How to get your cornerstone content to rank

Your cornerstone articles are the most important posts on your website, no question. These are the articles that you really want to rank for in Google and they are the pieces that will bring in the most traffic when they do rank. That being said, they are often the hardest ones to rank. That’s because they typically targeted the largest volume (and therefore the most competitive) search terms. So what’s needed to get them to rank?

In this post, we’ll dive into what you need to know and what you need to do to get your cornerstone content to rank in Google.

Start by creating awesome content

You can only rank with cornerstone content if you are creating the best, most valuable content that you can. It needs to be outstanding in every way possible. It has to have a killer headline, it needs to be long and informative, it needs to have great images and it needs to provide exceptional value to your audience. It also should probably have a great calll to action or at least a link to a sales page given how much traffic it is going to get.

Then optimize it for the right keyword

When it comes to choosing keywords for your cornerstone content you’re going to want to choose the most searched for terms that you can. These will tend to be the most competitive terms as well. Just make sure that you aren’t overstretching yourself and trying to rank for keywords that you’ll never be able to rank for.

Next, build internal links

Building internal links is the next thing that you need to do in order for your cornerstone content to rank. You might not think it’s that important, but creating a great site structure will be crucial if your cornerstone content is to rank effectively. That’s because Google uses internal links as one way to tell which pages are the most important. So your cornerstone articles need to have more internal links than any other page. Go through all of your existing articles and make sure to link back to your cornerstone content at every relevant opportunity.

Finally, promote your cornerstone content

You should now have an incredibly high-quality piece of content that is well written, well optimized and linked to all over your site. The final step is to get other websites to link to it. This will be easier than it would otherwise be because you should have created an exceptional piece of content that everyone is happy to link back to. That’s not to say your outreach won’t get rejected by some people. It almost certainly will. But just a dozen or so links can be enough to get your content ranking. And once it’s ranking links will start to flow in organically. This is the most important part of the entire process, so don’t skimp on the effort here. Give content promotion the attention and effort that it deserves.