Producing content at scale and struggling with discoverability? Building content hubs may be the solution.

In this article, we'll explore:

• What content hubs are
• The benefits of implementing content hubs
• Useful content hub examples
• How to create and optimize impactful content hubs
• How we developed a content hub system for a B2B SaaS startup
• A closer look at how we use hubs to level up your content library
• How to plan a new content hub from scratch
• How to measure your hubs' impact

Ready? Let's dive in!

What Is a Content Hub?

A content hub is a resource center on your website where you collect, organize, and showcase your blog posts & other digital assets dedicated to a specific topic or user need.

Content hubs offer easy access to all the information your users need to achieve a specific goal or alleviate a specific pain. A well-crafted content hub will create a cohesive experience and encourage your visitors to dig deeper into your material, resulting in:

• Higher engagement
• More return visits
• Better brand perception
• Higher chances of conversion

In other terms, we could say that content hubs help your users to progress across the value continuum.

The 4 Main Benefits of Content Hubs

Implementing a content marketing hub comes with many benefits, including:

• Clearer positioning and authority
• A better user experience
• Optimized content organization and management
• Potentially smoother content promotion

Let's dive into each one.

Clearer positioning & topic authority

Even with a broad range of products, it’s crucial to establish yourself as the premier, most valuable resource for a well-defined set of topic clusters. Your content strategy should revolve around a few central themes, with your entire content repository delving deeper into sub-topics relevant to various target audiences and search intents.

Content hubs enable you to consolidate all supporting materials for your expertise into a single, pre-filtered content library link. Remember, your content hubs can and should achieve high search rankings.

The result is clearer positioning and enhanced topic authority.

Topical authority signifies the depth and breadth of expertise your organization has on a particular subject matter. By centering your content around key themes and investing time in researching and creating high-quality, comprehensive materials, you establish authoritative voices in your industry. This strategy ensures not just visibility but dominance in your domains, leading to increased trust and recognition from your audience and search engines alike.

Enhanced user experience

A content marketing hub improves the navigability of your site, making it easier for users to find and consume your content. By organizing your material in a centralized location, users can quickly locate the information they need without getting lost in a maze of unrelated pages. This streamlined user experience not only enhances satisfaction but also encourages repeat visits, fostering a loyal audience.

Ultimately, this can increase engagement, time spent on your site, and even lead to higher conversion rates as users become more familiar with your brand and offerings. Additionally, a well-structured content hub can improve your site's SEO performance, making it more discoverable through search engines.

Better content organization and management

Structuring your content in a hub helps you identify gaps and opportunities for new material, making content planning and production more streamlined and efficient.

This is especially important if you're making the transition from generic content production to product-led content.

Often, teams that haven't achieved content-market fit produce too much shallow, TOFU content across a wide range of topics. Implementing topic clusters can help you:

• Make sense of your current material's scope, discard the irrelevant, and double down on high-potential topics
• Understand content gaps
• Plan the production of valuable content

Improved content promotion & usage

A well-organized hub promotes content re-sharing and cross-promotion, increasing your content's potential visibility. And beyond just marketing and social sharing, content hubs can be leveraged by your sales team to connect specific accounts to content that's relevant for their use case, pain point, industry, size, or any other characteristic.

Our Favorite Content Hub Examples

There are several types of content hubs. We like to divide them into 5 categories:

• Deep-dive hubs
• Interconnected stories hubs
• Topic hubs
• Use case hubs
• Programmatic hubs

Let's take a close look at each one.

Deep-dive hub

Features: In this type of content hub, blog articles are organized like chapters in a book, helping the user to gain deep expertise in a specific topic.

Basic structure: Pillar post + posts about specific sub-topics.

Best use cases: These content hubs are great for organizing educational content related to your brand's core value proposition. 

Example: Julian's handbooks

Why it works: 

• It feels familiar and scannable
• It leverages our minds' need to complete processes
• It gives users a clear blueprint for learning

Interconnected stories

Features: In this type of content hub, blog articles are organized as interconnected stories.

Basic structure: Index + individual stories.

Best use cases: Related topic research, customer stories, and interviews with industry leaders.

Example:The Atlantic's Shadowland content series 

Why it works: It helps users go down a specific rabbit hole. Best when combined with creative web design and storytelling.

Topic gateway

Features: These types of hubs organize content around a specific topic. In the best cases, this content is diverse, spanning different formats, so it's best organized into subsections.

Basic structure: Index (with subsections) + individual content pieces & resources

Example: Paddle's resource hubs

Best use cases: Organizing a large volume of diverse, product-led content.

Why it works: It's extremely useful for both sales enablement & self-serve user experiences. 

Use case hub

Features: This type of hub is usually a very precise topic gateway, dedicated to showcasing a specific use case and helping aligned users to thrive.

Basic structure: Intro/pillar post + sub-topic guides & resources.

Example: Intercom's blog

Best use cases: 

• Gathering both inspiring and information content on use cases.
• Managing customer objections.
• Helping users visualize how they could implement your product.

Why it works: It's BOFU content, compiled and presented in an intuitive way.

Programmatic hub

Features: These types of content hubs are programmatic SEO collections. In short, they're the page where users discover a certain programmatic collection. In the best case, they'll also have the option to filter the collection based on their preferences.

Basic structure: Programmatic index + programmatic pages.

Example: Zapier's integrations directory

Best use cases: Programmatic SEO. Learn more about how to conceive a pSEO collection on this blog post or by taking our free pSEO course.

Why it works: It'll work depending on the relevance and unique value of the collection. But, if done correctly, a pSEO collection will help you target long-string keywords competitively, at scale, without burning through your SEO budget.

How to Create a Content Hub for Your Blog

Wondering how to get started with content hubs? We can help you make the switch in under 4 weeks. 

In this section, we'll share what our process looks like. 

We usually:

• Identify core topics & user needs
• Organize existing content
• Design an intuitive template for the hubs
• Find and fill content gaps

Step 1: Identify core topics & user needs

In the first stage of our content hub development process, we conduct a 1-hour workshop where we:

1. Discuss your content strategy’s goals and impact so far
2. Take a general look at your existing material
3. Map out your content’s topical tree

Step 2: Organize your existing content

Next, we export a list of your existing content and organize it into clusters. If your website runs on Webflow, this process is usually pretty simple. It usually goes something like this:

1. We export your CMS collection/s 
2. We assign specific tags to each content piece, with each tag corresponding with a specific cluster
3. We organize your content

Once that’s ready, we’ll just re-import the content into your CMS. 

Step 3: Create a scannable, conversion-optimized content hub design

Once we know what content topics and formats we’ll use, we’ll develop a content hub template. This structure will have two key benefits:

• It’ll elevate your content discovery experience, making your new hub pages particularly competitive.
• It’ll make it easy for non-technical members of your team to create new hubs.

How we’ll embark on this step will depend on your team structure and preferred workflow. For instance, if you want to assign the development of the content hub to a member of your team, we’ll be glad to just work on the design. Likewise, if you have in-house designers who want to take the lead, we’ll collaborate with them directly, acting as consultants. 

Step 4: Creating new, relevant content to fill content gaps

Once your content hubs have been deployed, it’s time to start reaping the benefits of better content discoverability. But don’t relax just yet: With your core topics established and existing content organized, it's time to produce new materials. Focus on creating high-quality, evergreen content that speaks to your target audience.

Remember that consistency is crucial, so before we sign off, we’ll share a plan to help you find & fill content gaps. We’ll also help you establish a process for repurposing existing content into new formats, such as turning a blog post into a video, webinar, or gated resource.

How a Software Managament SaaS Startup Decreased Bounce Rate & Improved Engagement with Content Hubs

In mid-2023, we helped a SaaS management platform improve content discovery & organic lead acquisition through a partial website redesign.

Using their brand’s existing assets, we designed & developed 4 prototypes that were iterated across >3,000 high-ranking pages.

The client

The client was a USA-based B2B SaaS startup developing a solution that allows IT, procurement & finance teams to stay in control of their SaaS spending. We became the company’s top content partner shortly after their series A.

The partnership

At the time of this project, we had already been collaborating with the client for over 6 months. So far, our content partnership had caused:

• Tangible improvements in content quality and topical authority
• A 30% monthly traffic increase
• Maintained positioning across >100 top 3 keywords
• Top 3 positioning across >50  new keywords
• Positioning for 6k new keywords

We were also helping the company to create and promote lead magnets across several formats.

Challenges & goals

Lead magnet discoverability

The sheer amount of content we were producing, plus the material that the company already had published, created a situation of content abundance but poor discoverability.

Unless you stumbled upon a certain resource or blog post on the SERPs, it was impossible to get a sense of how large and rich the company’s content library was.

As a consequence:

• Users that weren’t ready to buy yet bounced, instead of exploring other resources.
• There wasn’t a clear incentive for newsletter subscriptions. Lead magnets were hidden, and the technical and actionable depth of the content wasn’t evident.

One of our main goals was to bring visibility to the client’s enormous content collection & help users filter and find relevant material.

pSEO discoverability

Additionally, the website included a programmatic SEO collection. This collection featured over 3k software tools that teams were managing through our client’s platform.

The pSEO’s collection head term was “{tool} discount”, and it was meant to attract startup leaders looking to save on software. A goal that was completely aligned with the product’s value proposition.

At this point, it’s worth noting the obvious: Facilitating discoverability for a content collection with 3k entries isn’t an easy feat.

Challenges included:

• The fact that the client’s website ran on Webflow, which severely limits how to display large collections
• The need to facilitate tool discoverability without jeopardizing the site’s performance
• Common pSEO challenges, such as content interlinking

Our goal regarding this collection was to strike a balance between abundance, performance & discoverability, allowing users to discover new tools, compare their options, and sign up to the platform to receive a cashback/exclusive discount.

Process

The project took 5 weeks, and included:

1. A discovery session - Before getting started, we aligned with marketing leadership to understand the project’s restrictions & goals.
2. Lo-fi prototyping - We produced several wireframes for all page templates, on Figma.
3. Hi-fi prototyping - Once the lo-fi prototypes were green-lighted, we adapted them to match the client’s brand & design guidelines.
4. Developing - We developed the pages as drafts, on an exact copy of the client’s Webflow website. Once the templates were complete and tested, we migrated them to the client’s website.
5. Testing - We tested the new pages on the client’s staging domain.
6. Deployment
7. Post-launch optimization - We gave extra support & guidance to the client after deploying the pages.

Our solution

Content hubs

Collaborating with the startup’s internal content leadership, we designed a filtering system that enabled users to sort content by category, format & audience.

This “insights” page also served as a layout for format-specific hubs, including:

• A webinars hub
• An eBooks & templates hub
• A blog post-only content hub

All content hubs shared the same footer, featuring a newsletter subscription form and the website’s main CTA. Of course, this doesn’t include the site-wide footer, which we didn’t redesign.

Blog posts

The blog posts’ template was also cleaned up to improve readability. Plus, we added three key navigation elements:

1. Table of contents
2. “Previous post” and “Next post” suggestions
3. A slider with recommended posts that matched the category of the piece the user was reading.

pSEO collection index

We maintained the collection’s index as a series of category previews, with 3 tools per category. When the user decided to move to a certain category, they were transported to a category-specific page with seamless pagination.

To help the user make sense of so many entries, we included a total number of items on each category page, and the pagination featured a subtle progress indicator.

Additionally,  we added an instantly interactive search functionality.

When the user searched for their tool of choice on the collection’s index, the filter was instantly applied. When they used this functionality on a category-specific page, their query was added to the category filter.

pSEO collection single page

Additionally, we used this opportunity to propose an alternative page structure for the collection’s entries, which:

• Added extra value to each page
• Helped users discover alternative tools
• Strengthened the collection’s interlinking

Impact

Thanks to this project, the client was able to:

• Lower their site’s bounce rate from 73% down to 48%
• 2x average pages per visit
• Increase pSEO collection traffic by 40%

How to Make the Most of Your Content Hubs

Your startup wouldn't be the first one or the last one to create a content hub. So, how can you stay ahead of the competition and build some interesting differentials? Content hubs can be a powerful tool for enhancing user engagement, driving conversions, and building a strong brand narrative. Here’s a more in-depth look at how you can maximize the potential of your content hubs:

Use several filtering criteria

Aside from just topics and formats, don’t forget that you can leverage content hubs to weave stories together into larger brand narratives. Allow users to filter your content through various criteria, such as:

• User Interests: Let users filter content based on their specific interests, whether it's product-focused, industry-specific, or trend-related.
• Content Types: Provide options to filter by articles, videos, infographics, or whitepapers. This allows users to consume content in their preferred format.
• User Journey Stage: Tailor content to different stages of the user journey, from awareness to consideration to decision-making, ensuring relevance and engagement at every step.

This comprehensive filtering not only enhances user experience but also strengthens your brand’s storytelling capabilities.

Use internal links strategically

Aside from just preventing orphan content, proper linking can help users move from the “just checking out” stage to conversion. Consider these strategic approaches:

• Funnel Progression: Group together content in a way that helps users move down the funnel. For example, link introductory blog posts to in-depth guides or case studies.
• Related Content: Suggest related articles or videos to keep users engaged and exploring more of your offerings.
• Call-to-Actions (CTAs): Use CTAs within the content to guide users towards key actions, such as signing up for a newsletter, downloading an eBook, or scheduling a demo.

Strategic internal linking not only improves navigation but also boosts the likelihood of conversion.

Add extra value to your hubs

Aside from the material itself, you can enrich your hubs with interactive content, FAQs, and other extras. Here’s how to add value:

• Interactive Elements: Incorporate quizzes, polls, or interactive infographics that engage users actively and provide personalized insights.
• FAQs and Guides: Add sections with FAQs, how-to guides, and troubleshooting tips that address common user queries and pain points.
• Exclusive Content: Offer downloadable resources, such as eBooks, templates, or checklists, that provide extra value and encourage users to return.

These elements not only enhance user engagement but also position your brand as a valuable resource.

Take an account-based approach

Listen to your customers, and don't hesitate to create content hubs specifically for their needs. Consider these account-based strategies:

• Customized Content: Develop hubs tailored to specific customer segments or accounts, addressing their unique challenges and interests.
• Personalized Recommendations: Use data insights to recommend content that resonates with individual users, making their experience more relevant and engaging.
• Customer Feedback: Regularly gather and incorporate customer feedback to continuously improve and adapt your content hubs.

A customized selection of content can help engage users in a meaningful way and re-ignite stagnant conversations, ultimately fostering stronger customer relationships.

By implementing these strategies, your content hubs can become a focal point of your digital marketing efforts, driving engagement, conversions, and long-term brand loyalty.

Measuring the Success of Your Content Hub

It’s essential that you establish sound content KPIs to measure the success of your content hub. Having clear, measurable goals not only helps you track progress but also guides your content strategy and optimizes your efforts.

We recommend tracking the following key performance indicators:

• Page views: Understand how many times your pages are being viewed, which can indicate the popularity and reach of your content.
• Time spent on your site: This metric shows how engaging your content is. The longer visitors stay, the more likely they find your content valuable.
• Bounce rates: A high bounce rate might indicate that visitors are not finding what they expected. Monitoring this can help you improve user experience.
• Click-through rates: Track the effectiveness of your calls to action and internal linking structure by seeing how frequently users click on links within your content.
• Exit pages: Identifying which pages users commonly leave your site from can highlight areas for improvement to retain visitors longer.

Additionally, you should keep an eye on how your content hubs affect:

• Average pages per session: A higher number suggests that users are finding your content relevant and are willing to explore more.
• Content discoverability: Ensure your content is easily found through search engines and within your site to maximize its reach.
• Micro conversions: Track smaller actions like video views, sign-ups, or downloads that indicate user engagement and lead to macro conversions.

Aside from these metrics, you can enrich your view of your content hub’s impact through zero-party data. For instance, by implementing non-invasive satisfaction surveys, you can gather direct feedback from your audience about their experience and satisfaction with your content. This qualitative data can provide deep insights into user preferences and help tailor your content more effectively.

Adding to the above, consider conducting regular content audits to evaluate the performance and relevance of existing content. This helps in identifying outdated information or pieces that may need a refresh. Also, leveraging A/B testing can provide insights into what type of content or presentation format resonates best with your audience.

Incorporating these strategies and metrics will provide a comprehensive view of how well your content hub is performing and what areas might need adjustments. By continually analyzing and refining your approach, you can ensure sustained engagement and success of your content initiatives.

Let's Power-Up Your Content Strategy with Hubs

In this post, we shared everything you need to know to get started with content hubs. But it isn't as simple as it may seem. Creating, growing, and optimizing a content hub requires:

• A sound, user-oriented, and data-driven strategy
• High-quality content
• Web design & development expertise

Is that what you're looking for? If so, we've got you covered. 

At Postdigitalist, we help groundbreaking startups grow through user-centric content experiences. Book a free consulting call today to learn more.