Choosing Your Topic First
It’s important to choose actual topics before building hubs around them.
We know of 17 different types of words so far.
The definition of a topic word is “the direct object in the phrase’. The THING. Services and product words are often associated with the THING.
CONVERSATIONWARE
PPC Software – the topic is software, a specific type.
Your main service or product is a good place to start, although, given the level of competition in some industries, the target audience might be better.
We can help you with a shortlist.
Categories are not the Start
Often, we separate categories, concepts, or umbrella terms as they implicitly ‘hold’ multiple topics. Some highly specific words are actually types of topic or even audience words.
So, unless we create content over time, we will gradually lose clicks due to a lack of specific content.
SEO is the topic that connects these two ‘stages’. The first is a provider search, and the second is likely an informational search for a commercial audience (ambiguity aside). These have hugely different value and need different content. Both are likely too ‘category’ and unspecific.
Category
Holding multiple topics, e.g. “Software”
Topic
Holding multiple types, e.g. “SaaS”
Type
Specific level of detail – closer to buying, e.g. “Email”
Hubs Activate Intent
The hub intensifies the conversation, embodies the sales timeline, and enables thought leadership content. We build pages for all the visitors’ decision-making stages.
Current Website Practices
Traditional Approach
Most websites use services, long guides and blog posts.
Improved Method
Creating granular pages for each decision stage in each topic area
Website Structure Examples
- Website/topic-hub/product
- Website/topic-hub/services
- Website/topic-hub/process/guides/
- Website/topic-hub/solutions/articles
- Website/topic-hub/problem
We replace ‘/topic hub/’ with an actual topic.
Do we *replace this stage with the ‘actual’ phrase? It depends.
Products and services are a recognised convention, whereas problems and solutions are not necessarily. Perhaps they will become so.
