Hub and Spoke Content Strategy
Content is king when it comes to SEO.
For this reason,
Aberdeen reports that content marketing leaders experience a 7.8 times higher growth in unique site traffic compared to followers, with a percentage of 19.7% versus 2.5% respectively.
According to DemandMetric, content marketing generates approximately three times as many leads as traditional marketing, while costing 62% less.
According to the Demand Gen 2018 Content Preferences Survey, 71% of B2B respondents reported reviewing a blog during their buying journey.
But not all content is created equal...
If you get your content marketing strategy wrong, you may not see results you're expecting. To maximize your return on investment for the time, people and effort, it is recommended that you follow our hub and spoke content strategy 8 simple steps to success.
Hub and Spoke content strategy for beginners
The hub and spoke model – also known as the topic clusters model – is a simple and effective way of increasing traffic to your website. The strategy consists of hub pages and spoke pages, which work together to increase your site's relevancy for an entire topic in Google's eyes.
Source: HubSpot
So, rather than trying to rank individual pages for specific keywords, you create an entire hub of pages that have high relevance and authority around a more general topic.
The hub and spoke model works
The hub and spoke model refocuses your content marketing strategy from targeting keywords to targeting topics.
For example, 'car accident' might be a key phrase that's incredibly valuable for your business. Your current content strategy might consist of dozens of disconnected articles that target long-tail keywords related to ‘car accident', all hosted on your blog.
In contrast, the hub and spoke strategy simply organizes those articles in a way that packs a much harder punch in the Google search results. For example, you'd create a ‘car accident' hub page targeted at that short-tail – and incredibly valuable – keyword.
And then you'd create spoke pages that target long-tail keywords related to ‘car accident' that the hub page would link out to such as articles on distracted drivers, driving under the influence of alcohol, equipment failures, commercial drivers, Trucks and Tractors and finally articles about driving and Cannabis. Each one of these spoke pages will also generate supporting content pages.
Through your URL structure and internal linking strategy, you'd structure these pages in a way that showed Google – and visitors to your site – that they make up an incredibly authoritative content hub on the topic of ‘car accident' as a whole.
Core Topic and theme visual
Why is the hub and spoke model important?
It's important to create relevant content marketing in this way because:
It allows you to target entire topics that are key to your businesses success, not just individual keywords – increasing your site's visibility and traffic.
Content hubs build your brand's authority by comprehensively covering a topic.
Hubs create a better site structure, which will improve both your Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and User Experience (UX).
Content hubs can help generate more leads and backlinks and will do so over time.
8 Simple Steps to SEO Success
If you're thinking about creating a content marketing strategy, you should be following the hub and spoke model exactly to make sure it's driving traffic and generating leads. Follow these simple steps across your site.
1. Perform some keyword research (to find topics to cover in-depth)
Every effective content marketing strategy is built on a foundation of detailed keyword research. Without performing keyword research, you'll be guessing at the topics and queries your target audience cares about and searching for in their quest to solve their problem. If you don't do the research, you'll have no idea which top-level topics and lower down the funnel topics to build your hub pages around – or what long-tail keywords you should target with your spoke pages.
So, open up your keyword research tool of choice and follow Blogging Wizard's guide to keyword research to find all the short- and long-tail keywords relating to each of the topics your target audience is interested in.
2. Map keywords to your hub pages
Once you've got your keyword data, you need to determine which terms you're going to build hub pages around. The most successful hub pages are targeted at terms that receive significant search volume and your business is a natural authority on.
Lawsuit Legal's guide to how civil lawsuit compensation works is a great example – a comprehensive guide on a topic they're a natural thought leader on. The result? The top spot in the Google search results for a term their target audience is highly likely to search for:
Find your hub page keywords by asking yourself… What long-tail keywords do our target audience search for that we can build an original and valuable content hub around?
3. Map keywords to your spoke pages
Once you've chosen the keywords you're going to target through your hub pages, you need to identify the long-tail keywords that stem from the topic so you can build out your sub topics. It's important to understand that these spoke pages don't all need to be long-tail variations of the keyword the hub page is targeting.
Hub and spoke car accident example
For example, the spoke pages stemming from a hub page targeting the key phrase ‘car accident' should include ‘what to do when a distracted driver hits you', ‘what to do when a drunk driver hits you', and ‘what to do after a semi truck accident'.
But for the biggest impact, it should hit related terms like ‘injured by a drunk driver' and ‘how to avoid distracted driving' as well. So be sure you're not being one-dimensional in your keyword research and instead cover every sub-topic.
Also, remember that your spoke pages don't always have to be new content. Unless you're executing a content strategy for a brand-new site, your existing content can almost definitely be repurposed as spoke pages through a content refresh.
So, don't make the mistake of thinking you need to start from a blank slate when you're launching a hub and spoke strategy. You could actually have all the assets at your disposal already and just need to rethink the URL structure.
4. Create a logical URL structure
The way you organize the content on your site using subdomains and internal linking sends a clear sign to Google – and your site's visitors – about how they're connected.
To achieve the highest return on investment with the hub and spoke content strategy, it is important to plan out a logical URL structure.
Here's what that might look like with our ‘car accident' example from earlier: The hub page would sit at the domain level on www.mysite.com/car-accident. Each spoke page would then sit on this subdomain:
www.mysite.com/car accident/injured-by-a-drunk-driver/
www.mysite.com/car accident/what-to-do-when-a-distracted-driver-hits-you/
www.mysite.com/car accident/what-to-do-after-a-semi-truck-accident/
www.mysite.com/car accident/how-to-avoid-distracted-driving/
Organizing website content and blog posts into silos within the URL structure can improve both the user and Google's perception of your expertise in a specific subject area. Creating a hub topic and grouping related articles can increase the authority of your website on a subject, compared to having a single article buried in your blog. This is especially important for a site with a lot of content.
5. Write your content
Now that your hub and spoke strategy has been laid out it's time to start crafting content that attracts new customers. Like any content marketing strategy, the hub and spoke method succeeds or fails based on the quality of your content.
Best-in-class optimized content is always going to outrank mediocre content that's been arranged in the hub and spoke strategy. So be sure you're creating detailed, engaging, and well-written content that's at least as comprehensive as the pages already ranking for the keyword your targeting.
This especially true for your hub page, as competition for short-tail keywords with high search volume is going to be fiercer than for the long-tail keywords you'll be targeting with your spoke pages.
One simple way of making your content stand out from the rest is to incorporate plenty of visual elements. Video is a great way to educate your website visitors and substantially increase your average session duration.
For example, Broker Engine's guide to meeting templates uses simple annotated images to bring the content to life: Simple additions like graphics this can help elevate your content from run-of-the-mill to exceptional.
6. Promote both hub and spoke pages
Ask any marketer: ‘build it and they will come' simply doesn't apply to content; which is why you need to spend almost as much time promoting your content as you do creating it if you want to dominate the Google search results in your niche.
First, craft engaging social media posts to push your new guide out to your followers. Be sure to send it out to your email list as well – and make sure you use a click-worthy subject lines.
Last but not least, execute an outreach campaign to drive traffic back to your content.
7. Track your performance
The hub and spoke strategy offers the advantage of allowing for easy measurement of ROI in content marketing.
Due to the consistent URL structure of your website, it is possible to efficiently identify traffic attribution and your other important metrics to better understand what content is attracting traffic and your website visitors behavior..
Content strategy and the marketing funnel
For example, you can simply filter all the URLs that include the hub subdomain (such as www.mysite.com/car-accidents/)in Analytics to find out the impact that the entire topic cluster is having on your SEO KPIs.
Setting up Google Analytics 4 properly will give you the relevant data on organic traffic and will help you to understand the unbiased popularity of your content; and will help you determine which content to revisit and refresh as part of your ongoing content marketing strategy.
8. Revisit and improve pages
Once your hub and spoke strategy is up and running and you've created your broad topic clusters that target your business critical relevant keywords (short- and long-tail keywords), it's well worth redirecting your efforts from creating new content to refreshing existing articles.
And while refreshing a piece of relevant content so it better meets the need of a search query is always a good use of your content marketing time and budget, internal linking is often the most effective lever to improve your hub and spoke content.
Ensuring each URL is tightly linked to every other URL in its topic cluster is a key part of the hub and spoke strategy. With a strong internal linking strategy, you simply won't generate the kind of topic relevance that makes this method so effective.
But when you're constantly posting new content it's easy to forget to go back and make sure each new article is being linked to from the existing hub and spoke pages from its topic cluster. So if a page in your hub and spoke strategy isn't performing as well as you'd like, make sure there are internal links pointing to it from the rest of the pages in the topic cluster as your first port of call.
An integrated marketing strategy focused on driving top, middle and lower down the funnel traffic
Content strategy and the marketing funnel
Investing in content marketing using this model is some of the best use of your resources. Create relevant content that is unique and well-structured. Do this first before spending money on driving traffic through paid advertising.
Content for SEO is one of the most effective inbound marketing channels at your disposal and the hub and spoke model will ensure you're getting the most from your efforts by addressing the needs of your potential customers at every step of the buying journey / sales funnel.
It will help attract more leads through the top of the funnel by improving your ability to rank on the first page of Google for your target keywords.
It will also help drive middle of the funnel and lower down the funnel traffic; helping those customers through the buying journey, as they're more likely to delve deeper into connected topics that will be easier to navigate to through your improved user experience (UX).
Together, these will help increase the amount of sales you make through the same content marketing efforts – simply by changing the way you organize the content on your site.
Summary
The hub and spoke model of publishing content is recommended for those investing in marketing to maximize their return on investment (ROI).
If you're already executing a content marketing strategy, then it's not a huge departure from your current approach. It's simply a different way of structuring your content allowing you to optimize your chances of attracting organic traffic and converting them.
The hub and spoke method can lead to a huge improvement in your overall marketing results – especially when combined with an integrated marketing strategy that includes paid advertising.
