In 2020, blog posts could still be a great asset for content marketing, but blog archives are a little behind the curve.
What I mean is that the traditional blogging organization does not meet the needs of a strategy of modern content marketing.
Think about it:
Let's say your content marketing strategy targets three different customer personalities, each with their own customer journey with corresponding targeted content. And you've been posting content targeted to these characters once a week, every week, and have been for two years.
With traditional blog archives, that would leave you with a long feed of over 100 blog posts organized in reverse chronological order, no matter who they are for or what they are used for.
You lanjust cing an endless stream of content among prospects and saying “find it yourself”.
It 's not the ideal experience for readers, is it?
Instead, there's a better way to organize content focused on personas, topics, and use cases, especially in highly competitive niches.
I'm talking about content hubs, and this article shows you how to get started with them.
How to create content hubs to cover competitive topicsDownload three useful templates to create content Hubs
This article includes a few different templates to help you implement each step of the hub building process. Here's what you'll need (and you'll find it in the template set below):
- TemplateMarketing Calendar: Plan project timelines and deadlines.
- Keyword Research Template: Store keyword ideas for your content hub.
- Content Auditing Template: Sort through the content you already have to find items that you can reuse.
About content hubs (and the spokes that support them)
What is a content hub?
Content hubs are simply a way to organize content that focuses organization around a topic or topic. 'a specific character instead of the publication dates.
By doing this, the same amount of content can have a bigger impact, both on SEO and on moving your reader throughout the journey you want for him.
Think of a wheel or a tire: the overall structure is madeslaughtered from a large, sturdy hub, with smaller, thinner spokes branching out to form shape and surface.
The concept is transferred directly to your content strategy.
Recommended Reading: Content Governance: How To Establish Processes That Build Great ContentIn a content hub, there is a piece of content which serves as a center or "welcome base" for a certain subject or a certain personality of the client. Then that is extended and supported by smaller, more specific pieces of content that branch out in different directions.
And they're all connected together in a way that creates a guided experience for the leads you're trying to attract and convert.
The advantages of creating content hubs
So what does this new method of organizing content have compared to the traditional way of organizing content? 'just have arindividual blog posts and a large archive?
- It organizes all of the content you've created on a topic into a focused, searchable collection. This way of consuming content is more user-friendly , especially when your brand has accumulated a lot of content on a given topic.
- It also attracts readers more easily, increasing the time they spend on your site and the amount of content that they consume. And with every item they click, you build more trust and authority.
- By displaying all of your brand's knowledge on a topic in a specific location, it is easier to become known, trusted and renowned on this subject. Sure, a dozen blog posts about their interest sounds awesome to your client, but a central hubalise (dare I say, an ultimate guide) to anything they would want to know about it sounds better.
- you organize your content around your customer journey , instead of the order in which it was written. You can put the content in the exact order your target customer wants the information to be included and reflect an actual conversation with your business.
- Content hubs strategically create internal backs between content on your site and typically involve one or more detailed content items and long. It all adds up to very satisfying SEO algorithms and increased search traffic.
Content hubs are one of those rare and wonderful things that appeal to bothto clients and algorithms, so it 's not I wonder that they have become a popular content marketing technique.
They allow you to present your content and authority in a way that puts it all in one place so that they both can easily integrate.
But for a content hub to do its job, it needs to be created strategically. Here's how to do it.
For a content hub to do its job, it needs to be created strategically.Before you begin: Hubs can get complex. Make sure you manage each step of the project well. In CoSchedule 's Marketing Suite , you can use the campaign management function to link all the different moving parts and keep your team on track.
How to create a content hub that attracts and conveysrtit
Step 1: Research your target keywords
The reason why content hubs can be so effective for SEO is that they create an interconnected content network that captures a mass of related keywords in its web trap.
But for that to happen, you need to do some keyword research to determine the structure of your hub.
A common approach to content hub targeting is:
- Use the hub itself to target more competitive and shorter keywords
- Use spokes to target more specific and longer keywords with less competition
Thanks to internal links, all will join forces to rank as many keywords around a certain subject as search engines and their users seehave the hub as an authority on it.
To start development for your website, first choose the keyword for your hub topic. It should be something general enough that you can cover it comprehensively from different angles, but specific enough that it doesn't attract an irrelevant audience or have something to do with your product.
To start building your website, first choose the keyword for your hub topic.
Then check the keyword data of these topics in an SEO tool to see how much volume and competition it generates. Your target keyword for the main hub may be one of your most competitive goals because it will be so comprehensive and frequently linked.
Once you've chosen a main keyword, you'll want to exploitFind all related keywords, topics and phrases that contain your keyword.
For example, if my hub were targeting "video content marketing ", some related keywords that I might be interested in might be:
- How to create a video content strategy
- Easy setup of video recording
- Video editing tool for beginners
- How to optimize YouTube video for search
- Converting YouTube subscribers to clients
(Assuming they have an attractive search volume and achievable difficulty level, of course.)
They all target different areas of video content marketing, attracting visitors of different awareness levels who would be at different stages of the buyer's journey .
Once you have your big list of target keywords, it's time to start organizing them inyour hub and your departments.
Recommended Reading: Actionable Content: How To Really Help Your Audience And Earn Their TrustStep 2: Choose Which Pages To Include
After the first step, you will have a fairly long list of keywords. Fortunately, you won't have to create a blog post or web page for each of them.
Instead, you start with this step to group them together. Think of this as determining the main branches of the spider web that emanate from the main theme in the center.
There are several options for choosing how to organize things:
- By subject: group and separate your keywords by subject or theme in the subject of your hub, by example by dividing a video content marketing guide by tools, strategy, promotion etc.
- By step: this option places the content in the order someone would need it by timeline or skill level, for example dividing that same video content marketing guide by planning, saving, editing and publishing the strategy.
- By intention level: this specifically examines where a person is in the buyer's journey, for example by grouping content into "considering video content", "using video content" and "maximizing return on investment video ”.
- By persona: Finally, you can organize the content by which of your personas is most interested in the 'information, separating what interests a content strategist from what a CMO would be looking for.
The organization of target keywords by topic or by stage is so mpler and require aless advanced targeting of your marketing strategy. But if theming things by intention level or persona will require more customer and SEO research, the increased content relevance will be worth it for your results.
Organizing target keywords by topic or by stage are simpler and require less advanced targeting of your marketing strategy.
Once you have grouped your target keywords into categories, each category can become a talk, section, or page in the content hub.
You'll want to address each of them as an individual project in terms of project management, then go to your marketing calendar and create a new project for each. You can also create a task template based on the instructions in the rest of this article.
Step 3: Design the hub and user experience
The next step is an important step to which you may not be used to for creating content like blog posts: mapping design and user experience.
Because content hubs contain so much content and so many interconnected posts and pages, the design and layout should guide the audience to where they want to go.
By example, take a look at the text CoSchedule Agile Marketing Guide :
This hub is organized by chapter, with many design and experience cues guiding people to the chapters or sections they need.
In addition to the easy navigation, there are designed images, embedded videos, and plenty of calls to action throughoutof each chapter before a link leading readers to the next.
Recommended Reading: How to Run Integrated Content Marketing Campaigns from Start to FinishWhen you create your brand's first content center, you'll want to work with your company's developers, designers, and user experience professionals to intentionally design what the hub and spokes will look like.
When you build your brand's first content center, you'll want to work with your business developers, designers, and user experience professionals.You can create a wireframe or general model that can be reused in different hubs and departments that you end up creating, so take some time to think about strategically to the flow of users you want people to adopt.
If you've never done a loop in designing and developing content projects before, be sure to add it as a step in your project management tool . This way you can use your Kanban board to easily track what has been passed to them.
Step 4: Structure your content and internal links
For a content center to rank for several competitive SEO keywords, it must be more than just quality content. Even more than quality design, even. Everything must be connected in a certain way.
In the last section, we talked about using chapters and their link to create a user flow. It is important for the user experience, but you needn of an additional structure on top of that.
For example, compare the two hypothetical content hub structures below, with arrows symbolizing links. One of the links for the feed, but the other has links for the feed and SEO:
In addition to ' include internal links to the "next " section in the content hub, other structural elements to consider before starting to create content:
- Create header and sub-sections dedicated to specific long-tail keywords
- Link to topic you have dedicated spokes when mentioned in other areas
- Include and reuse content you have already created on your blog
- Create section summaries or PDF version for short-term readers
- Add prompts to action for the best next step in your customer journey allthroughout the content
The more planning and thinking ah If you do, the easier content creation will be in the next step. And content hubs require a lot of content, so you'll want to take advantage of whatever efficiency you can save.
The more you plan and think ahead, the easier it will be to create content in the next step.Step 5: Create and publish content for your hub
It's finally time to create content for your hub.
And right now, let me answer the question I know you are asking yourself: no, you don 't have to create and publish all the departments and content to the time. Phew!
This is where organized project management will make it easier.
As long as you carefully follow what has been done and what remains to be done, you can easilypublish the different parts of your content center over the course of a month or so in place of your regular blog content.
Anytime you would normally post a blog post or video, post a new section or talk about your content center, then promote or distribute it like you would regular content. ". Post it on social media, email it to your newsletter subscribers, and whatever else you'd like to do anyway.
But on top of that, you'll also want to make sure that as each new department is put into service, you connect it to the bigger hub. This means that every time a new department is added you will probably have to go back to old posts and add new internal links, update the hub center or table of contents, etc.
To keep track of all this, assureMake sure you add to -dos for all that post-release work in your task t and don't completely close a project until it has all the links and edits it needs.
You also want to make sure that you incorporate the content that you have already created.
Not only does it save you time and effort, it's also more consistent when all of your content on a topic is in the hub and none of it lives outside of the hub. -this. If you have existing content on a topic, consider moving it to the statement for which it is relevant and redirecting the previous URL to that argument.
Finally, don 't forget to take the rest of your site into account when posting and logging in.
Recommended Listening: How to Create the Go-To Content Hub in Your Niche with GetResponse's Krista Wiltbank [AMP 034]Do not forget to add links to the hub, toboth the overall structure as well as individual spokes, of the rest of your website. For example, you can enjoy the site navigation and footer, your blog sidebar, etc.
Other real-life examples you can follow
Now you have an idea of what people might mean when they describe a content hub, and you've seen a handful examples of what each might look like. Then take a closer look at even more examples and understand what sets each one apart.
Musician 's Friend
The Musician ' s Friend blog is literally called The Hub , and it provides a place for all their guides to purchase, publications, videos, etc.
More than just a blog, it also features entire views, product demos and more.ypes of content. They put it to good use to host content that they can access directly from product category and product line pages:
REI
Outdoor gear retailer REI hosts tons of useful handy content in their Expert Advice . Here is an overview of the main page navigation, which includes links to different areas and interests that someone might be looking for:
Scrolling down brings up an organized collection of popular content:
SB Nation
Popular sports press briefing SB Nation features tons of targeted sports blogs , leagues and specific teams.Each of these elements can be seen as a hub in itself, helping to create a large number of micro-communities that allow them to provide targeted niche coverage:
Burpee
Seed and gardening supplies company Burpee forgoes a traditional blog in favor of hosting its educational content in a hub well organized :
Microsoft AI
Another way to think about creating a hub is to create a subsection of your blog that is entirely focused on a niche or create a secondary blog that achieves this objective . Take a look at Microsoft AI Blog :
Another way to think about creating a hub is to create a subsection of your blog who 'sse focuses entirely on a single niche.
AirBnB
AirBnB applies the hub co content except at their homepage, curat resources and information on specific destinations elsewhere on their site:
Lyft
Carpool service Lyft gathers their news and content from their community under The Hub . It offers drivers a place to go to find information useful, like their driver's guide, upcoming events, etc.
IBM
IBM 's Research Center brings together all the different types of content which are all related to show what they are doing through search tip.
Time to get started and be competitive
Content hubs are essential for playing on crowded terrain. And as you can see , these aren't small projects. But by planning it strategically and leveraging what you have, you can take it slow and take the time to do it well.
Ben Sailer contributed to this post.
April 15, 2020
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