What is ‘Cornerstone Content’? And is it relevant for me?
The word cornerstone is defined as “an important quality or feature on which a particular thing depends or is based”. This is key to understanding what cornerstone content for your website means.
Basically cornerstone content is the essential information that a prospect needs to know in order to place value on your business and its offering. To decide what this cornerstone content could be for your business you need put yourself in your prospects shoes and consider:
- How can you help a prospect meet their needs? and;
- What information could you provide to best do this?
One great way to do this is to think about the most popular questions you get asked weekly in your business by people you meet, or potential clients ringing for an initial quote or chat.
When considering it for our business at Bizboost (we are primarily a website design and development business). We often get asked questions like:
- Once my website is built will I be able to manage my own content?
- What is hosting?
Questions like this could make the perfect topics for us to turn into cornerstone content.
Once you have figured out the topic – then you need to write your cornerstone content and add it your website, here are a few tips:
1) Place your cornerstone content on a page of your website that is easy to find. So either in the main navigation menu or in a prominent quick link at the top of your sidebar. And make sure it is on a page rather than in your blog – this will ensure it can easily be found (and you can still link to it where relevant in all your blog articles).
2) Make sure your cornerstone content focuses around solving one key question and then optimise your website page for that specific keyword or phrase.
3) Make sure your content is written as “evergreen” content – this means ensuring the style and references used in the article won’t date. This allows you to leave this page on your website for a very long time which will give it a great chance to bed down and do well in search results.
4) Make the article at least 300 words long and include images or if possible other multimedia such as a video or audio.
5) Make sure you have prominent social share buttons on your cornerstone content pages – why? Because these pages have your key messages and provide useful information to your prospects so they are often the articles that get shared heavily. Also as you plan to keep it active on your site for a long period, then these pages have the potential for the share numbers to really add up with can add credit to your website.
6) Cornerstone content pages are also the ideal place for a small sign up to your enews form to help you build your marketing list.
So what are you waiting for – start brainstorming ideas for your cornerstone content. And finally ‘Is this relevant for me?’ the answer is simple – if you have a website for your business then YES.
