How to Build a Hub and Spoke Content Strategy from Scratch

Do you want to take your business to the top of the search engine result page? If yes, then you should pay extra attention to the content. When it comes to search engine optimization, content is the king. Creating a better content marketing strategy is mandatory for the business to generate the expected results.

Content marketing is more targeted than traditional marketing because it costs less yet generates about three times more leads. You can easily attract huge prospects and turn them into actual paying customers. This can be done by providing informative and engaging content. But remember that you should invest more time to bring the best quality content.

About 70% of marketers lack an integrated content strategy. As a result, they cannot achieve their marketing goal and fail to attract potential prospects. So, creating a content marketing strategy that educates your prospects and helps them make a buying decision is quintessential. This is where the hub and spoke content strategy comes in.

What is hub and spoke content strategy?

The hub and spoke content model is also called the topic clusters model. It is a simple yet effective way to maximize the traffic to your site. This strategy contains hub and spoke pages that work together to maximize the website’s relevancy for the whole topic for the search engine’s crawlers.

Hub content is a unique piece of content where someone is ready to exchange their contact details for getting that information. Significant examples of hub content are blogs, interactive quizzes, infographics, ebooks, and white papers. On the other hand, spokes are digestible related content linked to the hub content. It indicates social media posts, and videos.

The times have changed now. You don’t have to get individual pages for specific keywords to rank on search engines. Instead, you can develop the entire hub of pages with higher authority and relevance around the general topic. This content strategy refocuses your content marketing strategy from targeting topics to keywords. This will give you a scope to target more keywords and cover more information to offer.

Importance of hub and spoke content strategy

Unlike before, it is vital to approach your content marketing efforts with the help of the hub and spoke method for the following reasons:

• Content hubs have a higher potential to generate more backlinks and leads
• Let you target entire topics, which are a significant key to your business success
• Maximizes your website’s traffic and visibility
• Create a better website structure that enhances both UX and SEO
• Generates more leads
• Develop your brand authority

What to consider while developing hub and spoke content strategy

Are you considering developing your hub and spoke content strategy model from scratch? If yes, you must first consider your hub content as it is your main content. Then, ensure every spoke provides extra quality content. The whole concept is simple and easier to understand. Using this strategy in your digital marketing effort does not need technical knowledge. Here are the significant aspects to consider when developing the hub and spoke content.

• • S.M.A.R.T Goals you want to achieve with your spoke and hub content

• • The type of content form will render the best for your effort

• • Type of information your company will offer to the visitors

How to build a hub and spoke strategy

Are you wondering how to get started? If yes, then you have to follow the steps mentioned here carefully. It will assist you in developing a better hub and spoke strategy.

1. Keyword research: This is the first step in developing a hub and spoke content strategy after finalizing the cluster and spoke topics around key products, services, problems, needs or wants. It is a critical aspect of the content strategy because it showcases how to get your content featured at the top of the search results. It also uncovers sub-topics and questions related to the hub topic. To give you a clearer idea, here is an example: Consider that you have to create a Hub and Spoke content strategy for a windshield replacement company. For that, you will publish a hub blog on the keywords “windshield replacement” & “Windscreen replacement” and spoke blog pieces on the keywords “Hyundai Creta Windshield Replacement” and “Honda Brio Windshield Replacement.” Then, ensure to link it to the hub page.

2. User Persona: It is best to think about your audience by establishing a user persona. A persona is a composite, realistic representation of a typical prospective buyer. The qualities of the character are defined through research to determine similarities. These factors include demographics, familiarity with your brand, and many more.

A persona should be detailed enough to resemble a real person. This makes it easier to understand whom you’re writing for. Each constructed persona has a fictitious name. For example, if your company sells motorcycles online, you could name two of your personalities:

• • 1. • Freedom-Seeking Satya
       • Fun-Loving Poonam

It would be best if you chart the buyer’s journey to create and publish high-quality content. It helps develop a more intimate relationship with your target audience. This leads to converting them into actual paying customers. Determining the target audiences will also assist you in locating the most relevant keywords.

3. Create Relevant Types of Content: Next, you need to create hub content for your business. This content can be in the form of a free eBook, whitepaper, video, or infographic. Also, this content should be high-quality and unique so that someone would find value while receiving this information. It helps your new customers move further in their journey as you answer their questions.

4. Publish The content pieces strategically: It would help if you published the hub and then spoke to get the desired result. Spokes are additional and digestible pieces of content. They are highly related to and link back to the hub content easily. It is designed to push traffic back to your hub content and collect the user’s contact information.

5. Proper URL structuring: Organizing your site’s content with subdomains and backlinks sends a clear message to Google – and your site’s users – about how they’re linked. To maximize the return on investment from this approach, you must map out your hub and spoke content in a coherent URL structure.

Here’s an example of how that may appear using our ‘how to create content strategy’ example:

The hub page would be located at www.mysite.com/how-to-create-content-strategy.

Each spoke page would then reside on the following subdomain:

• www.mysite.com/how-to-swim/how-to-do-keyword-research/
• www.mysite.com/how-to-swim/how-to-identify-key-products/
• www.mysite.com/how-to-swim/how-to-do-URL-structuring/

You may make both Google and the user understand that you are an authority in this particular topic area by organizing material into silos through their URL structure.

Grouping many posts in the same hub elevates your site’s authority on a subject far more than if you had a single article hidden somewhere in your blog.

6. Track your performance: Finally, One of the significant advantages of the hub and spoke method is that it makes measuring the ROI of your content marketing activities simple. Because your site’s URL structure is so uniform, you can rapidly determine which themes are the main determinants of the metrics that matter.

For example, in Analytics, you can filter any URLs that include the hub subdomain (such as www.mysite.com/how-to-create-content-strategy/) to determine the influence of the entire subject cluster on your SEO KPIs.

And the more accessible the essential data is, the easier it is to examine and improve your content marketing efforts.

If you are investing in content marketing today, you should leverage the hub and spoke strategy to reap the best return on your investment. So, if you want assistance in building a solid content strategy, talk to our experts.