. This as easier than
it might look. All it takes is some
creativity and a bit of practice. You'll have to play around with the title and
descriptions a bit to get it just right I'm pretty happy with this one.
Let's move onto Pillar Posts
So now you saw how I do keyword research for my biggest
keywords.
They're the only ones I pay this much attention to because
they're the ones that have the ability to drive substantial amounts of traffic
to our site I normally try to create at least 2-3 of these Pillar Posts at the
start of a site
Meaning … when I start a new site, I'll always start things
off by crafting 2 or 3 Pillar Keywords, and then creating the Pillar Posts for
them
Only 2 or 3
Yes. As you can see, we're targeting a large number of
keywords here. And the MINIMUM total search volume I'm looking for out of these
Pillar Keywords is 50,000
2 or 3 pieces of content might seem like a really small
number, but in reality, they're targeting hundreds of thousands in search
volume.
The content for these types of posts also take a long time
to put together (which we'll get into next)
2 to 3 is enough for the beginning. You can do more if you
prefer, but I like to add in smaller posts (what I like to call inner pages and
will be discussed later) targeting long-tail keywords after I get just 2 to 3
of these published.
Follow along
Dunne your keyword research stage, put together 2 of these
posts first. We're not going to write the content just yet. Just do what I did
above. List out the related keywords and try to target all of them within your
site's tide and description.
