What are the benefits of creating a content hub for your brand?

22 Dec

Content hubs have superhero powers for brands in establishing online authority and to grow online presence. They help to showcase expertise and can also be used to improve a brand’s findability in organic search results.

Let’s dig a bit deeper into what a content hub is and how you can create one for your brand.

What is a content hub?

A content hub is a collection of webpages organised by topics that sit under one wider broad theme. The (content) opportunities are endless - they can consist of articles, videos, infographics, and other formats that provide in-depth knowledge and information. Content hubs, when created correctly, can help brands become an authority in a specific – but relevant -topic. Why? Because they help to show expertise to users (and Google), as well as build topical authority to help dominate SERPs for multiple informational keywords.

What is the difference between hub and hero content?

To clear up any confusion, the main difference between hub content and hero content is that they target different stages of the consumer journey. Let’s break this down further…

Hub content provides useful information, that’s usually evergreen, to improve a brand’s online findability and to help customers through the consideration stage.

And hero content is usually big campaigns that help build brand fame to reach new customers at the top of the funnel.

Why should you create a content hub for your brand?

There are oodles of benefits to creating a content hub for your website. We’ve wrapped them up into the following list:

As well as increasing your brand’s online visibility, informational content also provides an opportunity to reach more of your target audience and grow your overall organic traffic.
Giving users more opportunity to positively interact with your brand will improve engagement and generate loyal customers.
Content hubs can also capture potential customers during their consideration stage and if executed well content could help you generate leads and sales.
Creating onsite hub content is a great way to differentiate yourself from your competitors. Good content helps to demonstrate your expertise and encourages uses to trust your brand.

How to build a content hub

We’re making this nice-and-easy for you. Here are five steps to building a content hub:

Step one: start with your core topic(s)

To help you narrow your focus and identify key themes, start with a storyplanning (psst we hate the word brainstorm, but in case you wondered what we meant…) session.

Think about the following:

Buyer personas: who are your audience and what kind of questions would they likely be asking?
You’ll have tonnes of data and insight at your fingertips so speak to your sales teams to identify customer pain points. What type of content will help solve their problems?
Customer feedback: take a look at your reviews to identify any common themes. What’s being said on social?
Competitors: what themes and topics do your competitors cover in their content? Where are there obvious gaps?

The number of core topics you need will vary depending on your business, the industry, and the scope of the hub you’re creating. Sometimes, one topic is enough to produce lots of search-led content.

But, if you feel that you need to cover more in order to showcase your expertise, then you could consider 2-5 core themes. The key however, is to not dilute your expertise by covering too many topics - you can’t know everything, about everything.

Step two: identify your subtopics

Once you’ve decided on your core topic(s), the next step is to look at what subtopics will support it. Subtopics should be relevant to your core topic and useful to your audience - a keyword research will help you with this step. Simply, add your core topic as a keyword into the search bar and your tool should give you a list of keyword groupings. Review these groups to identify key subthemes.

Once you’ve finalised your subtopics, you can then begin to think about how to structure these to make a hub on your website.

At this point of talking about core topics and sub-topics, we thought this diagram might be a useful, visual reference…

Step three: conduct keyword research

Using your subtopics as seed keywords, you can then conduct your full keyword research using a keyword tool such as SEMrush or Ahrefs. Tackle one subtopic at a time, and make sure you’re pulling out all the informational keyword opportunities. It’s important to map out your keywords to your subtopics – we’d recommend doing this in an excel or Google sheet format.

Step four: review your existing content

Google hates duplicate content, really hates it. If you have two pages with the same content, Google can’t determine which one is more important, so can often drop both from its index. To avoid creating multiple versions of the same page, review your existing content. Is there anything that you can optimise and move to the content hub? You may also want to remove any low-quality content that is not performing in organic search.

Tip! If moving blog pages to a content hub, the URL structure will need to change too. So, make sure you add 301 redirects to prevent traffic loss.

Step five: create a content plan

Once you have all your keywords and a list of your existing content, you can map out a full content plan. For this, go through your list of keywords and manually check what type of content is already ranking in Google’s SERPs. Reviewing what content is already ranking is a great way to understand what content will best serve the user intent. What content do the top ranking pages have? Is it an infographic, an article, or a video?

Once you’ve established the most suitable content type, the next step is to create an H1 title for each page based on the top performing content in SERPs. Map these out against your subtopics and keywords.

Tip! Find an effective way to document your content plan. We’d recommend using an excel format or Google sheets to map out content titles to target keywords. This is a great way to stay organised, track performance, and make sure each piece of content has a set of target keywords.

Once you have a finalised content plan, you can begin to roll out the creation phase.

Creating a content hub will help your website and brand become a trusted source of information, in the eyes of Google and your audience. Rolling out useful content is great for your user’s experience, helps to build topical authority, and provides an opportunity to dominate SERPs and grow organic traffic. Now off you go…

Guest User