259: How To Rank For Competitive Keywords In Google With Jimmy Daly

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The hub and spoke content strategy targets a competitive keyword with a hub page that functions as a table of contents, surrounded by spoke pages targeting long tail variations of it. The hub links out to every spoke and each spoke links back, which produces the engagement metrics that correlate with more organic traffic.

Jimmy Daly runs content strategy at Animalz, an agency specializing in content marketing for SaaS companies, crypto companies, and consulting firms. He was introduced to me by my friend Gallant, and Animalz is responsible for ranking a large number of SaaS companies on genuinely difficult search terms.

Below is when to use hub and spoke versus the batch strategy, how to build a keyword library from scratch, and the title formula Jimmy uses on every post.

Key takeaways

• Build a content library organized by topic, not a publication driven by an editorial calendar.
• Start with 500 to 1,000 keywords in Ahrefs, then bucket them by topic and search intent. One keyword does not equal one post.
• New sites use the batch strategy: chase the lowest-volume keywords first and work upward as momentum builds.
• Publish one competitive pillar piece early anyway, so it has the longest possible runway to accumulate links.
• Switch to hub and spoke once your traffic stabilizes even in weeks when you publish nothing.
• Ranking first for a 1,000-search keyword typically delivers two to four times that traffic from related terms.
• Write 20 title options per post, and use separate titles and H1s: title optimized for search, H1 for the reader.
• Target 10% to 15% month-over-month growth in organic visits as your health metric.

Build a content library, not a publication

The first question is whether you need a publication at all. A publication produces content regularly against a tight editorial calendar aimed at a broad audience, while a library is slower, evergreen, less time-dependent, and organized by topic and hierarchy rather than as a feed.

Jimmy’s answer is almost always the library, because it is more efficient. The logic behind a publication is growing an audience of recurring visitors, and if your traffic comes primarily from organic search, those visitors are overwhelmingly new rather than returning.

Catering to returning visitors who are unlikely to engage that way wastes effort. Focus almost exclusively on bringing in new visitors instead.

Why the answer is actually a blend

In practice both things happen at once. Animalz builds traffic through organic search and also wants people subscribing to the newsletter, because they know it takes a long time from a first blog visit to an inquiry about their services.

Focusing exclusively on new visitors would produce no customers at all. The balance is required.

The real distinction between the two mindsets is how often you publish and what you publish about. Companies treating content as a publication cover a much wider variety of topics, which is too hit or miss.

You end up with a handful of large wins and a pile of content that cost time and money without performing. Animalz is deliberately strategic about topics and publishes when they have something worth putting out rather than because the calendar demands a post this week.

They still keep the mechanisms on the site to capture subscribers and leads, then nurture those people through email.

How to build your keyword library from scratch

Start by plugging every related keyword you can find into Ahrefs Keyword Explorer, aiming to generate a list of 500 to 1,000 keywords.

Then categorize to eliminate overlap. The mistake Jimmy cautions against constantly is assuming each keyword needs its own post, which is almost never true. A thousand keywords does not mean a thousand pieces of content.

Bucket first by topic, then by search intent. Which keywords carry buyer intent, which are clearly exploratory, which cover hardware versus software, which get into technical weeds.

Group the buyer-intent keywords together and work out how to turn that bucket into interesting articles. Then do the same with informational searches, where 500 keywords might collapse into 20 or 25 posts.

Building keyword variations around personas and use cases

Think about who actually buys the product and generate keyword variations around those people. For expensive headphones that means best headphones for podcasters, for salespeople who are on calls constantly, for developers.

There is a long list of keywords tied to the person using the product. Jimmy finds this a genuinely enjoyable exercise, and the content tends to be templatizable with tweaks per audience.

The batch strategy for a brand new site

The batch strategy works from the bottom up: find low-hanging fruit you can compete for immediately, build momentum, then chase harder keywords.

Reverse your keyword prioritization. Instead of sorting by highest volume, sort by lowest and start writing there.

Search volumes under 500 or 1,000 are a reasonable range, and Jimmy is not afraid of going lower. His anecdotal observation is that ranking first for a keyword with 1,000 monthly searches typically produces two to four times that in traffic, because by the time you hold that position you rank for enough related keywords to exceed the headline volume.

Monthly search volume is a relative indicator. If you are performing well you should be beating the volumes you targeted.

Publish one competitive pillar piece early anyway

Jimmy’s caveat to the bottom-up approach is publishing a single piece early that chases a competitive high-volume keyword, purely so it can start accumulating links immediately and marinate for as long as possible.

Animalz did exactly this with their content strategy guide, one of the first things they ever wrote on a brand new site. If they can rank for “content strategy” and “content marketing strategy,” the payoff is enormous.

His internal rule is that if he writes a post without linking to that guide, he has failed as a content marketer. A young site with low domain authority needs the longest possible runway.

When to graduate from batch to hub and spoke

The signal is traffic stability. Early on you see spikes and drops, and as those even out and traffic holds steady even when you are not adding new content, you are ready for hub and spoke.

The other indicators are how long it takes you to rank for your targets and how fast you are winning backlinks. Strong backlink acquisition lets you accelerate toward competitive keywords sooner.

How the hub and spoke content strategy works

A hub page is built to rank for a very competitive keyword and functions as a table of contents. Spoke pages target long tail variations, the hub links to every spoke, and every spoke links back, creating a cohesive cluster.

Jimmy’s own example is an article on lifecycle email marketing. The hub targets that phrase, with separate spoke pages for welcome emails, retention emails, win-back emails, and a few other types.

Spokes should live in a subfolder of the hub, structured as site.com/hub/spoke-one. That gives each spoke its own opportunity to rank independently.

When Animalz measures a hub and spoke, they measure the entire family of pages rather than the hub alone.

Why not just put everything in one giant guide?

The thing that makes a hub work is that it sends people away from itself. Visitors land on the hub and click through to a spoke, which kills the bounce and increases pages per session, and those engagement metrics correlate with more organic traffic.

What Animalz wants to see when measuring a hub and spoke cluster is markedly better engagement across that area of the site: more time on page, more pages per session, lower bounce rate.

You can approximate this with a single pillar page using anchor links as a table of contents. Jimmy finds it works, just not as well.

Reading experience is the other argument. Separating subtopics clearly gives you room to say something complete about each one.

Pillar pages also tend to show weak scroll depth when you track it, because attention spans are short and most readers want one or two specific things from the page.

Hub and spoke versus a pillar piece

Jimmy draws a distinction that matters. Animalz’ content strategy guide is a pillar piece rather than a hub: one very long article they link to constantly.

A hub is a more deliberate structural effort where the hub page acts as a table of contents for a specific body of information.

Both approaches work, and which one fits depends on the topic. Lifecycle email marketing has clean separations between welcome, retention, and win-back emails that each deserve their own space, while a comprehensive SEO guide could genuinely go either way.

The deciding data point is search volume on the variations. If variations of your target keyword pull comparable volume to the target itself, they deserve separate posts. If a variation attracts only marginal volume, fold it into the larger piece.

How to read a search results page before you write

Investigate what currently ranks and pull out the useful signals: how visual the pieces are, whether there are interactive elements, word count, and most importantly who is ranking.

The search results page tells you what type of content is required to rank.

If a results page returns only product pages on the sellers’ own domains, no amount of content quality on your own domain will break in. That is when you evaluate whether it is a pay-to-play situation where competitors pay bloggers for reviews, or whether there are review sites accepting user-generated content where you need your product listed.

Should your blog live on a separate domain?

Jimmy’s answer is no, with the caveat that he would be happy to be proven wrong. If you build traffic, it should be abundantly obvious that there is a product to buy.

Forcing a reader to leave the domain to reach the product creates enough friction to lose people.

The exception is content type. Paid blogger reviews obviously should not live on your own domain, while something like “10 ways to use your headphones to be more productive” clearly should.

My own view leans the same way, with the acknowledgment that a review or article sometimes carries more weight when it reads as unbiased.

How to build backlinks to content

Jimmy splits this into internal links first and external links second, and he considers internal linking badly underutilized on most sites he examines.

Part of that is site structure. Part is simply making sure that when you reference a topic you already have a piece about, you link to it.

For external links, the standard tactics still work. Guest posting has never been a major traffic driver in his experience and remains a good way to build links.

Founder visibility is the underrated one. Making yourself available for interviews and podcasts on topics tangentially related to your product opens doors to articles and backlinks.

If you start an ecommerce company, blog about your journey as an entrepreneur. That gets other people interested in what you are doing, which produces articles, podcast appearances, and links back to your site that benefit your commercial content.

I did exactly that unintentionally with MyWifeQuitHerJob.com. Jimmy’s observation is that it usually is unintentional, because you are genuinely passionate about starting the business, and that passion project functions as a loss leader for links and attention to the thing you actually sell.

How to write titles that rank and get clicked

Jimmy writes at least 20 title options for every post he publishes. The one that comes to mind first is never the best, and finding something both interesting and optimized for search takes experimentation.

He also always uses separate titles and H1s. The page title is optimized for search, and the H1 is optimized for the reader.

The keyword goes at the very front of the page title, which he believes still matters based on what Animalz sees working. In an H1 you have creative freedom, so the keyword can appear anywhere.

His lifecycle email marketing example runs “Lifecycle Email Marketing: The Ultimate Guide” as the page title, with a more interesting H1 explaining how the article is framed and why it is better than the alternatives. The H1 is typically what appears when someone shares the piece.

Find your angle before you start writing

The higher-leverage move happens before the title. A colleague of Jimmy’s wrote about this on the Animalz blog: approach the topic from a genuinely interesting angle, which makes the article easier to write, easier to rank, and easier to share because it is differentiated from everything it competes against.

The method is to identify the best practices, cliches, and commonly accepted ideas around a topic, then challenge them. That produces a contrarian view that makes an interesting article easy to write and produces title opportunities like “why the commonly accepted approach no longer works.”

Do it better or do it differently

Animalz frames content strategy as a binary choice: do the same thing as everyone else but bigger and better, or do something genuinely different.

If the page-one results are weak, you can win by going bigger, better, and longer. The problem is decay, because once competitors notice they simply extend their own articles, and you are in a word count arms race.

A great angle and an interesting title means you probably do not need to write as much. Competing on identical parameters to your competitors is what forces length.

Jimmy struggles with post-length guidance generally, despite the data saying page one requires 1,800 or 2,000 words. Competition level should determine which approach you pick.

How often should you publish content?

At least once a week, even though Jimmy would prefer publishing only when there is something great to say.

The reason is decay. All organic search traffic decays over time, so you have to add content simply to offset that decline.

Weekly cadence is also a positive constraint for writers. It forces you to approach topics from different angles and try things that might produce results you would never attempt on a monthly schedule.

The mistake almost everyone makes

The most common and most unfortunate mistake Jimmy sees is publishing an article and stopping there. No promotion, no link building, no refreshing.

Refreshing old content is hugely important. Your content workflow should not just be an editorial calendar producing new pieces.

A good strategy reserves time, energy, and budget for constantly optimizing the site, refreshing old content, and pruning content that is not performing. That maintenance is what extracts the value from what you have already made.

It is a heavy investment. Jimmy’s framing is that content marketing closely mirrors investing: a slow burn at first, with fluctuations and results below what you want, and compound growth available over months and years if you stay with it.

What results to expect and when

Expect some traffic immediately. If a piece cannot attract any traffic through email, social, or paid before search kicks in, that is a real problem with the content itself.

For long-term measurement, Jimmy recommends tracking month-over-month growth in organic visits and targeting 10%. Sustaining 10% to 15% monthly is a strong indicator of site health and sets you up for compounding.

Why content strategy differs by business model

Animalz works mostly with B2B SaaS because that is what they are asked about most, and Jimmy’s background plus founder Walter Chen’s experience selling a SaaS company give them deep in-house expertise there.

The biggest difference between B2B SaaS and ecommerce content is sales cycle length and customer touchpoints. Some SaaS clients have six-month or longer cycles where content brings people in the door and then keeps moving them through pricing and negotiation.

Ecommerce, depending on price point, may aim to close on the first or second visit. That changes the mix of content types you produce.

B2B SaaS pulls Animalz toward bottom-of-funnel work: case studies, sales enablement content, and ranking for branded keywords that a sales team uses during the sales process. Ecommerce may not need any of that.

Freemium changes the calculation again. A free or freemium product needs volume flowing into the product to produce customers at the other end, which pushes toward top-of-funnel content and higher-volume keywords. A company where nothing is free and the main KPI is demos requires a completely different strategy.

You can find Jimmy at animalz.co and on Twitter at @jimmy_daly.

Frequently asked questions

What is a hub and spoke content strategy?

A hub page targets a competitive keyword and acts as a table of contents, while spoke pages target long tail variations of it. The hub links to every spoke and every spoke links back, and spokes live in a subfolder of the hub so they can rank independently.

When should you use hub and spoke instead of the batch strategy?

Once your traffic stabilizes even during weeks when you publish nothing. New sites with no domain authority should start with the batch strategy, chasing the lowest-competition keywords first and working upward.

Why not put all your content in one long guide?

A hub works because it sends readers to other pages, which lowers bounce rate and raises pages per session, and those engagement signals correlate with more organic traffic. Spoke pages also get their own chance to rank, while a subtopic buried at the bottom of a pillar page does not.

Does every keyword need its own blog post?

No, and assuming so is a common mistake. Bucket 500 to 1,000 keywords by topic and search intent first, since 500 informational keywords might collapse into 20 or 25 posts.

How much traffic does a number one ranking actually produce?

Typically two to four times the headline search volume, because by the time you hold the top position you also rank for many related terms. Jimmy Daly treats monthly search volume as a relative indicator rather than a traffic forecast.

Should your title and H1 be the same?

No. Optimize the page title for search with the keyword at the very front, and write the H1 for the reader with more creative freedom, since the H1 is typically what appears when someone shares the article.

How often should you publish blog content?

At least weekly, because organic search traffic decays over time and new content is needed simply to offset that decline. Weekly also acts as a useful constraint that pushes writers toward new angles.

What organic traffic growth rate should you target?

10% month over month in organic visits is a strong health indicator, and sustaining 10% to 15% sets a site up for compound growth.