The hub & spoke content model is incredibly powerful and simple enough to implement in your content marketing strategy. Take a look at how this model works:
What is the hub & spoke content marketing model?
Simply speaking, the hub & spoke model refers to the way that your content can be organised to create the maximum value for your audience. You will have hubs and spokes for different topics that you’re covering, but for now, let’s look at the two distinct parts:
The hub
This is the overview of the topic that you’ve chosen to write about. It needs to cover most aspects that your audience may be interested in without going into too much detail about each of these aspects. For example, if you’re a personal trainer, you might have hubs that cover the following topics: strength training, injury prevention, and weight management.
Your hub should have informative content as the body and needs to provide links to the spokes that apply to the hub. This can be done through embedded links in the text or by providing a table of contents or list at the end of the hub content that makes it easy to find the relevant information. Make this piece of content as valuable, relevant and thorough as possible so that your audience will want to bookmark it and use it as the starting point of their reading journey. You want to show Google that your hub helps people to discover a topic and navigate it.
The spokes
While your hub gives your audience an overview of the topic, your spokes will address the different aspects within that topic that are relevant and useful to your audience. Using the example of a personal trainer again: the hub will be weight management, and possible spokes can be training for weight management, nutrition for weight loss or gain, common myths about weight management, how to identify your issues with weight management and so on.
Your content needs to address each of the spokes in detail, providing an in-depth look at the topic, referring to other relevant sources of content that you’ve created including videos, podcast episodes and other blog posts that relate to the topic.
As you create detailed spokes, you need to update your hub content to include links to the new content. This will strengthen your entire content model and simplify navigation for your audience. Your spokes should also link back to your main post.
Why is this model effective
The hub & spoke model helps you to establish your writing as authoritative on your chosen subject. By creating content that is linkable, focussed and relevant, and that satisfies the user intent, you’re going to be able to climb the rankings in SERP. Because the model makes smart use of links, it will guide audiences from one piece of content to another on your website or blog without letting them leave to find another source somewhere else. All of these factors indicate to Google that you’re creating good content that will be relevant for a specific set of search queries.
If you need help with creating your hub & spoke content marketing strategy, contact the digital marketing team at WSI OMS today.