How To Farm Links Using Content Hubs (Tactical Guide)

Want to gain authority in your niche? Want to get links and passive amplification for content?

Well, it’s every content marketer/blogger’s dream.

And the secret to getting the aforesaid incentives is unique & special content.

But how do you build Unique & special content when you don’t have access to a ton of data or you aren’t a thought leader in your niche?

Well, you could build “Content Hubs”.

In today’s Guide, we are going to teach you everything about content hubs and about how you can use them to farm links for your website.

Let’s dive in!

Disclaimer: Nicheshake.com currently doesn’t have any content hubs, but we do have them on some of our other AdSense monetized sites. And they work great! Unfortunately, we cannot share the URL of those websites because of Click fraud spam and many other problems that come along with it. 

What Are Content Hubs?

First, you had to dish out content to fill your blog & social media pages. And now you have to create a “Content Hub”?!.

Chills.

Well, there’s nothing to be scared of, building Content Hubs doesn’t require a super complex algorithmic mind. 

With the right resources and templates, you can easily build them (without messing up)

So, what is a content hub?

A content hub is a group of media assets (articles, videos, visuals) centralized around a specific topic and linked to and forth internally to establish a semantic relationship between them.

Word processing error? Here’s a practical explanation.

In the above visual the circle in the middle represents the “Primary page” for your primary topic & the arrows represent “Internal links” while the circles with the alphabets represent Sub-pages i.e pages where you will cover content related to the primary pillar page.

For example, if your pillar page is on the topic of “Keto dieting” you could create pieces of content related to Keto like the benefits of Keto, keto recipes, keto pros & cons, etc.

Here’s how it would look like,

Pillar Page – Keto dieting

A – Benefits of Keto

B – Keto recipes

C – Keto Pros & Cons

D- What Is Keto

Content Hub Examples

The first one is Moz’s Beginners Guide To SEO;

When you scroll down you can see links to subpages

And when you click on them a completely new page opens

The second one is Quicksprout’s guide to Link Building;

When you scroll down the page you will see a curated list of all the content on link building on the Quicksprout blog.

The 3rd example is Drift’s guide to Chatbots;

On their main (Ultimate) page they give a brief description of each topic.

And then provide a link to the sub-page in case you want to dig deeper.

After click;

The fourth (and last example) is Backlinko’s (Brian) hub on YouTube.

He has organized topics very neatly in customized blocks along with quick summaries on what to expect from the content inside.

And this has earned him quite a lot of backlinks (As expected)

Types Of Content Hubs (ContentHarmony)

Source for all of ‘em: Contentharmony 

#1 The Classic Hub & Spoke

This is similar to how Quicksprout’s Guide To Link Building Is.

#2 The Content Library

This is similar to Drift’s guide on chatbots.

#3 The Content Database

This is similar to HelpScout’s Blog Page 

#4 The Topic Gateway

CompareCards’ uses this in all of their pages on a given topic, for example, Balance transfers.

Why Are Content Hubs Important? (Top-level view)

Content hubs are important for several reasons. Some of them include:-

• Accessible Content Structure: with content hubs, you are mapping your content in a way that will be appreciated by both users/customers & search engine bots/spiders
• Easy Management: creating content hubs also helps you as a content manager or website owner. You won’t need to worry about searching for a piece among a sea of content pieces. With content hubs, you are always going to know where your content is because you already have Per-minute everything planned.
• Topical authority with search engines: When you create content hubs, you essentially build a library of content related to a specific term. And that signals Google i.e it gives Google a lot of context on your website’s topic (More on that coming up)
• Revive dead content: With the help of content hubs, you can give as much exposure as possible to your old content buried under your site structure. 

These are some top-line highlights on why Content hubs are important for your website, to help you decide whether you would want to reshape your approach to content marketing.

Content Hub Benefits

The previous section gave you a top-line view of the importance of content hubs. 

In this section, however, we are going to dive deep into the actual benefits of building Content hubs. So that you can decide whether or not it is worth the time and effort.

#1 Content Marketing 10x-ed

The above chart from SEMrush shows that marketers are actively growing their content marketing budgets, which in simple terms means that there’s going to be a lot more competition.

Per-minute, internet users generate 500 hours of YouTube content, 1,440 WordPress posts, 448,800 tweets, 65,972 Instagram posts, and 3.3 million Facebook posts,

So simple content marketing ain’t going to cut. You have to level up your content marketing game.

And content hubs can be a great way to do so. 

By building content hubs you are essentially 10xing your content marketing efforts. You are building pieces of content as a categorized & organized hub, which is going to stand out amongst others.

Therefore it will be a lot easier to promote your hub and boost your bottom line through content marketing. 

#2 Funnel Improvements

When a visitor comes to your website to learn about a topic, one page might not be enough to satisfy him/her.

But, if you have content hubs on your site your users might dig deep into it and learn more about the topic. 

As mentioned earlier, content hubs (generally) display you as an authority on that topic, and the same thing happens with your visitors. 

They associate your brand with the topic they had read on your content hub.

Eventually, when they will decide to buy the service you offer, they will immediately remember you and prefer you as their first choice.

This helps push more people into your marketing funnel, thus boosting potential leads.

Content hubs will contribute to bringing your potential customers to the consideration phase of the marketing funnel (#3)

#3 The Evergreen Factor

Content hubs aren’t your ordinary articles. 

When created right and marketed well they have the potential of becoming an Evergreen & authority piece of content in your niche. 

That is, content hubs are of great value to a user/reader. So over time, they foster a community/following among the influencers & practitioners in your industry. 

A great example of this is Moz’s “Beginners Guide to SEO” originally written by Rand Fishkin as a piece of content for Newsweek Readers.

Here’s a comment I found recently from an SEO practitioner under a thread in the r/BigSEO subreddit.

These types of content pieces help increase your brand synonymity and awareness too. 

#4 Long-Tail Keywords 

Long-tail keywords are key traffic drivers to the majority of the pages on the internet. 

A single page might rank for hundreds or even thousands of “Long-tail keywords”

And when you build content hubs you are essentially creating a universe of them. 

Let’s say you decide to create a Content hub on Keto dieting. You might create sub-pages like Benefits of Keto, Keto recipes, What is Keto dieting, etc.

When you will create say 9 relevant subpages for your pillar page on Keto you are going to go super in-depth on all these sub-pages thus covering as many long-tail keywords as possible.

For example, 657 long-tail keywords on a single sub-page. Now multiply that number by 9, and the result is 5913 potential long-tail keywords.

That’s a freaking ‘universe of ‘em. 

So think about how much traffic they are going to drive you.

#5 The Greater Goal

What’s the end goal of any company out there at the end of the day?

It’s satisfying its users.

And Google is no exception. Google too wants users to enjoy and trust their product never doubting their search results.

So instead of trying to work back how Google’s algorithms might be working, I would recommend trying to figure out what your users are actually thinking and doing things like user studies, inviting a bunch of people to your office, or virtually to show them something new that you’re providing on your website and ask them really hard questions where sometimes the answer might be we don’t like your website or we were confused by your website or we don’t like the colour of your logo or something.

So if you want to rank on Google, you need to help them fulfill their greater goal.

And by building hubs you are doing exactly that.

You are helping users by providing them with a one-stop-shop for all their queries on a single topic.

Content hubs are fundamentally built with the User in mind.

#6 Topical Authority

Take a look at the above graph.

Topical Authority is edging close to Backlinks as a ranking factor. And you can easily justify it with everyone advising to go niche instead of broad.

Take About.com’s example, they used to be a huge site about, everything.

In the beginning, this didn’t affect their search rankings, but with the launch of the Hummingbird update, their rankings fell like a rolling stone.

Our lesson?

It’s time to go niche to beat the big boys in our industry.

Semantic Search

When you build Content hubs, you internal link all the pages together, thus technically creating a hub.

Doing that helps you establish a semantic relationship between your subpages.

And helps your pages or your website in general gain “Topical Authority”.

PageRank Flow

PageRank is an algorithm used by Google Search to rank web pages in their search engine results. PageRank is a way of measuring the importance of website pages. According to Google: PageRank works by counting the number and quality of links to a page to determine a rough estimate of how important the website is. (Source)

As discussed earlier content hubs will always be superior resources to link to, no matter the industry/vertical.

And when you get backlinks from other pages what comes with it?

PageRank.

And when you internal link pages on a content hub what happens?

There is a passive and healthy flow of PageRank throughout all your pages. Even those who aren’t a part of your content hub (Home page, Product Page)

In a nutshell, you can funnel PageRank from building Content hubs to pages that just wouldn’t rank.

This SEO strategy of building links to content pieces and funneling PageRank to Products and homepages is called “The Middle Man Method” more info is in this article by Ahrefs. 

#7 Bird-Friendly

The Hummingbird update focuses on giving users the most relevant results. This algorithm was launched on 20th July 2013 and since then it has come a long way. 

The Hummingbird update deals with low-quality content that might not provide great value to users. 

Content hubs are perfectly aligned with the Hummingbird algorithm. As they provide a lot of value to users

Niche VS Broad Sites

In this section, we will be going over how to implement Content hubs for Niche or broad websites.

Let’s begin,

#1 Niche 

Let’s say you had a niche website on Python (Programming language). Then you would have to create a content hub based on Python only. 

You would have a pillar page similar to Drift (See Content Hub examples) that would give a short brief about each sub-topic and then nudge curious readers to visit the subpages to learn more.

When you expand to new languages you can just create new content hubs similar to the one on Python.

#2 Broad

Say you had a website on Diets. That means you would have to build separate hubs for Keto, Paleo, Vegan, Atkins, etc.

How To Build Content Hubs?

Phew.

We are finally over with all theoretical shit.

Let’s now dive into something that separates this guide from others. And that is;

How to build content hubs.

In this section, we are going to dig deep into it.

So let’s begin.

#1 Wikipedia

Currently, English Wikipedia has over 6 Million articles and averages 597 new articles every day.

Bonkers.

Wikipedia arguably always has the most detailed and well-researched articles out there.

Because most of its content is openly edited by contributors thus making its content super fresh and thorough.

You can use these attributes of Wikipedia to build content hubs for yourself. 

To do that, first of all, go to Wikipedia.com 

Then search for at topic – Let’s go for Content Marketing

Check out the table of contents for relevant sub-topics you can cover.

#2 Topic

Topic is a must-have tool for content marketers. It scrapes the web for questions related to your space. 

Consider it as AnswerThePublic, but better.

Open usetopic.com/peope-also-ask

Then type in your seed topic – let’s say “Content Marketing”

Immediately we get a lot of questions categorized neatly into semantic buckets.

Useful.

#3 Keywords Everywhere

Extension enthusiast?

We got you covered.

You can use Keywords Everywhere a freemium chrome extension that pulls relevant keywords for any search query right into the SERPS along with helpful metrics like search volume, volume trend & CPC.

Just search for a keyword

And get relevant keywords on a silver platter.

#4 Ahrefs

Ahrefs is a very expensive SEO suite.

But if you ask us, it’s worth it.

It’s got a monstrous link index along with a lot of helpful “Filter parameters” which is very important for savvy link builders like us.

Go to Keywords explorer

Search for your core topic – Content Marketing

Go to more keywords

Filter & sort 

And hit export 

You can then open up your CSV in either Microsoft Excel or Google Sheets to cherry-pick some great sub-topic ideas.

Alternatively, you can also use Content Explorer (from Ahrefs).

Just type in your core topic 

And pick topics you would like to include in your content hub. (Remember to pick topics with search traffic potential and a good virality score).

Content Hubs: Do’s and Dont’s 

Content Hubs can be tricky to create and even harder to remember the Do’s and Dont’s. 

So we organized both of them for quick and easy reference.

Do’s

Strategize User Flow

Making sure your users flow well in your content hubs is crucial. And by flow, we don’t mean the regular “Can they browse through content flow”.

You have to make sure your Users flow towards the core goal of your website or your driving notion.

Be it leads, product sales, course sales, sign-ups, or even affiliate sales.

For example, say we had a hub on Content marketing and in that hub, we had an article named “Content marketing mistakes”.

We could include CTA’s like “Geez..worried about mistakes?….schedule a call now and talk to our expert”  to make sure the user’s flow is well aligned with our core goal, that is to drive lead sign-ups.

So don’t forget to do it.

Amplify – Before Organic Kicks In

We all know it takes SEO a hell of a lot of time to work out.

So you shouldn’t wait around for Google, instead, you should start reaching out to influencers showing them your content hubs. 

Or you could spend a few dollars on ads (on cheaper networks) to amplify your content even more. 

A/B Test Content Experiences

When the first round of visitors come make sure to have some User tools set up (Like CrazyEgg or HotJar)

Also, make sure to analyze heatmaps and user recordings provided by these tools to see how users are behaving with your content.

Then you could try out another variant and stack their results against each other and decide which one to adapt vs which one to not.

These things can drastically improve the usefulness of your hubs.

Prioritize Stuff

Productivity tip, prioritize your content and build a content calendar accordingly.

This tip can save you tons of wasted time and headaches.

Dont’s

Stop Flow Of LinkJuice

LinkJuice (aka PageRank) 

Take the example of Drift’s content hub on chatbots.

It linked internally to a lot of drift’s marketing resources and also to the original hub page and other sub-topics.

This allowed all the LinkJuice obtained by Drift’s hub to flow within the entire website and other subpages which lacked it.

So make sure to do it with your hubs too.

Make It A 90 Page (Scribbled) Thesis

Do you like pages filled with walls of text? 

Of course no.

Content hubs have to be visually attractive and easy to navigate. You have to make sure to include things like Table Of Contents (TOC), Back to top buttons, graphics, etc.

Here’s the anatomy of a well-illustrated & structured piece of content

Always make sure your content structure is A+.

Here’s a table with all the required plugins and tools to pull off something similar to the visual above

Table of contents – Easy table of contents

Back to top- Easy back to the top for WP

Custom blocks – Stackable or Ultimate Addons for Gutenberg

Templates – Divi builder or Elementor

Graphic Design – Canva or Visme

Fluff It Up

Don’t just fill up your sub-pages for the sake of it. 

Make sure the content you are adding is relevant and not just added for a larger word count.

For example, Drift’s sub-pages aren’t filled with unnecessary info i.e where the topic isn’t expandable they don’t expand it by force.

GIF on a thin drift page

Fall Into the Good Content Paradox

Is your content really good?

Or you just bias it just because you have written it. 

That’s the Good Content Paradox in a nutshell. 

You think you have an epic piece until influencers don’t seem interested or don’t feel the same way about your content as you do. 
Hooked? Read this article for more info