In this episode, veteran content marketing expert Ryan Brock shares his extensive experience and knowledge of pillar-based content, giving viewers a comprehensive understanding of how to implement pillar-based marketing effectively.
Pillar marketing isn’t just about organizing content; It is a strategic approach that can significantly increase a website’s SEO performance, improve user experience, and generate more targeted traffic.
By focusing on creating comprehensive, authoritative pillar pages linked to related content clusters, companies can establish themselves as thought leaders in their industry.
Brock emphasizes the importance of understanding your audience, creating high-quality relevant content, and strategically connecting this network of content to create a cohesive, informative experience for users.
Brock explains in detail not only the theory behind pillar pages and topic clusters, but also the actionable approaches that can lead to growth and success. He delves into the nuances and advanced tactics that can take a content marketing strategy from good to great.
Check out the video for more details and the full podcast (link below the video) for the entire insightful conversation.
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Episode details, guest information and referenced links
Episode #63
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Transcript: Unleashing the Power of Pillar-Based Marketing, with Ryan Brock
Hello to all my Marketing Smarts Live viewers today. I am very excited to bring you another episode of the Marketing Smarts Live show.
This week’s theme is all about unleashing the power of pillar-based marketing.
So if you’re ready to start learning, buckle up and get ready to rock and roll.
Hey, I’m your boy George B. Thomas, speaker, trainer, catalyst and host of this show, the Marketing Smarts Live Show as well as the Marketing Smarts Podcast found on your favorite podcast app.
Our guest clips today are brought to you by none other than Ryan Brock.
Ryan Brock is the founder of content agency Metonymy Media, which was acquired by DemandJump. With 12 years of experience delivering measurable content results for companies across all industries, Ryan is a seasoned SEO expert.
Now, as Chief Solution Officer at DemandJump, Ryan works with businesses around the world to take the guesswork out of SEO and drive industry-leading organic traffic results through pillar-based marketing methods.
Ryan is co-author of Pillar-Based Marketing: A Data-Driven Methodology for SEO and Content That Actually Works.
Remember, Ryan Brock’s clips today are from the full Marketing Smarts podcast episode. If you would like to listen to the full interview with Ryan Brock and I, be sure to tune in to the Marketing Smarts podcast. Link to the full broadcast will be included in the description below after the live show ends.
In this episode I speak again with Ryan Brock about unleashing the power of pillar-based marketing.
What is this 16-part strategy that you talk about in your book?
Ryan: The reason we talk about a 16-part strategy is because we tested it. To create that network effect where Google sees it and it’s like two Spider-Men pointing at each other, meme where Google is like you see the same thing we do when it comes to this , how people want to know about it, that’s cool, you need 16 pieces networked together to get that effect.
That’s just the minimum. There are a few pillars we’ve created that span 130 pieces of content over time. Many clients we work with who use pillar-based marketing use our technology to make this happen, writing on average between 16 and 35 pieces of content for a pillar. It just varies depending on how large the network is. Sometimes you analyze a network and get back 3,000 terms, but a large portion of them could be garbage. A lot of this could be things you don’t care about and don’t want to cover. A lot of it might be really good, but there are only 200 terms in your network, so you have to really put in the effort and do the whole thing. It just depends.
One of the ways this works, and I’m going to speak from a slightly proprietary standpoint, because we need to regularly meaningfully address the question you just asked. What we’ve done at DemandJump to facilitate this strategy is we’ve created what we call a DJ score, which is essentially a score from 0 to 100 that we measure… I’ve talked about these sub-pillars before and how they are connected across many different journeys and many different terms may lead you back to the sub-terms you are targeting. We analyze each term that appears on the network and give it a score from 0 to 100 indicating how connected it is to other terms on the network.
The higher the score, the more robust it is when it comes to the paths people take to find out about it. The lower the score, the less important it is. When I implement the pillar-based marketing strategy, it’s actually quite easy for me to look at my dashboard in DemandJump and see that this is the priority order of most connected to least connected and whether I want to start with 16 pieces of content , boom, that’s my sub-pillar here, the three or four terms that are directly associated with it on the network and represent the highest DJ score… At this point, honestly, it kind of builds itself.
You just keep going until you feel like you’re driving the traffic you want, that you’re outdoing your competitors in a way that you’re comfortable with, and that you’ve covered all the seemingly relevant terms makes sense to you. But there is a way to analyze search terms yourself and quantify whether they are worthwhile or not.
Type the answer to that in the chat section or let me know on Twitter using the hashtag #mpb2b and of course tag me @georgebthomas.
We’ll get back to Ryan Brock and his thoughts on “unleashing the power of pillar-based marketing,” but first I have to ask…
Are you part of the MarketingProfs community? If not, become part of the MarketingProfs community by going to mprofs.com/mptoday – that’s mprofs.com/mptoday.
Now it’s time for one of my favorite sections…
In B2B News we talk about current B2B news or really important tips that we find in the Google News tab about you and your B2B company. This week the title is…
Pillar-Based Marketing – What it is and what benefits it offers
To stay ahead of the fast-changing world of digital marketing, it’s important to keep up with the trends. A cutting-edge tactic that has become increasingly popular lately is pillar marketing. This strategy has changed the way companies create and distribute their content, resulting in higher levels of engagement, better search engine visibility, and overall marketing success.
Want to understand Pillar Based Marketing (PBM) strategy?
To read this article, click the link below when the live show is over.
So let’s get back to Ryan Brock and his “Marketing Smarts” podcast episode.
How do we get started with this methodology and who might have problems implementing it?
Ryan: The smarter your company is about SEO, the harder it will be to adopt this methodology. I’ve found that when I work with career SEOs who have the ability to add value and demonstrate value, what we ask of people contradicts a lot of what you’ve learned about SEO. We don’t care about keyword density. We don’t care about cannibalization.
This is one thing we get all the time. When someone sees the strategy we develop on a topic, it is clear that we cover the same information in a few blog posts. We do this because the data tells us we need to, and because it’s a good user experience to not assume that your audience has read every blog post on your site because no one does. “But you will exploit this term, you are close enough.” For us, it is more about expanding and strengthening the network.
This is just one example of many, and there are many where we say forget it. Search volume doesn’t matter. I don’t think about the estimated search volume at all. I don’t think about competition. I’m not thinking about domain authority. I don’t build links.
That’s another thing we could probably do a whole episode around. We have never built a single link. We have never worked to build links to this content that leads to such success.
We’ll get back to Ryan Brock in a few minutes, but first it’s time for something…
Dope B2B learnings from the Vault of MarketingProfs articles
That’s right, it’s time to dig into the treasure trove of valuable information and pull out two golden nuggets that will help you become a better B2B marketer.
This week’s first article is: How to Improve Your Content Marketing with a Topic Cluster Plan by Amy Bock
Before we delve deeper into why a topic cluster plan is a must for any content marketing strategy, let’s start with some recent SEO statistics that illustrate the crucial role of organic search.
Organic search accounts for more than 50% of all website traffic. Paid search only brings in 10% and social accounts come in at 5%.
The first five search engine results receive almost 68% of all clicks.
Google dominates the search engine market share, controlling almost 87%.
Since organic search is the primary driver of web traffic on B2B and B2C websites, SEO should be a core strategy in your content marketing efforts. And since Google controls almost 90% of the market share, the primary SEO focus should be on Google.
So what can you do to ensure you’re capitalizing on over 3.5 billion searches every day and not giving away revenue to the competition?
Article two this week is: Generate high-quality traffic that turns into leads and sales
Skyscrapers, pillar pages… they’re all the same thing. “Creating cornerstone content on your website… has a special name because it’s kind of impossible to do that with everything you publish,” he says. “Choose your battles.”
And most of these battles should include an SEO traffic suite, Google’s “People Also Ask” feature, and tools like Answer the Public.
Would you like to continue learning? If so, check out the links in the description below after the live show to get access to both great MarketingProfs articles.
Okay, back to Ryan Brock… Let’s dive back into this conversation about unleashing the power of pillar-based marketing
How long does it take to achieve success and what does success look like?
Ryan: I would say you should start seeing rankings on page one no later than two weeks after publishing your content. This is something I haven’t really addressed yet. I think I agree that we might want to come back and debrief because I like this conversation. We don’t do the scheduling, we don’t do the calendar creation. We don’t publish a blog post per week. We prefer to write 16 pieces of content that together form a network and then publish them together as a network.
When I talk about a payback period of two, three, four weeks, I’m talking about it because we store the content as a network and not as individual pieces. This is very important because we want this network to be analyzed by Google and explored by our readers. After all, it is much easier to consider a network of content around a topic as authoritative than a single page on a more focused topic. It’s much harder to measure. When all of these sites are part of a network together, it works.
This is all just a little background to say that you’ve dropped that initial pillar, you’ve done everything right, your site looks good, you’re indexing quickly, getting crawled, and then within a few weeks at most you start getting rankings on page one see. There may be some volatility in your ranking data over time, especially the search experience currently looks different from user to user. Google is going crazy, everyone is crazy about all the changes and everything that is happening with AI.
But you should see it real quick. I have dozens of charts of PBM practitioners who publish content and then go from fourth place compared to their competitors in terms of overall rankings to first within a few months.
If you’ve published content, you’ve done everything the way we teach you, and you haven’t seen results in three months, then there’s something very wrong. Unlike traditional SEO where you can expect results with this at the earliest.
We’ll hear some words of wisdom from Ryan Brock here in a few minutes, but now it’s time to shine the spotlight on you, the MarketingProfs community. Yes, time for…
From the #MPB2B community
We’ve searched far and wide in the #MPB2B universe to find amazing information and conversations to bring to the masses.
So firstly, make sure you use the hashtag and secondly, make sure you are having fun and adding value to the community.
We will then put you or your crew in the spotlight on the show. This week it is…
Vahe Habeshian
Director of Publications at MarketingProfs
One in three people do not understand company or industry jargon. So skip the jargon and clarify your emails with simple, direct language:
? synergy
? Work well together
? Make hay
? Take advantage of the opportunity
? Bandwidth
? time or resources
Longer? Unfortunately yes.
Clearer? Absolutely – which is especially important if you have colleagues or customers around the world.
https://zurl.co/HymM
#mpb2b #b2b #infographic #emailmarketing
But you have to look at the description and click the link to view the post and read or learn more!
Marketing Smarts viewers, I have to ask: will you be next in the spotlight?
Remember, community, use the hashtag #mpb2b on Facebook, LinkedIn or Twitter and let your awesomeness be spotlighted on the next or future episode of the Marketing Smarts Live show!
Pro tip: It wouldn’t hurt if you tag me in your post too: I’m @georgebthomas on LinkedIn and Twitter.
Okay, let’s go back to Ryan Brock and say some wise words on this topic “Unleashing the Power of Pillar-Based Marketing.”
Here’s what Ryan Brock wanted to leave us with…
Ryan: Passion makes the whole thing work. It sounds so thin, but it’s so true. When you work for an organization or yourself represent an idea, solution or concept that makes people’s lives easier, that changes the way people work, that’s an exciting thing. Even if it’s small, even if it’s this little thing that you do and you’re not saving the world but changing a person’s life or a character’s life, that’s so cool to me. When you do SEO and marketing right, that passion is the fuel that drives the whole thing forward.
What we have heard from search engines, and what is still the case despite the continued proliferation of AI, is that humanity matters. It really does. If you’re trying to game the system, if you just want to drive traffic and you don’t care how you get it, then you don’t deserve to be at the top of the search engine rankings, you don’t deserve to be an authority apply. But if you’re really passionate about something and you’re willing to not only listen to what other people are saying about a topic, but also listen to what people care about first, and then you’ll know what to tap into to really advance your goal Story that you have a passion for your home.
I think pillar-based marketing is simply the best representation in the world of what this looks like in practice in marketing.
Did you enjoy today’s trip? Let us know and use the hashtag #mpb2b on the platform you join us on.