Using content hubs to increase traffic to your small business website

One of the biggest website crimes many small businesses commit is creating a small website with no plan on how they will attract customers.

With no new content added, or new pages added sporadically their Google Analytics traffic skirts along the bottom of the chart.

The good news is, there are multiple ways you can attract visitors to your website.

In this article, we give a full overview of one of our favourite methods: content hubs for SEO.

What are content hubs?

A content hub is a group of interlinked pages on your website that cover a range of topics around an overarching theme.

Rather than target keywords (search terms) in isolation, you create a series of web pages around the broader topic, with each page targeting a different search term and different search intent.

The power of content hubs comes from interlinking the pages, this helps both users and search engines find all the pages in the hub.

Let’s explore the benefits of content hubs in more detail.

What are the benefits of content hubs for SME websites?

Provide focus for your content creation

Content hubs are a great way of giving you focus for your website content creation. Rather than struggling with ideas on what to write next, they’ll provide a catalyst for content ideas.

Search engines love content hubs

Search engines also love content hubs. When you get the internal link right search engines can more easily find all the pages of your hub.

Working this way also passes “link juice” between pages, so if one page in your hub starts attracting links from other websites, it will pass on the benefits of this to the other pages. All of this adds up to a better performance in search engine results.

Provide amazing value for your website visitors

Most importantly of all content hubs provide more value for your website visitors as they can explore a range of information around the topic they are interested in.

Rather than visit one page and then leave your site to learn more about the topic they were searching for, they can easily and quickly explore your content hub to get all the information they need or make a purchase.

As well as these more direct benefits, a well-curated content hub will establish you as a thought leader in your industry. This in turn builds trust which helps strengthen your brand.

Another secondary benefit is the myriad of other content you can create from your hub pages.

Just one in-depth article can provide numerous tweets and content for LinkedIn and Facebook.

What is search intent? Search intent is a term used to describe what people aim to achieve when using search engines. The most common types of search intent are: navigational, informational, commercial, and transactional

What is link juice? Link juice refers to the idea that links from web pages pass a positive signal to search engines that the content being linked to is good quality. “Link Juice” is generated when an external site links to yours, but this can be passed on to some degree to other pages on your site when they are interlinked. This internal linking is what makes content hubs strong as “link juice” is distributed across all pages.

How to create content hubs

Creating a content hub is all about identifying themes and then generating sub-topic ideas grouped into categories that reflect their purpose.

As well as generating topic ideas, selecting the right format for your content is equally important. This can include blog posts, videos, podcasts, infographics, and more.

The key is to choose the right format for your content and ensure it’s high-quality and valuable to your target audience.

There are three stages to creating a content hub:

1. Identifying topics and themes
2. Developing a content plan
3. Promoting the content hub

Let’s look at each of these in more detail…

1. Identifying themes and topics

There are numerous ways you can get ideas for your content hub and plenty of tools to help you.

Ask your customers

Without a doubt, the best source of information for your website content is your customers.

So, if you already have a customer base the first thing to do is ask them about their information needs. The best way to do this is through surveys and focus groups.

Some questions you could ask include:

• What do you wish you knew before buying “product name”?
• What are your main considerations when buying “product name”?
• What are the features you are most interested in?

It’s also a good idea to review your customer support tickets too. These will highlight important areas where your customers lack information about your industry or products.

Forums

Forums around your industry are an amazing source of information for your business and marketing.

People go to sites like Reddit to ask questions when stuck, compare different products, or highlight things (good or bad) about your products.

Use keyword research tools

After reviewing your customer information, you’ll have an excellent list of topics you can cover. The next step is to expand this list using keyword research. These tools will provide the exact queries your customers are typing into search engines. You can refine your existing list of topics and identify new ones.

Some of our favourite free and low-cost tools include:

• Google Trends
• Google keyword planner
• Answer the public.

This article on the Ahrefs blog has some more excellent suggestions: https://ahrefs.com/blog/free-keyword-research-tools/

2. Develop your content plan

Once you have your long list of theme ideas your next job is to start grouping them and putting a plan in place.

We like to use a simple two-level framework that includes your overarching theme, then the sub-topics beneath this grouped into categories that reflect their purpose.

The idea of the categories is to ensure you‘re covering a range of content in your hub. We like to use:

• Informational
• Inspirational
• Relatable
• Commercial

You can then use these to generate article ideas based on your research from stage one.

Here’s an example:

Industry: Higher education

Theme: Student life

Educational: “Top tips for freshers week”
Inspirational: “How to balance study with a social life”
Relatable: “A day in the life of a chemistry student”

Getting the balance right

Using categories like this will also provide a valuable way to ensure you don’t overdo it in one area.

For example, you don’t want too many commercial pages, or you might find the balance is off between inspirational and informational content.

Covering a variety of categories also helps you:

1. cover a range of search topics, which is great for SEO,
2. by providing a great range of content that can be used on social media,
3. and ensure your website visitors get a variety of relevant messaging.

How many pages should be in your content hub?

The answer here is it depends. The size of the theme you’re covering and the resources you have come into play.

As a small business, we recommend aiming for around 10-12 pages as a starting point.

How many content hubs should you create?

This is the beauty of content hubs, you can create as many as you need (while still providing value). The key is to make sure the theme and sub-topics you’re covering a relevant to your business.

3. Promoting your content hub

A well-curated and written content hub targeting low-competition keywords will rank well in search engines.

However, to get real growth you need to promote your content.

Social media

Your content hub has the added benefit of providing a wealth of content for your social media channels. But rather than just post a link to each page, you can take snippets, ideas, and graphics from each page into individual posts.

One content hub page could easily provide over ten social media posts.

Advertising

The smaller pieces of content can also be used in social media advertising. And you can also drive traffic to your hub with search ads targeting the keywords you’re aiming to rank for.

Outreach

You can also interact in forums and share links to your content. This has to be in a natural way and where it’s actually helpful to the discussion. No spammy dumping of links!

You can also start an email outreach effort and contact relevant trade websites, bloggers, etc and let them know about your new content. You could also look for collaborations and guest posting opportunities.

Examples of successful SEO content hubs

Ahrefs local SEO content hub

Here’s a great example by Ahrefs (an SEO software provider) with a content hub on local SEO.

In this example you can see the main focus is on educational and instructional content types, providing a helpful resource for their customers.

Nerd Wallet mortgage content hub

Here’s another good example, this time from Nerd Wallet.

They cover a range of finance topics but this one is focussed on mortgages.

They provide tools, how-to guides, and lists of the best providers; it’s a really comprehensive content hub that gives visitors everything they need on the topic of mortgages.