Why Topic Hubs
Building the case for rewiring a website structure around what visitors are most interested in.
Hubs mean performance
Topic and audience hubs improve a website’s SEO and conversion performance. The granular treatment of subjects in topic hubs aids the buying decision and helps engage visitors through specificity, relevance, and completeness. Audience hubs offer more personalisation and niched messaging.
Granularity makes our content more competitive. Thanks to “the Google Flip” problem, and other digital platforms becoming more dilute, we have a much wider range of visitor click interest than ever before.
The quality of the conversation is enhanced by topic and niche hubs.
Solid reasons for Topic and Audience Hubs.
When we organise this section, we might have more.
Hubs give us higher conversion rates
- Grouping content automatically improves conversion
- Easier-to-navigate website conversations are good for conversion rates
Topic Hubs are good for SEO
- Visitor click-through-rates (CTR), and
- Engagement improves ranking performance – according to some
We have less competition when moving to Topic Hubs
- Competitive advantage for a while because it is new
- More chance for innovative products to get airtime
More concrete content strategy and playbook
- More appropriate messaging with stage-specific content
- Easier to define content objectives
Higher Conversion Rates
The content next to the content has a big impact on conversion.
The granularity and wider range of targets is also more specific, and therefore more performative.
Topic Completion is Good SEO
Building content around the whole topic sales timeline is inherently ‘better’ for SEO. The structure breeds internal links with ‘the right words’ in the links. It ‘completes’ gaps in the topic ‘pathways’ otherwise invisible in standard website structure (service pages + blogs).
Mostly, searchers are more specific than most website pages allow for. The hub structure covers that.
Less Competition
As only recently emerging, Topic Hub based sites have less competition (the related but inferior topic clusters have been around a while).
Engaging with earlier stage visitors is another positive, the early funnel has less competition up there.
Clearer Content Strategy
Projects become easier when the parameters and objectives for each piece of content are clearer.
Serving buying journey
Early stage prospects turn into our best prospects, just later.
By ‘the time’ our prospective clients make a final decision to pick up the phone, we have been in their eyeline multiple times. Familiarity means we are more likely to succeed.
There are more people earlier in the funnel
They will be later in the funnel at some point, eventually doubling our exposure
We want to serve everyone and give ourselves the best opportunity with all “topic cohorts”
What they need, when they need it
Subpages are organised in a relevant and courteous way. Drill down when you need to.
Courteous content is 3-dimensional
Linking from top-level pages to sub-pages, like this one, is a key aspect of why topic hubs work so well.
It is easy to underestimate a topic audience’s breadth and depth of interest. If you have one page on a topic, a competitor site might have eight.
Appropriate levels of messaging
Providing more in-depth information and examples in subpages is an excellent way to keep the main topic hub page concise while still allowing those visitors who need it to explore specific aspects of the concept in greater detail.
At the same time, we don’t interrupt people who already know it.
In summary, the idea is we link to sub-pages to elaborate on specific aspects of the topic hub concept.
We create a comprehensive and user-friendly resource
By linking to sub-pages, you can:
- Keep the main topic hub page focused on core concepts without overwhelming readers
- Allow visitors to choose which aspects of the topic they want to explore further
- Provide a more organised and user-friendly navigation experience,
- Maintain a clear hierarchy of information
- Facilitate better SEO by creating a network of interlinked pages that search engines can easily crawl
