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This is a content hub.
It might just look like a normal page at first glance,
but it was built strategically leveraging the best
of both worlds from SEO and content marketing.
And the result?
A ton of links to their pages, rapid growth
in organic traffic,
and becoming an authority on the topic.
And today, I'm going to show you how to create
your own content hub and maximize search traffic
to your pages.
Stay tuned.
[music]
If you're new to content hubs, the reason
why they work well is because they help build
semantic relationships between content.
For example, if you had a page on keto dieting,
you might talk about what it is, what to eat,
the benefits of keto, and provide some recipes
or dietary guidelines.
Now, if you were to go into great depth about
all of these topics, then it'd be more like
reading a book rather than a page or post.
Instead, you can create other relevant guides
and internally link between pages.
This tells search engines that all the content
is related to the broader topic of keto.
Plus, having a logical structure to your content
provides a better user experience for visitors.
Now, there are 3 parts to content hubs and
the best way to explain it is with a diagram
from Hubspot.
First you have your hub, which they refer
to as pillar content.
This page will usually be either an in-depth
guide or a resource on a broad topic.
And we've already talked about the example
of a page on keto dieting.
The second part is your sub pages - or going
by Hubspot's name, cluster content.
These are separate pages that go in-depth
on a more specific part of your topic.
So an example might be "the side effects of keto."
And the third part is hyperlinks.
These are used to connect the hub to its subpages
and the subpages should also link back to the hub.
Now, the reason why this is so powerful from
an SEO standpoint is twofold.
First, you're building topical authority on
your site and building relationships between
the pages using internal links.
And second, when you get backlinks to any
page within the group of content, all pages
can benefit since they're strategically linked together.
So in theory, your pages should rank higher
together, helping you maximize search traffic
on a given topic.
Now, should everyone be using content hubs?
The answer is no.
Sometimes, you won't have enough topics
that fit into a broader topic.
This is especially true for micro-niche sites
like one about chicken coops.
But for a site about farming, you could probably
create multiple content hubs.
With that said, content hubs come in all shapes
and forms.
Kane Jamison from Content Harmony
put together a great post on this,
so I'll link that up in the description.
So for this tutorial, I'll be focusing on
using a big guide as your hub rather than
resource or category pages.
Alright, before we continue further, let's break down
a basic overview of an awesome content hub
created by Drift on the topic of chatbots.
If you look at the table of contents on the left,
you'll see they link to their subpages on this topic.
And scrolling through their ultimate guide,
you'll see they cover subtopics like
"How do chatbots work?"
Then they have a brief description and at
the bottom of that section, you'll see a link
that leads to a page that goes deeper on that topic.
And the same goes for the remaining sections
like "What are the benefits of chatbots?"
"Why are chatbots important?"
"How to create a chatbot," and so on.
Now, if you look at these subpages, you'll
see that they all link back to the hub page,
creating a nicely organized group of content.
And within around 7 months, they've gotten over
500 links from unique websites and rapid growth
to around 6,000 monthly search visits on
a topic directly related to their product.
So how can you start creating hubs for your site?
The first step is to start brainstorming ideas
for your hub pages.
And there are a few questions you should ask yourself
to determine whether it would be a good page or not.
First, you need to ask yourself how many
subtopics can fit under the main page?
You don't want your topic to be too narrow,
otherwise you won't have enough subtopics
to write about.
But at the same time, you don't want your
topic to be so broad that you have too many
posts that would go under it.
Aim to have somewhere in the ballpark range
of 5-20 pages that fit under the topic.
The second thing you should ask yourself is
does the topic have enough search volume?
And enough search volume is a subjective number
because it'll depend on your industry and niche.
But hub pages should be targeting popular
queries rather than long-tail queries.
For example, if you have a site on social
media marketing, you might want to create
a content hub around the query "facebook ads,"
which gets around 61,000 monthly searches in the US.
And there are a ton of topics that fit under
it like "how to use facebook ads manager,"
"how much do facebook ads cost," and
"facebook audience insights" to name a few.
You wouldn't want to create a hub around
something like "facebook ads coupons,"
which barely gets searched and is too narrow of a topic.
Finally, you should ask yourself, can I match
search intent by targeting the pillar topic?
Search intent means the reason behind
a searcher's query.
And you can find this out by looking at the
top 10 results for your target keyword.
For example, if we look at the top-ranking pages for
"facebook ads," you'll see it's a navigational query,
meaning most people who search this want
to actually reach the Facebook website.
But the search results also have informational
posts like these ones from Hootsuite, Buffer,
and Social Media Examiner, which are big guides
on Facebook ads.
Now, when it comes to choosing subpages,
you'll want to make sure that they're
highly relevant to your topic.
For example, "how to delete a facebook page" would
be too far off from the topic of "facebook ads."
Good subpages are those that give more information
about a related topic.
Oftentimes, that might be a subsection on
your pillar page, similar to the way that Drift
did it in their chatbots hub.
So let's build a content hub of our own and
we'll use yoga as our example niche since
it's a broad and popular topic.
So, step one would be to find topics that could
act as your hub or pillar page.
To start, I'll go to Ahrefs' Keywords Explorer
and search for a broad word like "yoga."
Next, I'll go to the Phrase match report.
And all I'm going to do here is look for queries that
a) have informational intent seeing as we're
creating a content hub;
and b) they're broad enough topics to house
many subtopics.
So I would ignore queries like "yoga near me,"
which is clearly a local query, and "yoga pants,"
which is a transactional query as you can tell
from the ecommerce pages in the SERP.
Now, something like "yoga poses" could be
a great top-level page since I know there are
a lot of pages that could fall under it.
Now, we need to find subtopics.
Since I don't know much about yoga, I'll go
to Google and search for "list of yoga poses."
Then I'll click on this result.
And there's a nice table here with the list of yoga poses.
So I've already copied the list, so I'll go ahead
and paste them into Keywords Explorer.
And now we have keyword metrics on all of these
which we can pick and choose for our subpages.
One final way to look for subpage ideas is
to look for your main topic in Wikipedia.
With the sheer volume of content Wikipedia has,
they have to organize it well for both
search engines and users.
In this case, you'll see a list of asanas,
which are basically yoga postures,
and then a table below showing you a ton
of different poses you could research
and potentially use in your content hub.
Now, I'd love to know if you're using content hubs
or plan to use them in your SEO and
content marketing strategy.
Let me know in the comments, and if you enjoyed
this video, make sure to like, share and subscribe
for more actionable SEO and marketing tutorials.
I'll see you in the next one.