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How to Write a Cornerstone Content Piece: A Step-by-step Guide for B2B Companies

how to write b2b cornerstone content for organic marketing
Table of Contents

Learn how to write cornerstone content that gets your B2B company more organic traffic.

You wake up to thousands of articles, blog posts, and infographics published daily in your niche, all competing for the top in the search engine ranking.

Content marketing is a big business, but the competition is even bigger!

But is all the content that you create equal? Or should there be one piece of content that needs to be prioritized over the other?

In digital content, some content may have the potential to provide more value than others. They encapsulate everything you want to convey about your brand and how you can be helpful to your audience.

We’re talking about cornerstone content if you still haven’t guessed it!

Whether creating a new company website or upgrading an existing site, investing in cornerstone content will help you establish a robust foundation to shape your content ecosystem.

In this article, we will learn how you can create, optimize, and promote cornerstone content that will help drive traffic to your website, converting these visits into sales.

What is cornerstone content?

Cornerstone content is your website’s foundational asset, referring to an invaluable piece of content that aims to boost brand awareness and traffic.

Cornerstone content is designed to create brand awareness, develop credibility, build trust, and provide value to your target audience, all of which are essential to boost your SEO efforts.

Cornerstone content has to be informative as well as engaging. It should answer all the common queries about your business and also show how your products or services can be helpful to your clients.

What makes cornerstone content so effective as a digital asset?

Cornerstone content has gained a reputation for being a highly valuable part of any marketing strategy.

Identifying and focussing on your brand’s area of expertise is one of the crucial steps to distinguish your brand in the market, and cornerstone content can be an effective tool to establish that in many ways, such as:

  • It helps build traffic and brand awareness by creating a positive impression for website visitors, intending to convert these visits into sales.
  • It allows companies to communicate important information to potential customers.
  • It helps your business by getting your content on the front page for the most competitive keywords.
  • It can effectively assist your business in acquiring the coveted top spot of Google’s SERPs.
  • It enables you to build natural links from different pages on your website, your social media channels, and external sources if your content is of value and substance.

How can cornerstone content work for your business?

There are several benefits of creating cornerstone content for your B2B company, but lets take a look at some of our absolute favourite reasons to invest in it:

1. Use it to drive traffic back to your site

One of the most critical advantages of cornerstone content is that it appeals to new visitors who want to review all the information you offer.

Hence, it’s vital to ensure that this kind of content is prominent and available on your homepage or any other key landing pages to attract the desired search engine results.

Creating additional pages, e.g., a “FAQ” page linking back to specific posts with relevant information, will further help drive traffic to your site.

2. Use it as content for your blog

If your site’s cornerstone content is fruitful, you can also use it for guest posts! If the content comprises all the essential information relevant and valuable to your readers, then you can repurpose it as a guest post on another site.

Doing this may even get some backlinks in the process and is an excellent way of improving your brand’s SEO.

3. Use it to boost your SEO

Cornerstone content is a crucial piece of today’s digital marketing puzzle. We are all well aware of the importance of high-quality, informative content, and subject matter expertise is required in Google’s algorithms. Any content considered a “cornerstone” can perform exceptionally well with Google and continue appearing on the first page of search results for associated search terms.

So, now that we know about cornerstone content, its benefits, and how to use it for your site, let’s see how you can create amazing cornerstone content.

Your readers have landed on your website for one simple reason; they want to learn and gather more information about a topic that interests them. But if your readers are not hooked to your content, they’ll check out right after the first paragraph.

Despite having great content ideas for your cornerstone blog, you lose your audience if you lack finesse in putting together a content piece that your readers would want to read until the end.

Writing an excellent cornerstone content piece is no mean feat.

They are a crucial part of a brand’s content marketing strategy, which can elevate your content marketing game to a whole new level when done right.

7 ways to create great cornerstone content that can be informative and engaging for your target audience

While there is no one way of writing a cornerstone content piece, we do recommend following these seven steps/ ways based on our experience in B2B SaaS content marketing:

1. Do an In-depth Research

Knowing your customers and understanding their buyer persona is critical to marketing. You’ll have a better idea of what to write about if you know who your target audience is.

Content is the most significant for purchasing decisions in today’s diverse marketing system, So if you’re creating content, you must make it valuable!

Your cornerstone content needs to be accurate, valuable, and relevant. The ideal way to do that is to communicate with your audience by talking to existing customers, carrying out surveys, and analyzing the data.

Find out what people are searching for online. If you aim to jump up the SERP rankings, the content you provide must be better than what’s already out there.

Look for the keywords that people use when they search on Google. This will help you choose suitable keywords and phrases for your content, ensuring they match the most searched ones.

It’s highly essential to be confident when writing on a topic, as people tend to believe the information they find on websites they trust. Hence, if you’re writing about an unfamiliar subject, make sure you use credible sites and be transparent in using outside sources. Back up your content with appropriate sources or statistics for your audience to verify what you say.

2. Plan your content

Cornerstone content is typically like an in-depth article. You could consider writing a how-to guide with step-by-step instructions or a video tutorial, which should be helpful for your audience.

However, it doesn’t matter how technical your topic is; the writing must be in-depth and engaging to draw in readers. Your cornerstone content should cover so much detail that your reader doesn’t have to go elsewhere scouting for information on that particular topic.

Your content needs to be tailor-made to be linked back to various sources. Whenever there is a search for that subject, your page should be relevant, no matter how authoritative the sources are.

You can also repurpose some of your previous content into another format or channel. A skillful writer can transform existing content into something fresh and exciting, even if it covers the same subject.

However, your ultimate goal should be to make your prospects take action, whether it’s subscribing to your newsletter, filling out a form, downloading your guide, arranging a call, or purchasing a product.

Content production takes time, effort, and resources, so you must decide whether to keep it in-house or outsource the work. If you don’t have time to research, write, edit, design images, and publish your article, you can always hire a content marketer to write a compelling piece of content, optimize it for search engines, and upload it.

3. Write your cornerstone masterpiece

Your cornerstone content must be well-written and well-planned to ensure your reader is interested, informed, and inspired. It must be relevant and helpful, so much so that your reader should want to learn more about you.

Keywords should be built in naturally; take care to avoid keyword stuffing. Your brand reputation is at stake; hence, maintaining accuracy is crucial. Including links from other expert sources will help your audience and search engine rankings, as reliable websites tend to rank highly.

Your content should deliver on what the headline or introduction promises; e.g., an article titled “What exactly is AI-Chatbot?” should be able to explain the terminology and provide in-depth information with relevant examples.

Visual appeal is equally important for content, so don’t forget to include attractive graphics and images to keep the reader engaged. Ideally, you must make the entire content so engaging and impressive that readers want to share it forward or link to it in their own content.

4. Optimize your content for the search engines

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Cornerstone content is made to attract new leads to your site. Once you’ve created excellent cornerstone content, you must ensure it is optimized for maximum hits. Here are a few ways to optimize your cornerstone content:

  • Your website should be accessible and easy to navigate on any device, specifically mobile optimization.
  • Your content must be shareable on social media channels like Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn.
  • Your images should have alt text explaining them so the user can understand what they’re looking at.
  • Segment your blog post into H1, H2, H3, and H4 tags using bullet and numbered points, bold, and italics. Include a content list so users can jump to that point.
  • Determine whether your cornerstone content article’s text title and meta-description are optimized for success with keywords in both.
  • Your primary keyword must appear in the URL and the title tag, as it helps if the title answers the exact question being asked.
  • The top-of-funnel position means cornerstone content should always be available for free.

5. Promote your content

Once you’ve created an outstanding cornerstone content article, you must promote it. Innovative promotional strategies help your content reach a much wider audience.

If you have an email database, use this to inform people about the new cornerstone content. Consider giving them an extra incentive, such as a special offer on products and services, to encourage them to visit your page. This increases the chances of people sharing it with their colleagues and business circle.

Schedule social media posts or email shots with the help of marketing automation tools, as this will save time and nurture leads. Meanwhile, don’t forget that personalization is always appreciated, making the recipient likely to share or link to your content.

Organic social promotion may be ideal for your budget, but investing in a paid promotion will help you reach a more targeted audience. Use data analytics to assess who’s responding and modify your strategy accordingly.

6. Links and Sharing

Directing your page visitors to personalized post-click landing pages is another great way to generate leads. This doesn’t mean that suggestions keep popping up when they’re reading your content; instead, you can post an exit banner with some special offer once they’ve finished reading it.

If your audience lands elsewhere on your site, the best way to direct them to your cornerstone content is to provide plenty of internal links making it accessible to click straight through to new material.

Include backlinks and cross-references in other similar posts to increase exposure to your cornerstone content which can boost your rankings. Internal linking is vital to your SEO strategy, as Google favors a robust internal linking structure.

7. Monitor and manage your content

Content creation and marketing is an ongoing journey. Once an article is published, give it a few days to see how it performs. Be prepared to add new ideas or tweak the headers.

Refresh your content regularly, and when you make the changes, don’t forget to update the published date, as many readers won’t prefer reading a blog written 2-3 years ago.

Cornerstone content must be updated frequently to include new trends and the latest statistics. Also, keep a tab on the availability of products and the accuracy of the prices.

Ensure the website works smoothly, with no broken links or slow-loading images. Revamp the look of the pages from time to time as fonts and layouts begin to look outdated after a while.

Finally, as we all know, search engines love websites whose content is relevant and fresh. So monitor your content’s performance and enhance it whenever necessary. Regular updates inform Google that your content is up-to-date, which helps your SERPs position.

Wrapping it Up

Cornerstone content is an essential aspect of any SEO strategy, and if you want your site to rank high on the SERPs, you must create great posts for it!

Now that you know what cornerstone content is and how to create it, go on and create your own lead-generating cornerstone masterpiece.

Creating quality content takes time and practice, but with the above tips, you can ace writing engaging cornerstone content that’s going to bring high-value leads straight to you.

Need help strategizing and writing your cornerstone content?

Reach out to me here.

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