What Is Cornerstone Content? Tips For Creating Better Ones

Cornerstone content is one of the most important elements of your SEO studies. It consists of the most reliable, comprehensive, and high-quality content to get the most interaction; that is, they consist of the best articles and pages that you want to be indexed by search engines. However, cornerstone content precedes its reputation not just for its content but for its structure. It is a kind of the guide-central point of your site through well-placed columns, clusters that facilitate in-site and on-page navigation for readers to keep the user experience at the highest level.

Cornerstone Content and SEO

Cornerstone content is one of the lifebloods of your SEO strategy because it forms the core of your website. Metaphorically, it is the world tree in Norse mythology that is life-giving to your website. Thanks to its quality, it helps you get in the top positions in search engines through a higher user experience. 

When determining the content of cornerstone, you should focus on delivering the best and most complete information about the topic to the user rather than selling the service you offer. However, while doing this, you should choose a topic that is relevant to you and reflects the atmosphere of your website. Otherwise, as Screpy experts, we must say that it can do more harm than good to your site, like any SEO study done wrong.

See More: Content Marketing Metrics

To summarize, cornerstone contents form one of the main columns of your SEO from 2 aspects:

  • It increases the user experience thanks to the comprehensive, detailed, and complete information it provides. While high user experience will also generate organic traffic, it will result in high SEO rankings as it will be appreciated by search engines.
  • Cornerstone content fulfills many SEO requirements at once, as it contains the most relevant content about the atmosphere of your website, involves many interlinking, and contains relevant keywords. Thus, your page, which is perceived as “quality” by search engines, will rank higher.
Cornerstone Content

Things to Consider While Creating Cornerstone Content

Before jumping into tips about cornerstone content, there is something we want to talk about. We want to elaborate on things you should consider while preparing such content.

  1. Cornerstone content is usually long-tailed and informative articles.

These contents are articles that cover everything important about the topic chosen and bring together the necessary information about it.

  • Cornerstone topics are the most sought-after content by your target audience.

To fulfill such requirements and meet your audience’s needs, your article must be complete, authoritative, and reflect the spirit of your website.

  • Articles should include keywords used by your target audience.

While preparing cornerstone content, you should carefully determine the keywords that will make you stand out from your competitors.

  • You need to keep the articles up to date.

Cornerstone content should be very well written and reliable. Considering this, not revising the article when there is a significant update in the content of your article in terms of information will cause misleading/incompleteness. This, however, will reduce the user experience and negatively affect your SEO ranking.

  • Interlinking has an important place.

By interlinking pages on similar topics that your website has, you can inform Google which pages are most important. For this, you should build the right internal link structure so that you can guide Google.

Tips To Create Better Cornerstone Content

When determining your SEO strategy, you can’t ignore cornerstone content because it plays a game-changer role in the competitive internet industry. Therefore, as Screpy experts, we will talk about tips that can help you with this.

Topics With High-Volume Search Rate

It would not be wrong to say that cornerstone content is centered around what people want to be informed and so search about. Considering this, you should empathize with and understand your target audience so that you can identify what is searched most. However, you are not done by only discovering what people desire. You should also place the cornerstone content in a core, like a tree’s main body, from where relevant-topic branches grow to support the main core. 

Keyword Analysis

After selecting high-volume topics, the next step to take is keyword research. People indicate what they want and expect through keywords, so you need to determine which ones can be used for signs that will guide your target audience to reach your website.

Keyword Analysis - cornerstone content

By examining search engines, find out which words people search for the most. In this way, you can choose the keywords that will direct people to you and use them in your article.

However, there is one factor that we should warn about—the keywords/s need to be related to the title or your title to the keyword.

Fortify Your Cornerstone Content With Supportive Contents

While preparing your cornerstone content, you need to determine/ revise, or create other backup contents to support the main core. Therefore, you create an opportunity for your users to read the sub-topics you mentioned in the content of your article in detail on another page, and you also support the main article with additional resources.

If you have already had supportive content;

You can revise the article using the keywords by reviewing the supporting content on similar topics, or you can re-optimize the article by updating it.

You can bond the link of your cornerstone article with the relevant articles via interlink to effectively use the supporting articles mentioned above. This will also increase user experience and positively influence your website’s SEO.

Remember that keyword usage 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 while indexing, such as interlinking, to ensure that your page is displayed in the top positions among SERP.

HOWEVER,

As Screpy experts, there is an issue that we feel compelled to warn about. You should not over-internal-link. It is wise to give an ear to the 100 links per page rule specified by Google. Otherwise, your cornerstone content strategy may not result in an effective success.

Embrace an Evergreen Style

The more your cornerstone content adopts an evergreen approach, the more likely it is to be successful. Imagine timeless, core content that always responds to users under all conditions. On top of that, apart from providing general information on a specific topic, this content also offers the opportunity in a detailed and comprehensive style that evergreen content often lacks.

To learn more about what evergreen content is, go to the related link.

Add Calls to Action

You 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 strengthen 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 Conten

Cornerstone content requires more effort than other content types. You fall on it, take your time, build the necessary inter-links, and do resource research to give detailed information. You create content just like an artist produces his work. For this very reason, you must ensure that everyone sees this wonderful work that you have produced. To do this, you should promote your content, which will help you achieve quicker success after it’s published.

Promote Your Content cornerstone content

Here below, we will provide some tips to promote cornerstone content.

  • You should share the very fresh cornerstone content on different social media platforms. It could come in many shapes, a video post on Instagram, a text message on LinkedIn or Facebook, a brief tweet on Twitter, or even a picture on Pinterest. You should inform people what you have just created!
  • You can e-mail people through a user-based e-mail list. Announce what you have shared recently and let your click-through rate increase.
  • Like social media platforms, you can benefit from social media communication websites such as Reddit, Medium, etc. These platforms also hold a great number of users.

Cornerstone Content Optimization

Remember, cornerstone content should be SEO-perfect. Therefore, as Screpy experts, we tell you in this section how you can optimize your cornerstone content for SEO. You can find the items below:

See more about Content Optimization

  • Cornerstone content must include sufficient internal links. In this way, your article can function as a tree body that branches out to other contents on your website. However, at this point, you should not output links to any unnecessary/ unrelated article. Instead, you should establish an internal link network, including pages related to your cornerstone content.
  • Your cornerstone content is no different than your most valuable possession. For this reason, you need to focus most on it while creating. Your content should be readable smoothly, contain relevant and chosen-by-target-audience keywords.
  • Your cornerstone content needs to include keywords you’ll use to compete. To stand out from the competition through keywords, you need to perform comprehensive and detailed keyword research, as we have mentioned many times above.
  • Long-tail keyword variants should be optimized to cover all the content you link to.
  • You should also link to the cornerstone content from the articles that you link to via internal-linking keywords. Thus, you can specify which of the pages search engines should index.

Now, we will answer frequently asked questions about cornerstone content.

FAQ

What Is A Cornerstone Content?

Cornerstone content is SEO-perfect articles that should be on every website, reflect the atmosphere and mission of your website, and enable you to build a bridge between you and your audience.

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 serve comprehensive and quality content that will increase SEO ranking through competitive keywords and customer satisfaction.

Where Should I Start To Write A Cornerstone Content?

You should begin with discovering keywords that are used most. And, you should understand what your target audience wants to be informed through their queries based on these keywords.

How Can I Promote My Cornerstone Content?

You can use social media platforms such as Instagram, Youtube, Pinterest, Facebook, Linkedin, or you can e-mail people. If you want to go further, you can create posts on communication-based websites like Medium and Reddit to have a wider interaction.

Can My Cornerstone Content Includes Same Keywords Which Have Been Already Used Before On My Different Pages?

For most, this is not recommended. However, the answer to this question may vary depending on which industry you are from and which words are the most competitive. The wisest thing to do is to choose the most used keywords for your target audience.

Conclusion: Cornerstone Content

It can be easily said that cornerstone content is the essence of websites. They are the most important, reliable, and highest quality content that every website owner wishes for their cornerstone content to be listed at the top of SEO rankings. These contents, however, do not mainly focus on selling or promoting services. Instead, they are prepared to provide rich information about a specific topic most searched by the target audience. With cornerstone content, which takes longer than other content types, you should use the most competitive keywords that effectively make your website stand out and thus get high visitor traffic.

Cornerstone content is SEO-perfect, comprehensive content that reflects the essence of a website’s soul.

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