We’ve started talking about content hubs a lot around here recently and for good reason. There are so many benefits to building small hubs of content around specific topics. This can help establish your brand or business with thought-leadership content, keeps users engaged on your site longer, and is already becoming a best practice among content marketing professionals. Let’s explore how content hubs improve SEO!
These are many benefits of using content hubs, but possibly the most important reason to consider creating one is for the SEO benefits.
Google is only getting smarter and utilizing a semantic search approach more and more with their new initiative, Hummingbird. To boil this down simply, Google is no longer just looking at keywords, but the context of how those keywords are used as well as how people are searching for them. It’s no longer enough to just have the right keywords in your blog post. Quality and valuable content must be in every piece that you publish for it to really matter from an SEO standpoint.
But – HOW do you do this? Remember, it’s no longer just about keywords. We need to create quality, consistent content that is grouped together in a meaningful way to improve SEO.
Creating a content hub is a great, and proven way to do this. The hub could be focused on a keyword or concept that you’re wanting to use to target a particular audience or market. By gathering different assets together like blog posts, videos, graphics, social content and more into one place, you can target that audience more strategically by raising the quality of your SEO.
Why does this work? Backlinks!
SEO practices have changed over and over again, but there is a principal that still rings true and that’s creating a quality set of backlinks. In case you didn’t know, internal links are considered backlinks by Google as well. This means you have a lot of control over the amount of backlinks you create for yourself if you’re going about it strategically.
By creating a central hub where many other posts and pieces of content point back to, you’ll be establishing internal backlinks which will increase your SEO just like if you were linked to another site.
So, how do you go about starting a content hub? What do they look like? Stay tuned for a content hub how-to and ideas to get you started, in our next post!
Josh Webb is the Partner & Chief Marketing Officer at The Breezy Company. With over two decades of experience in branding, creative direction, and digital marketing, he brings clarity and creative impact to every client engagement.
