We're currently in the early stages of planning migration from wordpress to Hubspot CMS. Our current site is made up of 8 brands, each incorporating a mix of events/commercial subsites and content pages.
My question is - should we consider each brand a pillar and link both events/commercial style pages/topics and content topics to this, or is it better to have seperate pillars for commercial and content based pages?
We have up to 100 pages of content and 6-7 events (each consisting of 4-5 pages) per brand, so we're concerned this is too much to build around a pillar (assuming that we want to include every page - we're not even sure if that's required)?
Without having closer knowledge to what your business does it's difficult to assess whether the brand is a pillar or whether it is 8 different websites. At a high level in some ways, your 6-7 events could be considered your pillars for each brand and each one would be its own website with its own SEO goals.
With that said, moving from Wordpress to Hubspot as a CMS, shouldn't trigger the discussion of structure initially. The pillar discussion looks to how Hubspot sees SEO and manages it within its own tools. When migrating the site(s) you should first be concerned to make sure that your sites map to one another and that you don't have any drop-off. If this involves a restructuring or rethinking of your brand alignment and positioning that is another discussion altogether which should be driving your setup of the website(s) and, in Hubspot terms, the pillar SEO setup. So before you even get to worrying about the Hubspot setup, you should sit down to look at your overall brand and let that drive your website setup and then figure out a migration path forward.
Since you have a considerable amount of content and events per brand, it's understandable to be concerned about building around a single pillar. You don't necessarily need to include every page in your pillar strategy. Instead, focus on identifying key pages that represent the core themes or offerings of each brand. It's also important to ensure that your site structure is user-friendly and intuitive. Consider how users will navigate between brands and pages, and make sure your internal linking strategy supports this. If you're looking for more advice on SEO and site migration, I found a couple of articles on this topic that might be helpful: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/maximizing-visibility-advanced-seo-accountants-boost-clientele-smith-...
Thanks for the comments Ben, and appreciate my initial request was pretty vague. The pillar concept was a little foreign to us, so it's good to have confirmation that this can be a secondary concern, rather than a primary consideration when planning the setup.
Without having closer knowledge to what your business does it's difficult to assess whether the brand is a pillar or whether it is 8 different websites. At a high level in some ways, your 6-7 events could be considered your pillars for each brand and each one would be its own website with its own SEO goals.
With that said, moving from Wordpress to Hubspot as a CMS, shouldn't trigger the discussion of structure initially. The pillar discussion looks to how Hubspot sees SEO and manages it within its own tools. When migrating the site(s) you should first be concerned to make sure that your sites map to one another and that you don't have any drop-off. If this involves a restructuring or rethinking of your brand alignment and positioning that is another discussion altogether which should be driving your setup of the website(s) and, in Hubspot terms, the pillar SEO setup. So before you even get to worrying about the Hubspot setup, you should sit down to look at your overall brand and let that drive your website setup and then figure out a migration path forward.
