In the ever-evolving landscape of digital marketing, the confluence of SEO and content marketing has emerged as a powerhouse for driving traffic and establishing authority. Welcome to 'An Easy-to-Follow Guide to Building Strategic Pages to Maximize Both SEO and Content Marketing', an insider's blueprint crafted by the seasoned marketing experts at Whitehat. This guide is not just a walkthrough; it’s a masterclass in strategically designing content hubs that blend the art of content marketing with the science of SEO. Imagine a site that, at first glance, appears to be a typical page but, upon closer inspection, reveals a meticulously planned structure that attracts links, accelerates organic traffic, and cements authority on the topic.
Today, we're not just sharing our secret sauce; we're handing you the recipe. Whether you're grappling with the nuances of semantic relationships in content or seeking to transform your pages into a cohesive, ranking powerhouse, this guide is your compass.
Dive in as we dissect the anatomy of a successful content hub, illustrate its impact through real-world examples, and provide you with the tools to replicate this success. It’s time to turn your content into your greatest digital asset.
The site below 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. The result is a ton of links to their pages, rapid growth and organic traffic, and becoming an authority on the topic.
Today, we will show you how to create your content hub and maximise search traffic to your pages.
The reason why they work well is that 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 already 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 internal links 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.
There are three parts of the 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 subpages 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".
The third is the Hyperlinks. These are used to connect the hub to its subpages and the sub-pages should also link back to the hub.
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. 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.
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 the one about chicken coops, but for a site about farming, you could probably create multiple content hubs. With that said, that content hubs come in all shapes and forms. Kane Jamison from content harmony put together a great post on this.
In this article, we will be focusing on using a big guide as your hub rather than resource at category pages.
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.
Scrolling through their ultimate guide, you'll see they cover sub topics like "How do chatbots work?" Then they give a brief description.
At the bottom of that section, you'll see a link that leads to a page that goes deeper on that topic.
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.
If you look at these sub-pages, you'll see that they all link back to the hub page creating a nicely organized group of content. Within around seven 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.
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. Ask yourself the following questions:
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.
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.