It’s no surprise to those reading this blog post that content marketing is the hot topic for any person in marketing today. But there is a reason for this, it works. Stats upon stats can be found about the success of content marketing and how creating content creates a bond between the company writing it and the potential customer.
But, you just can’t create content and hope it will work, you need a direction to take and that’s where a well formulated strategy can come in. The strategy can help you understand user intent, know what questions your customers are asking, create topics for a calendar, understand how your content is working, test changes to behavior flow and garner ideas on how to curate leads.
One strategy that often goes overlooked is an onsite linking strategy. Providing users a direction on your website is important to having a healthy and respected website. That’s why an onsite linking strategy can be the most effective way to drive your content up the search result pages and it’s easy.
The idea
The idea is simple. It’s creating a “home page” for the individual, main topics you write about. At Brandpoint we consider content strategy, content development, and content distribution as our three main topics. You’ll see those three topics throughout our website and our blog. We chose these because it’s at the heart of service we can provide our clients. Stated simply, it’s our calling card.
The implementation
Creating a HubPage is rather easy once you understand the idea. The first step is to decide which topics you want to be your HubPages. Building these topics out with a content strategy is important. Your strategy needs to give you an idea where you’re headed. Use a calendar to know what content is being created when and make building out your main topics priority going forward. The more related content you can create and connect to these HubPages is the most important part of the implementation.
A great example of building content around a main topic is on the travel website, DreamPlanGo. On this website they have a main topic, i.e. travel destination: Chicago, and from there they built out their content around this topic. These pages, created early in quarter two, have seen their search engine results average position jump 46 percent. Moving on average to the second page of their primary keyword search results in a competitive industry like travel, within a half year, is great proof this type of strategy works. If the budget doesn’t allow for full throttle content creation right off the bat, a great way to utilize HubPages is done by Erie Insurance.
Erie Insurance came to Brandpoint at the end of 2013 looking for strategy and blog writing. Since they began to implement the HubPage strategy, they’ve seen a 60 percent increase in traffic to those HubPages. Since the beginning of their campaign they have seen a 400 percent increase in total sessions to eriesense.com; when compared to the previous time period. If you follow the link provided, you can see that all they did was provide a general outline to the main topic, in this case black ice driving, and then linked to the other blog posts going more in-depth into black ice driving.
Why it works
So why does it work? You’re writing for your customer. User-experience has become more important since Google shook up search results with their Hummingbird update. If you’re completing your on page best practices like using proper metas, titles, photos, building it to be shared, using header tags and using responsive design, using a HubPage will allow you to build authority in the eyes of your user and the search engines.
Conclusion
The two examples I gave within this post are proof this strategy works. As search changes, as it always does, there will be one constant within any algorithm: well written content. If you’re creating content that answers a question and you’re promoting that content you’re going to see brand loyalty increase and then over time sales. Using HubPages give users those answers and builds authority within your industry. Above all, that’s what we all want, including Google.
