Cornerstone content is a crucial aspect of your SEO strategy, as it helps you qualify for your most competitive keywords. In a nutshell, this means creating a handful of comprehensive, excellently written articles and optimizing them for your most important keywords. Then, link to these fantastic articles in other sites and blogs that focus on long-tail keywords. Your internal link structure indicates to search engines that your cornerstone articles are the most complete and important articles on your site, increasing their chances of ranking significantly.
In this blog post, I'm going to tell you a little bit more about cornerstone content. What kind of content should these pages have? What should you write on these pages? And how do you choose your cornerstone content if your site has been around for a while?
What exactly is Cornerstone content?
Cornerstone articles are the most important articles on your website. Their goal is to provide the best and most complete information on a specific topic. They should reflect your business or communicate your mission perfectly. In addition, cornerstone articles should be timeless, by which we mean that they should retain their relevance. It is also crucial to keep your corner pieces error-free and up-to-date.
Above all, you want your cornerstones to rank high in the search engines. Writing important content and a good internal linking strategy will help you achieve this.
Type of content for a Cornerstone item
What kind of text?
As mentioned earlier, the content of a cornerstone should be informative, and in an informative text you explain something to your audience. You want your readers to learn more about a topic, or you want them to use your information (put theory into practice). Writing a good informative text usually requires a little research to determine the exact topic and angle. Your cornerstone article, which is (one of) the most important on your website, definitely deserves some digging! Want to know more? Read my blog post on copywriting goals, where I distinguish three types of copy.
Example
If you own an online store with ballet shoes, you can write an article about the different types of ballet shoes you offer. However, you could also create a page about the importance of good and well-fitting ballet shoes. Maybe you could even write an article about preventing ballet injuries. If you rank on these pages, you can also sell your shoes.
It may seem counterintuitive, but even for a Online Shop should be the cornerstones informative article. I can imagine that it is not always easy to come up with such an article. However, your main content should not focus on persuading people to buy your products.
Rather, it should show your customers the uniqueness of your product. You could write about the function of the products you sell or about something closely related to the products you sell. Cornerstone articles shouldn't be too "salesy," but it's okay to use these pages to send users to your product pages.
Cornerstone content should reflect your business or your company's mission. However, a slightly broader approach that focuses on the field around your business could also be a good strategy to increase your audience and potential buyers.
Post or page?
It doesn't matter if you put your key data in a post or a page, as long as you make sure it's timeless, up-to-date, easy to find on your website, and informative. So a random blog post or page floating around somewhere on your website isn't enough. Give it the attention that a page with important content deserves! And depending on what you choose, we recommend creating a post or page with at least 900 words for cornerstone content. That's because long texts rank better than short ones.
Cornerstone positioning on your website
Your cornerstone articles should be relatively high in your site structure. In most cases, the Homepage link directly to these articles. In addition, make sure your cornerstone content articles contain many internal links from other related blog posts and pages. Search engines consider posts with lots of internal links to be more important. Think of it this way: Big cities have a lot more roads than small towns. These cities are your cornerstones. They should get the most links. The small cities are your posts on more specific topics.
Foundation stone for the content of an existing website
It's relatively easy to stick to the theory if you develop your cornerstone strategy from scratch and think in advance about the structure of your website and the keywords you want your cornerstones to target. If your site has been around for a while and you've never thought about cornerstone content before, how do you decide what your cornerstone articles will look like? And how do you make sure those articles contain the right content?
Well, you probably have a few more articles that will come in handy during the search. And you should be able to think of a few articles on your site that you really want visitors to read to learn more about your site or business. That's a great start! Follow these five steps to turn some of your articles into standout content:
Step 1: Think about your keywords
You need to determine the essential keywords you want to rank for. Make sure that you use the words that your target audience is searching for. Trying to rank for words that no one uses will do you no good. Your Cornerstone articles should be optimized for the most important or competitive keywords you are targeting. However, try to stay realistic when determining these keywords.
Step 2: Choose the best post
Look at the posts or pages that are optimized for keywords that are closest to your most important and competitive keywords. Which of them do you think is the best? That will be your cornerstone from now on!
Step 3: Rewrite it
Rewrite your cornerstone article to make it awesome and SEO friendly. Expand it and make sure it's up to date. This article should contain all the information that is relevant to the topic. Also, make sure that the article is well written. Reading from a screen is challenging, and cornerstones tend to be longer than regular articles. So you should focus even more on readability. Think about the structure of your text, present topics in a logical order, write clear and short paragraphs. The Yoast SEO Cornerstone-Content Analysis helps you write excellent content for your cornerstone articles.
Step 4: Optimize your other posts for long-tail variations
After you've selected and improved your cornerstone articles, it's time to look at blog posts on similar topics to your cornerstone article. These other blog posts should be optimized for long-tail variations of the keyword "head" or key phrase that your cornerstone article focuses on. So if the key phrase of your cornerstone article is "well-fitting ballet shoes", the key phrases of the other blog posts are: "well-fitting ballet shoes for kids", "best fitting cheap ballet shoes", "matching classical ballet shoes" and "well-fitting ballet shoes for men".
Step 5: Linking these tails to the head
One important reason for using a cornerstone content approach is to avoid competing with your own content for a ranking in Google. For this reason, you need to tell Google that your new cornerstone is the most important one on your site. You can do this by linking to your cornerstone article from all long tail articles!
The link counter in Yoast SEO helps you with this! You can easily select your cornerstones in the article overview and see how often they are linked internally. If a cornerstone article has too few links, you should link to it more often from related articles. With Yoast SEO you can see at a glance which of your cornerstones need a little more attention!
Conclusion: Cornerstone (Cornerstone) articles should be the best content!
There you have it: cornerstone content should be high-quality informative content that perfectly reflects your business and / or mission. It can be either a post or a page, as long as it can be easily found on your website. It should be long enough to comprehensively cover a particular topic. If you have already written countless articles for your website, you can follow our steps to a killer cornerstone strategy!