Content Hubs: How to Create and Optimize your Topic Clusters

Welcome to a new edition of Crawling Mondays. In this case, it's the edition dedicated to content hubs. What are content hubs? I imagine that many of you have heard about it and have tried to apply them, but are you really doing it well in a consistent way that is actually cost-effective and makes sense for your content strategy? And to talk about this, I have invited a couple of people who are very focused on this topic.

Hi, Aleyda.

She is the SEO content writer and strategist at Send It Copy. It's a pleasure to have you here, Chima.

Thank you so much for having me, Aleyda.

And Andy Chadwick. Andy is the co-founder of Snippet Digital and also the Keywords Insights tool. Hello, Andy. How are you?

Hey, Aleyda. Good, thank you. Very happy to be here.

To start, let's clarify what is a content hub and what is not. And when does it actually make sense to use content hubs in our content strategy? And how does it align in the content optimization efforts in the SEO process?

What a content hub is, is like a repository for similar content that's all related to a certain topic or certain topics, and they all can be interrelated. What I wanted to make clear what it's not and what I see, I did a little Googling before this and I looked at the first 3 and the second 3, and both of them differed in what it was. So for me anyway, a content hub can be many things and there's different approaches to that content hub. You can have topic clusters is the most commonly thought of one. And that's where I think some people get it wrong is topic clusters and this hub and spoke model, which a lot of people speak about, is an example of a content hub, but it's not a, it's not just the only content hub. You can have like topic gateways, you can have content libraries. There's other versions of a content hub. But what we most commonly think about is this idea of these topic clusters, which I think I'll go into a bit later, but quite simply, it's one long piece of content, generally speaking, your hub, which links out to your spokes. But that is just one example of a content hub. There's other ones depending on your niche, depending on your website, depending on the context of your audience, that might not always be the best way to form your content hub.

Already thinking about building a content hub, then that means that you believe that content should not exist in a vacuum, that every piece of content that you're creating should link to something else. That is like where that idea of building a content hub comes from. But I'll have to disagree with Andy because every time I think of content hubs, I'm thinking topic clusters. It's the same principle. You have content pieces that are talking about the same topic, the same overhead topic in a hub. The hub is what I usually see most cases is like a landing page. And then let's say the topic is— Sales pipeline, and then you have what is a sales pipeline. You have types of sales pipeline. You have sales pipeline stages. You have all these other content pieces, very exhaustive, comprehensive standalones. But all of them are talking about one topic, and then they're just on that page. And HubSpot really does that well too. Similar strategy. And then you can click to learn about what a sales pipeline is, and then when you finish, you come back and then you click to learn about the next topic. Basically, the idea is that. By the time you finish reading all of those content pieces in that hub, you become super knowledgeable about that topic. If that isn't a topic cluster, then I don't know what it is. No matter how you're looking at building the hub, it's still following the approach of related content pieces. That is the core of what a hub is.

Of course, a hub can take many formats depending on the type of content it will make sense So for example, to have even a category-like main page, pillar page, link to the more specific content that will go into the details.

Just to give 2 examples, because I know, as I said, Chima, I think the hub and spoke is definitely the most common and that's what most people associate. But to give an example of what I mean by that content hub could come in 2 different formats. To me, very top-level definition of a content hub is like-minded content that all talks around a similar topic. Normally and most commonly this is the hub and spoke model. But if we take one of my clients who sells steel doors, we've got 2 different types of content hubs on his site. We've got the hub and spoke model where we have, and this typically resides as an editorial or his blog section. These are things like everything you need to know about fire regulations, a hub page, which links out to fire exits and everything you need to know, which links out to fire signs and everything, you know, which links out to fire extinguishers and everything you need to know. We've got a hub page and all the spokes, but then we've got, because he's got a lot of branded traffic as well. A lot of people search for, how do I install a Ladham steel door? How do I install this rain deflector? These are very much FAQ type questions. And this hub and spoke model wouldn't really work in the same way. So we have an FAQ section, but I think the content hub is more of an idea of information architecture rather than an actual sort of other type of theory. So our FAQ section, we've got all the questions and guides to do with installing a door. all the questions are guides to do with maintaining a door. They interlink fine, but there's not one hub piece because it's just residing within a category. To me, that is another type of content hub, which isn't a hub and spoke. It's just similar content around installing a door. It's revolved around branding. It's not just FAQs for the sake of creating it for users. We still have to outrank our competitors who are trying to steal our traffic. So to me, that's another version of a content hub is this FAQ type thing, which if you over-intellectualize this, and I've seen it done, they'll be going, oh no, we need to make one hub for thing about how to install a door and then link our feature one about how— I was like, well, no, that doesn't make sense from a user point of view. It's not user-friendly. If someone lands on this, you literally just want each question to be answered in some nice category. It made sense for the editorial section. It didn't make sense for the FAQ. So that's what I mean about there being this idea of hub and spoke is definitely the most common and 100% go with it, especially with editorial sections. But there's not always, you know, this is where I think Aleyda said it nicely at the beginning. Some people over-intellectualize it and try and struggle to put this hub and spoke in, which sometimes it doesn't need to be that. It just needs to be, let's keep similar content in one place. An FAQ section being one of those examples.

Yes, it can take different, let's say, variations depending on the nature. The goal at the end is the same, right? To connect with the way that the people search, to establish authority, to allow the user to dig through the concept from a very broad level at the start and then allow them to start digging through into more specific areas and particular subtopics. So this is one very typical mistake that I see, especially commercially driven websites overlooking and thinking that these hubs and spokes that are not necessarily commercially driven are a waste of time or waste of effort. I imagine that you have seen many more of these and different types of mistakes. What are they? And most importantly, how do you overcome them?

Funnily enough, Aleyda, that was the reason. The exact example you've just given was how Keyword Insights was born. We had a client who sold luxury mattresses, an American client, and they came to Snippet Digital because they were like, all of our traffic is coming into our blog section and we want them to be going straight to our transactional pages. Can you help us? And we did a big keyword research. I think we had 8,000 keywords in the end and we took out any keywords that were definitely going to trigger blogs or editorial sections or guides. So we took out any keyword with how, why versus guide to. Took out all of those, so we were left with what we were what we thought would be transactional keywords, right? You know, just memory foam mattresses or king size. We just left them the ones that we normally would typify as as transactional. And then when we started spot checking, I think we spot checked about fifty of them, fifty out of eight thousand of them. And out of the fifty we checked, overwhelmingly sixty to seventy percent of the the top results were editorials. It was best memory foam mattress for back pain. Top 20 memory foam mattresses of this year, king-size mattress versus queen-size mattress, everything you need to know. That's what ranked for these transactional terms. And we couldn't— I mean, they paid us a bit of money, so we couldn't go back to them and go, look, out of the 8,000 keywords, we've spot-checked 50 of them, your blogs are going to rank. So one of the biggest things with Keyword Insights is it pulls in the intent of each. We pre-trained a model because we thought, how can we do this over 8,000 keywords to show him you need your editorial section? So we came up with Keyword Insights as an internal tool originally. And we went back to them and said, look, with all the will in the world, all the keywords you want, at least 60 to 70% of them, even the transactional ones trigger editorial long-form articles and guides. We'd love to take your retainer and help you do this, but you know, you're just going to have to make the user journey between your content and your transactional pages better. There's nothing else you can do here. We'll let you know when the intent changes because we can track that. But at the moment, the intent is such that you're just gonna have to go Get your head down and make that user journey better. And Shopify are a great example of a company that do this. I typed in the other day digital products for sale, which is a transactional term. The top thing that ranked was a Shopify article, top 6 digital products to sell in 2021. And as I was scrolling, really good guide, but everywhere call to action, start selling your Shopify now, start doing this. It was really good, that user journey there. So yeah, funnily enough, that was an example of a how we came about.

I think I learned everything about content hubs by experimenting. And the first mistake I saw was writing the parent topic first. That's like the biggest mistake. So you need to write all of those other content pieces first, and then write whatever is going to be at the top last, because I realized that when you write the first, the parent topic first, it's going to start ranking for all those other secondary keywords they are trying to rank for. And then those pages have like 10% chance of making it to ranking for anything at all. So that's like the biggest mistake I see a lot of people making and something to avoid. Write the parent topic last and the subtopic first. And then another one I see that really gets on my nerve is people who focus on only keywords that have search volume. I had a client that had to drop— it's a big red flag for me actually when someone comes and says, I want to build a topic cluster, but I only want keywords that have at least 500, 1,000, 2,000 searches because When you're building a cluster or when you're building a hub, I think the hub can have content that shows how that topic relates to your product use cases. So if you only focus on keywords that have search volume, then you're only building that information editorial content. But if you're looking outside of the keyword volume, then you can start to ask yourself, okay, what kind of questions are the sales team getting? specific to this topic that we can create so that when that question comes up, the sales team can just send that link to the client or to the prospect and they read it and they are at the finish line already. For example, I have a client called Aurelius that does UX research and we're building a cluster for UX research. That's not like their biggest keyword. That was a topic they're trying to cover. But they have use cases with their products. For who? For product teams, for design teams, for conversion copywriters. So we can create all these use cases. Maybe how to do UX research when you're a conversion copywriter. What does a UX researcher do? How to use Aurelius to analyze research data. Anything at all that has a use case related to that topic and related to the client's keyword will be added to the cluster because that is where the conversion is going to happen. When they've learned about the UX research and they're coming down, they're coming down to see content that shows that relationship. And that's something I don't see a lot of people targeting. They are so focused on informational keywords that have a lot of search volume that they're not thinking outside of the box. And it's frustrating because if you're not thinking outside of the box, then like you said earlier, what you're going to be getting is those top-of-the-funnel keywords that people are reading it, but they're not really converting because there's nothing to pull them down the funnel. Another thing I see is that most funnels tend to stop at the bottom of the funnel, but there's something beyond the bottom. There's post-purchase journey, which is where you nurture people to become brand loyal. And once someone is brand loyal, they're not going anywhere else. They're kind of stuck with you for life because they feel like if you don't have this, then they're not getting it. If a hub can also do that, there's this idea I gave, bike brand, and then after buying the bike, you're still going to be getting content in your email about how to maintain your bike, what you should not do, the kind of gear you should be using when you're riding a bike. This is where you should be taking your bike for repairs. All that content is still leading them so that even after making that purchase, when they want to make a repair, they can sign up if you have that service.

There's also another point that you made that I think is fantastic. So there's this tendency, as you mentioned, to start with the main pillar page because it has the higher search volume. So you start with the ones that will tend to attract more. But realistically, this is the page that also will have a much harder chance to rank for anything because There are so many authoritative resources out there already.

Yes.

Very well established from years around these very generic topics at the end of the day. And it will take ages for you to rank for anything. It won't be specific enough to rank for more specific queries. And for that effort that you have made into developing the pillar page at the start, you could have developed 3 specific spokes that in a few months you connect together pillar, but start with the spokes because they are targeting, yes, lower searches queries, but they will have a much easier time and you will wait for much less to see them ranking for them. And will likely also end up engaging better and attracting links in a way that will end up also helping the pillar page at the end of the day. I believe that it requires a balance. Isn't it?

Exactly.

Especially for those particular questions, queries, subtopics that are not well addressed yet. And that is why a good competition analysis and benchmark is also important. So it makes sense. And after 6 months, we can, after developing the content for all these posts, we can put that together with a pillar page. Then the other mistake that I also see is that, and it's a challenge sometimes because I have worked in the past with very strong informational websites. So for example, in the fitness space, so they have tons of content that they have been publishing through the years, but without any organization. So they have thousands of articles. And then you say, okay, I need to audit this all and see how we can organize them better in topics and subtopics in a way that makes sense with the way that people search. And then you realize that many of this needs to be consolidated because there is a lot of overlay, a lot of duplication, doesn't make sense. So you need to do, let's say, a lot of pruning, a lot of reorganization just to realize that those left needs to be optimized a lot. So you can pretty much spend months sometimes optimizing what already exists. And then you even forget that, oh, but you still don't have a pillar page to make sense of this topical hub. And that is why it's critical to do the keyword mapping.

What—

and a content audit to allow you to visualize what is the content that actually makes sense to create, what is the content that makes sense to optimize with what you already have. I think that unfortunately there's this tendency of like create more, create more when you already have sometimes a lot of information even in your FAQs or customer support sections. It's the perfect opportunity for the next question. If you can share please the building blocks of the process that you follow.

First things first, the audits. What do we already have on this topic? What needs to go? What needs to stay? Start with the audit first, pull out the topic into the Excel spreadsheet. And then once I have an idea of what we're already using, then I have to consider these ones that are staying. Are they good enough to rank? Or do we need to rewrite those content pieces? Or do we need to update it? We have to make the decisions on those existing topic pieces first. Once that is done, next step, pulling client use cases that relate to the keywords. Add those use cases to the clause, to the Excel spreadsheet. And then that is when I start doing the competitor research because I do competitor research before keyword research. It's always easier. Who owns this keyword? Not just on search, but also on social media. What are they doing? Who is putting out that content? Who is publishing it? Who is the authority for that brand? That is helping them to own that content. I want to see what they're doing. And then I'm doing that competitor analysis. I'm pulling out the topics that I think is really moving the needle for them. And then I'm looking at the strategy. Is it long form? Can we go longer? Is there something they've missed? Can we add it to kind of beat them there? Are they building links? Can we beat them there? What can we do to beat them for each of these content pieces that they are ranking for? Because If they're already ranking, that means we need to come harder than they currently are if we're going to beat them out. Once I have all of those competitors, keywords, and strategy, all of that goes into the Excel spreadsheet. And then finally I do the keyword research. Now, this is where it gets tricky because you can't target every keyword that relates to the topic. I think it's intuitive. You're looking at the volume, but you're also looking at the relevance. Is this relevant to the message we're trying to communicate? Is this relevant to what the product does? Will this help the reader to believe that we are the authority, and that the product is the best option in the market. You're not just looking at the keyword as a keyword, you're looking at it always through the lens of what the client does, and what the product offers. So that means that if we use that lens, then we're trimming out the list. This doesn't relate at all. Okay, yes, this relates. All of the stuff that relates goes into the Excel spreadsheet. At the end of this, we already have something comprehensive. But I still like to look at social media to see the kind of— sometimes It's— I call it little nuggets. There are some tweets or posts on LinkedIn that really get a lot of engagement around the topic and then get divisive in the comment section and everybody's like heated. I'm like, oh, this is a juicy one. What if we cover this and we make something comprehensive that kind of unites that knowledge and then get people really talking and moving through our funnel instead of having that discussion on social? And then I put all of that in there and With the clients, we discuss and we agree on what is going to make the cut for the cluster before we start building.

This is amazing! And there are 2 things that I think are very important to highlight here. The leverage of social media presence. Oh my God! Reddit, Quora.

Yes.

More and more keyword tools realizing this and integrating. And then on the other hand, validate with the client what makes sense to select based on Their business model, the unique selling proposition, where do they stand in the industry, how do they want to be perceived and recognized, what they actually end up offering to the user. You need to talk with them and interact with them.

Shimas was very in-depth, so I'll just give like top-level tips when I'm doing it rather than like a process. I guess the first thing I always do is try and roll up. What I mean by that is let's say I started the keyword research stage or the competitor audit stage and I come across a keyword which is what's the best type of wood for furniture. I always try and roll that up. Okay. There's a good keyword there. I know this could be part of, if I roll this up, I know this could be part of the guide. I guess it's coming back onto that point, starting with the spokes rather than the hub. So I come across various spoke type content. I try and roll that up. Think of an overarching guide that could target all of it. One of the things I will say, and it sort of led into that as another pointer, is with the exception of that main hub. We need to know when to break content out and when to target the same page with it. So the hub, always generic, covers lots of things sort of broadly, linking out to more specific pieces. Always try and roll up, which comes back onto that point of don't start with a hub piece, I guess. But also know when to start a new piece. Don't, don't try and cover too much in that one dedicated piece. You could, there's simple checks on any tool. Like the simplest check is Googling the 2 phrases you want to look at and looking at it. Ahrefs has it and Semrush. They all have these tools where you can actually see the SERP results. And you can export them off onto Google Sheets and look at the similarity between the two. There's so many ways you can do that. But yeah, that would be another tip when you're planning your content hub and when you're doing it.

It's definitely a great tip indeed. There is this boom of content tools. It's like 3 years ago or so it was technical SEO ones, like there was a boom. Now it's especially the AI content generators can be helpful to expand and to save a little bit of time, but not a replacement for sure. So yeah, so I see a boom. Of content tools in general, all types, right? I have to say that I am a fan of Semrush for keyword research. And I also love tools like Frase, Neuraltext. Also Surfer is another one that I also love. And of course, Andy, I don't want to— because I started using their tool Keyword Insights when it was just even beta and I was mind-blown at how it could actually automatize a good chunk of this process of correctly identifying the opportunities where you can create topic hub and which should be the subtopics. So it's another great tool. But of course, what other tools do you use? Which are your favorite ones? Which are also those features that you cannot live without from your top tools?

I didn't want to— I hate using these things to plug tools, but we invented Keyword Insights for that reason, for that client that I was telling you about with the mattresses. So I have sort of 3 stages. The keyword research, the competitor analysis, which is always done through either Semrush or Ahrefs and a mixture of both of them. I do use both because I don't know if you've noticed, but the volumes between them, the disparity is just huge. So I use both of them. Then my middle stage is plugging all of that into something like Keyword Insights. But in the interest of fairness, there are alternatives. There's Keyword Cupid is another great example. SERPstat also has keyword clustering. So I'm all about being fair. There's other tools out there. The only difference is ours has that intent thing, which I use massively. Because of that mattress example I gave earlier. So that'd be my middle stage. I get them all clustered. I then go down and this is where my idea of working from the bottom up goes. I look for these, these spoke type things. So a big one might be ideal chair heights. And then in that cluster, there's so many other keywords in there. And then I go, okay, we should do a guide on chair and table heights, which is then my hub piece. And then I would use something like Frase or Content Harmony or Surfer or any of these to then start actually pulling the brief together. That brief then goes out to content writers. Another final tool I use isn't so much as a tool, and it goes really nicely. Chima made an excellent point earlier about going that stage beyond the bottom of the funnel, which is a fantastic point. And a great tool for that isn't so much a tool, it's speaking to your sales team, speaking to your, the people in customer support. You get so many good ideas from them as well. So not so much a tool, just a tip. If we open up that dialogue between the marketing team and your sales and customer support. It's just content ideas everywhere. Oh, more than that. If you go on Facebook groups, it's a similar thing.

I have Neuraltext. I also use SEMrush for keyword research, for competitor research. In fact, I think I use SEMrush exclusively because I get confused easily. So I'm always very careful where I'm getting keyword data from. Like you said, Andy, if you look at the data from SEMrush and the data from Ahrefs, it's just like What am I doing? So I'm always very careful. I stick to the data from one keyword research tool. I also like to use Keywords Everywhere because when I'm looking for variations, like off the top of my head, I don't want to see if it has any juice, I can use Keywords Everywhere. It's attached to Google Search, so I just search that keyword and Keywords Everywhere just shows it to me immediately. It's much more faster. And they also have this thing on the side where they show you secondary keywords. That have like what I call long-tail secondary keywords on the side, which I really, really like. And they show that with search volume. Those are the 2 tools I use for keyword research, competitor analysis. And I also use Frase. I've used Surfer. I've used Frase. But I prefer Frase because I think it gives more data. Not I think, it definitely gives more data. So the cool thing I like about Frase is that I can see all the subheadings for all the content pieces that are ranking on page 1. And then I can see what is coming up repeatedly. And I'm like, okay, if this stuff is coming up repeatedly, then it's important is going into the brief. And then I can think cohesively and say, okay, what are these guys not covering that should be covered for this topic? And then add that into the brief. Even though I use Frase and other AI tools, my brief is still manual because I just feel there's only a point that automation can get you to. And then there is the point of human reasoning where I, as the expert, take over and then fulfill the rest. But Frase definitely helps. I also like those topic lists, I can just pick out the top 20, review it before I start writing, and then try to remember as much as possible and then insert it naturally into the content. So that's very helpful. And then I like those statistics they put at the bottom because it just makes my job easier. Instead of me going to type stats for this or stats for that, they already have like the ones that are coming up, and then I can just pull from that, link to the original source, and then add it in there to back up whatever it is I'm saying. So Those are the tools I use.

So to start wrapping up, a last tip. I want to wrap up today's episode with anything that you think that you haven't yet shared that you think is important enough not to miss from today's episode. Whatever you want.

Mine sounds obvious, but you'd be surprised at how many people don't do it. When I'm planning, especially the hub piece, like the content around that, you really need to make sure that your content is more informative and covers the same topics as everyone else. It sounds so obvious, but the amount of times I see someone have done this brief and it's maybe more informative than the first, the one that's ranking number 1, but it's not covering similar things, some of the H2s in article 2. And there's actually some, maybe some more topics in the article 3 that could be covered. When I do my planning, I pull the top 20 results and I'll download the H1s, the H2s, even the H3s of all of them. And I will look at all of them and make sure that where relevant, I cover what everyone does. And we've got— I mean, the best example I've got is this furniture company, startup furniture company. We're outranking some massive, huge UK conglomerates for all the content just because our content covers what theirs does, who do rank number 1 or did rank number 1. But we've also pulled in who's ranking number 2, number 3, number 4, number 5, and pulled all of them into the It's so obvious, but I don't think, as Chima said, it's still Phrase and Content Harmony are very great tools to start your brief. But the very manual part of what I still do is pull in all those H1s and H2s and H3s and even H4s from the top 20 and look at, okay, what isn't article 1 mentioning that article 2 is? And what's that mentioning that isn't article 3 and pulling it all that very obvious tip, but you'd be surprised how many people aren't doing that.

I think something I always want people to remember when building Okay, will I say hubs? Or hubs lives inside your website, but I don't like the idea of just limiting it to on your website. I always think about it as a spider web that starts from inside, being your website, and then spreads tentacles or whatever those spider webby things are outside to other places where your audience hangs out. So when you're building that hub, you're thinking of Where is my audience consuming content relating to this topic? Ideally, it's going to be on Google search. It's also going to be on video. It's also going to be on maybe places where they see pictures, places where they see video, and social media. So I like the idea of making that hub holistic and exhaustive enough that it's not just focused on the content you're creating on your website, but it's going out. So there's this thing I'm experimenting with now where we take some of those H2s or some of those subtopics, and then we turn them into really long-form posts, and we publish it on authority websites as part of the cluster, but on an authority website that is linking back to our own content. We're building backlinks with contents inside the cluster. So we have that cluster, the list of Algedon. We've not— we don't publish all of them on our own website. Maybe 70-80% goes on our website, and then the rest of that goes outside to really high-authority sites that have more traffic than we do, but also similar audience. And then we link back to our site with really good anchor text, but the content is long-form, the content is exhaustive, the content is even more likely to rank. But that's what we want to happen. We want it to rank because it's easier for those guys to rank than for us. And then when they click the anchor text, they come to our website and they continue the journey there. We're also thinking of social media. Some of those H2s, H3s, turn them into bite-sized social media content. It's something I do. Like, one hub can serve you for 6 months to a year of content. That is how you build authority. That is how I have seen Ross Simmons become like— will I call him the king of content distribution? Because he's always talking about content distribution, but he also has that content on his website and other places too. It's not just what he has created inside his website, it's what he's talking about on social. And I feel like social is where it happens. I don't have one piece of content on my website that talks about topic authority. But somehow, when people find me, they find me because they were searching for that topic on social or wherever it is. And I still come up because I've built that authority on social media. So you have to think of how can I take this hub, turn it into smaller content pieces, and put it on social media. Those hubs also need to have video content. Some of those pieces will be ranking for video. Make sure you're creating that video to give yourself an edge. You're putting that video on YouTube and every place where people watch video content. If that is where they prefer to watch content, just like Aleyda said, maybe they're trying to like find the easiest route, you are there. If they're on social media, you are there. If they're on high authority sites like industry blogs, you're also there. Wherever it is they're turning to to consume content on that topic, you want to be meeting them there. Not just limiting yourself to the hub on your website. That way, you're Authority is unquestionable.

That is amazing advice, Chema, for sure. Because who will end up buying a bike that is a non-trivial investment sometimes, that is expensive, in a website that they have never heard about, and they have run into this page because they have a product page that is very highly well optimized, but they have zero informational content. So you won't trust them. I won't buy, even if it is in position 1, for a query that is very commercial like that, but I will go to the second or the third if it is a brand that I already know that I have been getting information from and I trust already because I perceive them as authority.

Yes.

The type of authority that you will build with this type of content, with a proper topic cluster. So thank you for your tips and insights. They have been super valuable. And if you want to learn more about this topic, Please follow Andy, follow Chima. You have their details to follow them over social too, because they are always sharing tons of information about this particular topic. Thank you very much, everybody. Remember to subscribe to the channel if you want to see much more content like this and see you on the next Crawling Mondays. Bye-bye.

Bye.