Using Pillar Pages to Make Old Content More Accessible
Having a solid blogging strategy in place is important, but that doesn’t mean more content is necessarily better. Simply having a lot of content on your website isn’t the best strategy if it’s hard for visitors to find. In fact, if you have a lot of posts that don’t get any views at all, it can actually negatively affect your overall SEO strategy.
But if you have a lot of good, useful content that’s just buried deep in your blog, the time you spent writing it wasn’t wasted. You just need to spend some time reworking it to make it more accessible. It’s possible that you have a library of great content that visitors don’t know exists because they can only find it by going page by page through your blog posts.
One of the most effective ways to surface that content, organize it around a broader topic, and make it more visible to both visitors and search engines is by building a pillar page.
What Is a Pillar Page?
A pillar page is a long-form piece of content that broadly covers a main topic while offering a breakdown of supporting content with links to access each piece. The supporting content then links back to the pillar page, creating a connected structure that’s easy for both visitors and search engines to navigate.
A pillar page is made up of three components:
- Pillar Content: The main topic page that provides a high-level overview of the broader subject.
- Cluster Content: The supporting blog posts that each cover a specific subtopic in more depth.
- Internal Links: The links that connect your cluster content to the pillar page and the pillar page back to each cluster post.
For example, a pillar page called “Everything You Need to Know About Selling a Home” would serve as the central hub. The supporting content would be all of the blog posts written about related subtopics, like pricing, staging, choosing an agent, the closing process, and what to expect at each stage. The internal links would connect everything together so that a visitor reading any one of those posts can easily find the others.
★ Want to learn more about topic clusters and internal linking? Have a look at these posts:
- Why You Should Establish a Topic Cluster Strategy
- Using Internal Linking to Get More Visibility and Leads
- Switching Your SEO Strategy from Keyword Matching to Topic Ownership to Get Better Leads
Why Pillar Pages Work
There are two main reasons to build a pillar page, and both of them strengthen your overall digital strategy.
The first is SEO. Pillar pages are one of the most effective internal linking structures you can build. When search engines crawl your website and find a pillar page with multiple cluster posts all linking to each other, they interpret that as a strong signal that your website has deep, comprehensive coverage of that topic. That structure helps search engines understand the hierarchy of your content and improves rankings across the entire cluster, not just on the pillar page itself.
The second is user experience. A well-built pillar page makes it easy for visitors to find related content without having to search for it. Instead of discovering one blog post and leaving, they can use the pillar page as a starting point to explore every angle of a topic they care about. That keeps them on your site longer, increases engagement, and creates more opportunities for them to learn about you and eventually reach out.
Pillar pages turn a collection of disconnected blog posts into an organized, interconnected resource that’s more useful to your visitors, more visible to search engines, and more likely to be cited by AI platforms.
Pillar Pages and AI Visibility
Pillar pages also play a role in how AI platforms evaluate and cite your content. When an AI platform is looking for a comprehensive answer to a question, a well-structured pillar page with multiple supporting posts covering the topic from different angles gives the platform a much stronger signal that your website is an authoritative resource on that subject.
For example, if someone asks an AI platform a detailed question about selling a home, and your website has a pillar page that connects to posts about every stage of the process, the AI platform has a clear, structured body of content to draw from. That depth and organization is what gets your content cited and recommended over a competitor’s single, surface-level post on the same topic.
Start With a Content Audit
Before building a pillar page, the best place to start is by auditing your existing content to understand what you have, what’s performing, and what’s not.
Look at which posts get the most traffic, which get the least, and which are still relevant to your target audience. If you have content that doesn’t get any views but is still useful and relevant, a pillar page might be exactly what it needs to get in front of more people. If you have content that’s no longer relevant at all, it may be worth removing it.
For example, a lot of agents have years’ worth of monthly market report posts on their websites. Market reports from several years ago probably aren’t getting any traffic and aren’t useful to anyone anymore. Removing that type of content as part of a content audit helps keep your website clean, relevant, and focused on the content that actually serves your strategy.
★ Want to learn more about content audits and content strategy? Have a look at these posts:
- How and Why to Audit Your Real Estate Website’s Content
- Creating an Evergreen Real Estate Content Strategy
- The Benefits of Building a Long-Form Real Estate Content Strategy
Make Your Content Library Work Harder
If you’ve been writing content for years, there’s a good chance you already have the building blocks for several strong pillar pages. The content exists; it just needs to be organized, connected, and surfaced in a way that makes it easy for visitors, search engines, and AI platforms to find and navigate.
Building pillar pages takes effort, but it’s one of the most impactful things you can do to get more value out of the content you’ve already invested in, while strengthening your SEO strategy, your internal linking structure, and your overall authority at the same time.
Want to improve your content strategy? Download our Content Strategy Guide for Real Estate Agents. It has practical methods on how to plan, implement, market, and audit a successful real estate content strategy that will deliver results as part of your overall inbound marketing strategy.
