A simple content plan for your website: hubs, spokes, and city pages
A lot of service business websites have the right pages missing or in the wrong places. This is a plain way to plan yours: a page for each main service, a page for each common question, and city pages only where you do the work.
Search for the main thing you sell plus your town, and ask which page on your site should come up. On a lot of small business sites there isn’t a good answer. The services share one page, or the towns the business serves sit in a list in the footer with no pages behind them. With a hub-and-spoke plan, you decide what each page is for before anyone writes it, and you can sketch one yourself on a single sheet of paper.
What hubs, spokes, and city pages are
A hub is the page you want someone to land on when they search for one of your main services. It covers that service well enough that you’d send a new customer straight to it. A spoke answers one narrower question about that service, the kind people ask before they call. The hub links down to each of its spokes, and each spoke links back up to its hub. City pages are a separate layer, with one page for each city where you do the work.
| Page | What it’s for | Example for a roofing company |
|---|---|---|
| Hub | One main service, covered well enough to send a customer to | Storm damage repair |
| Spoke | One question about that service, answered in full | Does insurance cover hail damage? |
| City page | One city where you do the work, with something true about it | A town you serve, with your jobs and reviews from there |
Google’s SEO Starter Guide suggests organizing a site in a logical way, since that can help people and search engines understand how your pages relate to each other. Hub and spoke is a plain way to do that. A visitor can see where they are and where to go next, and your links give Google the same map.
Pick your hubs from what customers search
Start with the services you most want more of. For each one, find the words your customers use, which aren’t always the words your trade uses. Type the service into Google and look at the suggestions. If you have Search Console, Google’s free tool for site owners, its Performance report lists the searches your site already shows up for. Google’s starter guide makes the same point in its own way: people who know a topic well search with different words than people who are new to it. Write in the newcomer’s words.
Give a service its own hub when people search for it on its own and you want that work. Say you run a roofing company. Roof replacement and storm damage repair are different searches, made by people in different situations, so each one gets a hub. If people only ask about something as part of a bigger job, make it a spoke under that job’s hub.
Then look at what you have now. One problem we keep finding in the website reviews we write is a business that does several kinds of work and has one page covering all of it. Someone searching for one of those services lands on a page about everything, and a competitor with a page made for that exact search has an easier time ranking for it.
Write spokes from the questions people ask
Spokes come from the questions people ask before they hire you. Your front desk already hears them. Write them down for a few weeks: what it costs, how long it takes, whether insurance covers it, what happens if they wait. Under a storm damage hub, the spokes might be “Does insurance cover hail damage?”, “How do I know if my roof has hail damage?” and “Should I repair or replace after a storm?”
Each spoke answers one question in full, in plain words, then links to the hub, where the reader can call. If a question doesn’t fit under any hub, you might be missing a hub, or the question might not be worth a page.
A blog works the same way. Another pattern from our reviews is a long run of blog posts and only a few service pages. The posts can bring in readers, but they don’t lead to a page that explains the service and asks for the call. Before you write a new post, decide which hub it supports, and link to that hub.
Link up and across
Google says it uses links to find new pages and as a signal of which pages are relevant, and that every page you care about should have a link from at least one other page on your site (Google’s link guidance). In a hub-and-spoke plan, the links follow a simple pattern:
| Page | Links to | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Hub | Every spoke under it, plus related hubs | Readers can go deeper, and no spoke is left without a link |
| Spoke | Its hub, near the top, plus one or two related spokes | Readers get back to the page that asks for the call |
| City page | The hubs for the services you offer there | Readers get from the city to the details of the work |
Write each link in words that describe the page on the other end, like “hail damage and your insurance”. Google’s guidance calls link text like “click here” too generic. You don’t need a link in every sentence. Google’s own advice is that there’s no ideal number, so add the links a reader would want and stop there.
City pages, only where you do the work
In our reviews, city pages go wrong in two opposite ways. Some businesses list the towns they serve on a service area page or in the footer, and none of those towns has a page of its own. Search for the service plus one of those towns, and the site has nothing made for that search. Other businesses have a long list of town pages with the same text and only the town name swapped.
Google’s spam policies describe doorway abuse as pages made to rank for similar searches that lead people to pages less useful than the real destination. One of the examples Google lists is pages aimed at specific cities or regions that all send visitors to one page. A copy with a new town name comes close to that, and it gives the reader nothing new.
Before you build a city page, ask whether you can write something true about that city that isn’t on your other pages: jobs you’ve done there, an office, reviews from customers who live there, a local rule that changes the work. If you can’t, leave that city off for now. For Dante Law, a Florida injury firm, we built 15 city pages, one for each Florida city the firm targets (the Dante Law case study). The firm’s Google Maps work went alongside them, and that has its own post: how law firms can get into the top three on Google Maps. If you run a law firm, check your state bar’s advertising rules before any of these pages go live.
Build it in order, then keep a calendar
Build the hubs first, then the spokes, then the city pages. Spokes need a hub to point to, and city pages need service pages to point to. That’s the order we used for Dante Law: 24 main practice pages first, then 62 supporting pages, then the city pages. The rankings first moved in the month the supporting pages went up, and the case study has the results, including 342% more visitors from Google. The content was one part of that work, alongside technical fixes and the firm’s Google Business Profiles.
After that, keep a calendar, and decide which hub each new piece supports before you write it. Pick a pace you can keep for a year. A business serving a few towns needs far less than a statewide firm, and a short, accurate page beats a long one written to fill a slot.
Expect the early months to look quiet. Our SEO page says content-driven growth usually takes 3 to 6 months to kick in. You can’t plan your way past a page that doesn’t answer the search, or past a slow, broken site, and Google’s own page on hiring an SEO says no one can promise a #1 ranking on Google. I won’t promise one either, but a site where each page has one job gives new content a place to go and gives Google a clear map.
If you’d rather have us map it out with you, a free website review is an easy place to start. Missing service and town pages are among the things it can turn up.