When it comes to leveraging content to attract and retain customers, the challenge for brands can be overwhelming. It’s difficult to consistently publish high quality, authoritative content and, depending on your product niche, a traditional company blog may simply not be enough.

That’s where content hubs can be a worthwhile investment for consumer-driven brands—especially in the health and wellness space.

Content hubs act as a branded resource center for consumers to find and engage with helpful information. Instead of being a sales approach—as accomplished by a traditional company website—the content hub publishes niche information related to your company’s product and can convert visitors into leads.

The content hub is not a replacement for your company website. Instead, it’s a supplemental marketing strategy that takes advantage of the demand for well-organized, consumer-facing content.

Jump to How to Organize a Content Hub

What Is a Content Hub?

Depending on where you search, you may come across a multitude of definitions for the term “content hub.” Some consider content hubs to be themed content on a website or blog, spanning multiple pages or in series form all interlinking.

For the purpose of this guide and the marketing strategy we’re covering here, we’re going to define a content hub as a separate domain or subdomain branded as an information resource. It’s not the company’s corporate, product-driven website, and it’s more robust than a blog living on a company site. It’s often multi-media, including articles, infographics and videos and is highly engageable on social media.

Content hubs act as a visitor magnet but by way of providing valuable information around a  particular topic related to your product, rather than your company’s specific product itself.

In summary, a content hub is:

  • An authoritative resource about a particular consumer topic related to your product
  • A mix of content, including how-to-guides, infographics, tips, FAQs, video interviews and more
  • Branded, yet not a platform for direct sales like an online store or company site

Benefits of Content Hubs

Content hubs have specific benefits over other forms of content marketing strategies, like traditional blogs, e-book downloads or general web information. Because content hubs are based on a central and targeted theme, the main benefit of a content hub is that you’re leveraging Google’s mission to vet only the top, most authoritative content on a particular topic.

If you’re interested in starting a content hub for your brand and niche market, consider these top benefits of content hub publishing:

Attract Visitors

The primary goal with all publishing is to attract visitors to the site. But unlike a company website, which attracts visitors who are actively seeking your particular product, brand or product category, a content hub is attracting visitors who would make excellent eventual customers.

Having a content hub dedicated to a topic that directly interests your target audience ensures you can capture them in a way that also offers them something of value—the information they’re looking for.

Establish Authority

The next most important reason to build a content hub is to establish your authority in your field. The search engines are busy crawling potentially hundreds of thousands of pages in your topic arena.

Content hubs make it easy for search engines to recognize your domain as an authority on a specific site, not just because of the amount of authoritative content, but also because of how the content hub is structured, taking an “everything you need to know about X” approach to content publishing.

Increase Interaction

There’s only so much engagement that can be done with a traditional blog, company site or landing page. A content hub is a concept designed to take advantage of the fact that consumers will and do engage with content that’s helpful, useful and inspiring.

On a content hub, there could be articles to read, guides to learn from, fact sheets and infographics to share and videos to watch. The multimedia strategy just means more avenues for consumers to invest their time in.

Maintain Control

You’ll often see brands using their social media channels as a content hub where they post updates, announcements and interesting and relevant information. But there are a couple limitations with this. First, this content isn’t really indexable and attributable to your domain, meaning it’s not lending any credibility to your site. Second, you don’t actually own any of that content.

Establishing an independent content hub ensures that you:

  • Have control over your content
  • Publish content on your terms
  • Benefit from any domain authority your content generates

Instead of using social media as your primary promotion platform, use it as a secondary means to promote the awesome content coming from your hub.

Generate Leads

Saving this content hub benefit for last is by no means saying it’s the least important reason to start a content hub. In fact, it’s really the most important because after all, selling to customers is why you exist. This one is only last in the list to help shift your focus away from this being the driving force and rather it being the natural result that will occur when a content hub is properly done.

There are lots of creative ways to convert traffic into leads on a content hub. Using your content hub as a way to strategically funnel your traffic to your end product is just smart. You can do this with various call-to-actions that are relevant to the content pages they’re placed on (which is a whole other topic in itself).

How to Organize a Content Hub

We mentioned a couple things that will determine how effective your content hub is at reaping the potential benefits listed above. One is your ability to convert using smart calls-to-action, the other is how you organize the content itself.

The first step in organizing a content hub is to get very clear on the audience you’re targeting and the topic that appeals to them that’s related to your product. A good example is a yoga practice blog for a chain of yoga studios.

Now, you may be wondering how organizing content could be so important. If you’ve been taking the traditional blog approach, you’ve probably never concerned yourself much with content organization and architecture. But it’s important because it’s what makes all the difference when comparing a content hub to a traditional blog and what Google considers authoritative by comparison.

Let’s compare the difference between traditional blog content organization and strategic content hub organization:

Traditional Blog Content Organization

A traditional blog’s architecture looks something like the below. A bunch of different blog posts on your product’s industry all published on the same page level, without any real interlinking strategy. At best, you might find a blog with content categories, but often a single blog post will be tagged under multiple content categories.

Example of typical blog structure:

  • domainname.com/blog/top-benefits-of-topic
  • domainname.com/blog/top-4-solutions-for-topic
  • domainname.com/blog/new-research-on-topic-shows

With a traditional blog, there’s no logical order to the content and no decisive architecture for the search engines to crawl and follow. Additionally, having a blog following this non-structure makes it really hard to track and manage your current inventory of topics, meaning it’s difficult to build and create any kind of deliberate interlinking strategy to ensure all your content is being offered logically to your visitors.

To sum up, here is how the traditional blog publishing method lacks compared to a content hub strategy:

  • No content hierarchy with topic focus
  • No URL folder consistency
  • No set format or structure per page
  • Random word counts, meaning random content forms
  • No interlinking strategy

Content Hub Content Organization

With content hubs, the approach is much more strategic, and it takes into account Google’s current focus on ranking pages by topic authority, rather than by keywords. [See more on that at HubSpot, Topic Clusters: The Next Evolution of SEO.]

For example, a content hub would, by nature, be a much more organized content platform. It would follow a logical page hierarchy or architecture that makes it easy for Google to see you’ve built out authoritative content that’s easy to navigate and provides all the answers based on user intent.

Here’s how a content hub’s architecture could look:

Pillar Topic 1:

  • domainname.com/topic-1
  • domainname.com/topic-1/subtopic-1
  • domainname.com/topic-1/subtopic-2
  • domainname.com/topic-1/subtopic-3
  • domainname.com/topic-1/subtopic-4

Pillar Topic 2:

  • domainname.com/topic-2
  • domainname.com/topic-2/subtopic-1
  • domainname.com/topic-2/subtopic-2
  • domainname.com/topic-2/subtopic-3
  • domainname.com/topic-2/subtopic-4

Pillar Topic 3:

  • domainname.com/topic-3
  • domainname.com/topic-3/subtopic-1
  • domainname.com/topic-3/subtopic-2
  • domainname.com/topic-3/subtopic-3
  • domainname.com/topic-3/subtopic-4

The primary topic pages would interlink to the subpages, and the subpages would interlink back to the primary pages and between each other where relevant.

Using the example of the yoga content hub for yoga studios, their content hub might look like:

  • Yoga Poses (topic 1)
    • Child’s Pose (subtopic 1)
    • Tree Pose (subtopic 2)
    • Eagle Pose (subtopic 3)
    • Prayer Pose (subtopic 4)
  • Yoga Styles (topic 2)
    • Hatha (subtopic 1)
    • Vinyasa (subtopic 2)
    • Hot Yoga (subtopic 3)
    • Prenatal Yoga (subtopic 4)
  • Yoga Fundamentals (topic 3)
    • History of Yoga (subtopic 1)
    • Philosophy of Yoga(subtopic 2)
    • Yoga and Spirituality (subtopic 3)
    • Yoga Today (subtopic 4)

As you can see, you can really break it down into as many subtopics as you want, depending on how far you want to take your content hub. For a chain of yoga studios, it might be worth it to keep going deeper, depending on their goals (i.e. franchising, developing multiple locations, attracting more teachers, etc.).

Compared to a traditional blog publishing approach, here’s how content hubs prevail:

  • Logical organization of content based on topic
  • Ability to add multiple subtopics and sub-subtopics
  • Easy URL folder set-up for search engines to crawl
  • Easy to interlink to related subtopics for visitors, enhancing user experience
  • Set structure per content page level, including consistent format and length

Now that you have a better understanding of how a content hub’s content should be organized, it’s time to discuss how you actually begin building this content. For that, you will need a content plan and schedule.

Content Hub Production Plan and Schedule

If you don’t have someone on your content team who has a natural talent for planning and organizing and breaking projects into small, manageable chunks, then this section on planning and scheduling could really help you take the overwhelming task of building a content hub and breaking it down into a manageable project.

1. Topic Exploration

In this step, you’ll explore how the target audience might react to your content hub. You’ll really want to learn more about what your buyer cares about and the type of relevant content you can produce that will fulfill that need. Chances are, you probably already have a good idea of what this is.

In this phase, you’ll do things like:

  • Research topic ideas
  • Research existing content hubs on your potential topics
  • Research pages currently ranking for that topic and its many related search terms
  • Keyword research—longtail keywords (use keyword search tools for this)
  • Assess what information your target audience is hungry for and the types of questions they need answering

2. Publish Pillar Pages

Pillar pages are your core topic pages. Each of these pillar pages (also known as cornerstone content) will be more comprehensive guides or overviews of the topic. By publishing these first, you’re building your main platform from which to publish supporting content on more narrow topic focuses.

Be sure to include broad information on the pillar pages about your future subtopics as you’ll be able to interlink from the pillar pages to the subtopic pages.

3. Publish Support Content

Once the pillar content is published, you can build out your supporting content on the subtopics. Supporting content pages are more specific and usually shorter in length, although they don’t have to be. You can also use supporting content to link back to pillar pages and link in between related subtopic pages.

As you build out your subtopic pages, don’t forget to go back into your pillar pages and add interlinks to the supporting content as it’s published. Review these pillar pages once more, as you may have new opportunities to beef these up even more.

Get Help With Content Hub Development

If a content hub sounds like the right strategy for your health and wellness brand, work with Healthy Content on strategy, development and publishing. Healthy Content can conduct the research, investigate competing content hubs and blogs and put together a topic strategy, including pillar pages and supporting content.

To get started on a content hub for your brand, get in touch with Healthy Content today.