Cornerstone Content

What is a Cornerstone Content?

Cornerstone content increases your chances of ranking and attracting organic traffic from search results pages. This is possible because cornerstone content usually ranks for keywords with high search volumes. They also typically rank for hundreds of keywords, which increases their chances of attracting traffic.

Cornerstone content establishes your site as an authority on a topic or niche, making it likely that other sites would link back to you. Such content also links to multiple pages on your site, which improves your internal linking structure and allows you to spread link equity and PageRank to your other pages.

Additionally, cornerstone content enhances user experience by offering a clear starting point for visitors to explore a topic. It also helps organize your site’s internal link structure, making it easier for visitors and search engine crawlers to navigate and understand your content hierarchy.

Overall, cornerstone content improves your SEO, builds trust and authority, improves your brand awareness, keeps your visitors engaged, causes them to spend more time on your site, increases their chances of converting or engaging with your content, and reduces bounce rates. It also increases the chances of visitors returning to your site.

Cornerstone Content Best Practices

Sites that rank on search results pages typically have multiple cornerstone content. This makes the cornerstone content necessary for bloggers who want to improve their SEO. However, to maximize their impact, follow the best practices listed below. 

1 Focus on Evergreen Topics

Choose evergreen topics over seasonal content. Evergreen content remains valuable and will continue to attract traffic and engage visitors all year round. On the other hand, seasonal and trendy topics are only relevant at specific times of the year or may even be relevant at one point before becoming irrelevant.

2 Ensure It is Detailed and High-Quality

Cornerstone content must be detailed, well-researched, and offer value to your audience. Aim to answer all possible questions your visitor would have about the topic. For example, a “Yoga for Beginners” guide should cover the benefits of yoga, its poses, equipment, and tips for getting started.

3 Optimize It for Your Focus Keyword

Include your primary and secondary keywords in the content title, H1 tag, SEO title, headings,  meta descriptions, alt text, and body text. However, ensure to include the keywords naturally, otherwise, it would be considered keyword stuffing, which could cause search engines to penalize your site.

4 Use Clear and Engaging Headings and Subheadings

It is pretty common for cornerstone content to exceed 2000 words. So, make sure to break the content using descriptive headings and subheadings to make it easy to read and navigate. These headings and subheadings should also contain your primary and secondary keywords.

5 Include Internal Links to Related Content

Cornerstone content usually contains multiple internal links that help visitors to discover additional information and resources on specific parts of the content. These internal links also improve your SEO by spreading link equity and PageRank across your site.

6 Regularly Update Your Cornerstone Content

Periodically review and update your cornerstone content to ensure it stays accurate and up-to-date. This is especially important for topics that evolve over time. For example, tech, health, and political topics. It also signals to search engines that your content is fresh, relevant, and constantly maintained.

7 Include Visually Appealing Media

Long blocks of text can quickly become tiring to read. So, break them up using visuals like videos, images, and infographics. Ensure the visuals are relevant to the page’s content, as they are more impactful than irrelevant images. The images should illustrate key points and provide additional details to the textual content.

8 Include a Call-to-Action (CTA)

Your cornerstone content attracts a lot of traffic. You should capture some of this traffic for further marketing. So, include a clear call to action to guide users on the next steps. This could be to subscribe to a newsletter, download a resource, or explore related content.