BACKGROUND
This project was for a client in the employee onboarding software space. The goal was to brief a pillar page that would anchor a 12-piece content cluster, replace a thin existing page at position 19, and build topical authority across the full onboarding keyword cluster rather than targeting a single term in isolation.
I built the brief around the four specific ways a pillar page differs from a standard guide: length, link architecture, comprehensiveness over depth, and evergreen design. The cluster architecture section mapped all 12 supporting pieces with their target keywords, their relationship to the pillar, and the exact section each one linked from, so the bidirectional link structure was planned before a single word was written.
The result was a brief covering the full SEO rationale for the cluster model, a section-by-section structural guide with exact internal link placements, a mixed-intent audience analysis, and complete meta and schema requirements, including a note on potential HowTo schema eligibility pending discussion with the SEO lead.
