Creating content is crucial to inbound marketing success but to really leverage its full potential requires structure and organisation. If your site is lacking dedicated cornerstone content, you’ll be missing out on the full SEO and lead generation potential of inbound marketing.
So, let’s take a look at what exactly cornerstone content is and how to make yours as effective as it can possibly be.
What is cornerstone content?
Coined in this 2007 article, ‘Cornerstone Content’ is the content your site is built around.
It explains what you do, the advantages and anything else an important visitor to your site would really need to know. It’s presented in the most effective possible way and is fully optimised for its purpose.
Basically, it’s foundational content that you’ll reference time and time again. It’s the first content you’ll want to point potential customers towards.
Why’s it important?
When customers land on your site you’ll need to capture their attention and interest as soon as possible.
Not every prospect is going to take the time to read your blog or learn about your company’s history so it’s important you make it clear to potential customers as soon as possible what you do and how you can help them.
Perhaps most importantly of all though, it’s absolutely critical to good SEO.
See, sites aren’t what get ranked by Google and other search engines, pages are.
You could cram the keyword you’re aiming to rank for onto every page of your site and write daily blog posts about it, this will do nothing in itself to improve your search ranking.
With cornerstone content, you create a page dedicated to the keyword you want to rank for. Then, you focus on making that page rank as highly as possible, not your entire site.
Leveraging the power of links
A cornerstone page is not just another blog post or information page on your website.
It’s the Ferrari of blog posts, the king of information pages.
What goes into your cornerstone pages needs to be so useful, so engaging and so much better than the competition that people will simply have to link to it. Be sure to include pictures, infographics, videos – anything to make your page worth linking to because external links are a key tool for improving your search ranking.
As well as maximising your external links, make sure to link to your cornerstone content from your own site whenever it’s relevant to do so.
This means that as well as doing this for newly created content, include links from existing relevant content.
A handy trick for finding the pages Google currently ranks highly on your site for your desired keyword is to do a ‘site:’ search. So, for example, I might enter:
site:lexisclick.com inbound marketing
to see which pages on the LexisClick website currently rank highest for the phrase ‘inbound marketing’. Then, I can add links from these highly ranked pages to my cornerstone content to boost its prominence.
Final tips
As with any page on your site, be sure to optimise your cornerstone content pages for SEO.
This means getting your focus keywords into the URL, title and main body of your cornerstone page.
While it’s easy to get swept up in the SEO benefits of cornerstone content, don’t forget the human audience it’s intended for.
Your cornerstone content is your shop front. Make sure it covers everything prospects will want to know about your products and services and is useful, relevant and easily found on your website. Then, when your cornerstone content is perfected, don’t forget to tell the world on social media!
Want to learn more about how you can build quality sales leads through inbound marketing, download our free E-book here.
