Content hubs for fast SEO growth: Step1. How to choose hub topics with high traffic potential

10 minutes
11.07.2024
Content hubs for fast SEO growth: Step1. How to choose hub topics with high traffic potential

How we wrote 59 articles in 2 months with one SEO manager, two copywriters, and Chat GPT, resulting in an 18% traffic increase 4 months after publishing the content hub 👇

Are you a product company looking to attract organic traffic through a blog? Investing in SEO articles but not seeing the desired organic traffic growth? First, don’t fire your SEO specialist. And your copywriter too. Most likely, they have been writing great articles with great keywords.

We did the same for three years before discovering that single posts rarely work. The fix?  Grouping articles under one topic — content hubs.

A content hub is a collection of articles connected by a common theme, menu, and internal links. Here’s what it looks like:

SEO growth hub

This is the main article — a guide to the sections of the hub. The main menu of the hub, with links to other articles, is located on a gray background. Additionally, these articles are grouped under a single blog category. 👇

list of growth hub articles

In the screenshot, you see the Growth Marketing Hub. This is one of the five hubs we created at Dashly. Inside are 59 articles written with the help of Chat GPT. The posts within the hub strengthen each other by focusing on a unified topic. As a result, they brought us an 18% increase in site traffic within 4 months after publication.

How can you attract targeted traffic using content hubs? I’ll explain in a series of seven articles. The first step is topic research. Let’s dive into that 👇

How to Choose and Evaluate Potential Topics for an SEO Hub

1. List the tasks your target audience (TA) needs to accomplish with your product, their pain points, and their interests, as well as the features of your product. 

Additionally, check out the topics your competitors are writing about.

For example, here is my list when working with hubs:

Hubs topics ideas
Conversion Rate optimization 
Revenue growth
Lead generation
Conversational marketing
Lead nurturing
Inbound funnel
Marketing automation
Chatbots
Popups
Live chats
Triggered emails

2. Enhance your topics list with alternative phrasings and relevant terms. 

In addition to your own ideas and client formulations, I recommend googling each problem/feature/pain point in incognito mode to see your competitors’ content.

Hubs topics ideasRelevant terms
Conversion Rate optimization Conversion, CR, CRO
Revenue growthRevenue optimization, revops, business revenue, budget.
Lead generationLead capturing, MQL, SQL
Lead nurturingNurturing leads
Inbound funnelFunnel marketing, inbound
ChatbotsChat bot, chatbot, customer service chatbot, lead magnet chatbot, chatbot marketing
PopupsPopup, pop-up, lead capture popup
Live chatsLive chat software, website chat,

3. Check the potential of the topic in SemRush (or any similar service) 

Below you’ll find text guide, but if you’re more about video — here it is:

Enter the keywords from the first and second columns of your table one by one into the search. Select the country (in my case USA) and look at the Volume, Keyword Difficulty, CPC, and Keyword Ideas.

Semrush
  1. Volume indicates how often users search for the term on the internet. The higher this number, the better. 
  2. Keyword Difficulty shows how difficult it will be to compete with other websites for high rankings for a specific keyword. This metric is usually measured on a scale from 0 to 100, where 0 is very easy, and 100 is very difficult. Our preferred KD is up to 40. Higher values are also acceptable, but they require external links (usually  paid). You will need a lot of them. 
  3. CPC is an additional metric that, in our case, shows whether your competitors are investing money in paid advertising for this keyword. If the CPC is above $6, there is potentially good conversion. 
  4. Keyword Ideas are all the query options (potential subtopics) that your target user might use to search for content on your topic. These need to be examined in more detail, so click “View all keywords”.
Keyword research

Goal: Determine if there are enough queries for individual hub articles. 

Important: This is a preliminary selection, not the final choice of keywords (the latter will be covered in the next article). 

Method 1

Look at the first and second pages of the list. Based on your knowledge of your product and target audience, you should have a rough idea of which queries could potentially warrant separate articles. Here is an example of how I identified interesting keywords for myself.

keyword research 2

Click on each interesting query and open its details in a separate tab. The objective is to determine if this keyword warrants a separate article. To do this, look at:

  1. Keyword Volume, KD, CPC metrics. If they fit your requirements (if KD isn’t too high, if Volume is big enough), copy paste to your Google Spreadsheet with content hubs ideas.
  2. Variations of the key query. If there are relevant keywords with good volume and KD, as in the example below, we can preliminarily group them together and dedicate one of the hub articles to them.
How to choose hub topics keywords

3. Scroll down the page and look at the SERP Analysis, i.e., the search results for the query. If the top 10 results include articles specifically written for this keyword (with corresponding titles and URLs), then it definitely has the potential to be an article for your future hub.

checking SERP

The last thing here is to write a YES or NO answer under “Articles on topic?” column next to the keyword you check.

Important: if you notice that the top 10 results for two different keywords consist of 70% of the same articles, you should combine them into one article rather than writing two separate ones for each query. Put them to your list and mark keywords going to the same article with a common background color.

Similarly, review the other tabs and keywords. 

Record all keywords and their variations in your table. Add data for Volume, KD, and CPC.

Method 2

Go back to the first window with the main keyword and look at the automatically generated clusters, which are like potential article topics for the hub.

2nd method of the keyword research

Click “View all” and review the suggested main keywords for the hub articles. These will often overlap with the list you previously created.

keywords choice

You can expand each group (by clicking on the keyword) to view the queries within. Based on your knowledge of the product and target audience, you can find additional keywords for the hub articles. Evaluate them in the same way as we did before and add the interesting query variations along with their Volume, KD, and CPC data to your table.

Method 3 

Explore your competitors’ websites and review their articles. Check if they have collections or hubs on your topic, or if they have written many articles on the topic that interests you.

4. Evaluate the potential of the keywords you have gathered in your table.

First, look at the Volume. The higher it is, the better. However, if the Volume of a keyword, which is intended for a separate article, is below 50, reconsider if the effort is worth it. A good lower limit to consider is 100.

Next, look at the KD (Keyword Difficulty). If your domain’s Authority Rate is around 40, aim for keywords with a KD no higher than 40, ideally up to 30. This increases your chances of reaching the top 3 and attracting valuable visits. While your hub can include keywords with a higher KD, the majority should have a low KD.

For example, let’s compare two topics: customer engagement and lead generation.

Hubs topics ideasRelevant termsKeywordsVolumeKDCPCArticles on topic?
customer engagementVisitors engagement
Engage customers
Clients engagement
customer engagement1460308.45yes
customer engagement platforms1900417.49yes
customer engagement examples789354yes
customer engagement metrics400185.35yes
customer engagement strategies 365370yes
Lead generationLead capturing, MQL, SQLlead generation11000719.64yes
lead generation strategies700500yes
lead generation ideas400430yes
tips for lead generation10070yes
lead generation services1400688.34yes

The Keyword Difficulty for the keywords in the first hub is much lower than that of the second hub. This means that the hub on customer engagement is more likely to rank in the top 10 and bring you traffic compared to the hub on lead generation, despite the latter’s attractive Volume metrics. 

Our theory is further supported by the CPC data of the first hub. 

This doesn’t mean you can’t write the second hub. You certainly can, but you should expect that content alone won’t suffice — you will need backlinks. A lot of backlinks to your hub articles from relevant websites.

5. Set Priorities

Add a column to rate your confidence in each hub, for example:

  • 3: Definitely write
  • 2: Possibly write
  • 1: Do not write

Use this rating system to prioritize your efforts and focus on the most promising hubs first. This will help in efficiently allocating your resources and maximizing the impact of your SEO strategy.

Hubs topics ideasRelevant termsKeywordsVolumeKDCPCArticles on topic?Rating
customer engagementVisitors engagement
Engage customers
Clients engagement
customer engagement1460308.45yes3
customer engagement platforms1900417.49yes
customer engagement examples789354yes
customer engagement metrics400185.35yes
customer engagement strategies 365370yes
Lead generationLead capturing, MQL, SQLlead generation11000719.64yes1
lead generation strategies700500yes
lead generation ideas400430yes
tips for lead generation10070yes
lead generation services11400888.34yes
ideaRelevant termsKeyword 111000919.64yes1
Keyword 21700680yes
Keyword 3400730yes
Keyword 4100230yes
Keyword 51400528.34yes

Sort the table in descending order by priority, and voilà — you have a ready sequence for further research on hub topics. The next article will be about how to properly gather keywords for a content hub.

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