It consists of the most authoritative, comprehensive, and high-quality content for maximum interaction; that is, they consist of the best articles and pages that you want to be indexed by search engines.
However, foundational content precedes your reputation not just by its content but by its structure. It is a kind of guide-central point of your website through well-placed columns, and clusters that facilitate in-site and on-page navigation for readers to keep the user experience at the highest level.
Core Content and SEO
Cornerstone Content is one of the lifeblood of your SEO strategy because it forms the core of your website. Metaphorically, it’s the world tree in Norse mythology that brings your website to life. Thanks to its quality, it helps you to reach the top positions in search engines through a better user experience.
When determining Cornerstone Content, you should focus on providing the best and most complete information on the topic to the user, rather than selling the service you offer. However, when doing so, you should choose a topic that is relevant to you and reflects the atmosphere of your website.
To summarize, fundamental content forms one of the main pillars of your SEO based on 2 aspects:
It enhances the user experience thanks to the comprehensive, detailed, and complete information it provides. While high user experience will also drive organic traffic, it will result in high SEO rankings as it will be appreciated by search engines.
Cornerstone content meets many SEO requirements at once as it contains the most relevant content about your website atmosphere, involves many interlinks, and contains relevant keywords. Thus, your page, which is perceived as “quality” by search engines, will rank higher.
Things to Consider When Creating Cornerstone Content
Before we jump into the tips on core content, there’s something we want to talk about. We want to break down the things you should consider when preparing this content.
The main content is usually informational and long-tail articles.
These contents are articles that cover everything important about the chosen topic and gather the necessary information about it.
Key topics are the content most sought after by your target audience.
To meet these requirements and meet your audience’s needs, your article must be complete, credible, and reflect the spirit of your site.
Articles must include keywords used by your target audience.
When preparing key content, you must carefully determine the keywords that will make you stand out from your competitors.
You need to keep the articles up to date.
With that in mind, not revising the article when there is a significant update to your article’s content in terms of information will lead to deception/incompleteness.
Interconnection has an important place.
By linking pages on similar topics to your site, you can tell Google which pages are most important. For this, you must build the right internal linking structure so that you can target Google.
Tips for creating better Cornerstone Content
When determining your SEO strategy, you cannot ignore critical content as it plays a decisive role in the competitive internet industry. So, as SEO experts, let’s talk about tips that can help you with that.
Topics with a high volume search rate
It wouldn’t be wrong to say that foundational content is centered around what people want to be informed about and therefore want to research. Considering this, you must empathize and understand your target audience so that you can identify what is searched for the most.
However, you don’t end up just finding out what people want. You should also place the keystone content in a core, such as the main body of a tree, from which branches of relevant topics grow to support the main core.
keyword analysis
People indicate what they want and expect through keywords, so you need to determine which ones can be used for signals that will guide your target audience to your site.
When looking at search engines, find out which words people search for the most. That way, you can pick the keywords that will drive people to you and use them in your article.
However, there is one thing to be aware of: the keywords need to be related to the title or your title to the keyword.
Power your Cornerstone content with supporting content
When preparing your core content need to determine/revise or create other backup content to support the core. Therefore, you create an opportunity for your users to read the subtopics you mentioned in your article content in detail on another page, and you also support the main article with additional resources.
If you already had supporting content;
You can revise the article using the keywords by reviewing supporting content on similar topics, or you can re-optimize the article by updating it.
Interlink Cornerstone Content and Supporting Content
You can link your main article with the relevant articles via interlink to effectively use the support articles mentioned above. This will also enhance the user experience and positively influence your website’s SEO.
Remember that using keywords alone will not bring you success as there is already serious competition on the specific keywords. Therefore, you should use a method that search engines love when indexing, such as interlinking, to ensure that your page appears in the top positions among SERPs.
As SEO experts, there’s one issue we feel compelled to raise awareness about. You must not over-internal-link. It is advisable to heed the 100 links per page rule specified by Google. Otherwise, your foundational content strategy may not result in effective success.
Adopt an evergreen style
The more your foundational content takes an evergreen approach, the more likely it is to be successful. Imagine timeless core content that always responds to users in all conditions. Also, in addition to providing general information about a specific topic, this content also gives you the opportunity in a detailed and comprehensive style that ever-current content often lacks.
Add calls-to-action
You’ve selected the keywords, prepared the necessary supporting content, and completed the internal link-building process. Your Cornerstone content is almost ready. From now on, adding Calls to Action (CTA) to your article is a logical move to empower it and keep the reader engaged. You can improve the user experience with call-to-action examples that lead to other relevant content, such as “You can read this, don’t miss this”.
Promote your Cornerstone content
Core content requires more effort than other types of content. You fall into it, take your time, build the necessary interlinks, and do resource searches to provide detailed information.
You create content just like an artist produces their work.
To do this, you must promote your content, which will help you achieve success faster after publication.
Below, we’ll provide some tips for promoting key content.
- You must share every new fundamental content on different social media platforms. It can come in many forms, a video post on Instagram, a text message on LinkedIn or Facebook, a brief tweet on Twitter, or even a photo on Pinterest. You must let people know what you just created!
- You can email people through a user-based mailing list. Announce what you’ve shared recently and let your click-through rate soar.
- Like social media platforms, you can benefit from social media communication sites such as Reddit, Medium, etc. These platforms also have a large number of users.
Key content optimization
Remember, the core content must be perfect for SEO. So, as SEO experts, we tell you in this section how you can optimize your critical content for SEO. You can find the items below:
- Cornerstone content should include sufficient internal links. That way, your article can function as a tree body that branches out to other content on your site. However, at this point, you must not submit links to any unnecessary/unrelated articles. Instead, you should establish a network of internal links, including pages related to your main content.
- Your core content is no different than your most valuable asset. For this reason, you need to focus more on it during creation. Your content should be readable without any problems, contain relevant keywords, and be chosen by the target audience.
- Your core content needs to include keywords that you’ll use to compete. To stand out from the competition through keywords, you need to conduct comprehensive and detailed keyword research, as we have already mentioned several times above.
- Long tail keyword variants should be optimized to cover all the content you link to.
- You must also link to the main content of the articles you link to via internal linking keywords. So you can specify which of the pages search engines should index.
Now, we’ll answer frequently asked questions about foundational content.
Cornerstone FAQ
What are the benefits of well-prepared cornerstone content?
Thanks to Cornerstone content, you have efficient and healthy internal link building, attract new readers to your website and offer comprehensive and quality content that will increase SEO ranking through competitive keywords and customer satisfaction.
Where should I start writing cornerstone content?
You should start by discovering the most used keywords. And you must understand what your target audience wants to be told through their queries based on those keywords.
How can I promote my main content?
You can use social media platforms like Instagram, Youtube, Pinterest, Facebook, and Linkedin or email people. If you want to go further, you can create posts on communication-based sites like Medium and Reddit for broader interaction.
Can my cornerstone content include the same keywords that have been used before on my different pages?
For most, this is not recommended. However, the answer to that question may vary depending on what industry you’re in and which words are the most competitive.
Conclusion on Cornerstone Content
It can easily be said that fundamental content is the essence of websites. They are the most important, reliable, and high-quality content every website owner wants their foundational content to be listed at the top of the SEO rankings. Such content, however, is not primarily focused on selling or promoting services.
Instead, they are prepared to provide rich information on a specific topic most searched for by the target audience. With core content, which takes more time than other types of content, you should use the most competitive keywords that effectively make your website stand out and thus get high visitor traffic.
Cornerstone content is comprehensive, SEO-friendly content that reflects the soul essence of a website.
