The sweet spot for most businesses is 3–7 content pillars. This range gives you enough coverage to demonstrate expertise across your service areas or product lines while keeping your content calendar and internal linking structure manageable. A local Ottawa HVAC company might run four pillars: furnace repair, AC installation, heat pumps, and indoor air quality. A SaaS startup might have five: product features, industry use cases, integration guides, pricing and ROI, and implementation best practices. Fewer than three pillars usually means you're either too niche to sustain ongoing content or you're missing obvious topic clusters that your audience searches for. More than seven typically signals you're splitting hairs between topics that should be combined, or you're stretching beyond what your team can realistically support with quality content. Each pillar needs 10–30 supporting articles to build true topical authority, so seven pillars means producing 70–210 articles over time. The number also depends on team size and content velocity. A two-person team publishing twice a month should stick to 3–4 pillars. An agency with dedicated writers can handle 6–7. At Ottawa SEO, we manage a 500+ domain portfolio, and even we keep individual sites to 4–6 pillars because fragmentation kills link equity and confuses Google about what you actually do. Start by listing every service or topic you want to rank for, then group related items ruthlessly. Furnace repair, boiler service, and heating maintenance collapse into one heating pillar. Don't create separate pillars for overlapping keyword families. Each pillar should have distinct primary keywords and serve a different stage of the buyer journey or customer need. You can always add a pillar later once you've saturated the first few with content. Launching with three strong pillars beats launching with eight half-built ones. Focus creates authority; sprawl creates mediocrity.