Topic Completion is Good for SEO
Engagement, Navigation, Specificity, and Relevance; all directly or indirectly benefit SEO.
Information Gain
Large topic audiences have people at different stages of their research.
Targeting a narrow set of keywords does not provide the ‘information gain’ that Google patented and expanded upon in its helpful content update. Google wants users (as a group) to have a better experience, so it measures engagement and rewards it with rankings and clicks.
What could be more helpful or complete than a full treatment of the topic?
Single pages are either not enough or too much
There is a dichotomy with website content and SEO
The worst of all worlds are pages with thin content.
When there is not enough there to serve the visitors (you can tell when you map out your topic).
The second worst are long skyscraper pages with everything in them.
Single-page, massively long content serving ambiguous high-volume early-stage clicks is inaccessible to a wide range of topic interests. Our visitors each have very different beliefs, profiles and needs from our content.
People tend to bounce from these pages.
What visitors may have already seen is so different from each other. The variety in the click audience is wider than ever, given the Google Flip diluting our clicks.
Make 3-dimensional content
The best argument for website content is for it to become more navigable. The pyramid concept of short version at the top, a middle version and long version comes from Amazon, and the usability book ‘don’t make me think’
A simple message at the top, expanding and skimming gently as you scroll.
To expand on points that a number of people might already understand, create sub-pages instead
The skyscraper technique is old hat.
It has been a solid technique for years to get clicks, but clicks are not the sole objective.
Long pages serve early-stage visitors at the expense of late-stage, lower-volume, higher-value clicks.
Huge, long pages are less visitor-focused than topic hubs; they are purely there to game the search engine. In my book, they are not helpful, and they will not continue to win, with a poor conversion rate being the primary reason, but quality signals will invariably impact
We can never anticipate which aspect of our service proposition will be most interesting to different people. Efficient navigation allows people to filter out the noise and locate their current aspect of interest.
Relevance and Engagement SEO Factors
Both CTR and engagement are ranking factors (recently admitted by Google after years of denying it). The ‘naturally achieved’ internal linking within a hub is more relevant, prevalent and frequent, a courtesy for busy readers and powerful SEO.
The navigational structure
Engagement
Deliver a better experience for a wider range of visitors than individual pages. There is more chance people will find what they are looking for with more content and a more specific purpose within the pages.
The specificity of content to intent
Engagement:
Each visitor has a different intent at different stages of their decision journey. This means that inside a topic hub, they find each page more interesting at the right time. Our content design and navigation seek to make
Better click-through rate:
A set of granular pages in a hub gives better snippets for a more focused and, therefore, targeted search engine experience.
The relevance in URL and snippet text added by multiple specific pages (instead of one big one) should enhance click through rate (CTR) from the search listings and site engagement.
I used the word “should” as a qualifier because Google is consistently inconsistent, but the trend is towards topic hubs.
