While this model takes more coordination upfront, choosing the right keywords to focus your website’s authority around specific topics can significantly boost your organic visibility over time.
Implementing an effective hub and spoke SEO strategy requires careful keyword research and selection to map out the architecture of your content and optimization efforts. It’s more about choosing what subjects you want to dominate, rather than thinking you can rank for everything. It’s a well-known prioritization exercise.
In this guide, you’ll learn a step-by-step process for selecting target keywords to fuel your hub and spoke content engine, with tips for research, mapping content to keywords, tracking performance and more. We’ll dive into how
Understanding the Hub and Spoke Model for Websites
The hub and spoke SEO methodology structures your website almost like a wheel, with a main “hub” page targeting your primary service or product keywords. Then, you build authority and relevance by creating additional “spoke” content that supports and links back to that hub.
For example, if a law firm wanted to rank for the keyword “personal injury lawyer,” they’d optimize their main services page for that phrase as the hub. Then create spoke pieces of content about related topics like “what to do after a car accident” or “slip and fall injury guide” interlinking back to their hub. Similarly, for a blog section of their site, they would create sub-categories and go deep into each topic.
The goal is for the hub page to rank in search results for that main keyword, while all the spokes boost overall domain authority and keyword volume to position you as an expert resource on the topic.
Why Keyword Research is Vital for Hub and Spoke Sites
Without strategic keyword research and selection, creating a successful hub and spoke model is virtually impossible. You need data to map out what keywords your content will target ahead of time.
Choosing the main hub keyword is arguably the most important decision, as that will become your site’s pillar topic to compete for rankings in search results. Doing upfront research prevents wasted effort optimizing pages for the wrong terms.
In addition, researching keywords gives you insights on:
- Popularity by a topic’s search volume
- Alignment to business goals
- Gaps in competitor content
- Emerging keyword opportunities
As you’re planning content for your spokes, you need keyword data to identify relevant long-tail variants and low competition phrases to target. This allows you to expand your site’s reach and discoverability in the SERPs.
In other words, keyword research lights the path for your entire content marketing and SEO strategy using the hub and spoke model. Choosing the right keywords is essential.
Skip the Line: Automate Hub-and-Spoke Research with Search Alkemy
Before getting started, this whole process can be automated with Search Alkemy. Simply add in your “hub” keyword, we’ll find the spokes that you can build out. You can try the free tool here, though it has less keywords than the Pro version.
Moving on to the manual steps:
Step 1: Select Your Hub Keyword
When brainstorming the main focus keyword for your website’s hub page, you want to align it to three key factors:
- Core service, product or topic your business offers
- High average monthly search volume
- Keyword difficulty that matches your capabilities
If done right, this will become your flagship pillar content that ranks in competitive search results and drives direct traffic and conversions from organic.
Here is a four-step process for identifying and verifying your hub keyword:
Identify Main Service Keyword Candidates
Start by listing out your 4-5 core business offerings or products. Common examples include service categories like:
- Salesforce stands for CRM
- Okta stands for Single sign-on
- AWS stands for cloud-computing
Small businesses need to choose a niche group within these because the competition from these big players is too large to win traffic.
- Storyblok is targeting, “headless CMS”
- Zoho is targeting “small business CRM”
Here’s an example of small business CRM as the hub and free small business CRM as a spoke. On the outer edge are sub-topics, one more level deep into the hub-and-spoke model.
Do some initial research on keyword difficulty tools to identify 1-2 potential keywords around those offerings that have sufficient search volume.
Sources of data include Google Search Console, manual googling or paid ad campaigns. You can gather keyword data to see what is already working with your audience to build onto that structure.
At this early stage, also check that the keywords aren’t completely out of reach competitively. But don’t worry about specifics yet.
Confirm Keyword Aligns With Business Goals
Next, verify that the shortlisted keyword aligns to your organization’s business objectives and targets. You’ll want to make sure that the content you create fits in with specific value propositions and calls-to-action (CTAs) to drive leads or revenue.
Factors here include:
- Key buyer personas and customer demographics
- Profit margins or average order value potential
- Capacity for fulfilling new business
- Strategic areas company wants to expand into
Getting leadership or stakeholders involved early to review the shortlist is key. You want confirmation that investing in content production and optimization for your selected hub keyword makes strategic sense.
Research Exact Monthly Search Volume
Now you can dive deeper into the actual search metrics for the keyword candidates using Google’s Keyword Planner or similar data sources.
Look specifically at average monthly searches to estimate potential traffic volume you’ll get from rankings.
In competitive industries, anything from 1,000 to 5,000+ monthly searches is viable for a mid-sized company. Compare keyword volumes to inform your choice. But you cannot solely look at search volume. Google is so competitive, you need to consider keyword difficulty, or your ability
Verify Competitive Landscape
Finally, use advanced keyword research tools like Search Alkemy, SEMRush or Ahrefs to analyze the competitive difficulty ranking for the terms.
Combining search volume and competitiveness will guide your hub keyword selection.
Step 2: Conduct Spoke Keyword Research
The next phase is leveraging keyword research to map out target phrases for your spoke content.
The goals here are:
- Discover untapped long-tail keyword opportunities
- Identify gaps where competitors lack content
- Expand your website’s keywords and visibility
- Follow this process to research and compile your spoke keyword list:
Use Seed Keywords for Expanded Research
In this step, you can look at Google Search Console to understand what keywords you’re already successful ranking for. Keywords that are on page 4+, or position 40 and above, shows new content opportunities. Similarly, looking at a keywords with a high amount of impressions, but low clicks are good signals showing that Google thinks you’re somewhat relevant, but just not enough to rank with meaningful traffic.
Another way you can start is by using Seed Keywords on a tool like Search Alkemy – inputting your chosen hub keyword as the seed.
This automatically generates hundreds of expanded long-tail keyword ideas grouped into handy categories matching the seed keyword topic.
Review and extract relevant keywords from the Seed Keywords you could create content for.
Search Alkemy provides excel spreadsheets to easily export and organize keywords.
Use these to compile related keywords around planned spoke content subjects into topic groups. This structures your research for the next content mapping steps.
Prioritize Low Competition Keywords
Filter your spreadsheet by keyword difficulty and competition metrics to identify hidden long-tail gems competitor sites haven’t targeted yet.
These become prime targets for your spokes since the barriers to ranking can be lower. Established sites with high domain authority can most likely go for 60 – 80 keyword difficulty. Up-and comping sites can target 30 – 60. Brand new sites will have to dig deep at 0 – 30.
Identify Competitor Content Gaps
Look for categories where competitors lack content depth. If you can create better content than what’s currently on the SERPs, you’ve found your perfect place to start.
If you see high search volumes for a set of keywords, but not many sites actively ranking, that presents an opportunity to dominate that space.
Add any related gap keywords to target in your spokes.
The goal of this expanded research is to create an extensive master keyword list with priority tiers that feeds your content production schedule.
Step 3: Optimize Your Hub Page First
With research completed, it’s finally time to start building your actual hub and spoke SEO framework.
But begin by solely focusing efforts on optimizing your hub page first before creating any spokes.
Your hub will be a pillar content piece – a 3,000+ word definitive guide – dedicated to ranking for that primary keyword identified earlier. Or it could be more of a category page with supplemental content that grows as you create more spokes.
Sidenote: Follow best practices for on-page and technical SEO when publishing your hub:
- Keyword-optimized title tag and page URL
- Focus content around chosen keyword
- Related images and multimedia
- Proper heading tag structure
- High-quality backlinks to hub page
- Fast load times
With a strong hub foundation established, you can shift to mapping and publishing spokes to surround the hub.
Step 4: Map Spoke Keywords to Planned Content
The last crucial step is associating keywords to content topics so you’re purposefully targeting phrases with each spoke you create.
Follow this process for optimal mapping:
- Group Keywords by Relevance
- Go back to your master keyword spreadsheet with all spokes target phrases compiled earlier.
- Categorize keywords into groups that relate closely to one another. These form potential content clusters. Again, Search Alkemy does this automatically for you, try it out for free!
For example, around “vegan recipes” you may group keywords for:
- vegan breakfast ideas
- easy weeknight vegan meals
- healthy vegan protein sources
Choose Content Subjects
Review your topics and groups and identify content pieces you could create around those keywords like:
The Ultimate Guide to Vegan Proteins
5 Healthy Weeknight Vegan Dinners
This aligns topics to keywords. This process can be painstaking, but with AI tools and keyword research tools, you can start writing in days rather than weeks nowadays.
Assign Target Keywords to Each Planned Content Item
Now get specific. Based on relative priority, choose 2-3 target keywords or phrases from each grouping to assign to its associated content piece planned above.
Track these in a spreadsheet tied to content subjects for reference. You can start tracking these in keyword trackers if you have access to one, but you don’t need to track everything. Google Analytics traffic and Google Search Console will tell you if your new posted content is effective or not.
This connects the dots from keyword to optimized content – the architecture of well-planned spokes supporting your hub.
Execute and Monitor Your Keyword Performance
With all foundational planning completed, your last step is publishing spokes at scale while tracking keyword performance.
Content production itself comes down to your team’s workflow. But choose spokes to create based on priority keywords so you methodically gain ground in search results over time.
Another option from Google Search Console and Google Analytics is to use Search Alkemy’s rank tracking features to monitor your hub page and spokes keywords. If you run a report with the same input keyword every month, you’ll be able to track how you’re progressing in the defined hub you chose.
Identify any issues with keywords not moving as expected. Diagnose why and optimize existing content accordingly.
Choose the Right Keywords to Fuel Your Hub and Spoke SEO Strategy
The fundamentals of implementing hub and spoke SEO come down to research-driven keyword selection fueling targeted content production.
Choose one primary keyword for your hub page aligned to business goals. Then use tools like Search Alkemy to expand your reach through spokes optimized for strategic long tail keywords.
Map keywords directly to content plans using categorization and spreadsheets. Enable your team to scale production while purposefully gaining ground for rankings across topics. With the right keywords as your guide, your website will become an authoritative search engine recognized resource within your industry. And traffic and conversions will follow.
So take the time upfront to research the best keyword targets. Building your hub and spoke model on the right keyword foundation leads directly to organic growth and visibility.