One of the problems small business owners often present to us is how to rank for a keyword in their area. Unfortunately, there’s no single or easy way to approach search engine optimization for a keyword, but it doesn’t mean you’re facing an impossible task. Instead, optimization requires looking at things through a different perspective. And one of the ways I look at keyword ranking is through the hub and spoke content model.
I love the hub and spoke content strategy because it doesn’t require you to necessarily add new content, or reinvent the wheel for your website (no pun intended). All you need is to look at the content on your site — whether it’s a landing page, blog posts, or any other pages — and find the logical way to organize it all together.
What is a Hub and Spoke Content Model?
Think of a hub and spoke content model like a wheel. At the end of each wheel spoke is foundational content that demonstrates your expertise on a specific topic. All of those spokes connect to a hub in the center, which is a collection of all the related content.
Just like a wheel, spokes, and hub all work together to reinforce the wheel as it turns, the purpose of the content hub is to reinforce your expertise around one topic. With all of your content collected on a single hub page, you are linking it all together in a way that makes sense for your audience and search engines, thus improving your rankings for the keywords you want to be visible in — including your striking distance keywords.
Let’s pause for a moment of truth: SEO takes time. There is no immediate way to improve your rankings overnight. That being said: In every situation where we have implemented a hub and spoke content model, we’ve seen ratings increase dramatically over time.
Here’s an example from one of our clients: A home services company wants to improve their rankings for specific cities their offices serve. While building a local landing page for each city in their service area (the spokes), each of them link back to the respective office’s page (the hub) with the keyword “HVAC, Plumbing, and Electrical Service in [Office Location]”. By building a hub page with links to and from each of the location pages, the company is now ranking higher in local search, resulting in better qualified traffic and “Contact Us” conversions.
Two Kinds of Hub and Spoke Content Models
When you look at hub and spoke content models, there are two primary options to consider. The first fits easily into your current website architecture, while the second requires a little more work to identify complementary content. The result of both approaches are very similar: Better rankings for the concept and keywords you are targeting.
The Descriptive Navigation Hub
Building the “Descriptive Navigation Hub” is an easier model to implement because it requires less work overall. This hub and spoke content model relies on the navigation already at the top of your site. In order to start ranking for a keyword, we add that word (or words) to your top-level navigation, and support it with a hub page and spokes linking back to that page.
In turn, every page on your site now links to the Descriptive Navigation Hub and the supporting content on there, which can increase your rankings. This creates a lot of internal link authority for that keyworded page, telling the search engine that you have valuable content that a user wants to read.
While this is an easy way to create a hub and spoke model for your site, it does come with a downside. Although you will have supporting content linking into that page, not every page on your site has relevant content to link back to. This could diminish the full ranking potential for that page because you aren’t building a single page dedicated to that topic alone.
The True hub and spoke Content Strategy
While the Description Navigation Hub can be viewed as the “brute force” method of the hub and spoke content model, the true hub and spoke strategy works for the opposite reason of the Descriptive Navigation Hub: All of the content on the page is directly related to the keyword topic.
With a true hub and spoke content strategy, you are building one page related to the keyword you want to rank for. From there, you add links to the relevant reinforcing pages, and back from those pages to the hub. The result is a boost to link authority to the content you are already performing well for, along with a better user experience, consolidating the relevance and signaling to search engines you are an authority on that topic.
The downside of the true hub and spoke content strategy is that you may not have a deep well of content to draw from when building your hub. However, there are ways to change that for the better — we’ll get to that at the bottom of this blog.
Why do hub and spoke Content Models Work?
There are two main reasons why hub and spoke content models work. First, you are improving your rankings based on your best performing content through the power of internal linking. By creating links that point back to one hub page focused on that topic, and making sure they are all interlinked in a way that makes sense, you’re saying to users and search engines that this is the section of my site that is all about the keyword topic — thus improving search ratings.
The other reason why hub and spoke content models work is because they are great for user experience. If you’re a blog reader that comes across a post about a topic, and you can’t find the related page elsewhere on the site where you can read more, that’s not a good user experience. But if you have a really good link or call to action that’s right there in the blog post to read more, you’re creating a more engaged reader. It helps you funnel users further into your website, into other parts of the site you want them to get to, leading them to learn about you and ultimately convert.
How Do I Start Building a hub and spoke Content Model?
If you’re ready to start building your own hub and spoke content model, there are some easy-to-use SEO tools you can use to get started. First, consider the keyword you want to rank for and determine what content or web pages you have to reinforce the topic. There are three ways you can do this:
- Google Search: Go to google.com and search “site:yourwebsite.com” (where “yourwebsite.com” is your actual domain name) along with the keyword. This will show you what content the search engine thinks is relevant and ranking, giving you a base to get started.
- Google Search Console: While it can sometimes produce conflicting results, Google Search Console shows you the clicks and impressions you’ve earned from organic search. Use the “queries” section and filter the keyword you are looking for — the result will be your best performing content.
- Google Analytics: Using your landing page report, Google Analytics will show you the pages where users enter your website. This can be used to create content hubs, and find pages you might not have known were performing well.
When you’re ready to create a larger hub and spoke content strategy for your website and discover how it can help you get results, we’re here to start the conversation. Drop us a line to learn how using the web pages you have and building new content can result in a better SEO and a better user experience.
Ed. note: You’ll notice that this blog is full of links that offer additional information about local SEO and how to make it come alive. This blog, in fact, is part of our own hub and spoke strategy. The fact that you found it proves that it works.