HubSpot Community Developer Show | SEO with Rikki Lear of Digital 22 | S01E03

Really tough morning. I didn't know what I wanted to wear for this, so I just decided, was it like a Google kind of day, or you would wear like a Google T shirt, or was it more like a Bing kind of day? And I was like, you know, I'm ready for the day. Bring it on. I think there's more action in the back. But then I realized, really, I'm just going to be more geeky today. So I'm wearing my search geek shirt, which the irony of that is this T shirt is for paid search. Hey, everybody.

Welcome to the HubSpot Community Developer Show. I am Dennis, and I am going to be talking to some very smart people today about SEO. I'm joined by Ricky Lear, founder and director at Digital22. How are you doing, sir?

Hey.

I am well, thank you. I also have a guy named Victor, Victor Pan, who is the principal marketer at HubSpot, which I don't quite understand that title. And I. If you want to more define that, go for.

Just means I've been at HubSpot for a while, and sometimes there are things people know what to do. They are like, hey, Victor, figure it out.

Perfect.

And last but not least, we've got AJ Laporte, senior developer advocate at HubSpot, who you probably know. Hi, AJ.

Hello, Dennis. How are you?

I'm doing very well. All right, let's just jump right into it. So we're gonna be talking SEO. Last episode, if you watched or listened, you would have heard me say something like, my first email, I used Photoshop Slice tool, and then I got better at email. But this one, I'm still at that Photoshop Slice tool level of expertise with SEO. So I'm very excited to talk to you guys about and just like, you know, leveling up my skills and just generally understanding what SEO is. So with that, let's make that just a big blanket question here. What is SEO? And that's probably the hardest question ever. I'll start with you, Ricky. What do you think?

Yeah, so for me, it's all about increasing your visibility in search engines. Make sure whatever message you use that you're showing up when you need to show up and when you should show up.

Simple, perfect. Victor.

Yeah, had me there at soul searching. Been around for a while. And the way I see SEO is there's a lot of information in the world, and a lot of times you just have to organize it right and put it down in some sort of list and rank that list. So regardless of that format, whenever you have that problem. And you're trying to change that order. That is SEO. So it could live on Amazon, it could live in an app store, it could live in a search result. But whenever there is that list, SEOs are the people that are trying to change that order. And however you do it, there's some way.

Yeah, totally. And A.J.

Add to that, I'll take the easy approach and say search engine optimization.

Next, I would like to talk maybe just about what. So I have a site and I need help getting this done. As you already know, I've pointed out that I am not good at this. I want to hire a company. How do you even find a company? How do you determine between a good company and a bad company like snake oil? Basically, there's a lot of people out there right now selling the snake oil. I mean, get you ranked number one tomorrow or in 15 minutes. Obviously that's not going to happen. So, Ricky, once again start with you and Victor, I'd like to hear your opinions on that too.

I think you've kind of hit the nail on the head a little bit in there, but I think when, particularly in SEO, when you're looking at hiring agencies, if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is. If they use any words like guarantee that you'll be in number one position or anything like that, then that's an immediate red flag. If you start talking about how spending more on PPC somehow influences your SEO rankings and there's a good red flag. And then I think beyond that, just actually doing some real. Like when you hire an agency for anything, doing some real due diligence. So we often offer people to speak to our customers. I definitely think that's one thing that people miss when hiring agencies actually just ring some of their customers and speak to them and see what the experience has been like.

So, yeah, yeah.

Can you.

Before I go to you, Victor, can we just expand on that a little more like due diligence? Like, so what do I, I mean, I. Being the company that wants to hire someone out, like, what's. Before I do reach out to someone to start working. What, what should I do? You know, what's. What should I research? Where, where, where do I begin?

I think have a look at the agency themselves. Like, are they doing best practices? How optimal is their website? Like go and check it on page Insights or something like that. Make sure that title tag on the homepage, the agency doesn't say, like homepage or something. We won a customer a few weeks ago from someone that was paying, I think he was paying 15 grand a month for SEO and his company's title tag was still homepage a year and a half later. So people are laughing, but it actually still happens. So just check they're doing good stuff themselves, make sure that they're talking sense when you read on the blog. And like I say, the red flags are the easiest to spot in the SEO world. Like rich, quick vibes coming off it, just run to the hills.

All right, Victor, what you got?

Yeah, from our perspective, it kind of goes back to is there a one size fits all SEO solution for any business? And if you think the answer is yes, then I'm sorry, right. And so if you come to an agency and they guarantee that they have this proven method because they reverse engineered Google's algorithm, well, ding, ding, ding. Flags should be coming off everywhere, right? And so if that agency reaches out to you and they're not actually even listening to you or what your problems are, then they're fake, right? You have to understand what the business does. You have to understand what the goals are. And then organic search is one avenue to reach those goals. And they can't, you know, figure out the problems you're serving you have. Then, you know, no amount of traffic is going to solve that. It's kind of like, you know, hey, I, I can get you to page one for keyword you don't even care about. It doesn't even help your business, right? I mean, they delivered on their promise, right? But again, what does it do for you? So if you have someone that pitches you something and isn't even listening about what you're trying to do, then you know, that's just a bad match and that's just a flag. Like, they could be great at doing like irrelevant SEO, right?

Yeah. Aj, what do you think?

I mean, I kind of have to agree with what Ricky and Victor have said along the way, but for me, it's looking them up on Google, right? Seeing where they rank, look at their client base and take a look at a client and see the specific industry the client may be in. Like for instance, if they're in manufacturing, look at that and try searching for that particular company in the manufacturing area using keywords that you know that they would use. Are they ranking high? If not, then chances are they're probably just doing similar to what Victor said and just doing blanket keywords. But also when they're talking to you about keyword research and ad targeting and doing all of these things, take note of what they say in terms of how they're gonna help you rank for keywords because the biggest problem you can have is a broad match for something that is so generic that it blows through your ad budget or your keyword budget in a matter of minutes. So you don't want to be growing when they can help you target specific keywords instead of doing, like, the fuzzy search, if you want to call it that.

Yeah. Okay. And, A.J. actually, we were just talking yesterday about you working with your wife on her site and, like, targeting locally versus, like, you know, a broader, you know.

Net.

I mean, how do you go about that? How do you find. What's your process there? It's a terrible. I worded that question terribly, but I hope to God that you can figure out what I was asking.

Yeah. So in. In terms of local search for her particular industry that she's in, it's a counseling center. Like, so she's. She has her own therapy practice. So it was mainly trying to figure out, okay, how are people going to search for therapy needs? You know, what are they going to do in terms of, like, are they going to look for mental health therapists near me, or are they going to, like. Do you expect the general user to know the specific psychological terms that you're going to type into a search engine? Probably not. They're going to look up therapists near me, counselors near me. And when you're using, like, the near me kind of thing, Google's smart enough to know when you say near me, you mean your geolocation. So putting in keywords like the town and counselors as part of the initiative definitely helps towards the local aspect of the SEO. You know, I mean, there. And say, like, counseling and therapy could be the key words, but you're going to be competing nationwide, and that's not really what you're looking for in something like a therapy practice, you're looking to be close to the people that need the help the most and that are searching for that the most. So you want to use those targeted keywords of those locations in which you're looking to go.

Is that how Google actually surfaces that, like, through a keyword? So, like, specifically the location, or do they, like, kind of, you know, crawl your site, find your address? Actually, this is ignorance on my part. I mean. Or is it both? How does that work? Ricky, do you. Do you know more details on.

Yeah, it's actually a good point that ties back to what Victor was saying. There's specific experts in SEO that specialize in different things, and local SEO is a completely different base to B2B SEO or anything like that. So local SEO, something I haven't actually touched for quite a long time but from experience it works on a couple of things. There's the, there's a sort of information you put on things like the Google my business page, the sort of actual data that you're providing to Google that it will use. There's stuff like the footer as well. And then yeah, keyword wise I still think having towns and stuff in your keyword in your title tag is, is worth doing and is quite important. And then the last part from a local perspective, which is the main difference with normal lead gen SEO is the use of citations. So what Google's particularly looking for is people using your business name, your business address, your business phone number across the Internet and that's a really good signal to them that you're a legitimate local business with a physical presence. And that actually plays quite a large part in how you're find on that near me bit, how Google understands where near me is and it helps them get around. People put in therapist town A, therapist town B, therapist town C in their footer, which people used to do a lot. And that's how they get around that is using citations.

Cool.

I want to go to a few of the questions we had on the forum that you had. A great AMA Ricky and a lot of good stuff. So it's going to read through. Let's see. So with so much data to analyze, how do you prioritize what to optimize? How do you make sure your time spent is actually going to drive lead sales instead of just traffic? Victor, why don't you answer that first? I see what you have to say about that.

So it's a very generic question, so I'm going to have a very generic answer. If you have analytics that does point to revenue somewhere, then you should work backwards because you're certain that like if those are the terms that lead you to a Contact Us or like a pricing, then you know, if you have more traffic there and some sort of conversion happens then you have a deal. So sometimes it's about pricing pages, sometimes it's about comparison pages like X versus Y, you know, or like sometimes it's a little bit more generic. What is the best kind of X and if there's some sort of listing or some sort of comparison, you know that person is in that buying mentality and if you can work there and upwards, great. Now if you have an ad budget and you're also targeting search terms and again you're able to show that conversion, then you should also think gain things.

Like the people talk about. And it's like that 0.01 ranking factor. But there's. There's so much rubbish talks online about SEO that people get the wrong idea of what things like that mean. Like H1 kind of is what it says on the tin. You should have. You should have one of those in a site like 1h1. It's your main title of your site, having your keyword in it. If it comes naturally, amazing. If it doesn't, I'd rather have a good user experience and not have it in there because of how little it matters from a waiting perspective. But yeah, you're right, definitely. Header structures is one of the funny problems we come across quite often with people. Just like I put 15 H1s in. Was that not a good idea? Probably not.

Moving on to another question here, and this is a long one, so bear with me. My first question relates to page architecture for site redesigns. I know that shorter URLs tend to perform better than longer URLs. So let's say I have a product called Call Tracking on my website that pages is organized under Products in my navigation foldering. One of the reasons I would not want the URL to be www.site.com product call tracking versus www.site.com calltracking. I'll just stop there. I think you guys know the rest of it. A.J. i want to start with you. I have not started with you yet.

Honestly, in this particular region, I don't know if I would be much of help in providing adequate advice for that. I've done more technical SEO optimizations and things like that in the past, but I don't see any issue as long as it's human readable and it's easy to understand. I don't see there being an issue between having Product your product name or just your website product for content silo. Likewise, I think it's easier and it's more readable for people to understand that call tracking is a product of yours. So having it nested under Product Call Tracking is a little bit easier to read for people, and it's also easier for people to understand exactly where they're going inside of your site.

Yeah, I agree with that, Victor. You even put a note saying, feel free to cue me on this. So what do you have to say about this?

It's complicated. It's. I'm gonna pull the Depends, but at least I'm not gonna let you hang there, which is like An SEO thing like that's another flag you might want to have when you're hiring an agency. If they tell you it depends too much, that means they're not listening enough about what you do. There's some qualifying questions. What do you plan to do in the future with your products? Then is there a scenario where that changes? Those two questions are really important. On the structure. I can actually use HubSpot as an example. HubSpot used to be a single product company. Some of our features actually cross different HubSpot hubs, like having video. So the problem of having video, like say the marketing hub, is that you're probably going to have video on the sales hub and you're going to probably have video at some point in the service hub. And so now you have three video pages and technically they're slightly different, but you're going to have some self competing happening and you might even not have the resources to maintain all different variants. And you also then have to think about what is your messaging like when you're selling a video software solution, which might be the term you're going after. And all of a sudden now you have a marketing software solution, a sales, a service one. And so the structure is really important because like, what is your goal? Like what do you want to actually target? And that URL structure should reflect that. And hopefully you don't have to change it too many times because it gets really confusing for search engines. So. So if you want to put it at the root of a URL, it gives you some flexibility, but it also doesn't allow you that extra keyword to put in that URL structure to be like, this is exactly what we're doing and we're staying that way. So there's trade offs. It's going to depend on what your future goals and aspirations are. And any SEO will tell you, like any sort of URL change, the less you can, the less you can have on that, the better it is for your site. So plan ahead and really ask those hard questions on what is our company's roadmap in the future. And let's have the URL structure reflect that.

Yeah, that makes sense. I imagine it's really hard. That's a really tough question to really get that roadmap thought out. Ricky, what are your thoughts here?

Yeah, no, I think those were good answers. I think remembering back to the root of the question, there's definitely a marked and strategy piece which Victor's explained really well. And I think the root of the question, like, does Google care how long my URLs are. Like, this is probably a bit of a carryover from 10 years ago when people actually had like super long URLs with like numbers and letters in them and dot HTML at the end. And yeah, Google didn't quite like it if your URL was like 300 characters long. Yeah, for sure that's not great. But in Today's age, most URLs, that isn't a problem for Google. Like whether you have.

It's going to take a little bit to load. Like you want to make sure that you're doing optimizations and if it's one thing that I've always seen consistently through reporting or like when I was back in an agency. Image optimization should always be front of mind for any content creator that is adding content to a website because that is the most overlooked thing and that's what's going to ding you the most on like Google Page speed insights and especially like, because performance is such a big part of SEO, will ding you from an SEO perspective.

Another thing I see a lot is just a ton of H1 tags throughout a page. How much does that actually affect you? Is it.

Anyone marginal gain? Things like that people talk about and it's like that 0.01 ranking factor. But there's. There's so much rubbish talks online about SEO that people get the wrong idea of what things like that mean. Like H1 kind of is what it says on the tin. You should have. You should have one of those in a site. Like 1H1. It's your main title of your site, having your keyword in it. If it comes naturally, amazing. If it doesn't. I'd rather have a good user experience and not have it in there because of how little it matters from a waiting perspective. But yeah, you're right, definitely. Header structures is one of the funny problems we come across quite often with people. Just like I put 15 H1s in. Was that not a good idea? Like probably not.

Moving on to another question here, and this is a long one, so bear with me. My first question relates to page architecture for site redesigns. I know that shorter URLs tend to perform better than longer URLs. So let's say I have a product called Call Tracking on my website that pages is organized under products in my navigation foldering. What are the reasons I would not want the URL to be www.site.com product call tracking vs www.com calltracking I'll just stop there. I think you guys know the rest of it. AJ, I want to start with you. I have not started with you yet.

Honestly, in this particular region, I don't know if I would be much of help in providing adequate advice for that. I've done more technical SEO optimizations and things like that in the past, but I don't see any issue as long as it's human readable and it's easy to understand. I don't see there being an issue between having product your product name or just your website product for content silo. Likewise, I think it's easier and it's more readable for people to understand that call tracking is a product of yours. So having it nested under product call tracking is a little bit easier to read for people. And it's also easier for people to understand exactly where they're going inside of your site.

Yeah, I agree with that, Victor. You even put a note saying, feel free to cue me on this. So what do you have to say about this?

It's complicated. It's. I'm gonna pull the depends, but at least I'm not gonna let you hang there, which is like an SEO thing. Like, that's another flag you might want to have when you're hiring an agency. If they tell you it depends too much, that means they're not listening enough about what you do. There's some qualifying questions, what do you plan to do in the future with your products? And then is there a scenario where that changes? Those two questions are really important. On the structure. I can actually use HubSpot as an example. HubSpot used to be a single product company. Some of our features actually cross different HubSpot hubs, like having video. So the problem of having video on like say the marketing hub is that you're probably going to have video on the sales hub and you're going to probably have video at some point in the service hub. And so now you have three video pages and technically they're slightly different, but you're going to have some self competing happening and you might even not have the resources to maintain all different variants. And you also then have to think about what is your messaging like when. When you're selling a video software solution, which might be the term you're going after. And all of a sudden now you have a marketing software solution, a sales, a service one. And so the structure is really important because like, what is your goal? Like, what do you want to actually target? And that URL structure should reflect that and hopefully you don't have to change it too many times because it gets really confusing for search engines. So. So if you want to put it at the root of a URL, it gives you some flexibility, but it also doesn't allow you that extra keyword to put in that URL structure to be like, this is exactly what we're doing and we're staying that way. So there's trade offs. It's going to depend on what your future goals and aspirations are. And any SEO will tell you, like any sort of URL change, the less you can. The less you can have on that, the better it is for your site. So plan ahead and really ask those hard questions on what is our company's roadmap in the future? And let's have the URL structure reflect that.

Yeah, that makes sense. I imagine it's really hard. That's a really tough question to really get that roadmap thought out. Ricky, what are your thoughts here?

Yeah, no, I think those were good answers. I think remembering back to the root of the question, there's definitely a marked and strategy piece which Victor's explained really well. And I think the root of the question, like, does Google care how long my URLs are? Like, this is probably a bit of a carryover from 10 years ago when people actually had like super long URLs with like numbers and letters in them and dot HTML at the end. And yeah, Google didn't quite like it if your URL was like 300 characters long. Yeah, for sure, that's not great. But in today's, in Today's age, most URLs, that isn't a problem for Google. Like whether you have product in there, it's not going to make any difference from a length perspective. They're not going to penalize you because you're over 40 characters in your URL. So definitely agree that this is more of a. It's one of those interesting bits where SEO kind of crosses marketing strategy. That's kind of a marketing strategy question. The SEO bit's kind of inconsequential really. From like, how long should my title be?

Gotcha.

URL, not title.

It's okay.

It's okay.

Let's see. Next question here we have is we're in the electronic health record or EHR business. We're resellers for two types of EHRs. One is for our older legacy product and one is for our newer cloud based product. We frequently will write a post and publish it on both blogs with everything the same content, title, meta description, et cetera. We're getting Duplicate content warnings as a result. Is this hurting our SEO? If yes, can we just change the title and the meta description? Victor, what do you got on this?

Yeah, so what you're doing is called content syndication. The right thing to do is to pick a canonical of these two variants and to have the place that's syndicating from point the canonical to the one that you want to be the main page that ranks in Google. So that's the correct thing to do. Something to note is you see this kind of syndication commonly or across the web, sometimes it's a news story, like this story was originally from like this publication. Maybe it came from Forbes, maybe it's like the next web or something. They do that a lot too. This kind of syndication sometimes happens in webinars or some sort of like shared offer partnerships between companies. And sometimes you might syndicate your own content. Maybe you have a blog post, but then you have a different variant of it on a medium post or maybe on LinkedIn or something. And the canonical tag isn't always there as an option. So the broader answer for this is like syndication is a strategy. The best way to handle it is, is to edit the canonical and to choose kind of a home base. If that option is not available for you, add some sort of line on the top of the post that says this originally came from here and a link over as kind of a secondary signal you can do. Because again, your goal is to have one of these pages be the main one that ranks in a search result. So hopefully that does two things for you. Cool.

Ricky?

Yeah, no, that's, that's exactly how to deal with the problem. I think if the question was angled around, if they're going to do it for content syndication and it's got a, another way, it's going to add value to your business. Like I'm putting it on this site so I can share it on social or in my email campaigns or whatever. Then Victor's explained how to mitigate the risk. I think if they're putting it on that second site to try and get any extra SEO benefit, like I'm going to rank twice for this and I'm going to get twice as much traffic from the same piece of content. I'd probably say that's not particularly a good strategy. I don't. You're not going to get any extra SEO, whatever terms people use, juice or traffic or anything from having it out in the web twice. And if you don't deal with it properly, if you do it on a large scale, it could it could come back and bite you a little bit. It's very unlikely. But if you, if you're really, really syndicating a lot of stuff and not dealing with it properly, could do. But I think it's looking into why you're doing it.

What do you consider a large scale?

I think if you were going around the web and I was collecting articles other SEO agencies have written and I was taking them to my site and I was posting them as my news and literally like, like for like copying them and I was putting one out a day or something like that. And like you say not having any link or reference back to who originally wrote it, there's definitely a chance that Google's going to look at that at some point and say like hey, you're just scraping other people's websites here could be some sort of action taken against you. I think you'd have to be really doing it a lot and badly for Google to care that much about it. But yeah, it's definitely something to be aware of is ask yourself why you're doing it and there's definitely valid reasons you'd want to syndicate. But if you extra SEO benefit from it, I don't particularly think it's going to help you too much.

I feel like Victor has an example or something here.

So yeah, let's talk about penalties, which I got into one before via syndication. There are a series of websites that apparently have some readership. I'm just going to name them out. I don't know if their business model is still valid. I think one of them is like customerthink.com and then there's like a B2C community or something and then they take guest contributors and they're fine with syndication. And in the olden days of SEO where you found the web because you went through a web directory or a portal and you would submit sites and sometimes there are article submission websites. Again, if you hear any of these terms from the SEO agency you're hiring, then you know they're doing SEO from 10 years ago and you can get penalized for these things. But anyways, going back to syndication. So I again submitted some articles. Again the thinking is if you it's about readership and reach, right? The more exposure your content has, the more likelihood it gets shared on social, the more likely you could get backlinks through and gain authority. That was our thinking. But what happens when you syndicate on a website that then adds your article on their blog role? All of a sudden we had 2 million pages on their Syndication website pointing to our post that we had syndicated on their platform. And they just chose us because we were very lucky. That immediately triggered a manual action for unnatural links for Google. And you know, then we had to like immediately act because that triggered, that triggered a penalty. Like we were seeing organic traffic loss as a result. And back then it wasn't like page by page, it was the whole site. So there you go. Be careful where you syndicate. Do know what you're doing. Noted. Noted. Yeah. Something to add. There is, there are safeguards for some of these sites. These are called link follow attributes, if you will link attributes and you can trigger them as follow or nofollow. If you are doing something that has some sort of paid or quid pro quo element to it, then if you want to err on the side of caution it would be to have those links have that nofollow attribute. That's just a side note. And then I know we were talking about duplicate content as a penalty and not links, but actually they're sometimes tied together too. So I just wanted to add that fun story because nobody likes getting manual penalties.

Yeah, for sure. Next question we got here is I was in a conversation with an SEO who said that fresh content is higher ranked than any other. I asked him how that relate to what I understand as evergreen content, as in all the views, the links, et cetera. So what is your opinions on this aj? Do you have any thoughts?

I mean fresh content is definitely nice as is evergreen. I would say if you have an older blog that you can update, always update it. Always. Don't write the same blog twice, just with newer keywords or newer things. While yes, you're technically putting more content out there, Google's gonna look at that and it's gonna see that you have similar content on your site and it's going to make the decision of what's going to rank higher. And chances are your older blog will have more traffic and possibly more backlinks already to it. So you're just better off updating that evergreen content. It's not to say that creating new fresh content is not a good thing because naturally, how else are you gonna get your content out there? But you just wanna make sure when you're doing it to think about all the content you previously have written. And if the content piece you're creating now is relevant to old content pieces, look at how similar it is. And is it worth updating the old content to be evergreen or creating the new content and simply putting in links in there? Back to Your older articles as reference for things.

Ricky, you have thoughts on this? I'm sure you do. Of course you do.

I think that's a really good tip for most people. If you've been doing content marketing for more than a year or so, there is so much leverage in your old blog content. One of the biggest quickest SEO hacks on that is we all post things which have like the year in the title. And something a lot of people forget is like if people are searching and find that content this year. So if you've got an article which was like how to do inbound the best in 2020 or whatever, like, if you haven't changed that to 2021, there's probably a lot less chance that someone's going to click it. But also it's a really quick win for you to go through your blog in the little search tool. So if you're using HubSpot Blog in a search tool, put in the year like 2018, 19, 20. Look at the blogs which reference the year. Go back and make the content a bit fresher for this year. Change the title to reference this year. It's quite a quick win. Quick win a lot of people forget to do. There's an awesome tool. One of my favorite free SEO tools is by. It's by a content agency. I think they're based in New York and they're called Animals. And if you look them up, they do a tool where you can plug in your Google Analytics and it will show you the decay of your content. So when you publish something like a blog, you've naturally got like most things. You've got a life cycle. Like it grows, it grows, it plateaus and then it decays as it becomes irrelevant. And what this Animals tool will do is it'll start to notice the things start to decay and it gives you out a list of blogs you should go back and update. So it's saying, these are starting to decay. Go back and update them.

Interesting.

With answer to freshness specifically, I think the real important thing, and I mentioned this in the, in the reply to the person, the question was take a look at the context of what you're writing and that will tell you how important freshness is. So I think I used two examples in there. One was like, if you're looking for the top 10 best laptops. Oh, we were talking about Chromebooks before the show. You're looking for the best Chromebook to use this year. Like the freshness really matters because there's new models coming every week. It's very likely that the people ranking top of Google published an update yesterday or the day before. But if you're looking for something like best management styles that changes decades, like there's not a new management style every day that's notable and that will kind of. And then if you, if you go and search them, there's probably articles still ranking really highly from five years ago that still completely. Luckily when I wrote that answer, I did quickly screenshot and check and it was true. I just winged the answer but then checked it on the screenshot. The laptop example was a day or two old. The management style one was five years old at the top of Google. So it does really matter what the context of the subject you're writing about is as well.

How often should I be publishing new posts? I mean, what frequency, what cadence should I actually strive to have?

Yeah, that's a good question.

And I guess does it change per. Like, you know what my. I guess my objective is? I guess Ricky or. Yep, yeah, Victor was.

I'll just grab it. So there's the element that we're just talking about for freshness. I think that quote unquote technical term for it is query deserves freshness or QDS as an acronym. We Love acronyms in SEO. It is a response to actually 9, 11, when everyone was searching for like New York City twin towers, like what was going on and the search engines were all failing because they had an old version of the index. It was the iteration of caffeine. So being able to grab content really quickly and serve really fresh results to people. And the term query deserves freshness really depends. Some search terms really need that freshness, as like Ricky said, it's like you need. It needs to be timely. And being able to look at a search result and say like, this is something where freshness is important versus this is something where it's not. Like, freshness isn't a ranking factor for everything, it's only for the queries that deserve freshness. So going back to your blogging strategy, like when should I publish new content? This is also something that's been changing. So I would say, I don't know, seven, eight years ago, HubSpot was doing a bunch of webinars about the science of everything, like the timing of email, like how many posts you throw in. And then at the time, I think we're doing some sort of study where it's like the more you post, the more traffic you get. Well, that's because back then search engines weren't as specific about like topics Right. And So we as SEOs would recommend that for every keyword variation, you would have a page with that on its H1 or title for that variation. And that worked, and that's why we recommended it. And now it's not working as well anymore because Google is able to infer intent and kind of cluster things together. So if anything, for the search engine, they just see a lot of pages that are very similar to each other and they only have to pick one. Right. So how often should you publish? Well, there's. You could also ask, how often should I be removing things that I've already written about and pruning them? It's kind of two sides of the same problem. And that is what is your content strategy? And do you have one? Because you should be publishing to the cadence of that strategy and filling out the gaps of that strategy and not just like, oh, I have a quota to write five things this week and I'm just going to just hit it and see what sticks. Right. I mean, you could do that, but it's not very intentional. Right? You're not really. There's no real science or rhyme or reason of why you're creating stuff that. Other than the fact that you're just hoping it sticks. So if you can do the research, understand why you're writing, and then write and publish and then maybe have some hypothesis saying, like, hey, if I get here, these are people that are actually looking for my service, therefore it's worth my time and investment to do that, then I think you're in a much better place. Likewise. Hey, we actually already covered this because I did a site search on my own site for that keyword, and it actually falls into this other post that I've already written. Maybe I just need to update that post instead. Maybe the intent is the same. Maybe I should expand on that instead of writing something net new. Right. So instead of again, just writing out net new. Net new. Net new, and then pruning it later on, is it something that you actually have a gap? Is it something that. Where you've already kind of addressed somewhere else, but it's actually better for you to just expand that versus write something new again and have those two kind of canalize each other?

Totally makes sense. Aj, do you have any additional thoughts on this?

No, I think Victor addressed it absolutely, 100% perfectly.

Yeah, I think so, too. Good job.

I approve.

Next question here is I work in a geographic area that is considered to be very behind the times when it comes to anything in the realm of digital marketing. My experience in this area is that SEO is more a buzzword and a checkbox to mark than an actual strategy or tactic. Where do you suggest a client starting to blah, blah. Where do you suggest a client start putting in an effort to improve their SEO so they get visible outcomes quickly and, and start to grow their understanding of this concept and what it can do for their business? Ricky, go for it. Sell me.

Yeah, I think for starters, if anyone's coming to you and saying they want to get visible outcomes quickly, I'd probably start educating that this isn't the right tactic for you. Maybe this is a medium term game that you're playing here. So if you want to be hiring someone and having a conversation after three months about the ROI of your SEO, you're probably in the wrong place to start with. I think the answer is probably in the question a little bit around education. I think any client who's, I think maybe signpost them to some good third party content. So not stuff that's your own. So it's like bias stuff that's really trusted where they can go and just learn the very top overview of what SEO is. And with not having our bias hats on, I think the place I normally send people to do that is Moz. I think they probably do a really good job for beginners in SEO. They literally wrote the guide on the Beginner's Guide to SEO, which I think is probably the most referenced guide in SEO. So I think if someone's super new start and just. You don't have to read that whole book. It's a, it is an actual book, but chapter one is like, what is SEO? How can it help your business? I'd say to a client, go and read that and then come back to the conversation a little bit. That would be, that would be where I'd start. If someone picked up the phone and, and said that to me like as a, as a prospect, that's, that would be my answer. Like, let's go away, do some homework. Here's some stuff that's probably to read. Let's have a proper discussion about whether SEO is even the right thing for you. If you need money tomorrow, it probably isn't.

Yeah. What would you consider to be a reasonable expectation of a return of value on SEO? And maybe this is, this might be a bad question or it's just too generic. But what are your thoughts?

Probably the most frequent question we get asked in the sales process around if you book it in SEO and content marketing and just sort of organic digital marketing growth Together, it's probably the most common question we get. And there's a very stock answer in the SEO industry, which is kind of nine to 12 months. And I think that's a stock answer because seven times out of 10, it's not too far off. Like, there's a ton, as we've already discussed on here, there's an absolute ton of context to every SEO situation. And like I said, for someone like HubSpot who has huge authority, you can flick some switches and have some good immediate results. But for someone who's starting with, I've just registered my domain name today, like, help me rank against Accenture. Like, okay, we're talking years here, like, or is it even worth doing? Is probably a better point. So, so I definitely think, take the context. But there is this general rule of thumb, like, for an average business of an average investment amount, you're at least not wanting to have the ROI conversation until you get in and around that 9 to 12 month mark. That's what we normally say to people, because people want, they don't want to hear. It depends completely. Like, you need to give them some ballpark. And that's normally where we would steer them.

AJ do you have thoughts on this as well? I know.

Did you.

So in your former agency, I know you did like technical audits and whatnot for SEO, did you do like client interactions and say, you know, advice basically for this?

Yeah, we usually used SEMrush was one of the programs that we used there. As you know, there are multiple programs out there that can provide you the exact same stuff as SEMrush can provide you just as well. It's just dependent upon what software you're given at the time of being onboarded or that you fall into. But we would use SEMrush a lot of times. And those reports, if you just gave somebody a Semrush report, they would go, what am I looking at? There are thousands of lines here. There are things. And it was more about, like Ricky said, client education. A lot of the times these clients come, they don't understand the full effect of just what SEO is. They know it means get me on Google, make me number one. But you need to educate them a little bit more into the technical aspects of SEO or the more broader concepts of SEO. And I think Ricky hit it right on the head with that. Nine to ten, nine to even, sometimes a year. And it also depends upon where your particular company is in industry. Right? So some industries are very, very small and only have maybe a handful of Companies that do what they do and it's such a specific industry that you may see a way quicker return, you may see six months on something like that. But talking in manufacturing, huge industry, you could probably expect that nine to ten month for sure. But taking an example of a company I used to work for did school supply kits, very small niche industry, there may be a handful of competitors that are the top well known competitors. So being able to switch your SEO efforts or make decisions in that probably about a six month range, maybe even 5mm, it's really dependent on the industry you're in and the size of your industry. But as a general gauge, I think what Ricky said of that nine month to about 10 or 11. Perfect.

And Victor, how would you this person's question if you were, if she came up to you and asked this, you know, to take on her SEO efforts and once that quick return, what would you do?

Yeah, I'm a bit more evil. I need reasons to say no. And the way to say no is to ask for money. And the way to ask for money is I would need to do a site audit in order for you to give you a good estimate on like the ROI and time to, you know, your return on investment. So if you had like just a few featured snippets on your sites that you're just missing out on, I could give you like, you know, a 30% boost in traffic just by fixing those really simple common things like the next month. Right. But if you don't have that, but you have like a bunch of really janky legacy CMS issues where if I wanted to move anything on your website, it's gonna take three lawyers and you know, an outsourced development team, then you know that's like, that's nonsense, right? I'm not gonna get you something in nine to 10 months because I have to jump through three red hoops and like a flaming on fire and probably a tiger chasing after me. And those situations where again I used to work in an agency as well for Fortune 500 companies and we were not the agency of record, meaning, you know, some agency also takes care of like TV ads, print media, whatever, they're the agency of records. There are other agencies that report to them. And we were the agency of record for search, meaning paid search and also organic search. So anything that we came up with then had to go to them and then they had their own contracts of what they were obligated and we had ours. And sometimes these things will kind of conflict and then they kind of know the prices for a lot of things to get implemented. Like they have the direct relationship to, oh, we talked about Accenture to Accenture, who won the website back end updating infrastructure stuff which we then learned later on that they actually outsourced it out to a third party. Which, you know, again, this is, this goes back to the loop. In a loop, in a loop that you have to jump through that's already outside of your remit of what you're supposed to be doing in contract. And there was some email miscommunication and somehow they had sent over the fee sheet that these developers would, you know, ask from the agency record, like, hey, you wanted this from the search agency over there because they're the middleman. They're like, that's going to be some obscene amount of dollars and it would be something like $10,000 for a meta subscription change. Like, and then, and then the craziest thing is like, it's like bite or something is sometimes it's like by ticket. So sometimes some of these developers, you know, get gold, buy tickets closed or something. They'll have tickets that like they'll close for no reason. It's like, oh, we didn't address it. So. And then you have to reopen the same thing and then they close again. They get, they get twice the amount of money. It's like crazy stuff like that where, you know, unless you're able to see that happens, like I can't actually tell you it's going to be fast because I need to know like what your processes are. Like, how many lawyers have to go through this if you're doing like pharmaceutical, right. It could be a very lengthy review process. And maybe I think I can tell you, hey, add all these words and then the hours can't come back and go like, no, we would get sued if we ever said that. Right? It's, it's very nuanced. But you know, how do you stop that nuance? It's like charge for it. And oftentimes if they're not ready for that commitment of some sort of assessment, maybe they're not the right fit. And I feel like it's almost like buying property, you kind of want to do like a home inspection first to see if you know, you have termites or you have like structural issues with the house before you go in into that like long term relationship. Right. That's kind of like the way I think about it with SEO sometimes it's like, hey, do you want someone, an agency to be there to, you know, tell you like, hey, you're gonna have these things happen? Or are you just looking for someone to give you a quick fix of something for a very short run and right different perspectives on what kind of SEO you're trying to do? I'm not here to judge, but, you know, there are methods that will give you quicker results but also put you in a lot of risk.

Yeah, yeah, for sure. I mean, I. It's just a disservice to everyone if you don't do a site audit prior to, you know, accepting a contract. Right. People out there, if you know whoever you're talking to is not offering a site audit or to do one before actually giving you some sort of number, you know, don't. Don't go with them. I don't think it's a good idea. Um, yeah. Okay, next question we have here. Would love to hear some tips on how to determine when to use structured data. Do you have any sort of system for going through a website and figuring out where and what schema would be useful in HubSpot? Do you mostly use inline structured data or a JSON schema? If using JSON schema, where in templates is it best placed to use? Before we even answer the question, I think it's probably worthwhile just to define what this is. AJ, would you. Would you feel comfortable, like, just kind of, what are we talking about here?

I think Victor might actually be better. Victor suited to answer, like, the difference between. Because I know that there are the two different types. There's the inline versus the JSON, ld. But I think Victor would probably have a better grasp historically for that.

I am the host and you're going to. Victor, go for it.

I was going to say. Yeah. So structured data has like a long history. It used to be, you know, all the search engines got together, like, hey, we, we have a bunch of web pages, but we're not very good at understanding what they are. Maybe websites can help tell us what the particular sections are. And this, that's how schema.org is. It's like shared vocabulary. Everyone can agree on. Like this way we should standardize things. Kind of like your USBs, like 2, 3C, whatever. Like they need a standard. Well, at first, everyone was really excited about microdata. So that's the inline stuff that we're talking about because it actually told you where on that page did that matter? Right? Like, this is a part of what, this is a part of where, and it's that part of the page. But implementation was hard. Like there's A lot of really manual stuff. Unless you have modular components on your webpage, that's all just grunt work of someone going to the view source or whatever, the View editor mode and just entering that in and it's all invisible to the normal user but the search engine. Then there was JSON ld, which most people is actually now the recommended method by Google. And that's just throw that in the head. And it's not relational or anything, it's just like right there. It's, it doesn't correspond to a place on the page and they have their pros and cons and both are supported. I think if you have modular components on your website or the content like the modules are edited by human beings that really don't want to code and just let them do their jobs. If the modules themselves are marked up ahead of time then you know, restrict your data will just work when you have those modules. But if you don't have that then the best place is to just drop them in and JSON LD in the head and should you do it or should you not? That answer I think is actually pretty straightforward. Run tests, pick a few pages. Like what's your best guess? The benefit of structured data is actually increased click through rate because your search results look more helpful to the user. And if you don't have that answer of like did it actually get us more traffic? Then why are you investing in like oh, we should just do this to our pages. So run a few tests on a few pages. Maybe JSON LD is a lot easier for you and it sure is for me. Maybe it's not and you have to do the microdata portion. Run a test, make your best guess. I mean the scientific way to do it is to do it on a large swath of pages and all that. But most of us don't have, most of us aren't like a Pinterest that does like a crazy data science experiment, right? Or we're not like a bookings.com or an eBay where we're able to do like these giant engineering feats and then share it with the world. And like look, we have this really awesome a B testing platform for SEO. We have to go like this is a search term, this is what people want. I think if I have a rich snippet, which is what these special search results are called, more people are going to click and that's not hard to understand, right? And can I win that? And if I'm able to do both and it does great, can I do it? To more pages and see what that does. And then, then should I just roll out across my whole site or take it as a best practice? And here's a caveat. So HubSpot did try review snippets so the stars you get in a serp. What we did find was all of our competitors were already doing it and so that actually didn't have us standing out. If anything, that just made us look like all the other listings. And so it was really ironic that, you know, I'm thinking that I'm enhancing my page, but actually my page started to look more like my competitors. It didn't stand out anymore and we actually saw a decrease in clicks. Even though a lot of people are like, hey, schemas, you know, enhance your SEO with all that. But at the end of the day, you really need to look at what happened to your traffic.

Ricky, do you have any thoughts on this?

I think Victor nailed the technical part of it. To be honest, I've got nothing to add there. I think just to expand on that last part though, I think it's another one of those things in SEO where people get shiny object syndrome. And okay, I've got library here and it's given me 300 items that I could mark up on my website. So I'm going to jump in, I'm going to mark everything up and put insane amount of hours into doing it, which people did. Like when schema.org came out, everyone jumped on it. They marked up everything, everything on the website and the insane amount of hours that people spent on that, only to find that Google doesn't use 99.9% of it. So I think just to expand on what Victor said, the first thing is there are tools that will tell you whether specific phrasing types and industries and search types will actually show any schema at all and if so, what schemas are going to show. But even forget in the tools, just go and Google the sorts of things that you should show up for for your pages. If you're already ranking like Victor says, you can compare what's going on on the page versus the competitors. If you're not rank, just go and have a look. And is Google even open to using schema for those sorts of search terms and that will give you a good direction on whether it's worth your investment. This is one, this is definitely one of those where money can be better spent elsewhere if it's not going to have the impact you expect it to for sure.

Cool.

So we talked about this a little bit yesterday, Victor and aj amp.

This is just.

And there's no real question to it, just maybe just your thoughts on it and the use case value. I know things are changing with AMP right now. Anyway, Victor, you had quite a few thoughts, so if you don't mind, just wax poetic on AMP for a while.

Yeah. Rant alert. Sorry guys. First of all, I'll start off by saying I'm not in the next on amp. And AMP is an evolving standard. I think the latest hype and buzz is web stories, which is a storytelling kind of like standard that Google was trying to push out to publishers. Originally. AMP was just to solve the problem that publishers had something like 30 some crazy tracking pixels. And you know you're on your local news site, right? You click on something and it takes 30 seconds to load and lo and behold videos come out and then there's an ad there. It's like, it's crazy. This is for the United States, for any of the global audience. It's like news websites and local news websites in America are struggling to make ends meet. And a lot of times their version of digitized monetization is throw a ton of ads. What app does is really force, you know, it streamlined the experience for those news websites. It was originally for news websites, right? And it was rolled out to the rest of the web. And the benefit here from a performance stand of view was Google was going to cache AMP pages. So instead of you relying on a CDN or self hosted server, it's like, oh, Google has a server really close by and then here's the cached AMP page and boom. Instantly because there's a cache there, you get it so much quicker. But that was only part of the story because AMP was very restrictive back then. The amount of bloated code you could ever throw on an AMP page was extremely limited. And that was actually like the key thing of why AMP was so fast is because, you know, there was only so much you could do. Like in the beginnings of amp, I remember forms were not even enabled. Like you couldn't throw in a form. Like you'd have to hack your way through maybe throwing in an iframe or something. Nuts. Now there are forms and that's why I'm not really following all this. But for me, the big thing that bothers me about AMP is control. Like who controls the content? Is it on your site or is it really on Google? Now there's that cache version that they now hold with that Google URL that is so confusing and misleading to some people. Which I heard they're also trying to address that, or maybe they have already. Again, I'm not an expert here. And that's something you give away when you use amp. And in the past it used to be that there's a special search feature called the AMP carousel. So if you have your page amped, your content amped, you would be eligible on mobile devices to be like slidable on the side, and only if you had amp. It's kind of like that carrot of like getting people in. Right? And it's kind of like, you know, you're trying to rank for video search results and you kind of have to be on YouTube to do that. Like if you're on Wistia, if you're on like Vimeo. I'm sorry, right. It's kind of like that. And, and it's really tricky, right? You want that traffic, but doing that kind of, you start losing control like you're on YouTube. Think about how easy it is to get Lost on YouTube once that recommended video comes in or once like all these other distractions come in. So I think AMP is one of those things where it's nice in that yes, users get a faster experience, but at what cost, right? What is the carrot that Google is offering for you in addition to what you're getting from your users? What are you losing in return for that? And for HubSpot, at least we have pop ups, we have sliders, we have chatbots. Do they work with AMP right now? They don't. Right. Ricky's like shaking his head. What happened when we amped our pages for some blog posts? Those conversions fell down. Do we want to amp all of our pages? No, it's not ready yet. At least we're not ready yet. And it's a little bit of both. Right. How big is that market of like AMP stuff versus how big is kind of the pie we already have and all these other technologies we have and do they work together? And maybe that's really, that's a huge opportunity and maybe we should have our tech evolved to adjust for that. Or maybe it's a really small opportunity and why would I spend all those resources just kind of like Schema, where it's like, hey, we'll look the app for Schema. We're going to have like a 2% lift and it's going to take like hundreds of dev resources. Is it worth it? And you know that's going to be a changing answer. I mean, maybe it's going to go the way there's something called Rel authorship that Google did try to launch at some point. And there are a lot of SEOs adding like, you know, you know, people's Google profiles. Guys remember Google that all died. That was a lot of times wasted. Guys like, this technology is changing. You got to pick and choose. You got to weigh things. Don't get too excited about the shiny objects. As Ricky said, it really goes back down to those three things, which is those technical foundations, the on page and the authority off page stuff. Right? So fundamentals don't change. Stick to that, please amp assess it as you need to. If you're a news publisher, find someone that does news SEO. Please don't listen to me Again, there are verticals like we talked about local SEO. That's such a deep specialization. Same thing with news. That's such a different type of SEO. And it's like, oh, and now you're not in the news vertical and you want to amp it's like, well, you're competing with news websites on showing up on anything amp related. Are you ready for that David and Goliath fight? I'm honest there. Are you actually going to get an edge? I don't know. I don't work on amp. But again, what I do know is work on stuff that works. Test out things to see if it works for you. Don't go ahead and say like, oh, this next new thing, we got to go for it. It's like, no, you really have to test the water with these things because this is technology. You could be on the wrong side of history of like the format wars or something and become obsolete. And now you're like, oh, I need to do a huge PWA amp site migration, like something crazy and technical and really hard and it's just the world of pain and hurt waiting for you. Anyway, that's my rant. Sorry guys.

Love it. Ricky, have anything to add to this? I feel like Victor really just baton.

Of the amp rant if you want. Yeah, couple of points. I think it's such a backwards way to solve a problem. It's like, okay, we're putting lots of shiny stuff on our website. It's getting slow. So why don't we just rewind websites back to like they were in the 90s and just give everyone like really basic HTML website. It's just odd way to come at a problem.

So wait, Ricky, are you saying that table based websites aren't in anymore? I'm confused. I thought that that was.

But that seemed like coming at it from okay, people on mobile. So we're just gonna make everyone's websites terrible just so they load super quick. Which, like I say, seemed a backwards way. So I can't say I am a fan. The second reason I'm not a fan is because I'm a. I'm a huge believer in owning your own stuff. And I keep telling clients this all of the time. And I will fall out with clients over these, over certain fights, and one of them is owning your own things. So when Medium came out and everyone's like, oh, let's move all of our blogs off our own website onto Medium, I'm like, just please don't. And I will fall out with you if you decide to do this. This is something I will walk away from. And the same with. I've had horror stories with clients who go and put all their eggs into Amazon. Literally. I had a client put everything in, literally put it on Amazon. It did great. Amazon put this. It was several hundred thousand pound ordering because you order in big quantities, do this, and they go, okay, so we're going to put our whole site on Amazon. We're going to switch off our recom. I'm like, please just don't do this. This is the worst mistake you're ever going to make in your life. They did it. And a year later, Amazon came out with an Essentials version of their product and just, no, no. And then they ring me in tears and I was like, I don't want to be the guy who says, told you so, but this is. I'm going to have to go there today. I'm really sorry. We'll build you back up and I'll help you, but I told you so. So, yeah, for those two points, I can't say I'm a huge fan of amp. Again, Specific Industries News, whatever. That's. That's not my bag. That could be a good place for it there. But for regular companies, like, we tried AMP in our blog. We let it run for a year, got marginal gain in traffic, very marginal. But like you said, that the impact on conversion rate was huge. So we switched it off. We get more leads, which is the point of what we had. I don't even think we noticed the difference in traffic. Literally at a site like ours, where you get in, we get about 20,000 visits a month or whatever. Like, it's negligible. It's really negligible, the impact in traffic. But what isn't negligible was a loss in conversion rate. And it wasn't worth it to us. But the same caveat Victor had other industries. Maybe there's a case for it, but I'm not going to be the one waving the banner for amp.

I'll add something there. So if you have a very heavy and slow website on HubSpot, let's just say that's the case because you have a lot of functionality and if you are actually mainly targeting countries or your audience's that where they're very mobile, like most of the searchers are mobile and Internet connection is shoddy at best, then you might say, like, actually the benefit of that increased speed may outweigh the cost of loss of conversions. Or maybe you don't even have those set up and then you're just more than happy to kick that in. So that's something to look into. I do know brands that only care about impressions. It's surprising, but it is a thing. And yeah, they really take the maxim of, like, you need, like, 13 or whatever interactions with a brand before you make a purchase decision. And they're just like, hey, we love Impressions because that's another interaction with my brand. You do you. But, you know, again, depending on what your goals are and how you want to execute it, AMP could be great for you. Or it's actually totally against what your North Star metric should be.

Yeah, I think AJ and I are going to have a competitor amp amp competitor called Tables. Let's just get to work on that.

Okay?

Yes, absolutely. Launching next year.

Sorry, aj, I cut you off. What were you about to say?

No, I said launching next year. Absolutely, it'll be called Tables. But I have to agree with what was said about AMP so far. Like, I have to admit, I bought an AMP when it first came out, I was like, oh, everything's going to be fast. It's going to be great. And I brought it up in one meeting and one of my coworkers looked at me and he goes, well, if your site's responsive and it's already really fast, what's your benefit? And I was just kind of looking at him and I was like, I've got nothing. Because, I mean, I'm a Google fanboy. I love Android. Like, I'm a huge. I love Google stuff. But this is just one of those instances where somebody gave me a rebuttal and I was like, I honestly think about it, like, if the site is responsive and it's working, I'm just gonna walk out of the room right now because I have nothing else to give. And, I mean, it's 100% spot on. If your site's Responsive and it's already light and fast and it's the trade off that you're going to get. Definitely just comes down to like the conversions aspect and as Ricky pointed out, like it may be just so minimal that you don't even notice. And what is the point of giving up your content that is hosted on your own stuff at that point?

Cool.

Any final thoughts, guys? I think we've done a pretty good job. I think we covered, we solved it. It's done. This is the definitive guide to SEO, I think. Ricky, do you have any just like final words or thoughts that you would like to say?

I'm assuming most people listen to this, have got HubSpot and trailing back right to AJ's intro. The boilerplate is your bible. Like go get that build on it. That makes such a huge difference to your performance on HubSpot CMS. So I'll finish with that one. But definitely a huge shout out. Like you can get insane performance scores using that boilerplate and we've used it for a good year or so and it's made the world of difference. So if you're Devin on HubSpot, building sites on HubSpot, start from that boilerplate.

Victor, what you got?

Anything? Anything?

Any parting words?

Parting words would just be to stick to your business goals and then think about how SEO should support it. It shouldn't be the other way around where you just have growth of some term and then you tie back to your business goal. Like that's really forceful, that's almost kind of outbound Y if you will. Or you're just kind of like, hey, I'm ranking for this thing. But now I'm going to show you ads about something totally different. That's kind of my thinking about traffic. Not all traffic is created equal. Why don't you just focus on the traffic that does matter versus the traffic that feels like vanity. And that's kind of the guiding principle about a lot of what we do at HubSpot. And that is, you know, we want to do stuff that is helpful and yeah, see you guys in the SERPs, I guess.

AJ, any last words here?

I'm going to echo Ricky a little bit there and say, yeah, boilerplate. Like if you guys are looking for performance based and a good starting point, definitely hit up the boilerplate. Also, always audit your site. Like Victor had mentioned earlier, it's always good to make sure that you're constantly running audits. I'm not saying do it every day, you don't want overkill, but definitely set a good frequency of making sure to always check in on your site with an audit. For those HubSpot users, we have the SEO Recommendations tool inside of the portal that uses Google Lighthouse. It doesn't have all of the features of Lighthouse, but Lucas Pleba is working with his team and they are just making strides constantly and it's always being updated to add new stuff to it. The tool is phenomenal. It really will help you a lot. So always make sure to just audit your content and then always check for performance. And please, please always just optimize your images before putting them on your site because that is going to kill your SEO instantly.

Amazing. All right, this has been great. I will have a form at the bottom of this when it comes out. So if you have ideas or concerns or you just want to rant and yell at me or Victor, go ahead and put them in there and we will address them. Guys, this has been amazing. Thanks again for this. Have a great weekend.

You guys appreciate it.