When building content on a website, a hub and spoke SEO strategy can help you develop topics. The “hub” is your main topic, and the “spokes” are all supporting topics. This approach helps you organize your content for SEO and provides a useful and informative experience for readers.
For example, let’s say you have a B2B SaaS company that sells human resources software. You might have a product page (hub) for your main topic (HR software) that you optimize with top-of-funnel keywords. Your spokes would be supporting feature pages or blog posts that target MOFU and BOFU audiences looking to solve a problem, like: “How to onboard employees remotely.” The spokes and hub connect with internal links, which helps human users and Google bots understand and navigate your site.
In this post, we’ll talk about how we approach hub and spoke SEO and why it’s helpful for websites.
Benefits of Hub and Spoke SEO
Here’s how hub and spoke SEO can help B2B SaaS businesses:
Better internal linking
The first benefit of the hub and spoke model for SEO is that it improves your internal linking structure. Instead of randomly adding internal links every time you create content, you can plan how spokes will interconnect with the hub and even map out the linking plan in a spreadsheet for quick reference.
Improved authority for search engines
The hub and spoke model also helps you improve your authority on specific topics for search engine algorithms. When you have supporting topics for your main hub topics, you’re demonstrating the depth of your knowledge to search engines, which can boost your search visibility.
Specific keyword targeting
A hub and spoke model allows you to target specific long-tail and short-tail keywords together. Short-tail keywords — like “human resources software” — tend to be more competitive. With a hub and spoke model, you can still create content around short-tail keywords but use long-tail keywords to drive higher-intent traffic.
Upgraded user experience
The hub and spoke model helps your site visitors understand your product. People can easily explore topics and follow internal links to drill down into use cases.
Best Practices for Hub and Spoke SEO
Here’s how to get the most out of your hub and spoke organization and structure:
Define your topics
Come up with a list of topics based on keyword research. That includes looking at keywords your competitors are ranking for and finding a mix of high-value terms that may be difficult to rank for, as well as terms with lower search volume that you could rank for quickly.
While you may have existing content you can use to support your hub topics, there are likely keywords and spokes that you don’t have content for. Find these opportunities and create the content to support them.
Determine your content types
Think about what types of content work best for the keywords you’re targeting. Generally, product pages should include your short-tail, high-value keywords. Using the example of human resources software, here’s what an initial hub and spoke SEO plan might look like:
Provide helpful CTAs
Calls to action, or CTAs, are hyperlinks that guide readers through the buyer’s journey and onto the next step in the conversion funnel. At the end of each piece of content you create, you should have a CTA to help the reader move on to the next conversion action you want them to take. It could be a downloadable resource, a form to speak to a salesperson, or a how-to video guide, depending on your path to conversion.
Level Up Your SEO With Virayo
At Virayo, we’re experts in helping SaaS companies improve SEO and shorten their sales cycles. To learn more about how we can help you improve your SaaS SEO, schedule a quick strategy chat.
