The hub and spoke approach is all about building helpful or insightful information all around one core subject.
The reason this works so well is because it makes your hub and spoke guide the authority on that subject. To be an authority, you need to know something inside and out, and prove this knowledge.
So what is hub and spoke? It’s based on a wheel which has a hub at the very center, and spokes connecting from the hub out. Each spoke represents a sub-topic, and each page links from the hub and back to the hub. Think “Computer Monitors” as the main content, and all the additional content would be related sub-topics, like “resolution”, “refresh rate”, etc…
Google wants to feature the most helpful and informative content that exists. As it crawls the web, it sees that your content is “computer monitors”, but it also sees that the page links back and forth to all topics about computer monitors. This shows that you have a deep understanding on the topic and could really help searchers.
Would you go to your web designer for advice on back pain? Or your doctor for advice on web design? No! You would seek out an expert on the matter, someone who has proven their expertise. Google wants to feature this expert in their search results for the same reason.
By writing content that is at your businesses core level, and building out hub and spoke guides, you’re proving to Google (and your customers most importantly!) that you are THE expert on this subject matter.
Here’s a quick breakdown to help you get started:
- Choose a main subject that you can divide into sub-topics and go into great detail.
- Make a mind map with your main subject in the middle.
- Place all the sub-content around the middle that you can write about.
- Write your main hub page. This should go in-depth on the basics of each sub-subject with a link to each one.
- Write the first several sub-content pages. Don’t stress about doing them all at once, you can and should build these out over time to dive deeper on each.
- Link from the sub-content pages back to the hub page.
- Link from the hub page back to all sub-content pages.
- Link from sub-content pages to each other as you see fit. You could have these progress through step by step if it’s a process.
- Make sure you submit these new pages to Google and keep updating them as you see fit!
- Consider taking all this content and releasing it in one PDF as an e-book or “white paper” for potential new clients to join your e-mail list to obtain.
This simple approach can dramatically increase your rankings on Google.