How to Create Content Hubs [8 Steps to Know]

Content hubs enhance your business’s content marketing and boost your website’s SEO. Creating and launching content hubs is no simple task, and that’s what we’ll be covering here. So, what is a content hub?

A content hub is a source for centralized and themed content allowing users insights into a particular topic and subtopics. Organized and interlinked content, including infographics, videos, and blog posts, make for a user-friendly experience.

How do Content Hubs improve SEO?

Increases topical authority. Topical authority tells search engines that your site is knowledgeable and authoritative on a given topic. It improves SEO with trustworthy and authoritative backlinks.
Increases high authority backlinks. Content hubs increase link authority by using backlinks to support the topic of the content hub. Linking to credible sites improves your SEO rank and the websites linking back to your subpages. All backlinks have a common theme or topic, your content hub.
Improves user experience. By having a content hub with a structurally sound layout and on-topic resources readily at hand, people visiting your site will be encouraged to explore even further. Visitors will benefit from a better experience on your website.
Higher visitor engagement. After someone lands on your content hub, they will soon discover everything surrounding a common topic, which guided them to your page in the first place. By having highly relevant resources in one place, visitors will likely navigate your content hub to learn more.

Okay, all this is great, but how do I create content hubs? We have broken down the process into eight steps for creating content hubs.

Without further ado, let’s dive in.

How to Create Content Hubs

Here are 8 steps you can take to create content hubs.

1. Perform a Website Audit

The first thing to do is determine where your content hub will best fit on your website. Start by conducting a comprehensive audit of all content on your website.

Go through the content on your website to see if it’s relevant to your content hub topic. What relevant content is driving traffic to your website?

After discovering this information, consider expanding upon the content driving the most traffic. Content that could perform better can be repurposed and reworked depending on its relevance to your content hub topic.

2. Find your Content Hub Topic

The content hub topic must be informational and broad enough to support subtopics. Content hubs work better for general topics but can work with niche categories depending on their subtopics or subpages.

Choose a topic that is important to your target audience. Can I match the user’s search query by targeting the centralized hub topic? Look at the top results for your target keyword to find this out.

Pick a topic that can drive high search traffic to your site. What is a highly relevant topic not currently being discussed online in your industry?

Do the research. After finding your potential topic, perform a search query to see what you find on page 1 of the search results.

3. Determine Subpages

Consider how many subtopics can fit under the content hub. The main topic should be narrow enough to expand upon. Aim to have a minimum of 5 subpages to link to your content hub.

Perform a search query on your content hub topic to determine relevant subtopics for your subpages. Target common search queries versus long-tail queries.

Understanding your target audience and finding out what content drives the most traffic is an excellent place to start. What is an existing, highly relevant topic that you can expand upon? What is a common issue currently being discussed amongst your target demographic?

After developing a list of potential subpages, analyze the keyword metrics from your list to narrow down which subpages you decide to use.

Read our article on how often to post on your blog.

4. Create a Content Calendar

Create a content calendar to determine if your content will be sustainable in the long run. Define deadlines for each of your subpage’s publishing dates.

Details of your content calendar should include the subtopic, affiliated sources, target audience, journey mapping, and marketing objective.

Building relationships and creating content takes time. Take into account how much time your content developers need to make the content.

To improve your SEO rank, you need to keep the content current by continuing to update it. To stay on track, update your content hub monthly and refer to your content calendar.

5. Publish the Content Hub

Publish the content hub to your website depending on your website’s structure. After performing the website audit, get an idea of where the content hub will fit.

When publishing your content, it’s essential to be consistent. Stick to a schedule, so you’re target audience becomes accustomed to your uploads and postings.

Focus on quality over quantity. It is okay to gradually build up your content hub so long as it provides relevant value to the visitors browsing it.

As you publish your content, consider using anchor text to link to your landing page. Anchor text is user-friendly and allows for seamless navigation.

6. Promote the Content Hub

Now that your content hub is operating, it is time to get the word out. Leveraging all promotion channels will increase visibility and drive more search traffic to your newly developed content hub.

Take advantage of the PESO model, which includes Paid, Earned, Shared, and Owned media. If budget constrictions are of concern, postpone paid media promotions.

A great place to start is with shared media. Shared media is fast, effective, and allows for broad reach with hashtags (#) and @ mentions.

Next, look at your owned media to see if it can be of value. How can your owned media contribute to any of your referring domains already affiliated with your website?

7. Measure results

Measuring the results of your content hub helps to discover new content opportunities. Where should you focus your attention with the metrics you have uncovered?

Important metrics to constantly monitor include conversion rates, bounce rates, pageviews, social media followers, and email subscribers.

Keep in mind that it may take a minimum of 3 months until you start to see your metrics hitting your marketing goals. Creating quality content and developing a consistent following requires trial and error.

8. Make Revisions

Now that you have feedback look to see what content is driving traffic and what content is staying stagnant. Content that is underperforming needs to be analyzed.

Make a side-by-side comparison of top-performing content next to underperforming content. Where are your mismarks coming from?

If sidelined, always go back to the marketing objective and establish how the content fits into the customer journey, given the covered subtopics.

Underperforming content needs more data, so you must think like your customer.

Final Thoughts

Content hubs are an excellent way to organically drive traffic to your website and also improve your SEO rank. You can reach a broader audience by providing centralized, themed content, allowing for more outreach opportunities.

As you expand your content hub, always keep in mind the content strategy you are using to fulfill the marketing objective.

Improving SEO is a systematic process so remember to exercise patience if you are still waiting to see the results right away. Keep building upon the tools you already have. Soon enough, you will see your content hub outburst.