Manage Pillar Strategy & Content Recommendations

How do I add topics to my Pillar Strategy?

After August 2023’s Architect Release, finding and adding search terms to your Pillar Strategy is more intuitive than before. This article will help explain how to add topics to your Pillar Strategy and also provide advice on how to compare the recommendations that you will see in the newly renovated Content Recommendations dashboard.

Adding search terms to your Pillar Strategy

Let’s get the easy part out of the way first. You’ll do the work of selecting topics to add to your Pillar Strategy on the Content Recommendations dashboard, an upgrade to what used to be called the Pillar Strategy dashboard.

There, you’ll find some tools to help you visualize your available topics sitting above a data table containing all of your clustered Sub-Pillar Page and Supporting Blog topics. When you find a topic to add to your Pillar Strategy, it is as simple as clicking on the topic and then selecting “Add to Strategy”. 

Click a topic to add it to your Pillar Strategy

If you add a Sub-Pillar to your strategy, we will automatically add the connected Supporting Blogs to the Pillar Strategy as well—any Supporting Blog topic that appears on the list beside the same Sub-Pillar Page recommendation. However, if you add a Supporting Blog, we will only add that single topic. To rearrange these topics, head to the Manage Pillar Strategy page and use the Move functionality.

Comparing topics on the Content Recommendations dashboard

Before you get the satisfaction of adding topics to your Pillar Strategy and building out your roadmap, you will need to identify the topic(s) to add. To do this, there is a data table available to view each search term’s priority, your domain’s rank, and your best competitor’s rank. This will help identify the topics that are important to your pillar network and how you compare to your defined competitors.

Example of a Sub-Pillar cluster

Don’t forget to add Supporting Blogs under your Pillar topic

In a Pillar-Based Marketing strategy, not all blogs fall directly under a Sub-Pillar. We also need to find Supporting Blog topics that help strengthen the topical authority of the Pillar Page directly. 

Add blogs directly under the Pillar Page

At the bottom of this dashboard, we have a view that specifically identifies priority topics for these blog posts. In this case, we provide all of the same information that you would use to identify Sub-Pillar topics, including Priority. 

If you’re starting a new Pillar Strategy, we recommend adding at least three Supporting Blogs to your strategy, then on the Manage Pillar Strategy dashboard, using the Move function to organize those Supporting Blogs directly under your Pillar Page.