What is a content hub? According to terakeet, it is an online destination with curated content focusing on a central topic and sub-topics. OrbitMedia claims that the best-centralized content hubs have large bodies of topic-specific, high-quality, interconnected content.
Essentially, they satisfy targeted information needs for their audiences. The SEO benefits of having one include more search traffic, increased authority and trustworthiness, more sales leads, additional backlinks, and a stronger, more successful brand.
How to Build a Content Hub: Formats
Content Harmony splits content hubs into five categories, and these can provide frameworks for your own content hubs. One of the most prevalent formats is the hub & spoke, a parent page format that utilizes 5 to 20 subpages.
Most of this content should be evergreen, but the subpages don't have to change that often. A library format sorts large amounts of website content into categories. It highlights evergreen and fresh content, so it works well for sites with a lot of content covering a wide variety of subtopics that you cannot sort quickly or efficiently.
A topic matrix content hub has consistent subpages or parent pages covering all of its content. This type of page is also for a high content volume and can be very deep or wide. One example of topic matrix content hubs is medical sites; there might be a series of many diseases and condition pages that are hubs with subpages for symptoms, treatments, and medications.
A topic gateway format differs from a classic blog category page; these have a page of static content that summarizes the topic and links to subcategories. Many Wikipedia pages look like this, where users click on internal links that encourage them to keep browsing. The last format is the content database model, which features hundreds or thousands of sortable, filterable "child" pages.
Content Hub SEO
Perficient explains that "there is no substitute for good writing," and this theory of quality applies to your visual content as well. Dedicated subject matter experts can help you create content, but you also need to understand your pages' search intents.
The four main categories for this are informational (to get answers to questions), navigational (searches for particular webpages), commercial investigation (shopping for products), and transactional (when searchers are ready to make purchases). Content hubs should reflect user intent; this way, they find out what they need to know when they get there.
Prepare your content wisely, and optimize it further by including keywords, tags, URLs, applicable schema, great meta descriptions, and everything else that will make your content rank higher with search engines.
Exciting, unique ideas that align with content increase traffic, so if you are using stock photos, be sure to check how many others have already used it. Content hubs with images and onsite and offsite links have more value for users.
Some Final Remarks About Content Hubs
To maximize a content hub with the best SEO strategies, you must pick and choose a structure and stay with it, or users will get lost and frustrated. You can build up the content over time; important information that does not change, like the measurements for a standard king-sized bed, can stay there but can be refreshed. The rest should be timely and valuable for your target audiences.
Content hubs should be well-organized and have diverse yet interconnected assets. Besides written content, they need visual media like photos, infographics and videos to keep users engaged. Citing authoritative sources and providing various topics and subtopics is the critical strategy. Think about this: who wants to read medium-quality blog posts that are all about the same thing? Not us!
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