HubSpot SEO Tips
I have skimmed through the HubSpot SEO training course and here are some takeaways. At least we can have a glimpse of what works for them these days.
Btw, here is the link to their free SEO course.
Few words about Hubspot
If you work in marketing, you probably heard of HubSpot.
It is currently valued at $7.3B.
A lot of its success HubSpot dedicates to well-executed SEO strategy. If you search literally anything in digital marketing and sales online, you will end up on HubSpot blog. It is like digital marketing octopus, which covers all marketing clusters with its tentacles.
It is a stark contrast to SalesForce – which obviously is doing even better, but I can’t remember the last time I’ve read great SalesForce blog post. Do they have a blog at all? 😀HubSpot found a fantastic opportunity in SEO and utilized it at full scale.
Here is HubSpot traffic – 25M monthly visits.
Of course, it comes from different channels, but Organic Search is the top channel.
Therefore, 25M*0.45=11.3M
That’s 11.3M monthly organic visits!
Here are a few top HubSpot SEO tips, which caught my eye.
Let’s dive in.
Here is an infographic to quickly skim through.
1. Featured Snippets
Featured snippets becoming more & more important.
Google doesn’t want users to leave SERPs, therefore rich data, featured snippets, knowledge graphs are super important these days.
And of course, featured snippets appear above all other results, below ads. While the standard first organic position might be hidden below Videos, “People ask”, carousels and so on.
Featured snippets are created mostly for queries containing either “how to,” “what is,” “how do,” or “how does”, etc.
HS discovered that formatting matters a lot for featured snippets.
With updated formatting, 10-15% more featured snippets.
Therefore, select your content, which ranks in 1-5 positions and clear up all formatting as shown on the above screenshot. Add more lists to your content. Also, clear additional tags (<span>, <p>, etc) from your Titles, Headers, List items.
So, the first takeaway from Hubspot SEO: optimize for featured snippets.
2. Historical Optimization
Hubspot constantly optimizes old content.
Page 1 in Google gets 71% of all clicks.
This is not something new from HubSpot. All major bloggers utilized this tactic. Just to mention Brian Dean, whose site Backlinko (500K+ monthly sessions) only has 100 or so posts, but they are constantly updated.
How to update/optimize old content?
1. Target specific content for historical optimization
For example, this might be content, which ranks on 2-10 positions or 2-3rd pages of Google.
Or select your top content by traffic and then check which one still doesn’t rank on the first position.
Or check the content in Search Console, with lots of impressions, but not many clicks.
2. Add accuracy, freshness, comprehensiveness
3. On-page SEO optimizations – adding more keywords in the right places
Second takeaway: constantly update and republish your top-performing old content.
3. Guest posts
What also caught my attention in HS SEO course is mentioning about Guest posts.
Many SEOs think it’s an old-school technique, which was not once declared dead by Google itself, ages ago.
But, seems if done in the right way, guest posting still works.
Two main reasons for GP:
- Referral traffic;
- Boosting SEO (even more important).
As you can see guest posts can bring significant amount of referral traffic. On-screen below, up to 600 monthly visits.
But, because guest posts boost authority of specific pages – they create scalable SEO traffic, which grows over time.
And, as you can see, Guest Posting still provides good SEO rewards, with very limited resources.
You can check out my detailed guides for Guest Posting and SEO Outreach.
This is DA of websites, which HS targets for Guest Posts.
And very important, successful, high-quality guest posting is usually a result of building partnerships/relationship with other stakeholders in your niche.
Third takeaway: quality guest posting (via building relationships) still works.
Hope it was helpful!
