I have read a lot about the Pillar-Cluster model and I would like to organize our company content following its recommendations.
We would like to attract more traffic for a keyword that is really important for our business. This keyword is being used in one of our subdomains: "keyword.company.com".
This is my question: should we create a landing page for this keyword using the url ""keyword.company.com" or is it better something like "keyword.company.com/keyword"?
I had opted for the first option, but I don't know if it could have a negative impact on SEO.
There's no straight forward answer. The SEO community is divided. According to Rand Fishkin, "subfolders are almost always better for rankings". I tend to believe it.
Anyways, If I were you, I'd create a sub-folder on the main domain, like this: domain.com/keyword which is better than a subdomain.
The general consensus is that subdomains are less preferable to subfolders and pages from an SEO perspective beacuse Google still treats them in some ways as seperarte domains. This negative effect is not, I don't believe, strong to enough to overpower positive forces in your SEO, but its worth bearing in mind.
Personally, I always feel that when keywords are used in domains or subdomains, it has a slight spammy feel to it and I tend to trust the site less. This could only be me but I thought I'd share it.
My recommendation, without knowing all the facts of course, would be to ditch the subdomain and create the pillar page in the subfolder of your main domain where then internal linking can be most direct and effective.
If you are looking to build the pillar page, one thing worth keeping in mind that is outlined in this resource is that the pillar page should sit on the top level of your website in a space that gets a lot of organic traffic. To ensure that everything on the page can be crawled by search engines, the pillar page should not have any content locked behind a form or a password. For this reason, I would say that going with the first option is preferred.
I wanted to share this resource as well which discusses pillar pages.