A quick guide to creating pillar pages for your real estate website

Savvy real estate professionals use pillar pages for their websites to drive traffic and leads.

I guess you have heard of pillar pages, haven’t you?

If you don’t know what pillar pages are and why they matter, it means you don’t have them on your site in the first place. And if you don’t, I am pretty sure your content is disorganized and your site is not fully search engine optimized.

It is important to have pillar pages on your site because they organize your content and tell Google which pages are the most important. Based on these signals, Google rank content in search results. Pillar pages will boost your site’s internal linking and rank it for targeted keywords.

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Now that you know the benefits, let’s discuss what pillar pages are and how they work:

What are pillar pages for a real estate website?

As a real estate agent you work with property buyers and sellers. If you write blog posts for your target audience, your site must have categories such as ‘buy a home’ and ‘sell a home’.

You must have written a lot of blog posts on buying properties and selling properties. These blog posts probably provide microscopic advice on various steps that buyers and sellers have to take during the property transaction process.

For example, you may have written a blog post on what type of music that the sellers should play when they organize showings for prospective buyers.

This particular blog post is part of a broader topic – Staging.

Now you can create a pillar page for this topic. You can create a complete guide to staging a home. The guide must be comprehensive with all the details sellers should know about staging.

You can then link your smaller blog posts on the topics related to staging to this guide.

It will give a strong SEO signal to Google.

Google will know from the internal linking that this pillar page on the topic of staging is important on your site and give it a priority.

It will also reduce bounce rate.

You can give a small description of each post related to the broader topic of staging on your pillar page and then link the pillar page to the blog post that provides more information on that microscopic topic.

In order to know more about that topic, the visitors will click on the links on your pillar page. If they browse multiple pages on your site, it will bring down the bounce rate and boost real estate SEO.

This is an example of a pillar page created by The BREL Team in Toronto. This page ranks among the top results for its targeted keyword.

In order to create pillar pages, take the following steps:

Make a list of topics you want to rank for

The first step is to create a list of most important topics you want your site to rank for in search results.

For a real estate agent in Toronto, some of the topics could include:

• Buy a home in Toronto
• Sell a home in Toronto
• Staging
• Home buying process
• Home selling process
• Pricing your home in Toronto
• Getting a mortgage in Toronto

Identify keywords

Go to Google’s Keyword Planner tool and find keywords around these topics. You need to use these keywords in title tags and in the content of the pillar page.

Create your pillar page

Now you need to create a pillar page around each of the keywords you are targeting.

As already mentioned, your pillar page should be very comprehensive and provide detailed information on the topic in question.

In order to beat the competition for this pillar page in search results, you should google the keywords you are targeting for your pillar page and find out what other real estate professionals in your area are writing on that particular topic. Make your pillar page more comprehensive and interesting.

Create several blog posts around this pillar page

Now you can come up with a list of topics that are related to the topic of your pillar page. Create smaller blog posts on these topics and interlink these with your pillar page.

In conclusion

Creating a pillar page takes a lot of creativity and patience, but they are really worth the efforts. Be sure to make your pillar pages stand out from content on the same topic already available online.