What is cornerstone content?
A cornerstone piece of content is a high-value, foundationally strong piece of writing that is meant to help you increase traffic and brand awareness by demosntrating what you can offer. Your cornerstone content should be closely related to your business goals. By providing content that establishes you as an authority in your industry, you can bring in a stream of visitors who will eventually be interested in your products or services.
Keep in mind that a cornerstone content piece is not always designed to get people to buy something or convert. It is usually open and free so that people can read it. The real goal of cornerstone content is to make a good first impression on people so that they have a positive attitude towards your brand. This ensures that when they are prepared to make a purchase, they will be more likely to come to you.
The word “cornerstone” is derived from masonry, where the stone placed at the corner of a foundation is the key to stabilizing the entire structure. As the folks at Dictionary.com define it, a cornerstone is:
1. A stone that joins two masonry walls at an intersection.
a stone that is put in the ground to mark the spot where a building will be built, often with the date of the building carved on it
The basis of democratic government is a free press.
The basis of his argument was that all people are created equal.
The definition of cornerstone content is content that is essential to your website and supports the rest of your content as you build out your website. Your cornerstone content should form an essential part of your traffic base. One way to make your content stand out is to create appropriate ceremonies surrounding it. This will make it more memorable and special to your audience.
The benefits of great cornerstone content
Cornerstone content is a key tool for raising brand awareness, both through the content itself and through optimizing it. This is a great opportunity to communicate your main message to your target audience.
Achieving a high ranking on SERPs will help drive relevant traffic to your site. Most people only look at the first results page when they search for something online. Only a quarter of people go beyond that.
The content on your website can act as a foundation for building links from other pages, social media channels, and external sources. If your content is good, people will want to link to it. This is an effective way to make your business seem like an expert in its field, which will result in people having more faith in your company. It can help grow your business by attracting potential customers who can be tracked and nurtured so they are more likely to convert.
Content that is evergreen can be a useful tool to help build your brand identity across all marketing channels. This type of content can also be repurposed into different formats to help keep your website looking fresh.
If you create content that is valuable to your business, it will continue to drive value for your business.
How to create great cornerstone content
This section will teach you how to produce content that is interesting and useful to your readers, as well as how to get that content in front of the people who are most likely to want to read it.
Do your research
To be successful in marketing, it is essential to get to know your customers and understand their buyer persona. If you know your target audience, you will have a better idea of what to write.
It is important to make sure that your most important piece is interesting and up-to-date, and the best way to do that is to talk to your viewers. Get in touch with current customers, administer surveys, and then study the results.
What people are searching for online is something you’ll need to find out. It is best to find a subject that is often looked up but does not have many results. If you want to improve your position on the search engine results page, your content must be better than what is already available.
What are some problems that your target audience faces? What questions are they asking, and why aren’t they already being answered? The goal is to identify a problem that your business can assist with- perhaps by utilizing specialist knowledge or data to provide a unique solution.
When conducting research, one part is finding out which keywords people use when searching on Google. You will need to select the most relevant keywords and phrases for your content, making sure they align with the ones people are most likely to use when they search for a question (which only you can answer!).
Once you have gathered the data you need, keep it! You will want to access the data in the future to see how your target audience has changed and how you can adapt your marketing to them. PaaS storage solutions provide a secure and efficient way to keep data in one place.
Plan your content
Content that is considered to be the foundation or cornerstone of a website or online strategy is typically an article that provides comprehensive information on a topic, such as “Everything you need to start selling online” or “Cloud computing: the complete guide.” There’s no rule that says you have to communicate your brand’s values in one specific way.
This is an example of something you could do. You could create a guide that tells people how to do something step by step, or make a video tutorial. A searchable knowledge base on your website could help visitors find answers to their questions, while offering a free tool would make them feel positive about your company.
Keyword research
After you have your topic in mind, the next step is to do keyword research. You want to be sure that there is a healthy number of searches related to your topic of choice, because the number of searches is a sign of interest and demand. If there is a lot of search engine activity for a particular topic, there is an opportunity to direct that traffic to your brand and create a good impression.
We could say that we’re looking to create a great piece of content for a men’s grooming shop that sells shaving supplies, beard oil and mustache wax. People are interested in finding out how to grow a beard faster.
You know what this smells like to me? OPPORTUNITY. If we can get Wikihow out of that featured snippet, we could get tens of thousands of visits from potential customers each month. Pretty sweet, no?
Now let’s double-check that keyword in another keyword tool. SEM Rush provides a lot of different keywords that are related to the base keyword “how to grow a beard.”
Write your masterpiece
The best content on your website should be well-planned and carefully written so that readers are interested, informed, and inspired. It must be relevant and genuinely helpful, not only solving the customer’s problem but making them want to learn more about you.
Getting the details of your brand right is important in order to maintain a good reputation. Your content should sound like an expert so that people trust what you’re saying, which will also help your website rank higher on search engines.
Use keywords throughout your writing, but avoid sounding like you’re stuffing them in. Utilizing software such as Hemingway or Grammarly is a great way to verify that your writing is concise and informative.
The article should provide an explanation of the terminology as well as examples that are easy to understand.
Content creation
Now is the time to get to work and create your content piece.
Bartenders tend to roll up their sleeves.
This process is going to look different depending on your topic and format, but whatever you decide on, here are some considerations to keep in mind:
- Quality really matters here. You want to stake your reputation as a brand on this content. It should be completely accurate, truly helpful, a real “Wow” experience for prospects. So hire the best talent you can afford to create it, and build in time for review and revision. Get an outside expert opinion before you launch it if you can.
- Quality encompasses a number of things. This content piece should be visually appealing as well as easy to use and navigate, no matter what device visitors are using.
- Keep your keyword research close at hand! Those keywords you surfaced earlier should be naturally occurring in the text of your content. Let them define the structure of what you create. For example, there should be a “chapter” or section in your beard guide about how long it takes to grow a beard.
- Intent, intent, intent. Matching intent is so crucial. Try to tackle a topic that you understand inside and out, and ensure that your content really and truly solves the problem and gets your visitor where they want to be. (You don’t want a 59% approval rating do you?)
Now that’s a happy customer
- Use your cornerstone content as an opportunity to display your brand voice. Show people what your values are. Connect on a human level – be real.
- Cornerstone content shouldn’t be too pushy – if your mattress guide just says “buy my mattress, it’s the best” nobody’s going to trust you. Why should they? The goal is to solve a problem in a brand-neutral way. Cornerstone content is top-of-funnel.
You should keep your target audience in mind and work on creating something they would love and want to share.
Optimize your content
Your next step is to make sure your great content is fully optimized to get the most views possible. Your website should be designed in a way that makes it easy to access and navigate on any device, with a focus on mobile optimization.
Your primary keyword should appear in the URL and the title tag. The title tag is also your headline, so it should be especially appealing. If the title of your content accurately reflects the main topic and key points, it will be more likely to appear as a search result.
In addition to using keywords throughout the body of your text, be sure to use them in subheadings as well. The title tags are designed to be short, with the most important words coming first. This makes it easy for readers to see what the content is about at a glance, and for search engines to recognize its relevance.
Promotion
Putting in a lot of effort to create a good piece of content would be wasted if it wasn’t promoted well. You want it to make a splash. Organic search rankings take time, especially for new businesses. To get your content in front of people in the meantime, you’ll need to explore other avenues.
Email promotion
If you’ve got an email list, use it! Notify your email list that you have published new content. Email campaigns like this often have high open and click-through rates.
In addition to promoting your content on social media, you can also reach out to specific people who you think would be interested in it via email. Personalized emails have a higher chance of being read and shared, and if the recipient likes it, they may even link to it on their own website or blog.
Examples of cornerstone content
For clarification, here are a few examples.
Moz is an SEO software company, and their main content piece is a Beginner’s Guide to SEO. This guide covers the basics of what SEO is and how to get started with it. This can also be considered a pillar page. This is a comprehensive guide that can be accessed online or downloaded as a PDF. I often give SEO advice to people who are trying to learn it. Moz puts a lot of effort into keeping their blog up-to-date because it’s a big source of traffic, links, and leads. The company makes it very clear that this is a key feature of their product.
That’s B2B, so what about a B2C example?
Paula’s Choice is a small, but popular, skincare brand that has earned a loyal following – I’ve actually heard people say they belong to the “cult of Paula.” In addition to selling skincare, the site also has an ingredient dictionary that breaks down what all of those strange chemical names in your face wash really mean and whether they are good or bad for you. The company also has a separate website called Beautypedia that posts expert and community reviews of products from other companies. This website breaks down which ingredients are legitimate, which products are overpriced, and which products could be harmful. Genius!
To make sure your visual content is effective, include alt text, use relevant keywords in image file names, and make sure images load quickly. Cornerstone content should be available for free to those at the top of the funnel.
