We all know what a Ferris wheel or a bike wheel looks like – the hub is the round bit right in the centre, and the spokes point outward (or inward, depending on your perspective) from it. In Hub & Spoke content (also known as the ‘Cluster Model’ marketing) the hub is the main topic that you want to create more authority around, and the spokes are supporting content helping to boost your credibility and traffic around that topic. Make sense?
So in Hub & Spoke content marketing campaigns, you need to create both a hub page, and multiple spoke pages to help increase how relevant you are seen to be by the search engines on a particular topic.
Why is Hub & Spoke Content Marketing important?
The Hub & Spoke content model, when done well, shows that you know the topic in depth. This helps establish your website as an authority on the subject, and when visitors come to your website, they’ll spend more time with you, and are more likely to convert into a lead or customer.
How does Hub & Spoke work for SEO?
Hub & Spoke content campaigns are great for giving your SEO strategy real focus. Rather than trying to get individual posts and pages to rank for competitive keyphrases, you work on improving the visibility of the entire hub of content, with highly relevant and good quality copy
What makes Hub & Spoke different from other marketing campaigns?
Most business blogs are full of disconnected posts all vaguely related to the same broad subject. Hub & Spoke content is designed and organised in a way that is much more focused, and effective than this. By interlinking the pages, and creating a logical URL hierarchy, you can demonstrate to the search engines and your visitors that you have a catalogue of knowledge on the topic they are looking for.
How do you create a Hub & Spoke Campaign?
Step 1: Research your keywords
Notice, our first step is not ‘decide on your topic’. We’re going to let keyword research decide for us. By carrying out detailed research you should figure out what focus your hub page should have, and have a list of long-tailed keyphrases for what your spoke pages should be about that stem from your hub topic.
Step 2: Look at the content you already have
The little marketer secret that is about to make your life so much easier: your spoke pages don’t need to be new content! If you already have blogs, articles, videos and pages that cover topics that would expand on your hub page, then repurpose them as spoke pages.
Step 3: Create new content
Even the most meticulously planned and arranged Hub & Spoke strategy will fail if the content is poor quality, so you need to make sure that the copy on all of your pages is engaging, well-written, and full of useful information.
Step 4: Make sure your links make sense
The way that you organise the Hub & Spoke content on your site using internal links, and hierarchical URLs is what turns it from a batch of articles into a structured campaign. So for example, if your hub page is on ‘Wedding Planning’ and one of your spoke pages was ‘how to choose flowers’, your URLs might be www.website.com/wedding-planning and www.website.com/wedding-planning/how-to-choose-flowers. You would also create links between the pages.
Step 5: Promote all of the pages
You then need to tell people the pages exist, so use social media, email marketing, and adverts if you have the budget to draw people into all of the different pages on your wheel.
Step 6: Track and Improve
Keep an eye on the pages, see what is doing well and what needs improved, and gradually you’ll see the fruits of your labour.
For help creating your own Hub & Spoke campaign plan and content, get in touch.
