Cornerstone Content

Your cornerstone content refers to the set of pages on your website that you consider to be the most important and they form the foundation of your online presence.

These will be the articles on your website that you want to rank for, and those that you consider to be the best representation of what your business is all about.

The term comes from architecture, where the cornerstone is the first and most important stone from which an entire structure is built. When it comes to the world of SEO, cornerstone pages are the substantial, authoritative pieces from which the rest of your content is organised and points to.

Using Cornerstone Content

Designating your cornerstone content helps you to focus your efforts and your site’s authority where it matters most.

Not every page can or should rank among your most competitive and valuable terms, and trying to spread high levels of effort evenly throughout hundreds of pages is more likely to leave none of them strong enough to compete for rankings.

By identifying a handful of cornerstone pages that target your most important topics, it’s possible to focus your best writing, internal linking, and link-building efforts on them, providing them with the strength needed to rank for terms that matter commercially.

In a structural sense, cornerstone content is closely aligned with the idea of topic clusters and pillar pages. Cornerstone pages generally cover a broad and important topic in a comprehensive way, and a set of more specific supporting articles can zoom in on narrower subtopics while linking back to your cornerstone.

There are two important advantages of this SEO strategy. Firstly, it can help readers to navigate from detail to overview and back, and secondly, it channels internal link equity toward the cornerstone page, signalling to Google that it’s the central authoritative resource on the topic.

As for the supporting pages, they can bring their own ranking rewards by catching long-tail keyword searches while funnelling relevance upward.

Picking the Right Cornerstones

Choosing the best cornerstone pages for your website is a strategic decision rather than a technical one, and will largely boil down to your industry and audience.

They should align with your most valuable commercial goals, and you should target topics with genuine search demand while picking subjects where you can show off your knowledge and authority.

For most websites, cornerstone pages will align with their core services or products, as well as broader informational topics that surround them.

Once you’ve chosen your cornerstones, these should be the pages that you invest heavy amounts of time in. After all, these are the pages that will justify the 10x content level of effort, because they will be responsible for the most important ranking work on your website.

Useful Applications

In everyday SEO, treating content as a cornerstone versus supporting helps you to better prioritise your pages.

When you create a new supporting article, always link it back to your relevant cornerstone. Likewise, whenever you earn a strong backlink, you’ll want it to point to a cornerstone page or at the very least flow towards one through internal links.

Whenever you analyse the performance of your pages, your cornerstones should be the ones you watch most closely. It’s a simple organisational principle, but it can work wonders for unifying your content strategy.