We’ve spoken before about the power of hub pages and continue to see the benefit for your business as valuable materials to support the KNOW, LIKE, and TRUST phases of your buyers’ journey. Focused on a single topic, hub pages become a foundational source for readers and potential clients, providing a bounty of information to help them better understand your approach to a given topic.
No matter what kind of business you run, there is value in establishing hub pages for relevant areas of expertise. Here are ways they can transform your business to connect with potential customers throughout their engagement with your brand.
First of all… what is a Hub Page?
Think of any hub page as an online mini-course. It’s a single page on your site that collects a variety of information on a single topic relevant to your customers’ challenges. A good hub page can cover the Know, Like, Trust, and even Try phases of the customer Hourglass (with the proper CTA). We have even seen hub pages used effectively to help support the Buy phase when your sales team shares hubs with specific potential clients to help reinforce your brand’s expertise and know-how during sales conversations.
Establish Yourself as an Industry Expert
One of the best ways to build trust with customers and prospects is to prove that you really know what you’re talking about. When all of your knowledge is spread across your website (which is pretty standard), it’s more difficult for visitors to get the full scope of the expertise you bring to the table and to fully understand the breadth of your knowledge surrounding solutions to the challenges they face.
When your thinking around client solutions isn’t centralized, people might only be aware of a tiny sliver of the knowledge you have. For example, if you run a landscaping business, someone might be aware that you handle regular, in-season lawncare, but they might be unaware of the work you do to help preserve the functionality and beauty of residences year-round (e.g. snow removal, holiday light installation, and seasonal sprinkler maintenance).
Without a hub page, visitors might also be missing out on understanding your depth of understanding on a particular topic. Returning to the landscaping example, they might have heard from a neighbor that you saved their old elm trees from an invasive species, but they might not know your level of expertise in preventative care or that you are the only area landscaper using eco-friendly pest prevention methods.
Hub pages empower you to demonstrate prowess in very focused areas of your business and how this knowledge helps your clients thrive. With hub pages, you can effectively showcase your expertise – which becomes a key differentiator between you and your competition.
Increase Trust and Authority with Search Engines
Trust and authority have become two of the most important ranking factors with Google (and other search engines like Bing, Yahoo!, and DuckDuckGo). Creating hub pages allows you to leverage not only internal linking (cross-linking to materials you have created and shared on your site) but also to link out to other industry experts who have created materials relevant to your hub topics and valuable to your audience.
When you can create high-quality internal linking, Google’s algorithm ranks you more highly in both authority and trust. Over time, these factors will help your site rank higher in Google’s search results, meaning that your best content — featured on your hub pages — will be seen by an even broader audience.
Boost Your Content Offers
It’s commonly known that creating content offers like ebooks or checklists (often called “lead magnets”) provides valuable information to your target audience and helps identify and capture your most qualified leads.
When you include content offers on your hub pages, you can generate even greater interest in these materials. You’ve already established your expertise on the topic through the wealth and variety of material shared and linked to on your hub page. Getting visitors to sign up for regular updates or share their email addresses with you to download a more extended, value-driven resource becomes that much easier.
Since hub pages increase your standing in search engine rankings, your content offers featured on these hub pages get seen by a broader audience, meaning you can capture even more qualified leads.
Organize Existing Content
Suppose you’ve been following content creation best practices over the years. In that case, you likely have hundreds — perhaps thousands—of blog posts, webinars, podcasts, videos, and the like across various channels. That means you’ve shared a lot of useful information on topics about which you are best positioned to demonstrate your expertise.
But right now, if someone is looking to do a deep dive into a specific topic, they have to go to your blog, search for a relevant term, and sort through articles looking for the most pertinent ones. (Not to mention other channels where you might have published over the years like YouTube, LinkedIn, or other social channels.)
Hub pages allow you to bring order to the content chaos that’s pretty standard for most people who are creating material regularly and help guide your visitors’ experience and ease their ability to access your wealth of valuable insights. Let’s say you’re the founder of a wealth management firm. You might create hub pages around various topics like estate planning, managing your assets to reduce taxes in retirement, protecting your assets, and information on the different types of investments.
On each hub page, you would then create sub-categories, allowing you to share related content in an organized fashion. This makes it easy for visitors to scan for the information they need quickly, and maybe even discover related content they wouldn’t have thought to search for on their own. Creating bulleted lists that link out to assets both on- and off-site makes it easy for your clients to gain access to the information they need and to view you and your organization as a trusted authority in the space.
Give Old Content a Second Life
You put a lot of time and effort into creating meaningful content for prospects and customers alike. But suppose you’re only adding these articles to your blog or posting them on your podcast hosting site. In that case, the material eventually fades into the background as newer posts and episodes are added. Eventually, valuable materials and resources end up buried in the recesses of your archives.
Hub pages allow you to highlight evergreen content — those “oldies but goodies” that remain as relevant today as they were when you first posted them — bringing these materials front and center so you get the most out of the work you put into their creation.
Content Surge with a Clear Start and Finish
A hub page project is a shot in the arm for any organization not yet fully committed to content marketing. It gives your team a clear purpose to tackle the Know, Like, Trust phases of the Hourglass and, combined with the right content offer, even provides benefits in the Try stage – all contained within a single effort.
If you are starting from scratch, committing to an effort that may not fully bear fruit for months can feel daunting. Creating your first hub page outline usually requires approximately 15-20 article titles to complete. Still, you gain benefits throughout the process just through getting new materials created and posted to your site as well as in getting practice at content creation itself. The hub page push helps add a content foundation with a clear start and finish. And with the proper keyword focus, you can begin ranking much quicker than with a slapdash or gradual approach.
We strongly believe in the power of hub pages to transform a small business’ content marketing game. They allow you to harness the full power of the high-quality content you’ve created over the years. Or they inspire you to jump-start your content marketing effectively. Plus they help you rank better in search and drive conversions with the most promising leads. What’s not to love?
Need help getting started with hub pages or outlining a plan of action? Give us a shout to schedule a consultation.
