11 Essential Ingredients Every Cornerstone Content Page Needs [Infographic]

Cornerstone content is the foundation of your content marketing plan.

It will help you establish a clear picture of the specific problems you can solve for potential customers.

As I said in Your Cornerstone Content Blueprint: to 9 common questions, it can also help you achieve some even bigger goals, including:

• Getting links to your website
• Finding new readers
• Attracting subscribers
• Ranking in search engines for competitive keywords
• Highlighting archived material

Accordingly, cornerstone content is vital for both seasoned bloggers and anyone launching a brand-new website.

In this article, we’re going to explain the 11 essential ingredients of a cornerstone content page and present everything you need to know in a handy infographic.

If you want to work on your own site’s cornerstone content with the help of the Copyblogger team, sign up for our Content Challenge below the infographic.

1. Keywords

The first step is keyword research. 
A cornerstone content page will help you rank for keyword phrases in search engines.
Select 8 to 12 keyword phrases and create a cornerstone content page for each one.

Your group of keywords will also loosely define your area of expertise, which helps you build authority.

2. Headline

The headline for a cornerstone content page is built around a keyword or keyword phrase. Look at these examples from our own cornerstone content pages:

• Content Marketing: How to Build an Audience that Builds Your Business
• Keyword Research for Web Writers and Content Producers
• Landing Pages Turn Traffic into Money

Each keyword phrase begins the headline, but remember that the rules of good headline writing still apply.

Also, the headline that appears on the cornerstone content page can be different from the headline that appears on search engine results pages.

Let me explain.

3. SEO Title

Your headline is also a title tag that appears on search engine results pages.

Search engines want to offer relevant results, so write an additional SEO Title using language the searcher would use to find your content.

You want to speak to the prospective reader in his or her own chosen words.

Most content management systems, including the Rainmaker Platform, allow you to fill out an SEO Title tag.

4. Introduction

The top of your cornerstone content page should immediately draw in your visitor — and keep her reading.

Use short, engaging sentences that could:

• Tell a story
• Ask a question
• Share a metaphor, analogy, or simile
• Invoke the mind’s eye
• Quote a statistic

5. Body copy

The body copy of your page should contain a blend of educational content and links.
The educational content gives your reader a broad understanding of the topic.
The list of links highlights other articles that expand on the topic in very specific ways.

This mix of information also gives search engines more content to filter and index.

6. Subheadlines

There are two types of subheadlines:

1. An extension of your main headline.
2. Mini-headlines sprinkled through the page.

Underneath your main headline, you can add a subheadline that provides another incentive for the visitor to keep reading, as well as more copy for search engines to index.

Additional subheadlines inserted throughout your text break up the copy, entice the reader with more benefits, and help search engines determine the topic of the page.

The same writing rules that apply to headlines also apply to subheadlines.

7. Media

A strong cornerstone content page will include other media formats like images, videos, and infographics that fascinate readers and encourage them to share the page.

Investing in a professional designer for certain types of media could make the difference between a winning cornerstone content page and a flop.

8. Bullet points

Bullet points are a killer way to draw the visitor’s eye to meaningful and persuasive copy.

They can serve several functions:

• List benefits of an offer
• Arouse curiosity to keep the visitor reading
• Explain data and proof
• Tease what’s coming next
• Dish out the chapters in a book or modules in a training course
• And more!

9. Conclusion 

An effective conclusion feels like the click on a box being shut. There are no loose ends. 

In addition, a good conclusion culminates in a persuasive call to action. All the copy that precedes the conclusion was driving towards this appeal. So craft it carefully.

And don’t be afraid to repeat the call to action more than once.

10. Call to action button

Every cornerstone content page you create has a goal: to get people to act.

You may want to drive traffic to your cornerstone content page to ask visitors to:

• Join a content library.
• Subscribe to an email newsletter.
• Start a free trial.
• Download an app.

Remember: you don’t have to wait until the end of the content to include a persuasive call to action. 

In fact, include call to action buttons early and often to show readers what you’d like them to do.

11. Social share buttons

You can’t only rely on search engines to drive traffic to your cornerstone content pages. Particularly if a page is new, you’ll need to jump-start the process.
Post your cornerstone content on social media and encourage people to share it.

Add big and bold social share buttons at the top and bottom of the page or use a scrolling sidebar that moves down the page as the user does.

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Google Keyword Planner's Dirty Secrets

Sometimes our best data sources aren't exactly up to par. While nearly every search marketer will rely on Google Keyword Planner data at one point or another, especially while doing keyword research, the reality is that the data is often untrustworthy and should be viewed with great skepticism. Whether you plan to use it to help build a paid search campaign or determine which content to write, there are huge caveats to the numbers presented as Average Search Volume. Today, I want to walk through a number of the "gotchas" in Google Keyword Planner data so you can do better keyword research and make smarter decisions for you or your clients' sites.

Dirty secret #1: Rounded averages

By far, the most-used piece of data from Google Keyword Planner is the "Average Monthly Search Volume" metric. This key data point is used in everything from basic decisions on what keywords to use in an ad campaign to complex traffic prediction curves. But can we trust it?

Suppose you run a sports website and two keywords pop up in the recommendations: baseball scores and basketball games. Google Keyword Planner lets us know that each of these keywords has an Average Monthly Search Volume of 201,000. At first glance, you should be able to choose either of these keywords and expect similar traffic results, right?

Wrong. The "Average Monthly Search Volume" is more than just an average; it's rounded to the nearest-volume-bucket (which I will describe later). We know this is the case because Google Keyword Planner also exposes the last 12 months of traffic data. If we average that data, we will see that baseball scores receives 217,275 visits per month, while basketball games averages only 205,750! That is a difference of over 10,000 searches per month, which is obscured by Google KWP's rounding algorithm.
When we took a sample of keywords at the 201,000 Average Monthly Search volume, the standard deviation was 14,621 in the "actual average." In some cases, it was off by over 40,000 monthly searches per month! If you don't look at the last 12 months of data, your annual traffic estimates will likely be off by tens of thousands of visits. What causes this anomaly?

Dirty secret #2: Traffic buckets

Google Keyword Planner uses "buckets" to group keywords by traffic volume. When a keyword returns a traffic volume of 201,000, it isn't because the keyword was actually visited that many times, or really that it was particularly close to the number 201,000, but just that it was closer to 201,000 than the next biggest bucket of 246,000. The next lower bucket is 165,000, which gives us a nice 80,000-searches-per-month wiggle room — within which a keyword might actually fall and still be categorized as 201,000 by Keyword Planner.

After analyzing a massive data set, we found that Google has around 85 different "buckets" for traffic, which are logarithmically proportioned. This means that long tail keywords might fall into buckets which only differ by 10–20 searches at a time, while head tail keywords might see gaps of hundreds of thousands of searches per month. The bigger the search volume, the less certain you can be about the accuracy of the Average Monthly Searches, especially relative to other terms that fall in the same group. In fact, the largest buckets have variances of of nearly a quarter million searches per month!
Google uses this rounding procedure for convenience and, likely, to take into account the real month-to-month variance which can be huge for these very popular terms.
Dirty secret #3: Hidden keywords

Rand had an excellent write up on this issue a while back if you want to read the full details or want a more in-depth look at the problem. However, I thought I'd just throw out some stats here to show you just how ridiculous the recommendation system can be relative to the reality of related words and phrases. Let's start with the phrase "football." In this example, we will start with usingGrepWords data to find the most valuable words that contain "football" in them. Then, we simply ask Google what they recommend. How close do they match? What is missed?

The top 3 most-trafficked football-based keywords weren't recommended to us, and only 4 of Google's recommended made it into the top 10. In fact, when we analyzed dozens of Google keyword recommendation reports, we found that only 35% of the keywords were among the most trafficked terms.

It appears that Google Keyword Planner is simply trying to provide a diverse cross-section of terms, but for marketers it means you potentially miss out on huge opportunities unless you dig much deeper. 

You can battle back against this "feature" by choosing more short-tail terms to seed your searches and setting volume and CPC limits, as the recommendations get stronger and stronger the more specific you get. In the end, though, you're going to miss out on some great terms if you've restricted your research to only Google Keyword Planner.

Dirty secret #4: Combination inconsistencies

If you're like me and spelling isn't your forte, you have certainly seen Google give you the "showing results for {correct spelling}." This is very useful for the searcher, but throws a pretty big wrench into keyword volume metrics. What does Google do in these situations? Does it count all the traffic towards correctly spelled keyword (which is actually showing in the search results) or does it count the traffic toward the misspelling or variation? Well, it turns out it's a mixed bag. Let's take a look at a fairly popular term Texas A&M Football.

In the above picture we see several variations of how one might search for the concept Texas A&M Football.

Keyword                                    Corrected?              Distinct Volume 

Texas A&M Football                     No                          Yes

Texas A and M Football                No                          Yes

Texas AM Football                       Yes                         Yes

Texas A & M Football                   No                          Yes

Texas A& M Football                    Yes                         Yes

Now here's where it starts to matter. Let's say that you run a site that sells football attire and you're deciding which schools to include. You look up Google's Keyword Planner data and see that "Texas A&M Football" and "FSU Football" are both searched 201,000 times a month. These keywords seem equal in terms of volume but, in reality, there are many more keywords that are mapped organically to the phrase "Texas A&M Football," which makes its combined search volume much higher.
In this particular case, there are several thousand visitors a year that you might miss out on by choosing "FSU Football" over "Texas A&M Football" simply because Google doesn't combine the keywords in Keyword Planner despite doing so in organic search.Notice that whether or not the keyword is mapped to the canonical spelling makes no difference, in this case, for the total search volume. Even though many keywords will show you Texas A&M results, Google's volume count is only for the correct spelling of the term.

This might seem like a reasonable compromise. 

The Keyword Planner is giving you back the search counts for the keywords, regardless of whether those searches are redirected to a different phrase. This would be appropriate if it was consistent, but with certain punctuation in terms we see Google treat the case completely differently. Take the search terms facebook.com and facebook com. 

Google reports that both of these terms are searched 7.8 million times a month. Clearly these two variants are not searched an identical number of times; Google has simply mapped the keywords together BOTH in organic search results AND in volume. This forces keyword researchers to build huge keyword lists and go line-by-line removing the edge cases.

Here's a quick tip for you Excel experts out there: Look into using Jaro Winkler distance to find very similar terms that have identical search volume. Often these terms are mapped both in organic and in volume, and you can find those exclusions easily.

Dirty secret #5: Strange recommendations

Sometimes Google Keyword Planner gets the keyword recommendations completely wrong. Here are a couple of the examples that I was able to pull in just a few minutes of brainstorming:

Starting Keyword                                  Recommended Keyword

Baseball glove                                  boxing glove

pigeon                                             cabins

calamari                                           pork chops

rap                                                  country music

Because Google Keyword Planner uses more than just phrase matching to build their recommended keywords, you will regularly find some truly strange entries in your recommended keyword list, or connections that a computer might make but a human never would.

Unfortunately, this means you have to be very careful about what you get back, going keyword by keyword if you want to start a paid search campaign based on what's been returned. You simply can't be confident in the relevancy of the results. Can you imagine how many webmasters just blindly added Google's recommendations to their advertising campaigns?

All is not lost

Luckily, there is more than one way to get at and improve the Keyword Planner data using clickstream data sources. For example, we know of two keyword data sources — ClickStre.am and SimilarWeb — which correlate nicely with Google Keyword Planner volumes.

While this data from SimilarWeb is very useful, building a more accurate prediction of search volume for a term requires that you build a regression model comparing the user data to Google's estimates.

Moreover, demographic differences between the whole Google user base and those included in the user panels of SimilarWeb and ClickStre.am mean that building a ubiquitous regression model across all the keyword data might not be the best, as the users tracked by SimilarWeb and ClickStre.am might be biased towards different topics. The solution is to build models around topically-related keywords.

For example, instead of modeling all the keywords against one another, if Google Keyword Planner gave you 2 keywords on the same topic with the same keyword bucket (like 201,000 searches per month), you could build a regression model on the fly comparing a sample of topically-related keywords, using that to predict with greater granularity the performance of the two seemingly identical keywords.

While this user data helps you defeat issues of granularity, getting better (both more thorough and more accurate) recommendations for keywords can be a little more difficult. Your best bet here is to use keyword data aggregators like GREPWords, KeywordTool.io, or the upcoming Moz Keyword Explorer.

Keyword Planner is dead. Long live Keyword Planner

Unfortunately, despite all of the strange quirks and outright deceptions of Google Keyword Planner, it's the best thing we really have going for us in terms of getting search volume data out of Google. We can potentially refine some of the data with clickstream data, or get estimates by running Google Adwords campaigns and watching impression counts, or even looking in Google Search Console. But none of these are strong replacements for the Google Keyword Planner.

Instead of letting Google Keyword Planner's problems get in the way of your keyword research, use it to your advantage. Look for the edge cases where a keyword has a ton of misspellings mapped to the correct version, but not combined into the volume score.

This could be a great win that your competitors are overlooking because the head term looks smaller than it really is. Wherever there's bad data, there's also money to be made in sweating the details. So, put your gloves on and get to scrubbing your Keyword Planner data. Somewhere beneath the rough is a diamond.

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How to Use Long Tail Pro for Keyword Research

Are you looking for an efficient way to research keywords for your website?

Do you want an easy way to find the best keywords to rank in Google?

Do you know how to track how well your website is ranking for your target keywords?

Long Tail Pro is a tool that allows you to do detailed keyword research with a user-friendly interface. It provides really valuable, detailed information to help you to choose keywords to focus on, and even find available website addresses based on these keywords.

So, how does it work?

Long Tail Pro carries displays information on searches for keywords related to the terms you enter.    With the information returned it’s easier to pick out keywords you have a chance of ranking for.

There are a range of keyword research tools available, but one of the biggest benefits of Long Tail Pro is the ability to search for many different keywords at once.  No need to search for every option individually!  Just plug in your ‘seed’ keywords all at once and set it to work.

Getting started with Long Tail Pro

To get started with Long Tail Pro, download the software from the Long Tail Pro website and install it onto your computer.

Click ‘Find Keywords’ on the top left.

Find keywords with Long Tail Pro

Click in the box underneath ‘Add seed keywords’ and input a word or phrase related to your industry or niche. Click ‘Add’.

Repeat this as many times as you want to, including as many relevant keywords as you want.

Next, you want to add filters to make sure you only see results that are worth your time.

Here, you can choose to only see longtail keywords that have a certain search volume (either locally or globally), you can choose how long the keyword phrase should be, and you can select which top-level domains should be included, if you want to find an appropriate URL to buy.

Add filters to your search

When all that is done, click ‘Generate keywords and fetch data’.

It can take Long Tail Pro a few minutes to provide the information you need, depending on how many keywords you are searching for and how many filters you have put in place.

Wait patiently for the magic to happen!

The Long Tail Pro team made a video to show this process, step by step.

Manage your Long Tail Pro keyword results

Depending on the popularity of your keywords and the filters you have set, you might find that you are faced with hundreds of results.

Long Tail Pro makes it easy to manage these results and make them useful.

You will see that there is a column for each of the filters you set when you started the search.

You can order the results using the columns.  So, if you want to see the results with the longest phrases first, click on ‘Number of Words’.  This will display the results with the shortest phrases first – just click again, and you will see the longest phrases at the top of the results.

You could also choose to see the results in order of search volume, or competition.

Click on the filter options at the top to sort

You can also filter by keyword.  For instance, you might only want to see results that contain the word ‘strategy’.

You do this by typing the word into ‘Filter by keyword’ in the Keywords column.

As you can see here, this reduces the results so it only shows the phrases you are interested in. 

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When you identify keywords you like you can then view the Google search results for these keywords.

You are displayed a list of the top 10 results together with very useful information such as:

• Page authority –  A web page goes up in authority when it gets good quality links to it (there are other factors that contribute to but links is the main one)
• Domain authority – This is overall authority of the website.
• Page links – The number of links to content in the search result
• Juice links – The number of authority links, not all links are useful.
• Mozrank – A ranking of a website provided by a company called ‘Moz’.  More authoritative sites have a higher rating.
• Page rank – A number from 1 to 10 provided by Google.  This gives an indicator of the importance of the page.  As Google hasn’t updated this for a long time don’t focus too much on this
• Age of site – Older sites tend to rank better so you’ll see the older sites get a higher number.

What you are ideally looking for is listings in search results that don’t have many juice links and their authority is quite low.

Here’s an example of results for the keywords ‘social media search’

Longtail prosearch result analysis

With the premium version of Longtail Pro the keyword competitiveness score is also completed.  This takes into account the domain authority, page authority, links etc and then calculates a score.  The ones with the lower scores are easier to beat in search results.

Here’s an analysis of some of the search results above:

• The first result has a reasonably low domain authority but a high page authority.  If you look at the ‘juice links’ column you see there are a lot of good quality links.  It’s going to be hard take over number 1 position for this!
• The third result doesn’t have ‘social media search’ as a direct match in the the meta title displayed but you can see that it has over 30k juice links so good luck trying to replace that one!
• The 7th result has a low domain authority and no juice links so there’s a good chance of beating that in search results.

Check your search engine rankings with Long Tail Pro

Do you know where your website ranks on Google, Yahoo! and Bing for your target keywords?

Long Tail Pro has an added feature where you can input your website address and keywords, and it will carry out a search to track where your site ranks on each of these three search engines.

This video shows you how:

Find a keyword-rich URL with Long Tail Pro

If you haven’t set up your website yet and want to find a website address that includes your best keywords, Long Tail Pro can help.

Warning:  If I were you I’d avoid this functionality.   Years ago Google used to rank websites better for keywords that were in your domain name.   Every year Google places less emphasis on this so I think you should ignore this and not use this functionality!

Export your Long Tail Pro data to a spreadsheet

While being able to filter and look at your data within the Long Tail Pro app is useful, many people prefer to use their own spreadsheet.

To export your data to a spreadsheet, click this icon on the top right of the screen.

Export Long Tail Pro data to a spreadsheet

Now, you can manage large amounts of data within Excel.

What’s next?

Long Tail Pro is a very useful piece of software.  One of its best features is that you can carry out heavy analysis on the keywords of your choice, without being limited to only working with one or two at a time.

Long Tail Pro can provide you with vast numbers of longtail keywords, or you can apply filters to find the precise keywords to fit your bill.  And you can check your rankings at the same time!

It costs $97 to buy, or you can choose the Platinum option which is $97 plus $27 a month.

There’s a free 10 day trial worth trying out.

Do you like the look of this tool? Which feature would you use the most?

Tell us in the comments!

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