Cornerstone Content Strategy: Worthwhile or a Waste of Time?

No matter what business you're in, your marketing goals likely include increasing brand authority and awareness, boosting organic traffic, and generating leads. Cornerstone content is one of the most effective ways to accomplish all of the above. 

But, to benefit from it, you first have to know what cornerstone content is and how to create it. In this post, we'll talk about exactly that.

The definition: what cornerstone content is

Cornerstone content is the foundation of your company's content marketing strategy; the most in-depth, authoritative pieces of content you've created around your main areas of focus. 

It can be anything from educational articles that provide value and build trust with potential customers to FAQ pages. In any case, they provide comprehensive coverage of an essential, foundational topic related to your business and relevant to your target audience. And they are showcased more prominently on your website and in your digital marketing than other pieces you produce.

Your cornerstone pieces are the main attraction and other smaller pieces complement them by discussing further the various sub topics covered in those cornerstones. 

Let’s get into the benefits of approaching content this way.

Elements of a strong cornerstone piece

When creating excellent cornerstone content, there are several key elements to consider:

1. Comprehensive Coverage: Ensure that your cornerstone piece covers a foundational topic related to your business in-depth, providing valuable insights to your target audience.
2. High Value: Deliver content that is educational, informative, and engaging, offering real value to your readers or potential customers. Providing high value is a key tenet of crafting cornerstone content that garners social media shares, high reader engagement and guides users through the marketing funnel.
3. Trust Building: Use your cornerstone content to build credibility and trust with your audience by showcasing your expertise in the field.
4. Prominent Placement: Feature your cornerstone pieces prominently on your website and in your digital marketing efforts to attract more attention and engagement. It’s best to include links to your cornerstone content in main navigation menus, like your header or footer.
5. Supporting Content: Complement your cornerstone content with smaller pieces that delve deeper into specific subtopics covered in the main cornerstone, creating a cohesive topical map. One strategy for internal linking is to build up a small library of relevant content first and then creating a comprehensive cornerstone piece that links out to each of your smaller works.
6. Showcasing Expertise: Demonstrate your knowledge and authority in the industry through well-researched and well-presented cornerstone content.
7. On-Page SEO: Cornerstone content is powerful for on-page SEO because of how thorough it is, opening up many opportunities for internal linking. It can also serve as a good place to insert important images like infographics, graphs and charts. Original images like these often serve as link bait, resulting in dozens of natural backlinks.
8. Evergreen Content: Aim to create cornerstone content that remains relevant and valuable over time, driving consistent traffic and engagement.

By incorporating these elements into your cornerstone content strategy, you can create a strong foundation for your content marketing efforts and effectively engage your target audience.

The benefits of cornerstone content, especially for SEO

Cornerstone content has a lot of advantages. The first and most obvious is that it helps to establish your authority on a specific topic. It increases trust among your target users who are seeking information, which can lead to repeat visits to your website and higher conversion rates.

In addition, cornerstone pages often rank well in search results because they’re typically:

• Long-form and in-depth
• Linkworthy and shareworthy
• Linked to all of your other important content, which helps search engines recognize its topical relevance

If it does rank high on the first page of a relevant SERP, it can significantly boost brand awareness and the number of relevant visitors that land on your website. This, in turn, can make it easier to generate qualified leads consistently.

Great cornerstone content could be just the thing your content marketing strategy needs to start producing better and longer-lasting results. Instead of decent results from surface-level content that can easily be outranked or that you have to drive traffic to manually, it allows you to bring in and nurture qualified traffic on autopilot!

Cornerstone content typically focuses on more difficult keywords that come with high search volumes. By having lots of supporting blogs with internal links, you can more easily tackle these high volume keywords, bringing in new organic search traffic to your website that actually converts.

Outstanding examples of cornerstone content done right

Want to see proof that cornerstone content strategy works? Backlinko has a great example in its SEO Trends in 2024 and How to Adapt, which is featured on the website homepage. What makes it so successful? 

This impressive piece of content:

• Is truly definitive, coming in at nearly 8,000 words and thoroughly covering 9 topics from Core Web Vitals to clickthrough rates
• Earning more than 24,000 shares on Facebook and Twitter alone and more than 39,000 backlinks
• Getting Backlinko (likely thousands) of signups to its email list since this article is gated on the website home page

While your content may not rack up tens of thousands of shares and backlinks as this piece has, you can still enjoy a significant increase in brand awareness, traffic, email list signups, and so on. 

Love him or not, Neil Patel also has a good example of cornerstone content with his post What is SEO? Your Complete Step-By-Step Guide. Although covering the same topic as Backlinko’s guide, this nearly 10,000-word post has racked up more than: 

• 27,000 backlinks
• 2,700 shares on Facebook alone
• 1,400 comments 

And thanks to its internal linking structure, it likely also drives thousands of visitors to Neil’s other SEO-related posts each month. This goes to show that even if there’s existing cornerstone content in your niche or industry, you can still get a piece of the pie by creating your own (as long as the quality’s high, of course). 

Last up, let’s look at an example from email marketing giant Mailchimp. The long-form post Email Marketing Strategy & Tips:

• Covers email marketing thoroughly, including what it is, if it works, how to get an email list, tips for success, and so on
• Has earned more than 4,000 backlinks and hundreds of social media shares
• Links to and drives traffic to several of Mailchimp’s other email marketing resources

This beginner’s guide builds the company’s credibility by giving a comprehensive introduction to the topic it’s best known for. And it also directs people to high-value content on relevant subtopics. This is what your cornerstone pages should do as well. Here’s how to make sure that it does. 

How to create effective cornerstone content

Ultimately, the rest of your content strategy is only as strong as your cornerstone articles and pages. And creating solid cornerstones that are more valuable than anything else out there is not easy—time and other resources are required. However, it can be simple. 

1. Decide on your core topics and do keyword research 

It's easy to make the mistake of going too broad, covering topics that are only loosely related to what your company does. The resulting content, of course, does a lackluster job of reaching the goals most important to your business. 

This is why it's so important to hone in on and cover, at most, a handful of main topics that are aligned with your audience and business goals. Once you have those in mind, it's time for keyword research...but not the kind you usually do. 

It's often hard to rank for competitive search terms like "search engine optimization" because so many authoritative sites have already covered them. Yet, in this case, it’s okay to target your most competitive keywords.

After all, you'll be doing a deep dive on the topic, making the content unique, doing internal linking, and likely building backlinks too. If any content can rank on the first page of the SERP for one of your highest competition keywords, your cornerstone piece should be it. 

As long as you can satisfy the search intent behind the keyword, don't hesitate to go for it. 

2. Generate an outline 

Next up, create a content outline for your piece to make sure your topic will be covered thoroughly and in a logical order. You can do this in minutes using Jasper's Blog Post Outline template.

All you have to do is add your topic (or title) and your desired Brand Voice. Jasper will give you several relevant subtopics to cover and ideas for how to order them so that navigating and understanding the content is as easy as possible for readers.

One thing you might want to do during the outlining stage is to make a list of all the supporting pieces you’ll build internal links towards from the cornerstone piece.

3. Research and write the content

Do interviews, conduct surveys, and explore other forms of research that will make your cornerstone piece more valuable and in-depth than existing evergreen content on the topic. Once that's done, you can move on to presenting that research and other information in writing.

To speed up the content creation process, you can use Jasper's long-form document creator. In fact, you can create top-notch, long-form content in half the time it usually takes with our long-form blog creator.

Just enter the topic for the blog, your target audience and your Brand Voice then let Jasper do all the work for you!

Here’s what the output looks like using the above inputs:

Then, add a bit more content—for example, some of your original research—to give Jasper additional context to work with. Click Compose again or use CTRL + J, and then rinse and repeat until your cornerstone piece is complete! 

After that, all that's left is to add AI-generated images using Jasper Art, publish it, promote it, and update it periodically. Is the piece authoritative, relevant to and valuable for your audience, and otherwise optimized for search—perhaps with the help of an SEO AI tool? If so, you should begin seeing results from it within months. Especially as you create and update high-quality supporting pieces of content and link them to your cornerstones. 

4. Update your cornerstone piece over time

It’s important to regularly update your cornerstone pieces over time for maintaining its relevance, authority and value to your readership. By regularly revisiting and refreshing your cornerstone pieces, you can ensure that the information remains accurate and up-to-date. 

This practice also demonstrates to search engines that your content is current and trustworthy, which can improve your ranking in search results. Updating cornerstone content also serves as an opportunity to add more internal links to blogs published after you publish the cornerstone page or after the last time you updated it.

Start creating cornerstone content with Jasper

Are you looking to elevate your content creation game and establish your authority in your niche?

With Jasper's intuitive platform, you can seamlessly incorporate your original research, infuse it with relevant insights, and optimize it for search engines, all in one place.

Try out Jasper's 7-day free trial to unlock the power of generating long-form content for your cornerstone pages effortlessly.