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:

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. 👇

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 ideas	Relevant terms
Conversion Rate optimization	Conversion, CR, CRO
Revenue growth	Revenue optimization, revops, business revenue, budget.
Lead generation	Lead capturing, MQL, SQL
Lead nurturing	Nurturing leads
Inbound funnel	Funnel marketing, inbound
Chatbots	Chat bot, chatbot, customer service chatbot, lead magnet chatbot, chatbot marketing
Popups	Popup, pop-up, lead capture popup
Live chats	Live chat software, website chat,

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

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.

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”.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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 ideas	Relevant terms	Keywords	Volume	KD	CPC	Articles on topic?
customer engagement	Visitors engagement Engage customers Clients engagement	customer engagement	1460	30	8.45	yes
		customer engagement platforms	1900	41	7.49	yes
		customer engagement examples	789	35	4	yes
		customer engagement metrics	400	18	5.35	yes
		customer engagement strategies	365	37	0	yes
Lead generation	Lead capturing, MQL, SQL	lead generation	11000	71	9.64	yes
		lead generation strategies	700	50	0	yes
		lead generation ideas	400	43	0	yes
		tips for lead generation	100	7	0	yes
		lead generation services	1400	68	8.34	yes

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 ideas	Relevant terms	Keywords	Volume	KD	CPC	Articles on topic?	Rating
customer engagement	Visitors engagement Engage customers Clients engagement	customer engagement	1460	30	8.45	yes	3
		customer engagement platforms	1900	41	7.49	yes
		customer engagement examples	789	35	4	yes
		customer engagement metrics	400	18	5.35	yes
		customer engagement strategies	365	37	0	yes
Lead generation	Lead capturing, MQL, SQL	lead generation	11000	71	9.64	yes	1
		lead generation strategies	700	50	0	yes
		lead generation ideas	400	43	0	yes
		tips for lead generation	100	7	0	yes
		lead generation services	11400	88	8.34	yes
idea	Relevant terms	Keyword 1	11000	91	9.64	yes	1
		Keyword 2	1700	68	0	yes
		Keyword 3	400	73	0	yes
		Keyword 4	100	23	0	yes
		Keyword 5	1400	52	8.34	yes

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.