What is Pillar Content?

Showing expertise is one of the most important aspects to building a successful financial services, wealth management or fintech business. If a person or a company is going to trust you with their money, they want to be damn sure that you know what you’re doing with it!

Pillar content and case studies are long form, detailed guides that really get deep into a topic or business area.

These aren’t ‘Top 5 Tips’ articles. This type of content takes a lot of research, a lot of work and a lot of words. Usually these tend to fall in the region of between 3,000 or 5,000 words, and the background work takes significantly longer than a regular article or blog post.

In many cases our writers will need to speak to members of your team, such as your portfolio managers or engineers, to gain a deep understanding of the issue at hand and to make sure we’re doing your expertise justice.

It can be a detailed process, but what you end up with is a hefty, authoritative piece of content that is going to naturally build backlinks and create domain expertise.

The Importance of Backlinks

Not sure about backlinks? Simply put, it’s when another website links to yours. They’re not going to do that if your content sucks. They’re not going to do that if your content is thin. It’s like any referral. The quality reflects on the person making it.

If another company or website is sending traffic elsewhere, they want to make sure that it’s relevant to their audience.

The reason you should care about backlinks is because they’re one of the key ranking signals for Google search. Backlinks, keywords and content quality are the key to getting new visitors to your website. Getting new visitors to your website is key to getting new clients.

So, by creating an authoritative, detailed resource that anyone can access for free, over time you’ll find other websites will point to it. This raises your own domain authority. It means the pillar piece itself will rank better on Google, but also all of your other content too.

High share potential

It’s not just backlinks from other websites that make pillar content so valuable. You want readers who've taken value from it to share it themselves. This is more common than you think, but it isn’t necessarily going to happen overnight.

Sure, on the rare occasion you might find someone who is so impressed with your detailed guide that they share it on social media. 

In reality though, it’s going to be shared in WhatsApp messages to their friends or family members when it comes up at Easter. It will be posted on Reddit by a helpful user to forums like r/Investing or r/UKPersonalFinance. If it’s useful and well thought out, it will build its own organic reach over time.

Pulling it all together

All of this serves to pull your own website together. They’re called pillar content pieces for a reason. The key areas of your business also form the pillar content of your website, which can then provide multiple interlinking opportunities between your other articles.

These make it clear to a visitor to your site what you do best and what you’re most authoritative about. 

If you’re a fintech firm with content on payments processing, some B2B SaaS articles, machine learning and a few pieces on crypto, it’s going to be hard for a potential client to really understand what you do.

On the other hand, if you run corporate treasury software and analytics and create highly specific content around this targeted at global CFOs, you’re going to target and engage your ideal clients.

How we can help

We call ourselves The Finance Writers because we only work with businesses that allow us to do our best work. We know the industry in and out and we can provide proper insights and deliver real value to our clients. 

For clients who do work with us, they gain access to a real content partner. 

We work with you on content strategy, keyword planning and ideation on both evergreen and topical financial content. Because we’re constantly writing about the latest financial goings on, we know what's trending and we know what your clients and prospective clients are interested in.

Work with us, and you tap into all of that knowledge.

Prove it

All those words sound good, but where's the proof? Well, our clients have a lot of nice things to say about us, which is a good start. From a credentials standpoint, all of our clients work directly with our Founder and Head Copywriter, Jason Mountford. Jason has over 15 years experience in wealth management and financial services, including 10 years as a qualified Financial Advisor. He’s worked for Fortune 500 financial institutions, venture funded startups and boutique financial advice firms across the United States, United Kingdom and Australia.

As well as his financial advice qualifications, Jason also holds a Masters of Applied Finance degree, and as a financial commentator he’s appeared in FT Adviser, Bloomberg, the Daily Mail and the Daily Express.

Why do you care? 

Because it means you’re dealing with someone who knows your business. Not a writer who’s spent 20 minutes on Google before speaking with you. Throw out all the acronyms you like. Send over a muddle sentence full of jargon. It’s not a problem, because we live in the same world as you.

So, if you’re looking for great content writers and copywriters for your financial services website, we can help. You can see a small sample of some of our work here.