Pillar pages lifted an agency's organic traffic 744% in 13 months

Campaign Creators is a HubSpot partner agency. In a post dated 27 November 2018, its own team described how it restructured its blog around pillar pages and topic clusters, and published the traffic figures from its analytics. This is the agency writing about its own site, so the numbers are self-reported.

Why the agency tried it#

The post frames the change as a response to how search had moved from matching keywords to understanding topics, citing Hummingbird in 2013 and RankBrain in late 2015. Its authors put the argument plainly: “Simply dominating a few words is no longer enough to produce successful results.” They also say they chose to prioritise search over social, because company content was getting less reach on social platforms.

What the agency changed#

The blog held six years of posts with some internal linking but no organizing structure. After a 2016 rebrand and relaunch the site’s traffic had dropped, and by July 2017 it had only recovered what was lost. The agency’s best pre-relaunch month was 937 organic visits, in October 2015.

In August 2017 the team launched a content pillar strategy. It mapped its buyer persona’s core problems, drawing on the 2017 State of Inbound report, and grouped them into three topics (lead generation, lead nurturing and marketing technology) that matched its services after the rebrand. It then researched subtopics with KWFinder and HubSpot’s Content Strategy Tool, looking for terms with reasonable search volume and manageable difficulty.

Every old post was audited into a topic and subtopic in an Excel spreadsheet that tracked URL, title, pillar and subtopic. The authors’ advice was not to “fit a square peg in a round hole”: posts that did not fit were left out of the clusters, and poorly performing posts unrelated to the new pillars were deleted.

How the pages were built#

Each pillar started as a basic page: the topic as the h1, each subtopic as an h2 with a short description and links to the related posts. The agency defines a pillar page as a comprehensive resource on the core topic that links to each cluster page, and cluster content as roughly 6 to 8 subtopic pages that each answer a specific question.

Each cluster post then linked back to its pillar using the same keyword as anchor text, with a line such as “This blog post is part of Your Definitive Guide to Lead Nurturing”, and to sibling posts. After three months it had three pillar pages.

Later steps went beyond the first rollout. The team used KWFinder’s question search, Answer the Public and the HubSpot tool to plan six months of new, question-led posts. It then reworked the pillars with resource types, longer subtopic introductions, definitions, diagrams and calls to action for lead magnets. Subtopics that performed well, such as conversion rate optimization, were promoted into pillars of their own.

The measured results#

The agency reports organic traffic of 1,091 in August 2017 and 3,497 by February 2018, a 220% increase in six months. It says traffic kept growing to 9,214 in September 2018, a 744% increase in just over 12 months.

How to read this case#

Three limits matter. The baseline was small, so the absolute gain is thousands of visits, not hundreds of thousands. There is no control group, and the new content, pillar rewrites and promoted subtopics all ran inside the same measurement window, so the post cannot separate the effect of the relinking from the effect of publishing more. The traffic figures come from a screenshot the agency describes, not from a third-party audit.

What the case does support is a practical point: most of the early work was reorganizing and relinking existing content, which is cheap to try. Treat the 744% as this site’s outcome, not a benchmark.

Applying it to your own site#

The mechanics the agency describes line up with Google’s own link guidance. Google says “Every page you care about should have a link from at least one other page on your site,” and that good anchor text is “descriptive, reasonably concise, and relevant” to both pages. It can only crawl a link that is an <a> element with an href.

In practice that means three checks before building pillars:

1. Inventory existing posts and map each one to a topic, as the agency did, before writing anything new.
2. Confirm every cluster post links to its pillar and the pillar links back, using crawlable HTML links.
3. Review anchor text across the cluster so it describes the target page. The anchor text diversity calculator can show whether one phrase dominates.

For a second, independently reported example of internal linking changes and traffic, see the IFTTT internal linking case.