Right now, I'm obsessed with organization.
Around this time every year, I realize that I have too much junk around the house and I start watching that Marie Kondo Netflix show again. Then, I get even more crap during the holiday season...I guess that's why "spring cleaning" is a thing.
However, while my personal life gets cluttered, so do my websites.
So for 2024...it's back to basics. I got to clean it all up. What "sparks joy" on my websites? And what needs to go in the trash?
I'm not going to completely reconstruct my websites, but I am going to reorganize them and make sure I'm using "pillar pages" again.
Constructing websites are no different than constructing a house. It requires a solid foundation (meaning a good domain and quality content). And also much like a house, you need some pillars to hold it upright.
Pillar pages are the bones of your website on which everything else is constructed. Depending on your niche or vertical, you'll have 1-4 pages that you'll build most of your content around.
Let me give an example. Saying you're starting a website all about cold plunges (a popular trend in fitness right now). Your pillar pages would be something like:
Or you could just go with a single pillar page:
(I'm not an expert but this sounds like it would be the right way to go here)
Now, with my pillar page(s) in place, I can begin to construct the rest of my blog posts and content around these. Everything on the website is under the umbrella of one of these pillar pages. This is good for the organization of the website. Users and search engines will be able to understand and process your site better.
You can get more specific deep down in the posts, but the pillar pages are intended to be general and accessible. Ideally, most of your traffic will be going to these pages, so you want to make it easy for your users to understand what your website is about.
If you're a small business, your pillar pages maybe will be for the services you really want to promote. If you're a lawyer, you'll showcase the areas of expertise you have, for example. If you're a marketing agency, you'll pick what you're really good at.
The next question is what a pillar page should look like. Again, we want these to be accessible, which means you'll want them to be catchy. Big and clear headings will help your users easily jump around to what they are looking for.
You'll also definitely want to include images. While having a lot of quality text is good, visuals will help everyone understand better what you're selling. If you are really creative, you can include a video so that users can not even read at all! That's all the rage these days...video content is reigning supreme.
But if you're like me, you'll want to write it all out for everyone. Do not be afraid to brain dump on this page. You'll want to be editing the pillar pages constantly, so don't be afraid to have too much in the beginning. Over time, you'll test and perfect the pillar pages, but in the beginning just have them be a lot of specific and relevant content.
Oh yeah...and be sure to include some calls to action on these pillar pages too. You have to try at least to convert some of these people! You never know what might come from your pillar pages, so definitely throw some non-intrusive CTAs on there.
Get to working on your pillar pages and I can guarantee you'll start to see more traction to your target keywords in 2024!