Content With a Purpose
Knowing what people want makes it easier to know what to say.
Easier when you know who
If you know who they are, it’s even easier. And, by knowing when in the timeline they are in their decision-making process, you can be most effective.
The timeline
Visitors seek to make a wide range of decisions before taking any action. Understanding all their decisions means we can be more purposeful when planning each piece of content. Writing is easier when there is a structure to follow.
The most profitable treatment of a specific topic can be comprehensive enough to overwhelm any one visitor. Yet, most prefer to educate themselves before talking to you.
The job of hub
The hub’s job is to organise all information to cater to a wide range of needs and make it easy to find.
- Comprehensive and yet not overwhelming
- Easy to find more details if they want
- Easy to scan if they don’t
- Hubs are courteous of both the cursory reader and the detailed
The short and sweet mention at the top of the topic, with links down into more detail. We find the audience contains both people who want lots of detail and those who want the highlights.
The audience has an underlying structure
The diverse nature of topic audiences
Serving the whole buying journey
An audience is a group of people with a common interest. The topic word in each search signals what our audience has in common.
They are naturally more interested in more information on the topic than they include in their 3-5 search words.
Our guiding principle is to appreciate the topic’s totality.
The context is that any individual searcher could be interested in any other aspect of the topic. Any keyword on its own makes no sense, but put together, you can see a clear pathway from early to late-stage interest.
The hub structure separates that journey into steps. The decisions people try to make are clearly defined; therefore, we can serve each with appropriate content.
llowing people to scan a topic quickly is a service commitment that reaps rewards over time, it is less wasteful of clicks.
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 way people can find
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.
- Keep the main topic hub page focused on the core concept and its benefits without overwhelming readers with too much information.
- Allow visitors to choose which aspects of the topic they want to explore further based on their specific interests and needs.
- Provide a more organised and user-friendly navigation experience, as visitors can easily access the information they need without having to scroll through a lengthy page.
- Maintain a clear hierarchy of information, with the main topic hub page serving as an introduction and overview and the sub-pages diving deeper into specific elements of the concept.
- Facilitate better SEO by creating a network of interlinked pages that search engines can easily crawl and understand, potentially boosting the visibility of your content.
When linking to sub-pages, make sure to use clear and descriptive anchor text that accurately reflects the content of the linked page. This will help visitors know what to expect when they click on a link and improve the overall user experience.
In summary, the idea is we link to sub-pages to elaborate on specific aspects of the topic hub concept. This approach aligns well with the goal of creating a comprehensive and user-friendly resource that caters to the varying needs and interests of your visitors.
Comprehensive Content Strategy
By creating a single structure around topics, we have the potential to reconcile the warring factions in the marketing world.
Full Funnel Content
- Purpose: Content should help visitors in ALL their decision-making processes, increasing traction the full way
- Search vs Social: Changes in search strategies make fragmented keyword approaches less effective
- Search + Social: Topic and audience hubs offer a way to integrate content strategies.
Top-of-funnel content is typically more creative and full of ideas.
But it is most often stuck away in blog posts, and shared in social channels.
It delivers a disconnect
