Cornerstone content: what is it and how to use it

There is a lot of talk about content marketing and its effectiveness in promoting a business. However, it can often be difficult to create a content plan, especially if you are starting from scratch. In this case, the best option is to start with the foundations, focusing on the so-called cornerstone content.

What is Cornerstone Content?

Imagine the construction of a building, the cornerstone is the first to be laid and will ideally support the whole structure.

The laying of the cornerstone is a very important moment, and it is no coincidence that in many cultures it is considered a very important ritual.

Cornerstone content is therefore the content that holds your entire content structure in place. It is the first content you need to focus on and must encapsulate the concepts behind your business.

Cornerstone: definition

According to Copyblogger,

A cornerstone is something basic, essential, indispensable and is the fundamental element on top of which something is built or developed. It deals with what people need to know about in order to take advantage of your site and do business with you.

It is very important that it manages to cover the topic as fully and thoroughly as possible. In fact, talking about SEO, we pointed out that the level of depth of the content has a positive effect on search engine rankings.

Therefore, it is best to build a content that is at least around 1,800 to 2,000 words long, benefiting from the highest possible traffic volume.

How to create cornerstone content

Since the cornerstone will capture most of your traffic, it is essential that it be well linked to other content on the blog to make it easier for users to navigate to the information they need.

Usually this other content will be based on insights into more specific topics and therefore based on long tail keywords or body. It is important that the cornerstone has links to these posts and vice versa.

Let’s look at an example. Wordstream, a well-known advertising management platform, in its blog created this cornerstone content (constantly updated): Facebook Ad Benchmarks for YOUR Industry that links to:

• How to Use Facebook Ads to Recruit Top Talent
• All of Facebook’s Ad Targeting Options (in One Epic Infographic)
• Facebook Remarketing

Yoast, a great tool for analyzing your own site content, suggests these 5 steps to build a noteworthy cornerstone:

1. Make a keyword plan: select the main keywords related to your business for which you want to improve your search engine rankings. To find out the search volumes for each keyword you can take advantage of the many free tools online, for example https://searchvolume.io/
2. Select the best content: analyze your blog content and choose the best. In case you are starting from scratch, no problem: you can analyze your competition and select the content that has gotten top engine rankings.
3. Rewrite and improve: starting from what you have chosen you can create a better version. More updated, longer, more graphically appealing, etc. There are many ways you can improve an existing piece of content!
4. Optimize other posts on long-tail keywords: create or optimize content on long-tail keywords, so they can become insights from your cornerstone content.
5. Take care of interconnections: to show Google but especially your users how best to browse content, make sure that the cornerstone has links to long-tail articles and vice versa.

The last step, of course is promotion! Climbing the SERP and getting good SEO rankings may not be immediate, in the meantime you can give visibility to your cornerstone with various channels, for example email marketing, social media marketing or PPC campaigns.

How about you? Have you created your cornerstone content yet?

P.S. Did you know that you can increase the number of leads obtained from your cornerstone through Lead Champion booster? And find out which companies are interested in your content thanks to Lead Champion discover?