SEO trends of 2025 have, no points for guessing, AI-led pillar articles on top of the list. Article writers and content writing service providers are upskilling themselves with the relevant AI toolkit. We will get to that in a bit.
What remains unchanged is hitting the relevant keywords (long-tail for new websites and small businesses) and publishing search-intent based content. And that’s where pillar articles and cluster blogs come in. They form an integral part of your SEO strategy.
What is SEO Strategy?
SEO, or search engine optimization, basically means creating, optimizing, and publishing content on the web that ranks high on search engine results pages (SERP) for target keywords. It includes on-page, off-page, as well as technical SEO know-how, and establishes you as a subject matter expert. Here, you need good content writing services for targeting pillar articles, part of on-page strategy, as well as holistic SEO. Meaning, the likes of cluster blogs and all the internal linking that goes into it.
Why You Need SEO?
SEO is vital to grow a business and rank its website. In its initial stage, if done right, it generates enormous brand visibility and raises awareness about the brand’s offerings- products or services. Then, it helps streamline that traffic of users to convert from audience to customers. While paid media or performance marketing helps with quicker growth, SEO is a more sustainable approach, yielding high dividends long-term. However, search is a long process, and you need quality content writing services to grow and rank.
Pillar Articles
Pillar articles are essentially well-researched white papers that cover a topic in-depth. These are the lifeblood of a brand’s effective SEO strategy. Pillar articles are the basis on which cluster blogs are created.
Pillar articles generally target broad, short keywords, that help cover a more expansive topic. For example, if a pillar article talks about SEO is, it will then target keywords like SEO, social media, SERP, content marketing, backlinks, etc.
These keywords will give direction to the article writer to craft an informative long-form piece which will describe what search engine optimization is in-depth, and touch upon briefly its constituent features.
Cluster blogs would explore those features in detail, targeting more long-tail keywords. We will come to it in the next bit. The reason why we call pillar articles in-depth, despite the provision for cluster blogs, is relativity.
They are relatively more in-depth than your regular blogs. Hence, taken individually, pillar articles can provide sufficient information about a topic, too, for the user. Which periodic blogs or shorter newsletter articles cannot.
Yet, for SEO, it leaves room for search engines to crawl a site architecture, thanks to internal links, and index it properly for ranking. Hence, these articles triply help the website or business owner to generate traffic, gain clients, and increase revenue.
The 2024 AI Content Marketing Report for SMBs by SEMrush, a digital marketing tool seller and thought leader in the field, reported that 50% of marketers use AI to help with content writing, and 67% of businesses use AI for SEO and content marketing tasks.
Google added “Experience” to its Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness (E-A-T) framework in 2022, which requires Google’s Search Quality Raters to evaluate the quality of search results, according to the new model called E-E-A-T.
These make AI-assisted pillar articles even more comprehensive. Hence, eligible for top SERP ranks. The biggest help AI has lent to the industry is volume. Article writers today can generate more content than ever before in shorter time.
There is a catch- research and quality still lag in AI tools. This is where the “experience” and “expertise” of content writing services come in handy. Strategy for thematic cluster blogs, and sorting them into pillar articles and interlinked sub-pages, requires both.
Cluster Blogs
Cluster blogs, or simply put, a topic cluster of blogs, are a related bunch of content organized around themes. These blogs, targeting specific long-tail keywords, while addressing specific topics each, are hyperlinked to each other.
To use the above example of a pillar article talking about SEO- the topic cluster it would belong to is SEO- with its target keywords- social media, SERP, content marketing, backlinks- forming individual blogs internally linked to each other within the cluster.
With the widespread adoption of AI in tech, there are not only an increasing number of tools to generate content, but also a growing reliance on machine learning and large language models (LLM) by Google crawlers to rank relevant content on search keywords.
What this means, for business owners using content writing services, is that user’s search result- one of their content- should fill the gap between the user’s search intent and the specific keywords that they used to search for it.
What we mean by this is, many a times when we intend to search for, say, hair ties within a budget, we may ask Alexa or just type ‘rubber bands’ in Google. Now, if a seller who sells hair ties do not include ‘rubber band’ in their content, chances are they will not show up in the search results, despite the two meaning the same.
Now, understandably, this requires some level of guessing, beyond keyword research. However, the probability of that guesswork to turn out to be effective requires experience on the part of the article writer.
That experience is what translates a guess to an insight, informing the overall SEO strategy. Therefore, in the ‘hair ties’ case, this can become the topic cluster and perhaps the pillar article.
While related long-tail keywords like ‘synthetic rubber bands for hair loss prevention’ or ‘cute hair ties for every party outfit’ may be used to create cluster blogs. There cannot be cluster blogs without a main pillar article- which is why a sound SEO strategy requires both.
The Way Forward
Hire virtual employees from India as article writers or outsource content writing services to integrate the best practices of SEO in your business strategy.
