What Is a Pillar Page? (And Why It Matters For Your SEO Strategy)

 Just when you thought you understood SEO ... search changed. Again.

"Understood" is a strong word. Search engine algorithms change at such a rapid tick, it's hard to keep up with the best strategies to optimize your blog to rank on the first page of SERPs. But this change is a biggie, so hang onto your keywords for this one.

Human search behaviors have changed, and so have the technologies used to interpret and serve up search results. Optimizing blog content to rank for long-tail keywords is no longer the best way to rank in search engine results -- and your blog architecture has something to do with that.

Access Now: 21 SEO Myths to Leave Behind in 2021

In this blog post, we'll walk you through the ways search has changed, the scoop on topic clusters, and how pillar pages fit into the equation.

What Are Topic Clusters?

As we mentioned before: The way people search has changed, and in turn, that's started to change the way SEOs and bloggers create content. Here's a basic primer -- but for more details, read our latest research and blog posts about the evolution of search.

People are submitting longer, more conversational search queries.

Picture yourself before entering a Google search. If you were trying to find a place to eat sushi, would you search for "restaurants," or would you search for "Japanese restaurants near me"?

If you'd go with the second option, you're among the majority: 64% of searches are four words or more, and we're seeing a growing number of these longer-form conversational search queries that help people find the exact information they're looking for.

This is, in part, due to the rise of voice search. Between Siri and Google Assistant, 20% of mobile Google searches are conducted via voice search, and thanks to the rise of Amazon Echo and Google Home devices, this percentage will surely be on the rise.

But voice search isn't the only reason people are submitting longer queries. For one, there's a lot of content out there -- and quality is greatly outweighed by quantity. People are submitting more detailed queries to sort through the junk get the information they need, faster. People are also skimming content more -- often relying on the headers of blog posts or Google's featured information to get simple answers to questions quickly.

Search engines are getting better at sorting through the thousands of pieces of content out there to serve up the best, most accurate results possible, too. More on that next.

Search engines are better at providing exactly what searchers want.

Google's algorithm is constantly evolving to provide the best possible answers to searchers' queries. Some of these changes include penalizing too many irrelevant internal links, interpreting conversational queries as an entire thought instead of individual keywords, and using machine-learning to serve up more accurate interpretations of specific terms.

What all of this means: Google is helping searchers find the most accurate information possible -- even if it isn't exactly what they searched for. For example, if you searched for "running shoes," Google will now also serve you up results for "sneakers." This means that bloggers and SEOs need to get even better at creating and organizing content that addresses any gaps that could prevent a searcher from getting the information they need from your site.

Now, your site needs to be organized according to different main topics, with blog posts about specific, conversational long-tail keywords hyperlinked to one another, to address as many searches as possible about a particular subject. Enter the topic cluster model.

Topic clusters help more pages rank to give searchers better answers.

The way most blogs are currently structured (including our own blogs, until very recently), bloggers and SEOs have worked to create individual blog posts that rank for specific keywords. The result is disorganized, and hard for the user to find the exact information he or she needs. It also results in your own URLs competing against one another in search engine rankings when you produce multiple blog posts about similar topics.