Cornerstone content, otherwise known as evergreen content, is the heart of your website. It consists of the best, most important articles on your site. These pages or posts are the ones you want to rank highest in on search engines.
Cornerstone articles are typically longer, informative articles. They also combine insights from different blog posts and go in-depth to cover everything relevant about a particular topic. Like the name “evergreen content” suggests, these posts are made to thrive on your website for years.
When creating cornerstone content, it’s crucial to realize it’s not designed to sell your product or services. Instead, they exist to show your authority and trustworthiness in your field. Still, these articles should reflect your business goals and identity throughout.
It’s also important to know what your audience is looking for. Keyword research plays a huge role in producing effective cornerstone content. You’ll want to create content based on topics that people are consistently online searching for.
Cornerstone content can be either a page on your website or a blog post. Either way, you should ensure they’re well written, continually updated, and designed to rank for your most competitive keywords.
How Cornerstone Content Helps Your SEO Strategy
One way that evergreen posts help you out is by allowing you the opportunity for internal linking. Since these posts are typically longer and delve deeply into one particular topic, it should allow you to naturally link to other pages and posts on your site. Again, this shows Google and other search engines the organization of your content.
Building internal links like this is a fabulous way to prove your business as an authority in your industry, which helps build trust with your customers. It also helps keep people on your website, providing lower bounce rates and higher sales conversion opportunities.
As you create future posts, it’s important to keep linking back to your cornerstone content. This continues to show Google that this is, in fact, the most important information on your website. So whenever you write a post that relates to your cornerstone article, simply link back to it to reap the benefits.
What Articles Are Cornerstones?
It would be best if you were very careful when choosing your cornerstone articles. You should select no more than 4-5 key articles that you want people to read above all else when they come to your website. Which articles are most important for your brand? Do those articles target the keywords you want to rank for most? Which ones are the most thorough and authoritative?
The bigger the website, the more cornerstone articles you will have and vice versa. If you’re writing about multiple topics you want to rank for online, choose one cornerstone piece per topic.
How to Write Cornerstone Content
First, you need to make sure these articles are thorough, well researched, and professional as well as well written. Some companies find these articles so important that they hire them out to companies to get the perfect copy. Therefore, balancing keywords, word count, and external and internal links are critical.
Second, make sure that you write them for your audience and not just search engines. You want the people who land on a cornerstone article to actually read it, and hopefully, click into other pages of your website because of it. So don’t go keyword stuffing or linking to pages that aren’t relevant or substantial enough.
With that said, it is still very important to optimize these posts for SEO. Use a strong title, create great alt tags, make sure you have a powerful meta description, include images or charts, and use headings. All of these will help you in the long run. So, if you need help, here’s an article for writing your best blogs yet!
If you’re struggling to develop content ideas for your cornerstone content, there’s an easy solution. The easiest way to find ideas is to narrow down the top three to five keywords for which you’d like your site to rank.
One great tool for discovering what your customers/readers are looking for is Google Search Console. Simply click the “performance” button on your home page and scroll down to “queries.” This shows you the top searches your website is already ranking for. The best part is, this tool is 100% free!
Maintenance is Key
You may think that simply writing cornerstone content is all you need to do. But, unfortunately, if you just write a post and leave it there, it will eventually get outdated. Regular maintenance on your post will keep it relevant and refreshed, so it continues to do its job and grow momentum for your business.
You must regularly come back to make sure there are no broken links, that your information is current, and that you link to any new pages you’ve written that are relevant. Those simple steps will make sure your evergreen content stays that way.
We hope that this breakdown of what cornerstone content is, how to write it, and how it stays effective helps your business. Following these steps is a proven way to build your SEO and help grow your website.