5 SEO Hacks for Advanced HubSpot Users

Your SEO strategy determines your search rankings. If your website isn’t showing up on the first search engine results page, your current SEO approach might need some work, which means you’re in the market for the latest SEO hacks in HubSpot. 

Effective onpage SEO brings in high-quality organic traffic and drives more business, so incorporate the following SEO hacks into your SEO strategy to attract visitors and boost your site’s domain authority. 

1. Target Feature Snippets

Google’s Featured Snippet is a selection of text that appears in the search engine results page. There are different types of Featured Snippets, including:

• Paragraph 
• Bulleted List
• Numbered List
• Table
• Video
• Accordion
• Tool or calculator 

HubSpot has reported that in a sample of 5000 queries, the click-through rate increased by 114 percent for high-volume keywords, just below the featured snippet. This means that if you rank first on Google, below the Featured Snippet, and your keyword was searched 10,000 times, you can expect 1700 visits. Nab the Feature Snippet for the same keyword and you can expect 3700 visits. 

How do you get your content featured in a Featured Snippet? There are a few things you can do to land this prized position. 

• When creating content, target question-based queries. 
• Ensure your pages are organized with headings and paragraph tags. For example, in a blog post, the search query should appear as a header (e.g., H3, H4), and the content you want in the Featured Snipped should have a <p> tag below. 
• When suitable, include steps in a list format. 

2. Keep Technical Considerations in Mind

When looking for SEO tips, you can’t forget the fundamentals. There are standard SEO must-haves that your site needs to deliver in order to appear in search results. 

Google has over 200 ranking factors, covering everything from the user experience to domain factors. This includes the following: 

• High-quality page content
• Page titles and headers
• Meta descriptions
• Image alt-text
• Structured markup
• Fast site speed

You must also focus on internal linking and your page URLs. Take an inventory of your site with these SEO considerations in mind and ensure you are hitting the mark. 

Review HubSpot’s Ultimate Guide to Technical SEO, and conduct audits on your page speed, XML site map, URL structure, site architecture, and pagination. Speed is of utmost importance and a key ranking factor. If you find your site or pages are slow, make some tweaks to increase speed. For example, compress files appropriately, because large images can slow down load times. 

3. Audit Your Existing Content

While taking an inventory of your site, audit your content as well. Content marketing is likely a big part of your HubSpot SEO strategy, and in addition to creating new content, you need to manage your existing content. 

This means removing old blog posts and any low-quality content to reduce poorly performing indexed pages on your website. If you have indexed pages that are performing negatively, it will adversely affect your site speed and performance, and consequently impact your SEO ranking. 

This doesn’t mean you should delete all of your old blogs. Instead, do what HubSpot has dubbed “historical optimization.” This entails updating old blog content to generate more traffic. According to HubSpot, by updating old content, they increased monthly organic search views by 106 percent and doubled the number of monthly leads. 

A great SEO tool is HubSpot’s Attribution Reports. View yours, and see how many new leads each post generates. Just like HubSpot, you may find many of your old posts are generating your most views. With this tool, find your high-traffic, low-converting posts and your low-traffic, high-converting posts, and update accordingly.

4. Avoid Cannibalization with Redirects and Canonical Tags

You don’t want to steal search rankings from yourself, because it will split your click-through rate and decrease the value of each page. This may cause the competing pages to sink lower in search results. 

When you conduct your audit, you may find there are pages with similar content. To resolve this issue, HubSpot recommends consolidating the pages with redirects and canonical tags. Redirect the lowest-performing page to a similar page that is performing better. If there are duplicates, add a canonical tag from the duplicate page to the core page. This tag tells Google that search engine crawlers should prioritize the core page when ranking. 

5. Establish Page Authority

To establish page authority, you need to develop a good reputation with Google. The search engine needs to view you as an authority who provides top-quality content on the topic at hand. 

You can position yourself as a subject-matter expert by focusing on content-specific pillar pages and topic clusters. A topic cluster uses a pillar page as the content hub, because all content related to the topic will link back to the pillar page. In turn, the pillar then links out to each asset. This is one of the SEO hacks in HubSpot that will indicate to SEO crawlers that you are a subject-matter expert. 

Link building is a critical piece of your SEO strategy, as well. Execute the skyscraper method for more effective link building: 

1. The first step is to find relevant content on your website with lots of backlinks. 
2. Next, take this content and level it up—increase the length, freshen it up, and make it more visually appealing. 
3. Make the content more “actionable,” too. Effectively use a call to action (CTA) to provide the next step for your visitor (e.g., an in-line CTA leading to another blog post). 
4. The final step is to reach out to those who have already linked to your content and ask for a link to your new and improved content, swapping out the original link. 

This is an effective link-building strategy that will help establish page authority. 

Putting time and effort into researching, evaluating, and optimizing your organization’s website for search engines is more important than ever. Strong SEO means increased search visibility, more site visitors, and more sales. Build a better business by using these SEO hacks in HubSpot.