Are core pages considered "cornerstones"?

[MiriamEllis]

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.

[Roman-Delcarmen]

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)

[MiriamEllis]

Thanks for clarifying, Roman.

[Roman-Delcarmen]

You are Welcome Miriam Ellis

[BrianAlpert78]

Yoast, primarily. But also I'm seeing it mentioned in various blogs and some webinars I've seen.

[BrianAlpert78]

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?"

[BrianAlpert78]

But it is specifically about articles and not basic pages, right?

[MiriamEllis]

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:

1. Frequently linked to internally because they provide the most authoritative answer to a question

2. Way better pages than your competitors have created

3. 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!

[Roman-Delcarmen]

I always love to read your answer, Miriam Ellis

[MiriamEllis]

That's so nice of you to say, Roman. Thank you.