My talk from the 2022 Digital Marketing Europe conference.

1. Building 1-
million Session
Content Hubs
Dan Taylor / Digital Marketing Europe 2022

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About Me
Head of Research & Development @
SALT
SEO nerd. Speaker. Cat Dad.
TechSEO Boost Research Prize Winner.
Experience in a number of verticals at
various levels, mainly enterprise.
Problem solver, not a box ticker.

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What is a content hub?
How a content hub fits into your… Website Architecture // Your Funnel
How to research, plan, and prioritize your content hub content production
Stakeholder involvement and contribution
Ongoing maintenance and long-term planning requirements
1-mil+ Content Hubs

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Peak March/April
2021 with 1.8m
sessions per month
Third-Party Data
Content Hubs Achieving
1mil+

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📈 = (🔍+✏️+⌛)

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What is a content hub?

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Core Topic
Topic
2
Topic
3
Topic
1
Pillar
Content
Cluster
Content
Cluster
Content
Cluster
Content
Cluster
Content
Core Topic
Sub Topic
Topic Elaboration 2
Topic Elaboration 1

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Hub & Spoke
Pillar & Cluster
Content Clusters
Content Hubs
Knowledge Hubs
Content Silos
Mapped Content
}Same Objective(s)
User acquisition
Traffic acquisition
Content to “build EAT”
Relevant internal linking hubs
Backlink “earning” content
Informative to the end user

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Incorporating content
hubs into your website

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When developing content hubs, we need to think about the different architectures and
systems we deal with.
Website Architecture
How will we fit the hub into the architecture? It should be separate from the blog?
Same CMS?
Sales Architecture
Content will more than likely be associated with TOFU, and maybe upper-MOFU.
What is the motivation of these users?
Objective = Placement

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There is more than
one “type” of content
hub. Decide the type
you’re building, and
stick with it.
Dan Taylor
SausageKing.net

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Informational Content Hubs
The type shown in the early graph. The type we’re focusing on today. Heavily focused
on showing subject matter expertise, without sales or product messaging.
Product Knowledge Bases
If someone has a use case, or usage question about the product - you want to rank
for it, not StackOverflow or Quora, or some random opinion piece.
Optimized Support Centers
Take all your SDR feedback, all the weird edge questions, and create support articles.
Own your space, and contribute to it, addressing faults/issues/use case issues.
Hub Types

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Decision predominantly led by the existing stack and processes.
Subfolder on the domain? Same CMS?
Subdomain (if implemented correctly it can work fine)
It should be separate from the blog. It’s a different content type. We want users to
think of it as a special resource area, not bundled in with The Top 5 X, Y, Z’s for 2022.
Website Architecture

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Content hubs should aim to answer user queries, address concerns, and ultimately help
the end user better understand the product/solution as to how it can help them
achieve their goals.
Challenges I’ve encountered….
➢ Lots of traditional businesses feel this is better served by the sales team, once the
user has already got in touch.
➢ Lots of traditional business models see the sales process as also being the place
to educate users… As it helps build trust, rapport, and can lead to upsells and/or
cross-sells
➢ The human element in the sales process is vital.
Challenges

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On average, 70
percent of the buying
decision is made
before a prospect
engages with the
company.
Marcus Sheridan
They Ask, You Answer

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Planning a content hub,
and data sources.

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Third-party tools
Ahrefs, et al (end process for MSV, and additional KWs from Dbs)
PAAs (People Also Asked features)
DragonMetrics collates these, and you can scrape easily enough with Python
Entity analysis / Image entity tag analysis
Quick and easy way to do this is to search images, can also be scraped. MUM.
SDRs / general sales feedback loops
Feedback loops with SDRs are valuable for SEO anyway, and can be used here for
edge perspectives.
Useful Data Sources

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Let’s take a random topic, and then reverse engineer what a basic content hub
architecture could look like…
So, where do we begin?

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What is the difference between walking boots and hiking?
Are hiking boots better than shoes?
What boots to wear for hiking?
What are the three types of hiking boots?
Is it OK to wear hiking shoes everyday?
Is it OK to wear hiking shoes everyday?
What is the difference between a trail shoe and a walking shoe?
What do you wear to a waterfall hike?
PAAs

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What is the difference between walking boots and hiking?
Are hiking boots better than shoes?
What boots to wear for hiking?
What are the three types of hiking boots?
Is it OK to wear hiking shoes everyday?
What is the difference between a trail shoe and a walking shoe?
What do you wear to a waterfall hike?
What do you wear on a muddy hike?
PAAs

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An association score may reflect a likelihood or degree of confidence that an attribute,
attribute value, relationship, class hierarchy, designated context class, or other such
association is valid, correct, and/or legitimate. In some embodiments, for example, an
association score may reflect a degree of relatedness between two entities or a
context and an entity.
US Patent 10,198,491, a lot of authors, Google LLC
Entity Analysis / Image Entity Tags

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Waterproofing, submergence, wet grip.
Muddy/mud distribution, aesthetic permanence.
Hiking versus Trail versus Walking.
Leather versus Gore tex
Breathability, comfort, temperature control
Desert treks, snow trails, wet walks, forest walks (terrain mixture)
So themes…

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So with the keyword research, we want to match the objective of the content hub.
In this example, we’re looking at providing an expert source (resource hub) that helps
demonstrate to users that the site (brand) are subject matter experts.
So we want to focus on:
➢ Questions
➢ Perspectives
➢ Scenarios
And then combine with the PAA and Image Entity Tag data to form both a “plan” for
your hub, and then content types.
Backed up with keyword research…

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Hiker boots + fashion
Cleaning hiking boots
Best hiking boots
Should they be a size bigger / toe room
How to wear
How to lace
Ahrefs Parent Topics

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Questions (Ahrefs) Potential Content Type
How to clean hiking boots Written, Video
How should hiking boots fit Written, Diagrams
How to lace hiking boots Written, Video, Diagrams
How to break in hiking boots Written, Video
How to clean smelly hiking boots Written, Diagrams
How to waterproof hiking boots Written, Video
What kind of socks to wear with hiking boots Written, Images
How to dry wet hiking boots Written, Video, Images
How to stretch out hiking boots Written, Video, Images
How to care for hiking boots Written

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The best internal linking strategy for content hubs I’ve found covers three key
objectives of the content silos themselves, these being:
➢ To support and provide authority to the domain for the key commercial search
terms that other pages are targeting.
➢ To provide (additional and contextual) relevancy for TOFU (top-of-funnel) and
MOFU (middle-of-funnel) search terms relating to your product service.
➢ To act as further education resources for users, empowering the need for your
solution.
Because of this, these hubs need a variety of linking structures, and to link internally to
other pieces of content on the website (commercial, blog, support) that have the right
context and perspective (making the link useful).
Hub Internal Linking

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One of the points I emphasize when brands are creating big content hubs is to not mix
intents or perspectives.
By this, I mean remember that just because a user is on your website, doesn’t
necessarily mean they want selling too…
As these content areas oftentimes target informational intent queries, or TOFU/MOFU
queries then shoe-horning in sales pitches, CTAs, and branded references isn’t natural
and devalues the content from the user perspective.
This is why I advise that links from the hub and spoke(s) to commercial pages are…
Internal Links To Commercial Pages

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Brand agnostic
Not overly branded, or major visual CTAs. E.g. a CDN solution versus Brand X’s CDN
solution.
As natural as possible
Come at appropriate junctures in the content, where it may make sense to encourage
a user further down the funnel based on the query(ies) that section of content has
answered.
Query has commercial or transactional intent (anchor text)
Anchor text from the hub and spoke to commercial pages matches queries that have a
transactional or commercial intent, and aren’t general informational queries.
Internal Links To Commercial Pages

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Making use of the template for your hub and spoke internal linking is a fantastic way to
both add user value, and create natural linking hubs to prevent excessive unnatural
internal linking that causes issues for Google.
➢ A secondary navigation menu localized to the hub.
➢ A “related content” sidebar section.
➢ Internal body links.
➢ “Localized” HTML footer.
Templated Linking

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Thanks!
@taylordanrw
LinkedIn: Dan Taylor
https://dantaylor.online
https://salt.agency