Topics, pillar pages, and subtopic keywords

With HubSpot's SEO tools, you can organize your content into topics that matter to your customers. Each topic is composed of a pillar page and supporting content. Linking supporting content back to a pillar page on your main website helps search engines discover your content and surface it in search results.

Before you get started

Before you begin working with this feature, make sure to fully understand what steps should be taken ahead of time, as well as the limitations of the feature and potential consequences of using it. 

Understand limitations & considerations

• Creating topic clusters in HubSpot doesn't affect your website's SEO directly.
• A pillar page should sit on the top level of your website in a location that gets a lot of organic traffic. To ensure that everything on the page can be crawled by search engines, the pillar page shouldn't have any content locked behind a form or a password.
• There's a limit of 100 subtopic keywords for each topic. Additionally, each piece of subtopic keyword content, such as a blog post or landing page, can only be attached to one topic.

Topic

A topic is a main goal, problem, or idea that your customers are interested in. You can research and compare which topics are worth writing about directly in the SEO tool. Learn more about creating a topic. 

When you're researching new topics, the tool calculates the following metrics:

• Monthly Search Volume: the average monthly searches for this term in search engines. Longer or niche terms might have no or low monthly search volume, and broader terms might be highly popular but difficult to rank for. 
• Difficulty: an estimation of the difficulty you'll face breaking into the front page of search results for this topic. This score is measured on a 100 point scale, meaning it's easier to see success with topics that have lower score

Pillar page

A pillar page is a comprehensive resource page that covers a topic in depth. This page links to high-quality content for supporting subtopic keywords. A pillar page should apply on-page SEO best practices, referencing the topic in the page title, URL, and H1 tag. Content on a pillar page should also be adapted to convert visitors, since all your supporting content links back here. Learn more about attaching a topic to a pillar page.

Want to see how other users are building their pillar pages? Check out a few examples on the HubSpot Marketing blog.

Subtopic keywords

Subtopic keywords address a specific question about your pillar page topic. This piece of content should include a link back to your pillar page to drive traffic to your website. When you attach a blog post, landing page, or website page to a subtopic keyword, the SEO tool tracks how many inbound links you have referring back to your pillar page. Learn more about adding subtopic keywords.

You can attach the following types of content to your subtopic keywords in the SEO tool:

• One of your HubSpot blog posts, landing pages, or website pages
• The full URL of a webpage
• A link to a high-quality external website or blog

When you add a new subtopic keyword, you'll see analytics in the Subtopic Keyword panel for Monthly Search Volume.