Content marketing is one of the most popular methods to drive traffic to a website. Content is king and hence a strong element to rank higher without violating any SEO guidelines. A great piece of content requires no help to reach the top position of the Google search engine result page (SERP). Content marketing is based on different types of content pieces and the creation and marketing strategy.
SaaS-based businesses are finding content as a successful tool to drive traffic, collect leads and convert them into a robust customer base. Content helps you to build brand awareness regarding your website in the market and provide a trustable market image.
Highlights:
- Content-based websites show 7.8 times higher growth in website traffic from organic search as compared to others.
- Content-based search engine optimization is 62% economical in comparison to the other types of online marketing.
- 89% of B2B companies and customers admit that they prefer reading blogs before turning to the buying journey for any service or product.
Whether you are creating the content on your own or hiring some agency or freelancer for the same, the content piece is created according to a few rules and regulations. A few tactics like the unique title, keyword stuffing, and grammar check, are done. There is no specific source of cohesion. With the increase in competition in the online market, you need to make more effort to stand out as the leading organization and win the online market.
This is the time to give the audience of your niche something more to explore. Give them the reason to visit your site multiple times. It all can be changed by marketing your content based on a hub and spoke content strategy. It is a powerful way of putting a relationship between all the pieces of content. This way you can add more value to your content and introduce a new perspective of the content and information to the audience reading traditional blogs for a long span period.
This blog post will break down the hub and spoke content marketing strategy and give a complete idea of this new tactic in advance SEO. This blog will explain to you the importance of such a unique content marketing strategy. You will get to know how your audience’s opinion can help you to grab huge traffic on the page and drag your website to the top of the Google SERP.
What is the Hub and Spoke Content Model?
The hub and spoke content strategy targets the ways to arrange a relationship between all pieces of content. It escalates a weight to your content and gives it a sole centric potential on that particular topic, it helps you to explain seamlessly to your audience and Google also easily understands what exactly you are willing to deliver through your content pieces. You can also target different groups of the audience through the same topic with different forms of content pieces under Hub and spoke content marketing strategy.
The hub and spoke strategy consist of types of content:
- A Hub Article: It is a comprehensive resource of information addressing the board part of the topic. Creating it aims to target highly competitive short-tail keywords. Later it links every entity to the series of Spoke articles and other content pieces.
- Spoke Content: These are sub-topics of the hub. Each spoke targets the long tail keyword, this way you get voice search optimized and SEO-rich content. Starting with the material that relates to the hub topic and later diving deep into the sub-topics. These content types are the bulk of your content library.
From a keyword research perspective, we can think of it as:
Hub: High-volume keywords generally show high competition. For example, SEO Service or SEO Company.
Spoke: Long tail keywords holding supportive phrases and entities, such keywords have lower competition and search volume. For example: what are the best SEO techniques?
Why Should You Use the Hub & Spoke Strategy?
Hub and spoke content strategy aims to put in more information and esteem to the content, it is pretty much effective as compared to the traditional blogging strategies. It makes your content more useful leading to more backlinks, social buzz, ranking uplift, and amazing brand image. Hub and spoke content marketing is not only beneficial to you but also your readers and your search ranking.
Let’s find out how:
Hub and Spoke Strategy Serve the Reader:
Hub and Spoke content strategy asks you to put all the information about any particular topic. Once readers come to your page, they will not have to search anywhere for the same. No question remains after reading a hub and spoke model-based content. Instead of creating a question and its answer, you have to think from the reader’s perspective and find out all the possible questions in a reader’s mind.
Hub and spoke model makes it easy for readers to bookmark it for later as a reference and information resource so far. Unique arrangement and representation of the content make it unique and engaging for a better reading experience than one blog could deliver.
This type of content strategy sticks you to a niche and increases your authoritativeness. Potential customers find you the right and authentic source of information, here you are a trustable source and customers also follow your advice.
Hub and Spoke Strategy Improve SEO:
Google strongly considers site structure for a better web experience. You check this from the Google update released on Thursday, May 28, 2020.
Google prefers a site structure with a seamless flow of navigation design and content. When people look for more information then they should get drop downs to the sub-topics. You can see all the leading websites ranking best in their niche on the SERP, always writing their content in such a manner.
A flat site structure has been the option, where understanding the content nature and site navigation becomes difficult for Google crawlers. Hub and spoke content model introduce the key metrics that are considered by Google as a search ranking factor like keyword stuffing, content structuralization, long-form content, etc. it also increases the stay time of your audience over the page reducing your bounce rate. It makes Google understand that your site has quality content and enhances the SEO performance.
How to Implement the Hub-and-Spoke Model?
Hub and spoke content model can help you to rank your website in the featured snippet section of the Google SERP. You can also take audience responses and design your content model accordingly. The major step is the planning stage where you need to neatly manage the subtopics and arrange them in the right position. Let’s understand ways to implement the complete hub and spoke model to the content.
Step 1: Research Topics Based on Your User Personas
Pick out a topic and start writing, this is not the way to create engaging content. You need to understand your audience persona, you need to think about what they are like, what they are looking for, and what they will look for in a few more years.
To match your content with the audience’s interest, let’s start with some research. Here are the most effective key tactics to help you out with the research.
Do an Internal Customer Research
You can get many interesting insights into the customer interest that will later work as the most important essence of your content. If you have a customer base with enough size, then 95% of the research work is complete.
Simply shoot a mail to your readers asking about their interests and current problems. Consider both responses differently, the one coming from paying one and the other from email subscribers.
Need to prioritize the paying customers, as the entire process focuses on the ROI in the end. The survey goal is to understand the problems and experiences of the customers with your previous or existing services and products.
Amazon Review Mining
If you do not have enough customers or cannot get at least 100 responses. Then amazon reviews are a great tool to help you out. Go to the amazon website and enter relevant keywords into the search bar.
Put the filters accordingly and read out the product reviews. Go to the 3-star and 4-star reviews, and read them out carefully. The customers share the challenges over there. You will get the potential of topics from this technique.
Check out both negative and positive reviews, to see what people are saying. They share suggestions and challenges related to the product. Similar things you can do with the services by researching different forum sites.
Snoop Quora
Probably almost every internet surfer knows about Quora. It is a question-answer website that has become a huge social network for readers to search for their answers. No, it has hundreds of millions of visitors every month.
Questions asked over Quora are widely used as topics, even so, many topics cover all niches you can ever imagine. You can easily perform title research by entering the keyword into the search bar. Suggested questions, Spaces, and topics will appear. When you click any relevant one according to your choice.
Click on the ones that are relevant to you. You will get more related to it, just pick one and reform it. You can check out the relevancy by looking at the number of people following that question or topic. If any question has 50k+ followers then it shows the topic is interesting and the answer is in demand. Always focus on the questions answered by popular writers, because they tend to answer the question which will increase their visibility in the community.
Step 2: Choose a short-tail keyword for the hub
When you create web content, you need to focus on keywords priorly. Most of the readers will be able to reach you only based on keywords from the search engine, and that will be your organic search traffic. All you need is to place keywords in the right place so that Google can read easily and categorize them accordingly.
Keyword research for the hub and spoke content strategy is quite different from the one for normal blogs of web content. Here you will require certain tools for keyword research like SEMrush, Ahrefs, Google Keyword planner, etc.
The hub article always targets short-tail high-competition keywords. Such keywords cover the brand range of information and, these are phrases in just two or three words. Such phrases have high search volume but low conversion rates because of difficulty arising from higher competition. Generally, short tail keywords are close to the problem of your users, also the users searching on Google by typing the text try to use the smallest phrase to do so. Additionally, the short keywords cover a large number of audiences looking for small sub-topics. This is the reason you need long-form content to be visible to Google with that highly competitive keyword.
Step 3: Choose Long-Tail Keywords for Spokes
Always choose at least 8 spoken articles which means 8 subtopics. As these all are individual subtopics, they need focus on separately. So before starting writing, perform good keyword research for each and find long tail keywords and LSI keywords for them. The writer needs to write the subtopics simply as normal blog posts. The hub titles are guides and spokes have chapters on what, when, and how.
You need to optimize your spoke articles well to capture the customers. Include a call to action (CTA) at the end of every article. This way you can encourage your readers to sign up, order, subscribe to the newsletter, etc.
Step 4: Create Your Spoke Content
If you try to understand, then the hub and spoke model is fundamental content that can be perceived in a very creative way. Try using your artistic skills while crafting the spoke content, use every possible content type to explain maximum information most simply. Keep in your mind that, through this content piece you are going to drive traffic, grow your audience, boost rank, bring ROI, expand customer base and build an authority on that particular subject.
Content spokes give power to your content hub. Already you have a long-form article over the hub page but still, when you are developing the attractive spokes, it makes the reader book market your page for sure. Always go an inch wider and a mile deep into the title. Back your content by the links redirecting readers to the relevant sites.
However the spoke content is not limited to the article, several formats can fulfill the target to deliver the info. A few types of content that work as content spokes are:
Podcasts
Podcasts can be considered the fastest-growing form of content after videos. You can embed the relevant podcast recording if you have one, otherwise, you can use guest podcasts on that topic with permission of the creator. Podcasts can amazingly get you immense traffic on your content.
You can integrate podcast recordings in text form also as the commentary script if it is shorter.
Infographics
Some time back it was very costly to create an infographic but now different AI tools and designing software on the internet are helpful to create infographics in minutes. Infographics are one of the best ways to present any data in a highly engaging form.
Ebooks & White papers
You can interlink the ebooks, whitepapers, guides, PPTs, and other gated contents if they are extremely useful to the reader. This way you get better relations with websites in the same niche and better support.
Videos
Video marketing has become the marketing frontier. Marketers are using this as a primary marketing tool. Videos are very useful at driving lead generative traffic.
Step 5: Create Your Hub Page
Once you publish all your spoke articles are published. It is time to create a hub page that brings everything together. The page gives you a platform that an ordinary blog does not. It is the part that gives other pieces more importance. The hub page should be neat, beautiful and have thorough navigation. Present your page like a resource center, so that the readers will bookmark your hub page as an information hub. Do take plentiful time to design your hub page, no need to hurry up with this part. Check out the example of a simple hub page on content marketing.
Do not only link the hub page to the content pieces or interlink pages from your website, but also the maximum package of knowledge you can provide to the user. Think, if you are creating content based on the strategy the reader should not switch from your website to another.
Step 6: Organize the Link Structure
Always remember that your hub and spoke content is a group of content pieces interlinked with each other. You have a hub with articles relationship in between. So, deliver a signal to the readers and search engine about the same, this is done by embedding internal and external hyperlinks. Link your articles in between the relevant phrases.
After finishing the posting, build lots of links for them. Feel free to create links throughout your website, Google always likes content pieces with a web-like structure. The hub and spoke content is just like all parts of a system just interconnected with each other. The hub article should have a connection with every spoke article, and each of them should link back to the hub.
Step 7: Promote Your Hub & Spoke Content
You can let your content grab the audience itself. But it will be beneficial for your hard work to promote your content. You can ask out the influencers in the same niche when they share your content with their followers, you can get traffic in bulk. This gives you an alliance with their trusted brand.
You can take the content promotion opportunity by reaching out to the influencers to contribute to your content by sharing their video, podcast, suggestion, advice, etc. this way they will already have a reason to share your content. Moreover, the content becomes more valuable when it has the contribution of an expert in the industry. Use Email marketing, social media marketing, and community outreach using various platforms like forums, Quora, social media groups, etc.
Step 8: Monitor the Results
Now final steps ask you to keep an eye on your hub and spoke content. Use Google Analytics, the top-notch tool to monitor your content performance. It is free to use, there are many other options listed previously for keyword research. The same can be used for audits also. You will see a raise in traffic, higher ranking in search engines, reduced bounce, and exit rate, increased stay time, and much more.
You can notice less stay time on the hub page but higher on the spoke content pages. As the hub page is just the reference to switch from one article to another, just like an index in the chapter guide on any topic. Hub page attracts more backlinks, which gives you a different sort of traffic over the website. You will see the mail signups, subscription to your newsletters, and their trust over all the platforms.
Step 9: Take Your Hub and Spoke Strategy into Your Marketing Funnel
Your hub and spoke content strategy can take your marketing practices to the next level. It has always been a great way to drive traffic and drag websites immediately to the top of Google SERP. but you need to prepare a marketing funnel to qualify the leads generated and convert them into paying customers. Hub and spoke content model are an uncut part of epic content marketing.
Remember, your hub and spoke content is the top of your funnel marketing tool. Here the reader will get to know who you are. Secondly, you have to take more steps to get benefits from the traffic driven by that hub and spoke content piece. It nurtures your brand image and makes you authoritative in a particular niche. You have to use email marketing tactics to convert the leads you got from the hub and spoke model.
You Can Repurpose Your Hub & Spoke Content
Once you have created and posted your hub and spoke content, you can drain more benefits from the model. You can release it as an ebook, quickly turn it into a series of social media posts (infographics, podcasts, and videos can be posted directly), and you can link the customers who need solutions. Such content pieces become prime landing points for paid ads. It can also be used as the foundation of an online course. You can have unlimited ways to benefit from the content.
Conclusion
The hub and spoke model are a highly effective way to overcome many flaws you are facing in your SEO practices. SEO companies practicing advanced SEO tactics suggest their clients with such high-standard marketing ideas. If done properly, this type of content can protect your ranking and revenue on Google.
You will spend enough time creating it, but it will perform for you for a longer time. This entire blog post outlined the introduction, ideas, stepwise methods, benefits, and later on the outcomes of the hub and spoke strategy for content marketing.
