There are many ways you can approach structuring your content. Ultimately, we should aim to structure content in a way that’s easily accessible for search engines and is seamless to navigate for users. The Hub and Spoke model is an SEO content strategy that you can leverage to satisfy both groups. Using the Hub and Spoke model could help:
You might have heard the Hub and Spoke concept used in other industries. For SEO, the Hub and Spoke model is a way to organize your content topically. Hence, the relationship of your content is easier to understand for search engines and users. This model utilizes internal linking, information architecture, and a better UX.
Hubs: serve as an opportunity to provide your audience a single page targeting a general topic (typically a top-of-funnel search intent or head term). Your hub pages will provide your audience an overview of an entire topic while glossing over some more in-depth concepts relevant to the topic, which are broken down into spokes. The hub page should facilitate easy navigation between the hub and its spokes.
Spokes: pages to target advanced concepts (mid/bottom-of-funnel search intents or mid/long-tail terms) mentioned on hub pages but warranted a separate article to provide full coverage.
Links: act as a web holding this Hub and Spoke structure together. Links will interconnect a hub with all of its spokes and allowing relevant spokes to link to each other within this model. Having all your content connected in this manner will enable them to all work together.
With the Hub and Spoke model, you can avoid having a content structure with random pages linking to one another, pages siloed from your internal linking strategies, or pages falling deep into your site structure. Instead, this content model allows you to effectively group your content so search engines can understand the relationship between your content in hopes that your brand will be seen as an authority for targeted topics.
The Hub and Spoke model will provide structure to your internal linking strategies. Ensuring your content is linked together in a Hub and Spoke model will provide a structural foundation for your content to work and rank together.
Because all of our content is linked together in a Hub and Spoke model, it will allow any page(s) that see success in the form of backlinks to distribute its PageRank to relevant content. All the pages within this structure will signal their eligibility to rank for a query to their fullest. If you do any backlinking campaigns or PR for particular pages, this model will make sure you’re reaping all of the benefits. Botify uses an internal calculation to emulate how PageRank would be perceived on your site, helping you understand how PageRank is currently flowing based on your internal linking.
Gone are the days of targeting a single keyword. When your brand has topics it would like to be seen as an authority or thought-leader on, the Hub and Spoke model structurally allows you to target that topic from start to finish.
Depending on where your Hub and Spoke models live on your site, you can improve your site’s information architecture by keeping it close to the homepage and organizing content topically. It’s typically best practice to keep your most important content 1-4 clicks away from the homepage, and using this model will allow you to make sure content doesn’t fall too deep in your site structure.
Since you have your content topically grouped, you can provide your users a seamless navigational experience to explore a particular topic from start to finish. You want to avoid making it hard for users to educate themselves on a topic and convert along the way. Building a Hub and Spoke model that also ties in UX could keep our audience engaged with your content.
Hub and Spoke models should target customer journeys while nurturing them towards conversion/advocacy. Suppose you’re able to tie in relevant call-to-action in your Hub and Spoke model for different kinds of search intents. In that case, you can provide your audience an opportunity to be nurtured on their customer journey within your site instead of them finding answers elsewhere.