Establishing yourself as an authority in your niche can be a game-changer for growing your business.
By positioning your website as a trusted source of information, you’ll attract more visitors and significantly boost your conversion rates.
The more high-quality content you create, the more traffic you’ll draw – and when your expertise shines through, visitors are more likely to trust your brand and make a purchase.
People naturally gravitate toward businesses that empower them with valuable insights to make informed decisions.
The good news? Any business can achieve this level of influence with well-researched, strategic content.
This article explains how to transform your website into an industry thought leader using content pillars guided by Semrush’s Keyword Strategy Builder.
What are content pillars?
Content pillars are pillars of website content that cover all aspects of a particular topic. This approach provides a 360-degree understanding of the subject.
For example, imagine you’re an ecommerce retailer selling camping gear. One approach is to have a website that simply lists products with little to no added expertise.
Such a site would struggle with conversion rates and likely compete solely on price, offering little value or education to customers.
Alternatively, you could create a website that guides consumers in choosing the best camping gear for their needs.
By helping them navigate this decision-making process, you’ll build trust and create a better overall experience, making customers more likely to choose you – even if your prices are slightly higher.
This approach can be implemented by building content pillars – a strategy that thoroughly explores a specific topic by covering various subtopics to support the customer decision-making process.
Each pillar includes sub-pillar content that delves deeper into individual categories, supported further by additional content for each sub-pillar.
The structure is broken out like the below:
Content pillar (main theme).
Sub-pillar (each pillar will have multiple sub-pillars).
Supporting content (each sub-pillar will have multiple pages of supporting content, going into detail on each one)
It’s important to know that each website can have multiple pillars, depending on how broad you want to cover the knowledge.
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How to develop a content pillar strategy with the Semrush Keyword Strategy Builder
To start, it’s helpful to identify the general pillar you want to create. For example, we want to build a pillar for tents.
Within Semrush, we can enter seed keywords within the Keyword Strategy Builder to help identify sub-pillars and supporting content.
In this case, let’s say I want to create content around tent materials, accessories, maintenance and cleaning.
With that, I’ll enter these keywords into the Keyword Strategy Builder.
After several minutes, Semrush will provide a super helpful topic overview.
I prefer the topical overview over the table view as it gives a nice visual overview of different sub-pillars and content we could write about.