How to Write Cornerstone Content that Will Help Your Site Rank Higher

Cornerstone content is a piece of high quality, “evergreen” (meaning it doesn’t go out of date), informative and entertaining content that can be repurposed time after time in order to:

(1) Provide visitors with unique information they can use on your site or blog;

(2) create more backlinks pointing toward the original resource;

(3) Generate large amounts of highly targeted traffic;

(4) Drive up conversion rates; and

(5) Increase SEO rankings.

It’s also important to note that you can typically sell affiliate products within this type of content – making it an effective way to make money online.

What will writing cornerstone content entail?

Writing each piece of content takes time – most bloggers write about 1500 words per day (it’s roughly equivalent to one side of A4 print). Your articles need to be useful; they also need to be thorough and well-written with clear benefits for the reader. If you don’t have time (or expertise) to produce cornerstones yourself, you can outsource the work to freelancers on sites like Elance or Guru.

How long should each article be?

1,500 – 2,000 words (roughly 4-5 pages in standard font and font size). You can use an online word count tool such as this one to help you estimate the number of words in your articles.

What is a good approach for building cornerstone content?

You need to create something that:

1) Find out what people search for when it comes to finding topics for blog posts, keyword research is one of the most reliable sources. Try different keywords related to your industry, see which trends emerge, and check the search volumes for each of them.

2) Test multiple headlines Sometimes, just changing a couple of words in your headline can lead to a dramatic increase in CTR (click-through rate). I’ve seen posts where headlines with 12 or 13 words got more than double the number of clicks compared to ones with 8.7 and 9.7 words. Crazy, right? That’s what happens when you stop thinking about writing and focus on reader intent instead: based on their queries, people want to find different things and only one title/headline will convey it best. Just think about what they’re looking for!

3) One side of the medal – bad links; another – amazing benefits let’s be frank: if your article does not look like a valuable resource to your visitors, they won’t link to it and share it. Plain and simple. That’s why we need to make sure that:

a) we write something uniquely valuable (if you can’t think of anything, start with answering YOUR questions and those of your co-workers);

b) provide the best solution;

c) explain WHY you’re right;

d) avoid pointing out “best practices” because they will never be truly unique.

4) make them care about every word what do readers (and Google!) look for? VALUE. And how to convey value? With WORDS! If we focus on benefits, we’ll get noticed much easier than if we just put what we know. Nobody cares whether UX Designers prefer the color blue over others; they want to know what benefit it will bring them.

5) Write for readers, not SEO Right now people try to game Google and I strongly believe that this is the #1 reason why cornerstone content works so well. Instead of optimizing our posts for search engines, we need to think about readers first! After they read our article, let’s assume they will share it with their friends on social media (and hopefully link to it as well). In this case, Google will see that your piece of content appeals not only to its crawlers or bots but also to real humans – which means you might get featured in SERPS.

6) Boost with infographics If you want to share your article on social networks, I advise you to consider including some kind of infographic. Even though these visuals are not the most popular type of content on Facebook, they still have a better CTR compared to plain images or texts. Infographics will also boost engagement rates and help your tweets stand out from the crowd. Statistic Brain’s research backs that up:

7) Don’t overdo it! Nobody likes a spammer – whether it is a person or a robot. Believe me when I say that I would never link to something just because somebody left my blog post in their tweet without giving any additional value.

Conclusion

If you’re trying to attract new visitors, cornerstone content helps you develop a powerful marketing asset that is likely to remain visibly on the first few pages of search engine rankings for years. You can use this high-ranking web page or blog post as leverage when promoting affiliate products which makes it an incredibly effective tool in your internet marketing arsenal.