Pillar Pages & More: How Site Structure Can Help or Hurt SEO Effectiveness

As you build out the content on your website, it's easy to think that the success of your campaign rests entirely on the quality of what you post. Optimizing for keywords, nailing down the perfect meta block, and offering value to your readers—aren't these ingredients the "secret sauce" for SEO success? They are, but other factors at play could keep individual blogs and big pillar pages alike from ranking well—your website hierarchy. 

Yes, even how you design your website and structure your content can impact how you rank. This effect stems from both the nature of how search engines work and the level of patience users have when visiting a new page. Let's look at why that is and consider how content mapping can help you create a sensible structure. 

Why Does Your Website Hierarchy Matter? 

Without a sensible hierarchy on your site, finding the information a user wants becomes difficult. In some cases, you might even have orphaned pages—articles or other content that doesn't link to anything and has no links coming to it. Other pages might be buried so far down a chain of navigation links that most users won't encounter them. These issues create problems on both sides of the equation. 

A poor hierarchy means search engines like Google can't index your site effectively. Web robots have a "crawl budget," several pages they'll try to index over a particular period. If your hierarchy is overly complex and disconnected, pages you've invested time and effort into perfecting might never appear in search engine results. Likewise, users at various funnel stages may not be able to find relevant content—so they'll go elsewhere. 

Web Content Mapping: A Powerful Tool in the Right Hands 

Content mapping is just what it sounds like: creating a road map of all your content and how it connects. There's much more to this process, but at its most basic, it's about defining a flow of information that naturally corresponds to how users at different stages engage with content. Few people arrive on your site ready to act immediately—they need to learn more, research, consider, and then decide. 

Content mapping helps you create a hierarchy that makes it easier for bots to crawl and humans to navigate. It also lets you guide a user's buying journey—and as a bonus, mapping out your content can make it apparent where your content has gaps where you could better serve users. 

Drilling Down: From Topic Clusters to Pillar Pages 

So how do you overhaul your hierarchy effectively? Speaking with SEO and content writing professionals can help, as can using external tools to analyze your existing structure, content, and ranking. If you're just starting out, though, you'll need to think about content across the entire funnel—and the best way to do that is by building pillar pages and populating them with clusters of related topics. 

Each pillar can link to many individual blogs, and some can even link horizontally to other pillars—creating an interconnected web of knowledge that's more intuitive to users and more effective at funneling users to your desired actions. In one survey, nearly half of marketers (44%) said they have between 1 and 5 pillar pages. Another 24% said they maintain 6 to 10, while 20% more say they run 11 to 20 pillar pages. That leaves much room for expansion and growth depending on how many topic clusters relate to your business. 

By starting with one related group of subjects and breaking them down into digestible sub-topics, you create a web of content that crawlers transit with ease. Meanwhile, each page has a role to play in strategy. Remember, though, it's possible to go wrong here, too—you can over-complicate pillars and their child pages, confusing users with redundant information. 

Plan for Success from the Start 

When the average time a user spends on a web page is about 54 seconds across the industry, it's clear you need to work hard to keep a reader's attention. Improving your hierarchy can pay off in that regard. When finding content is simpler, it's more sensible to stay on pages for longer. When it doesn't look like you can quickly find what you need, you'll go somewhere else. 

Some businesses report that they average multiple minutes on pages such as blogs, and pillar pages can drive even more engagement. This is a good sign of robust content that's providing relevant information to your users—and it's what you should hope to see. Take a step back, look at how you've arranged your content, and explore options for improvement.