Are core pages considered "cornerstones"?
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To check that I understand the terminology, "cornerstone articles" are posts (or pages) that have some extensive, detailed, important information about a subject that other blog posts and articles can link to in reference, right? For example, a website for an auto repair shop might have a blog post about what cold weather does to a car's transmission and that post could link to a cornerstone "explainer" article that goes into more detail explaining to car-dummies like me what a transmission even DOES.
But are core pages also in this category of cornerstone content? Or are they something entirely different and should be constructed accordingly? By "core pages", I mean the base-level pages about what your business is and does. For the repair shop example, I mean things like an "About Us" page or a "Services" page*.
*or broken up into individual pages listing the services related to brakes, engine, wheels, etc.
Thanks!
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Hey Brian,
Thanks so much for asking about this. Before diving in, may I ask, are you seeing the word "cornerstone content" being used as a metric/descriptor in a particular SEO tool? Like maybe Yoast SEO or something like that? It's not a term I see used frequently, and want to be sure I understand.
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According to Yoast cornerstone content are the most important articles on any website. This is the content that exactly reflects the business or the mission of a website.
Category pages or tag pages could make great cornerstone ‘articles’ as well. If you want to optimize your category pages for cornerstone content, it is of great importance to provide really awesome introductory content. You should make sure that this page is a compelling overview of the subject and invites visitors to read even more content on your site.
For example, on an Italian food blog, there might be an original recipe to make pasta. That recipe could be used in every blog post about pasta. So this original recipe would have the potential to be a cornerstone article. The bloggers should place it on the category page of ‘pasta original’. On top of that, they could add links there to all the blog posts that use the recipe.
Pasta Original > Cornerstone Content > Main Keyword or Topic
Place to buy ingredients > **Long Tail Keyword **
The history of the pasta > **Long Tail Keyword **
Alternatives for the pasta > **Long Tail Keyword **
Healthy ingredients > **Long Tail Keyword **Cornerstone articles should be explainers, they should be informative articles. Even on a webshop, the cornerstone content should be informative articles. Perhaps you can write about the use of the products you sell or their history. Think about all the places you can link this cornerstone content, like in a blog post on new developments and in the actual product description in your shop!
Websites should have a minimum of one or two cornerstone articles and a maximum of eight to ten. If you want to write more than ten cornerstone articles, you should probably start a second website.
Linking structure for cornerstones
Cornerstone articles should appear very high in your site’s pyramid. Ideally, someone would be able to click from your homepage to your cornerstone articles instantly. You should link all your other posts about similar topics to that particular article. Subsequently, you will write tons of new blog posts focussing on new angles of the topic of your cornerstone article. From every single one of those blog posts, you’ll link to your original cornerstone article. Such an internal linking structure will increase the chance of your cornerstone content article ranking in Google.
Taking the Yoast website as an Example their cornerstone content is:
- _Yoast SEO for WordPress, _
- _Online SEO training, _
- SEO blog
All the content in the website link to those articles/pages/content, you can check it by yourself. Let's take the URL (https://yoast.com/academy/courses/) go to your MOZ Open Site Explorer filter the result ok the backlinks (Just Internal Links) and you will see that practically all the site point to that page if compare it with any other random article you will notice the difference, in that way they tell to Google hey this is one of the most important Articles in my website and of course, is about SEO training then Google will compare it with other SEO training websites and decide which will be in first place
IN SUMMARY
Answering your question. Yes category pages can be a cornerstone content (you can consider core pages and cornerstone content as the same thing)
IF THIS ANSWER WERE USEFUL MARK IT AS A GOOD ANSWER
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Hey Roman!
Thank you so much for joining this conversation. For my own clarification, is this your advice, or Yoast's:
Websites should have a minimum of one or two cornerstone articles and a maximum of eight to ten. If you want to write more than ten cornerstone articles, you should probably start a second website.
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It's a Yoast Advice, keep in mind that their main audience are small business websites, and bloggers, affiliates, so their course and content works fine for that audience. I've already ranked a couple of websites using their techniques. But it will not work on biggest websites with hard competition (This is my personal opinion I took 2 of their courses and read it a couple of their ebooks in the past)
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Thanks for clarifying, Roman.
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You are Welcome Miriam Ellis
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Yoast, primarily. But also I'm seeing it mentioned in various blogs and some webinars I've seen.
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Does this mean that a website for a local business can't/shouldn't have more than 10 pages? The thing I'm hung up on (and maybe this is just a semantic thing) is how all these definitions talk about cornerstone content as articles. This makes sense for a website that is already primarily a collection of articles and posts. But for local service businesses, I feel like there's a third level of page that I'm don't know how to classify. I don't mean the category or tag pages. I mean the services page, the service area page, the about us page, the contact information page. Blog posts and articles are very useful and important, but I feel like they are supplemental to the website.
An example of the kind of page I'm unsure if it should be considered a "cornerstone article" (just a random repair shop I found, I have no relation with the company). Would this count toward the "maximum of 8-10 cornerstone articles"? http://www.friedmanautorepair.com/services/brakes/
If you were to remove the cornerstone content from a local business's website, would there still be "a website" left? I don't know, maybe this is a meaningless distinction I'm worrying about between website structure and content marketing. Maybe I'm just dancing around some kind of ontological epiphany about "what IS a website?"
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But it is specifically about articles and not basic pages, right?
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Hey Brian!
Thank you so much for clarifying that you were seeing this as part of a tool's terminology, as well as some references elsewhere. Sometimes, different folks have different names for things. Here at Moz, I think we'd be more inclined to refer to this as "Evergreen Content" or even "10x Content" (see: https://moz.com/blog/how-to-create-10x-content-whiteboard-friday). While I'm not sure I agree with the Yoast quote Roman found about needing to build another website if you have more than 10 superlative pages (if you are a local business, creating multi-sites is generally a BIG no-no), I think the main idea here is that every website should have a set of pages that are:
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Frequently linked to internally because they provide the most authoritative answer to a question
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Way better pages than your competitors have created
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Perennially useful
If this can be used as a a definition of "cornerstone" or "evergreen" content, then I wouldn't limit this to having to be a landing page. It could be a core page (like an about page). It could also be a video or an infographic. It could be a landing page, or it could be a blog post.
I think the key here is not confining this to a specific format of content, but, instead, identifying your best and most useful pages and remembering to internally link to them so that they are easily discovered by consumers. Looking at your analytics, the findings of tools like Moz Pro, and listening to your customers is going to help you identify which pieces of content are your best. And, typically, best is going to equal the content that specifically supports the various stages of the user journey, be that awareness, consideration, decision, or conversion. Conversion is almost always the end goal of content, but each stage has to be supported, and evergreen content can play a role at each stage of the journey.
So, summing up, I wouldn't confine the definition of this type of content to a single format (it could be any type of page or form of media), and I also wouldn't state that you can only have X number of cornerstone pieces on a given website. A small site might only have 3-5 of these, but a larger site could have 20, 30, 100. Identify the most important topics for supporting the consumer journey, and then be sure that your resources are better than your competitors. Finally, be sure you are intelligently linking to these cornerstone pieces internally, so that they are ideally accessible.
Hope this helps, Brian!
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I always love to read your answer, Miriam Ellis
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That's so nice of you to say, Roman. Thank you.
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