You may have heard the term “cornerstone content” floating around content marketing strategy discussions. If you guessed the importance based on the name, you’d be right! Cornerstone content should be an integral part of the digital marketing strategy that supports your wellness website. 

Your website’s content is targeted at different segments of your audience. Different articles and videos cater to their unique needs and interests. But cornerstone content is for everyone. Ideally, every one of your leads will read or watch this content. These pieces communicate what you’re all about and why prospective clients should choose your wellness practice. Cornerstone content plays a vital role in messaging and improving your website’s ranking.

What is Cornerstone Content?

Some content on your website might have a relatively short shelf life. This sounds like a problem, but isn’t necessarily bad. A successful content marketing strategy requires regularly posting new content on your website. And content that’s new, timely, and relevant to your audience today may not be as timely or relevant six months or two years from now.

Frequent turnover and a steady stream of fresh content lead to your site being crawled and indexed more often. This in turn boosts your SEO. So regularly posting new content not only engages your audience, but also supports your technical SEO strategy. Content turnover also helps you stay up to date with industry developments and gives your audience a good reason to return to your site.

Cornerstone content, on the other hand, is built for the long haul.  Cornerstone content for your wellness practice should be evergreen. The topics you write about should be fresh and relevant no matter when a user consumes the information.¹ 

Why is Cornerstone Content Important for Your Wellness Website?

Cornerstone content is at the heart of communicating your wellness practice’s message to prospective clients. Since this content is usually what visitors see first, cornerstone pieces are your chance to make a great first impression. But cornerstone content’s true power is the positive impact on your SEO strategy. Here’s how to use cornerstone articles boost your website’s SEO:

• Make these articles the most compelling content on your site so other reputable sites backlink to you.
• Create an internal linking structure with your cornerstone articles at the center so visitors and search engines can find them easily. 
• Choose your keywords for cornerstone content strategically and use the ones you’re most eager to rank for.

1. Linking Matters

Cornerstone content does the heavy lifting of informing your audience about your wellness practice. Since these pages maintain their relevance over time, they’re also more likely to be linked to by other sites. When your cornerstone articles collect backlinks, search engines view your content as trustworthy and of interest, boosting your entire site’s authority and SERP rankings.

Internal linking is just as important. As search engines crawl your site, they’ll identify your site’s structure. If you have a cluster of pages all pointing toward a central cornerstone article, crawlers know the content found there is what your website is all about. An easy-to-understand site structure makes ranking higher for your keywords more likely.²

2. Using the Right Keywords

Although we tend to talk about your website’s ranking as a whole, in reality, different pages on your wellness practice’s website have different rankings.³ Since the keywords in your cornerstone articles are the most powerful in terms of ranking, choosing the right keywords is more important than ever. 

Start by focusing on the keywords most central to your wellness practice, as opposed to those related to more niche aspects of your brand. Choose keywords you can realistically compete for. Don’t direct the power of your cornerstone content to ultra-competitive keywords. This is typically a waste of time when you could be investing in keywords you have a good chance of taking the top spot for.

This requires a bit of a balancing act and, like the other aspects of creating powerful cornerstone content, can be tricky to master.  A wellness marketing agency can help guide you through the process of creating cornerstone content that attracts and converts your ideal prospective clients. 

To learn more about creating a winning wellness content marketing strategy and our full suite of wellness digital marketing services, contact us at 888.307.7304 to schedule a discovery call.

 

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