When creating copy for Google, the content that you want to produce is called cornerstone content. A cornerstone is something that is basic, essential, indispensable, and the chief foundation upon which something is constructed or developed. It’s what people need to know to make use of your website and do business with you.
And when approached in a strategic fashion, this content can rank very well in search engines. The key is creating compelling content that’s worth linking to, and then finding a way to get the word out.
You have to treat your web pages like they are the bricks in the foundation of your business or recruiting agencies. You want them to be strong, stable and reliable. Your website needs to be able to support all the other marketing activities you do on top of it, including social media marketing, email marketing, and search engine optimization (SEO).
It’s also important to understand that people will access your site from all different kinds of devices, at different times of day and under different circumstances. The point is that if you have great cornerstone content—strong foundations—you can build a solid house on top of it.
Search engine optimization can be a big, scary monster to tackle. What’s a cornerstone article? What’s content marketing? How do I make compelling content people want to link to?
All of these things can seem like a lot of work, but if you break it down, you can see how they’re actually pretty simple to understand and implement.
A cornerstone is something that is basic, essential, indispensable, and the chief foundation upon which something is constructed or developed. It’s what people need to know to make use of your website and do business with you.
This could be an article explaining the process you use when creating products or delivering services, or it could be an article about why your company is the best in its industry and why people should do business with you.
What makes this content worthy of ranking well in search engines? Well, for starters, it’s all about quality. You need to create compelling content that’s worth linking to. You also have to find a way to get the word out—not just publish it and hope someone finds it on their own.
A cornerstone article helps demonstrate your expertise in your field and provides information that will help people understand what makes your company special.
Here’s a 5-step strategy that I’ve found useful when developing cornerstone content and getting it to rank well.
1. Keywords
Taking the above information into account, and what we know about keyword research, choose the most appropriate keyword phrase for your content.
In other words, what is the relevant question that searchers ask that your content and business will answer?
Will answering that question aid a visitor to your site in getting the most out of the experience? Are enough people asking that question to make ambitiously answering it worthwhile?
2. Title tags and headline
There’s a lot of debate among SEO practitioners about what works and what doesn’t, but no one disputes the importance of using your targeted keyword phrase in your title tag.
Search engines want to offer relevant results, so the title of your page should prominently reflect the words the searcher uses.
But remember also, the title tag is a headline. You want to speak back to the prospective reader in their own chosen words.
Plus, you want to wrap those words in a compelling headline structure that promises to answer the exact question the searcher asks with the query.
And finally, writing the perfect headline makes it more likely that someone will simply use your title to link back to you. To the extent link anchor text is a component of a particular search algorithm, this can only help.
3. Remarkable cornerstone content
Can a 500-word article rank well for a competitive search term all by itself?
Absolutely, because a lot of what determines how well a page ranks depends on the overall authority and age of the website it appears on. And perhaps for some topics, a short explanation is all that’s really required from a user-gratification standpoint.
But if you have a newer website trying to rank for a competitive search term, you’ll need links from other authoritative sources to make it happen. That means your content must be impressive, both in quality and in scope.
Develop an awesome multi-part tutorial. Write an inspirational manifesto. Answer the question so much better and more comprehensively than the competition does, and chances are better that your effort becomes worth linking to.
4. Content (SEO) landing page
If you’re going to be ambitious in scope with your content, it makes sense to make things easy on the reader from a usability standpoint.
A landing page is designed to instantly communicate what’s going on to the visitor as soon as they arrive, and also acts as a table of contents (via links to each part) that increases clarity.
Here are some of the benefits of the landing page approach:
Retention
Keeping a reader from hitting the back button is crucial to just about every aspect of successful cornerstone content. You can’t score a reader, customer, or link if the benefit of the resource is not quickly communicated.
Links
A visitor might be instantly impressed with your work, and link to you based on the benefits and scope communicated by the landing page itself. The quicker you can impress a potential link source, the easier you’re making it for them to follow through.
Optimization
Tweaking on-page copy can boost your ranking after attracting those links, so a landing page is a key benefit. It’s a lot easier to optimize a landing page than your 5,000-word opus.
5. Related content
You may have noticed that I’ve used the word “website” throughout this post, rather than “blog.” However, I would never try to undertake this strategy without having a blog involved.
Search engines favor websites that have a lot of relevant, frequently updated content.
Active business blogging allows for constant participation in the social media space. It’s a critical way to build general site authority via links, delve into specific and related topics, and reference your cornerstone content.
If you’ve done your job correctly when selecting the focus, it will be perfectly natural to continue to cross-reference link to your cornerstone piece from within future posts as well.
Don’t go overboard, but do provide context when discussing advanced topics that require an understanding of the basics.
Never assume that everyone is aware of your cornerstone resource or understands the basics. Periodically cross-referencing your cornerstone content allows for continued exposure and links, assuming it still meets the needs of the audience.
Craft cornerstone content people want to share
The first goal of cornerstone content is usefulness and relevancy to the website visitor, no matter how they arrive.
The second goal is to make that content so compelling and comprehensive that people are willing — no, make that excited — to link to it.
If you focus on these two goals in a strategic manner, the search engine thing has a good chance of working itself out.
