HubSpot SEO Recommendations Demystified

We are here every Tuesday at this time. Today we are talking about SEO recommendations. Super excited to have George B. Tahomas here in conversation with Amanda Schumacher. I think it's I'm just going to sit back and learn a lot myself next week. We're talking about objects and associations in HubSpot. Lots of great stuff has happened with objects and associations over the last few years. Ways to visualize things. Lots of things you can do with associations. Same objects. Associations are the newest thing, but by next week they will no longer be the newest thing. There's lots of stuff happening there. Definitely advise you to register for that. The week after that we're going to talk about the Gmail and Yahoo email updates. This has impacts on deliverability. HubSpot has adapted to make sure emails are being delivered, but just a lot to learn with the strategy and the behind the scenes stuff. Things you can do on your team to make sure emails are getting through to people. After that we're going to have a session on an integration with webflow. It's a CMS tool. If you're interested in that, be sure to come by March 19th. Maybe our biggest event ever. We have the former CEO, current general manager of Clearbit coming to talk about what clearbit's acquisition by HubSpot means for the future of HubSpot. I think that'll definitely be a good one to come to the week after that. Honestly, I'm even more excited about this one than I am about the Clearbit one. Forms we got the Forms team coming. I feel like there have been many, many events here at the Admin hug where people have been like, yeah, but does it work in forms? So that's a cool feature. When will it come to forms? All of those questions are going to be asked. The Forums team has huge plans on their roadmap for 2024. Come get a peek behind what they're working on and get your questions answered. Then April we're going to have someone from the support team talking about how to solve common issues in HubSpot. So if you've ever turned on a workflow and immediately regretted it, or import a bunch of data that you should not have, they're going to share some tips and tricks about how to fix that and also tell you a little bit about some of the internal tools the support team has that enables them to undo some stuff that you might not be able to undo yourself. We're going to have a HubSpot 101 for Salesforce users, so if you have friends who are coming from a salesforce usage background into HubSpot and are just completely confused about all the words and terminology and where things are located and how stuff works or if that describes you or a client you're working with, if you're a partner or whatever the case may be. Hoping that this is a useful session to a lot of people, please make sure those people hear about it and know that it's happening. Middle of April we're going to talk about risk management. The team that's been building security tools in HubSpot is starting to think about business risk more generally and how HubSpot might be able to help you with that. Would they're here to share their ideas with you, but would also love your input and feature requests and ideas about how HubSpot can help you with that. So if that's a thing you're interested in as an admin, seems like a safe bet. Definitely come by. And then later in April we're going to see some Python scripts that do some really cool things inside HubSpot that'll be fun. So that's what we're looking at in the future. All of our previous sessions are on our YouTube channel, so if you ever miss one or want to rewatch one or share one, this is the place to find those recordings. It's got 74 today we'll make it 75. We are creeping up on that 100 mark. We have a space on community.HubSpot.com we post things here occasionally. Definitely worth checking out. We also have a group on LinkedIn. If you want to share things or keep up on on stuff that's happening, that's a good place to do it. But as far as community resources go, my favorite is this slack community called Sprocketeer. They now have more than a thousand people in there. These are all people actively using HubSpot. It's a great place to come make some connections, get questions answered, mentor some folks. If you've been around for a while, if you're looking for just in time peer to peer kind of input on the projects you're working on. No better place on the Internet than this. I keep this tab here. Hey actually George is here.

I am, I am.

Boot camp is incredible. Hear nothing but good things about it. It does tend to fill up pretty fast. The winter cohort is now closed. George, do you know it's the dates for spring been not yet has has.

Not been released yet. But I can tell you that even without dates released there's 150 overflow from the last one that we did, trying to get into the next one.

Yeah, great. So just watch this page, wait for that button to appear, click it, get yourself on the waiting list. It's. It's very. It's pretty competitive, sounds like, but it's. It's definitely worth it. People who have been there can pipe up in the chat about how awesome that is. Bevy is the webinar platform we're using for this session. If it starts misbehaving, refresh the page, leave the webinar, come back in. Those simple sorts of things generally shake out the bugs and make it work the way you want it to. Again, we do these sessions weekly. If you have ideas or requests for speakers or topics you'd like to see here, let us know. We have a form. But also feel free to reach out to me or Deanna directly. And that is enough from me here at the beginning. With that, I'm going to pass it over to George and Amanda to talk to us all about SEO stuff. I believe we have the Q and A turned on.

Yeah.

So, yeah, go ahead, Deanna.

Are we hitting record?

It is recording.

We. Oh, beautiful. We're recording. All right. So, ladies and gentlemen, let me give you a little bit of backstory here. I've been using HubSpot since 2012. Before that, I was a web design nerd. I fancy myself to be somewhat of a technical guy, but there's a tool in HubSpot that has made me scratch my head and go, what am I supposed to do here? How do I know who to reach out to? And so I literally reached out to Kyle and said, listen, brother, we need to do something on SEO recommendations, because I'm telling you, there are a lot of clients that are confused. There's a lot of users that are asking questions in Facebook groups here, there, and everywhere. And so I'm super excited. He hooked me up with Amanda, and Amanda and I are going to journey down a trail. Now, here's what I'll say. Make sure that you do two things for me. If there's questions along the way, put them in the question pane, Pay attention to that question pane, and upvote the questions so we can hit the ones that are most important to you as the people who are being involved in this. But also, I want to do something real quick in the chat pane. Have you ever went and looked at the SEO recommendations tool in HubSpot and been confused? Put, yes, confused, no confused in the chat pane. Yes, confused, no, confused. Because I need to know how many nerds are going to say no or if everybody here is going to say yes. And my thoughts and reaching out to Kyle and being hooked up with Amanda is like, yes, finally we're going to reach the SEO recommendations. Okay, we got one. No so far. So I'm feeling pretty good about the thing that we're doing here. So let's go ahead and jump into this. Amanda, let's start. For folks who, if I ask the question, have you ever went to your SEO recommendations tool? They would put a no. How the heck can we start to view and implement SEO recommendations in HubSpot?

Yes, absolutely. First of all, thank you so much everybody for having me here today. I'm really excited to join you for the admin hug. I am the product manager at HubSpot for the SEO recommendations tool and I am a product manager for cms. So my team owns a bunch of tools, the SEO tool being one of them, and I'm really excited to dig into this with you today. So, yes, to answer your question about how can I get started with the SEO tool, it can be a lot to dig into, especially if you have a really big website. This is a tool to sort of frame your thinking that I see as like marketer oriented with some technical issues sprinkled in. And it is also somewhat of a high level diagnostic tool. It can be helpful to flag pages that have major SEO issues. And admittedly, if you have some really technical issues like page speed, you may need to partner with a developer to work to resolve some of them. Or you may need to do further digging and bring in additional diagnostic tools like Lighthouse. Now, with that being said, there is still a lot that you can do to hit some of the highest impact, sort of biggest technical SEO issues, even if you are a marketer or not super technical within the SEO tool. So would it be helpful, George, if I share my screen and give a peek at the tool and you know.

Absolutely, absolutely. Because as you're doing that, I imagine there are people probably sitting here going, wait, where is the SEO recommendations tool? So by sharing your screen, they're going to get a chance to see under the hood. Because I always want to make sure that we're talking about folks that might just be getting started as well as people have been using HubSpot forever.

Yeah.

All right, let me go ahead and share my screen and we can go ahead and get started here. All right, let's go over to. I think this is the right window. All right, let me know if you can see my Screen.

Yep. And it is SEO recommendations, not the pictures of puppy dogs. So we're on the right screen.

I was really worried that my secret puppy dog picture stash would be uncovered from this meeting. All right, so here we are inside of the SEO recommendations tool in HubSpot. This may be familiar to a lot of you. For those of you who have never been inside of this tool before, you can find it within marketing in the navigation website and SEO. And there are a few different places that you can view your recommendations inside of HubSpot, but this is going to be sort of the home base, the primary place where you can view website recommend SEO recommendations across your entire website. And so inside of this tool, in order to get started, you're going to have to scan a domain. And so when you enter your domain in, we'll automatically crawl all of the subdomains that we find. So when we crawl the website, it's sort of like a spider. We will look for links on the page and then crawl those links. And it's sort of like a web until we've covered your site. And so if you have a WWW subdomain, if you have a blog subdomain, you will notice that when you use this tool, we will scan all of them at once and they'll separated out in this domain drop down here. So another thing that you should know about the SEO recommendations tool that I see is a point of common confusion in folks who use it is that this is a point in time scan. So when you crawl your page, when you crawl, your website will calculate all the recommendations for it at that point in time. And if you want to do an updated look, if you fixed your issues and then you want to check and make sure that they have been resolved, you'll have to do a rescan. So yes, we see a lot of support volume and a lot of questions asking, you know, hey, I updated this, but I'm still seeing the SEO recommendations tool showing it as an issue. And the reasoning could be either your fix didn't work or you just didn't rescan and recalculate the page afterward. So that's sort of a high level overview of this tool.

Love it. So the first thing is to do the scan and to fix the issues we'll get into like the fixing and what we should do first and things like that. But I did want to ask a question, Amanda, because as you started to mention the rescan, I'm curious if there's a best practice on how often we should be coming into the Tool, doing a rescan, looking at new errors that might be showing up on, based on our content marketing strategy, inbound strategy, things like that.

Yeah. So one of the famous SEO sayings that you hear all the time is it depends, and I would say it kind of does depend on. On how often you're updating your website and how big your website is. If you're not updating your website very often, then you can probably get away with doing this less often. Doing a major audit quarterly or monthly. If you're updating your website really frequently, you may want to be doing weekly rescans, especially to make sure that the new pages you're putting out are free of SEO issues. So that's the cadence I would generally recommend, with the caveat that it depends on how much you're updating your website.

Nice. So let's go ahead and dive in because I've been looking at the SEO categories and maybe you can talk about the way that the SEO categories are broken down into those different recommendations and maybe why they're actually in those different categories and. And how you or the team maybe thinks about these categories for the end users.

Yeah. So we categorize in the way that you can see here in this left side navigation, SEO categories. And really the reason we break down these categories is to help you stay organized and to help sort of break up this potentially daunting list of a bunch of different SEO recommendations. And so this is a way that you can better organize your time. If, for example, you're really focused on one particular element, let's say you really want your pages or your website to load quickly, then this gives you a way to hyper focus on performance only. Or maybe you just really want to make sure that your website is secure. Using these categories, you could narrow down and only look at security. We also made somewhat of a light attempt to mimic at least some of the categories that Google Lighthouse uses. For example, Lighthouse has a performance and security and accessibility categories, and we also have some that include some direct Lighthouse recommendations inside of them. And Lighthouse also has a generic SEO category somewhat similar to our on page SEO category that we have here. So that is where these categories sort of came from and why we have them there. It's really an organization tool. It's meant to help you prioritize your time.

Yeah, I love the idea of prioritizing and I love the fact that you can uncheck the ones that you don't want to pay attention to. The other thing, Amanda, that I love is you have picked a portal that doesn't look too bad. There's 54 total recommendations here. I've been in Portals where it's hundreds, if not thousands of recommendations. So I want to jump to kind of like the brass tacks here and just ask you, from the marketing standpoint, SEO standpoint, business owner standpoint, what are the most important things we should be fixing immediately when we come into this tool and start to go through these categories?

Yeah, that's a really good question, George. I would say one thing to keep in mind about the SEO tool is most of the audits that we have here are strictly, strictly technical audits. And obviously there's a lot more to SEO than that. And so one thing that's not reflected in this tool is that one of the most important things that Google looks at is the overall quality of your page and how well the page that you're creating matches the user search intent. So one thing that I would just say to keep in mind is that this can be a good tool to help you find pages that are maybe standing in their own way of being seen by users that are standing in their own way of doing as well as they could have due to technical issues. But ultimately it's not the entire picture. So fixing SEO issues and having performant pages, Google, of course, does look at user experience and core web vitals and all of that, but I would caution against getting like so hung up on zero issues as opposed to creating a really good user experience and content that really helps your users. Now, with that being said, there are some recommendations in here that I would classify as, quote, unquote, more severe than others. One tool that we have that's helpful for you to sort of parse through those is we have labels in the tool. And so impact here actually is the SEO impact that we estimate that the issue might have. So if you're looking for a good place to start, maybe you have 500 recommendations, God forbid, maybe you have more than that. A really good place to start would be to filter down to the highest impact issues and to talk more specifically about which issues of the high impact that I would recommend starting with. So I think that any issues that have to do with your page not even being able to be crawled by Google or being able to be seen with Google are probably going to be the highest impact. So those recommendations probably would be like the page is blocked by your robots Txt file. You can create the best possible organic content that is imaginable, but if Google can't crawl it, then it's not going to Rank. So there is a recommendation in here. I don't think that my page specifically has it triggered, but confirm the correct pages are blocked by your robots Txt make sure that your pages are indexable. Those are just non starters if you want to be ranking. So those are definitely ones to look out for for any pages that you're trying to rank. And I would say security issues I would also classify as extremely high priority. And so if there are any pages that are not loading over HTTPs, we have a recommendation here. Make sure all pages load over a secure connection. This is a really high priority issue because it can pose a security risk to your users. And there's also an SEO concern if your page is loading under both HTTP and HTTPs without a redirect, search engine crawlers could potentially see that as duplicate content. So you know, a few different considerations with that particular recommendation. So I would consider that one to be one of the most important to look for right off the mark. And another one that I think is really important to prioritize highly is broken links. And broken links can be either broken internal links and when I say internal, I mean links to other pages on your website within the same domain, or broken external links, which are links that lead outside of your website. Maybe you're linking to a resource or citing a source. And the reason why broken links are problematic is they one make it harder for Google to crawl your website, especially if they're internal links. But they also on top of that can create a bad user experience with which Google values very highly. So if a user goes to your page and they see that links are 404ing or broken, then that can be frustrating and it could hypothetically lead a user to bounce from your page or from your website entirely. So if I had to pick three, I would probably start with those three.

I love it. Very good. So filter by impact. Always fix security. Look for internal and external links as a recap. By the way, I'm looking at the chat pane as we're going. Amanda. Marlo, Marlo, if you're joking, there should have been an LOL at the end of that bad boy. I'm trying to figure out if 49,000 is a real thing right now I'm kind of twitching. But hey, you know, at least to fix the problem, you got to know there's a problem and now we're good to go. Moving forward. Amanda, you mentioned the goal might not be zero in that last section, which by the way, for my ADHD and my inbox, zero again, I'm Kind of twitching right now with the fact that I can't really ever hit zero. But it leads me to the next question, which is what SEO errors do you consider? They're just more suggestions than necessarily like, this is a to do.

Yeah, it's a good question. So the ones that I would consider more of a suggestion are ones that would probably be bucketed in the low priority here. So this one here is a good example. Make your link anchor text more descriptive. This is a recommendation that is for user experience, for the most part, and helping users understand what links on your page are doing. While Google does value user experience, this one particular thing is like, in the grand scheme of things, probably not going to be the difference between rank number one and rank number 50. So things like this, which are incremental improvements to user experience, probably lower priority than your page, isn't able to be crawled at all.

Okay, so let's dig in because when I think about the group that's here and the group that might be watching this on the YouTube channel for super admins, which by the way, if you haven't subscribed, hit that. Subscribe right now. If you're watching on YouTube, see what I did there. Kyle, I'm. I'm. It's all love for you, brother. All right, so there's two classifications here that might touch this tool. There's the marketer, Amanda that wants to come in and have the best site they can because you know, hashtag job security. And there's the developer that they might have to lean into. And so I'm going to ask two questions, but I'll ask you one and then I'll ask the follow up one. And that is back to the categories. Are there certain SEO categories that most marketers can dive in and start to edit?

Yes, and HubSpot also has some labels to help you discern that within the tool. So next to the impact label that I showed you previously, you'll see that there's also both technical difficulty and recommended role. And so if you're a marketer looking to get as far as you can without a developer, a good starting point would be to take a look at the recommendations that we have classified as marketer. Now you will see there is also this marketer with an asterisk. And the reason we added this specific additional label on top of normal marketer is because in many CMSs or if your website does not use a CMS, these types of recommendations may require a developer. You might have to edit things like H1 tags in the code, in which case that might be difficult for a marketer to do. However, we know that Specifically inside of HubSpot there is an easy marketer friendly way to fix this issue. So step one is filter down and view the recommendations that are classified as marketer. And from there I would say that most marketers can make edits for most of the issues inside of the on page SEO category inside of HubSpot. So these are improvements that are typically within the editable area of the page in HubSpot. So these can be copy issues, for example, address duplicate content. These can be things like images and making sure that images are used in a proper size, that they're compressed correctly. And titles and meta descriptions inside HubSpot are also relatively easy for marketers to edit. So so those are things as well that marketers shouldn't have a lot of difficulty implementing. There are a few other ones that HubSpot does make easy to resolve if you are a marketer as well. And one example that I will show live is let's see, there is a recommendation to this is why it's not showing up. I have my categories filter. One of the highest priority recommendations that I talked about is making sure that all of your pages load over a secure connection. And there's actually a pretty easy way that you can fix this inside of HubSpot if your website is hosted on HubSpot. If not, or if you have a more complex setup, you may need to go into your log into your DNS and set up a redirect or set it up there. But inside of HubSpot what you can do is go into your domain settings in global settings, domains and URLs, go to your domain for that particular recommend recommendation that's showing up and then we allow you to update the domain security settings. You will see for my domain that I do not have the this require HTTPs selected. And so if I select this, then that should actually resolve that particular issue. So that's an example of like a recommendation that is high priority that a marketer can solve. It seems really technical. On the surface you're looking at DNS, but it's really just a checkbox for a lot of folks that are hosted inside of HubSpot.

Love that. Love it, love it. Here's a little tip too that my brain went into. If you're making edits, one thing you don't want to do is make your edits and immediately go back and hit rescan. Unless you want a 45 minute break to drink some coffee or if Your website's real huge, maybe a couple hours. So do all of your work till you're done, then go ahead and do that rescan. But this was a two part question, Amanda. The first part was what can marketers dive into? So marketer classification, marketer asterisk, which by the way, Nick from Fargo says he's an asterisk. I don't know how to take that, but we'll, we'll, we'll accept it. And then the on page SEO category as well. So the second part of this though is how do I know to tap in tag in a developer? Like what SEO categories do developers need to be paying attention to?

Yeah, again we have the developer roles which can help directionally point you towards those. There are a few developer recommendations that I think marketers can make some headway towards and I'll talk about that. If we're talking about recommendations that would typically involve somebody who knows how to code or a developer, I would say most of the recommendations that reference any of the Google Core Web Vitals metrics. So these would be more technical site speed issues. So a lot of the performance issues that we have are better suited for a developer to fix. So these are recommendations. Like we have one that is reduce the size of the page network requests. While some of these large network requests could be images, that's something that could be easy for a marketer to fix. If it's code files or other scripts, then that might be difficult for somebody who doesn't have a coding background to fix themselves. And then another recommendation that could be difficult as an example is reduce how long the page is blocked from responding to user input. TBT is a Google Core Web Vitals metric and this one is pretty technical. It basically refers to how long before a user can like click and interact with the page. This is one that can be pretty difficult for a marketer to solve. And then here are a few that are marked as developer. But I actually do think marketers can do some things about and I can demo that a little bit. So there's one recommendation here that is make sure all page resources such as images and CSS style sheets load. So if these are JavaScript or CSS files that are broken, those might be difficult for a marketer who isn't familiar with code to go track down. However, if the resource that's not loading is a broken image or a broken video, then a marketer could go on the page and replace the video or the image that's not working themselves. If it's in an image module or even if it's embedded in rich text on the page. Improve page load time is also one that I'd like to address, and improving page loading time is one that for a lot of the time a developer could be needed. But there are things that marketers can do as well to move the needle on this. And so I have a few tips for things that marketers can check to help improve their page load time without a developer. And then after that, if the page is still loading slowly, it may be worthwhile to bring in a developer.

So I'm excited for that. Put in the chat pain. Are you excited right now that you're about to get a demo to actually fix your improved page load times? Yes. Excited. I'm not even going to give you no excited just yet. Say you're excited to get these tips right here. Amanda, go ahead, let's jump in and show that.

Yeah, let's show it. So one of the First Things is HubSpot CMS should automatically be taking care of a lot of these things for you. So if your website is hosted on HubSpot CMS, we should be minifying your JavaScript and CSS files for you. And so for the non technical folks in the room, that basically means like we do a lot of magic to remove a lot of spaces when it loads to help it go faster. So one thing that you can do to do like due diligence before going to your developers is just making sure you see this.min when you're inside of the Network tab. So I'll back it up a little bit. I kind of just whip this right out. I use the Inspect tool inside of Chrome a lot. So basically what I do is I control right click and then I go to Inspect. And you'll see a lot of handy dandy technical looking tools in here. But one that I use a lot is the Network tab. I see someone else in the chat Control Shift C is also a nice shortcut for opening this up. So if I reload this page I can see sort of all of the different parts of the page that are loading. And this waterfall here shows like when each thing is loading on the page. But if I see any files here in CSS in this little category or in HTML, they should have this min after it. So if you're a marketer and you're seeing that you have some really big files, but hey, they don't have min, then that could mean that your file isn't being compressed correctly. And a reason for that could be syntax errors in the code file, which is something that a developer could fix. But you have taken one step to help identify the issue as far as why that's happening. Another thing that marketers can check for for page speed is making sure that you aren't going overboard on embeds. And so when I say embeds, I am referring to forms largely inside of HubSpot chat embeds, new CTAs, cookie banners. And it kind of hurts my heart to say this a little bit, but we do have some ways to go with improving the performance of certain HubSpot embeds like forms. And I know that those product teams are production prioritizing and working diligently on that. But when used heavily, those things do have a cost to page speed. And again, it's a trade off. You know, if Your page loads 0.003 seconds slower, but you're using that form or that embed to generate leads, then it's a worthwhile trade off. However, one thing that you can do is, is sort of think about how to use those sparingly. And so one thing that you could do is you could have your popular pages linked to a place to submit a form instead of putting and embedding the form directly on most of the hit pages is one example. So know that there is like a little bit of a performance cost to embeds, but that that cost is not always necessarily, does not always mean that it's not worth it. It's just worth considering that it can have an impact on your page. And then other things that marketers can do to help improve page speed is take inventory of your scripts and third party tracking cookies. And so when I say this, I mean things like, like your Google Analytics script, your Facebook ads pixel, all of those other third party tracking scripts. HubSpot is also one of them. These are things that like to some extent are necessary because you need to be able to get the analytics that you need to track your performance to run your ads and everything. However, if you have been, if you've been using your website for a while, if you've moved around and experimented with a lot of different tools, it could be worthwhile to just check and make sure that all of the scripts that you're using are actively being used because some of those can add up in terms of performance. And when you're loading a ton of scripts, it can slow down the load of your page. So take inventory of your scripts and make sure that if you're just trying things out and you decide you're not actually going to use it, take it out, remove it from your page, just to make sure that it doesn't have a residual impact on your page load. Now, something else that marketers can do to have a big impact on page speed is to properly size your images and videos and to use GIFs sparingly. So there are a few things that you can do directly within HubSpot to help with images. So one example is here I am on my website. My, my wedding website is the one that I often use as an example because it's a real page that I have that has content and traffic on it. There's actually another place that you can see your SEO recommendations inside of HubSpot besides just the Recommendations home tool, and that is this optimized tab inside of the page editor. We lovingly internally call it X Ray because it's somewhat of a X ray into your page and all of the elements on it, but it's called Recommendations inside of the app. If you are working and actively editing a page, or if you see from SEO recommendation a page that's marked as slow or that has images that are not properly sized, you can go in here and check this Images tab right here for some images. We're still actively refining this recommendation because it's new and we're making it better over time. If it is an image module that is missing a height and width attribute, we have a click to fix action for this. Actually one thing you can do is just click this button and we will magically add those attributes for you. You don't have to code, you don't have to know HTML or CSS or any of that. You can just click and improve your image size and then it is taken care of for you. Now this is only available for image recommendations. However, I'm sorry for image modules and not images that are added through the rich text or custom modules. But for a lot of images this can be like a surprisingly easy and delightful fix. So that was a very long winded answer to your question about what developers can fix. What I really wanted to drive home is that while those recommendations are pretty technical, there are some things that marketers can do to move the needle on those as well.

So yeah, that's Amanda, that's amazing. First of all, Evan, I agree Magic Magic on that clicking the button, I can tell I'm a nerd because like as soon as you said X ray I'm like, I'll forever call that the rest of my life. That's what I'm gonna call it. And it does make me so happy that the team is working on the load speed of the HubSpot tools for the embeds. That brings joy to my heart. While your heart was sad, it brings joy to my heart. And if you're watching this right now and you're like, oh my gosh, I have all the embeds and all the cookies, maybe that's something to look at after you get done watching the rest of this. So let's dive into the layer. Amanda, that is, I love the word significant. Meaning if we look at most marketers across the board in general, what are the most significant SEO mistakes most of us are making that you would like to just take this to be a time of like, stop it. Just stop it.

Ooh, that's a. That's a good question. I already somewhat alluded to some of these earlier, so let me see if I can think of some other examples without repeating what I've already said. So one, I would say, one mistake I would say is focusing too much on keeping up with algorithmic trends instead of your customer need. And so what I mean by that is it kind of all goes back to what I said before. The quality of your page and your content and making sure that it's helping your users, that it's talking about topics that they care about, that it's helping resolve their queries is always going to be a higher priority than Google made an algorithm update and I need to figure out exactly what caused my page to drop by one position. Another thing that I would say is I already mentioned going overboard on tracking scripts. I already talked about Recommendation zero. I would say it can be great to aim for 100 on all of your core web vitals or on Lighthouse. But again, at a certain point there are going to be trade offs that you might need to make between a zippy performance and user experience. So if you have really large and beautiful images that you want to show, those can be worth it, especially depending on the type of business. If you're like an artist or a graphic designer and you need to have those for your portfolio, you know, those high quality images might be worth the extra one second wait. And so I would say take a look at how your page is performing in Search Console. Is it still ranking? Are you seeing high bounce rates on it? You know, if you're, if your rankings are suffering, if your bounce rates are high, then that can be an indication that the page loading time is having an impact. But if not, then aiming for 100 doesn't necessarily have it can be diminishing returns after a certain point if you're already in the green. So those I would say are. Oh, one more thing actually that I just thought of. Be careful too with custom fonts on your website, because custom fonts, while they are beautiful and a lot of times they are just necessary for your brand and your brand image, they can be large files that impact load time. So what I would recommend is trying to use as few as possible or use that custom font, but be sparing about the different weights and fonts and font files that you're loading onto your website.

So good. Some great tips there. I love the trade offs. Zippy performance versus a great user experience. We should probably like tag that somewhere just so nobody gets confused. When you're talking about custom fonts, you're talking about the knowledge article that has you upload them to like the file folder and all. You're not talking about Google fonts and what's kind of already baked into the theme, correct?

Yes, that's right.

Okay, beautiful. Speaking of that, because I mentioned the word themes and there's Google fonts in those, how does the HubSpot theme that we use impact the SEO recommendations that we might end up getting?

Yeah, it can have a big impact. So a lot of the recommendations that we trigger, especially the more developer ones, can be or need to be fixed within the actual template files or code itself. And so if your HubSpot theme that you've downloaded from the Marketplace or that you've built is optimized for SEO, then you will have a lot less work to do from the get to improve site speed. A great theme should be optimized for performance out of the box. And so some tips that I would have for you when you're choosing a theme. For starters, I would check out the reviews on the theme. All of the HubSpot themes on the Marketplace should have reviews there. And so I would take some time to read them, see if anyone voices any concerns about performance or SEO optimization. Another trick that I can show you for the theme is if you go to view a theme that you're interested in on the Marketplace, you can actually preview it in a new window and so you can click around and get a sense yourself for how quickly it's loading. If you want to be even more advanced, what you can do for a theme that you are interested in, excuse me, is load it. And then inside of that same developer tab that I showed you before, there's this lighthouse area. And so if you click over from network to Lighthouse, this actually allows you to run Google Lighthouse directly on this page. I'm going to reopen my Are you Amanda? Are you showing a different screen.

Because we're still seeing the focus screen?

Oh yes, I'm trying to show an Incognito tab because Lighthouse can oftentimes be extensions and plugins can interfere with it. So if you're not seeing my Incognito tab, I'll just. I'll just run it in the tab that you all are seeing. And just know that the performance for this theme might look worse than it actually is because I'm not running it in Incognito. So if you're checking out a theme, another tip is you can run Google Lighthouse on the preview and get a sense for the performance of this theme. And so again, this looks a lot worse than I'm sure it actually is because I have 10 million extensions in Google Chrome that are slowing down the load time of all of my pages. And so previewing the theme in Lighthouse can help you get a sense for how it might load. Another thing to be careful about when you're looking at themes is giant videos, especially if you see themes that have a very large Hero background video. Those can be kind of tricky to optimize. And in HubSpot I don't think we have very much to auto optimize the video or even recommendations to warn you about things like that. So again, trade off. The video looks really cool, but it might load kind of slowly. So those are my tips for thinking about choosing a HubSpot theme and how the theme you use might impact the recommendations that you're getting.

Very cool. So a couple of things that come to mind and I've got to be that guy Free is not always free. Just going to throw that out there, especially when we're talking about SEO recommendations. Bonus tip test in an Incognito window if you're paying attention to what just happened there. And I'm super curious and this is going to be like a very micro type question, maybe slightly nerdy, but because I think we can add any URL into the SEO recommendations tool, could we actually take a themes preview page or themes page and run it through our recommendations tool to see what it kicked back to us?

Hmm, that's actually a really good question. I do not know if that would work. I would say it's worth giving it a try.

I know what I'm testing after this webinar, that's for sure. I'm gonna go test it out because People need to know. That would be great. Okay, so let's keep moving forward here. How can I optimize my HubSpot 3 theme that I may have already purchased to get better SEO results? Or is this a conversation to where I'm reaching out to the theme developer? Like, what power do I have as a user who have has already purchased a theme?

Yeah, I think sometimes the load of the site can truly be due to the theme and how it's built. But oftentimes there is a lot that's in your power to change based on the content that you've added to the page. And so for this I would recommend that you think back to the tips that I gave earlier as far as making sure that you are using properly sized images, that your images are compressed, making sure that you are being sparing with scripts. Oftentimes you might even see that a theme in the marketplace looks really performant and then you scan it and all of a sudden your page is really slow. And that could be because the image that you've added into the placeholder is simply larger or less performant than the one that was in the in the standard. So in terms of optimizing your HubSpot theme, I think the SEO recommendations tool can be a good diagnostic to figure out what the highest impact issues are for the theme that you've already chosen. And the other thing that I would mention is if you are seeing issues with the theme that are pertaining to how it's built that you're having trouble fixing as a marketer, you can always try to reach out to the developer of the theme. If you go to the marketplace and click on a specific theme, there should be contact information for the partner or developer that built the theme and you should be able to get in touch with them to ask any follow up questions that you might have. So you can always use that as a fallback.

Love it. I've got one more question I'm going to ask. Before I do that, I need everybody that's on here to run over to the Q and A tab and start up voting the questions that you want us to answer with the limited amount of time that we're going to have left in this session. But I also do want to say, Jennifer Nixon said to answer George's question, yes, you can add a theme URL to the scan and actually see the stuff before you buy it. So that's amazing. Okay, last question. Why everybody runs over and starts up voting. What are some advanced SEO tips from the HubSpot SEO team? Amanda that we should start paying attention to as we move forward to really be SEO ninjas.

You asked for advanced SEO tips.

Yes.

Okay, let's see. So there actually is one thing that I didn't talk about is like schema or structured data. And HubSpot doesn't really have a lot out of the box to help you with adding that for those less technical on the call, Structured data is basically like a JSON. That's a type of code snippet that you can add to your page and it's what Google uses to generate featured snippets. So if you go to Google and you see things like a recipe carousel or like other widgets at the top, the those are featured snippets. So while there definitely is more that we could do to help with that, we have a setting for blog at the very least that I want to show you. So if you go into your settings and into blog, you will see that there is this structured data setting at the bottom. And turning this setting on actually applies the blog posting structured data schema to all of your blog posts. And so this is pretty standard blanket. It only adds the structured data for the blog posting type. So if you have different blog posts that are specialty things like recipes or news articles that you want different schema for this, this might not be a good fit for you. But if you just want your blog post to show up in the blog featured snippets, you can turn this on. So my recommendation would be if you know that your developers already implemented custom schema on your posts, you might not want to turn this on because then it'll just add it twice and that's not really necessary. But if you aren't using any structured data at all, then this is really easy to do and probably better than not having anything at all. So that's one advanced SEO tip that folks might not know about. Another advanced tip is using Google Lighthouse in Chrome to help you troubleshoot issues further. So our issues that we have for page speed are pretty high level. I'll admit it. We'll say that the page is slow, but you probably have to do some additional digging as far as how to actually fix them. So the HubSpot page, the HubSpot recommendation to improve page load time, for example, there are more specific recommendations in the SEO Rex tool that actually impact that recommendation. Use correctly sized images, make sure all images are compressed, reduce the size of page network requests. And so you could look at those, fix those, and then go back and rescan and check the sort of higher level recommendation as well. But you could also go into Google Lighthouse and sort of run the scan here and see if there are any specific tips that are given to help you break down that issue a little bit further.

Yes, love it.

Oh, sorry. I could go on but I should probably leave some time for questions.

Yeah, yeah. So first of all, Amanda, thank you for being you. Thank you for your brain. Thank you for your time. Deanna and Kyle, do we want to use a little bit of time left here to actually answer some Q and A along the way?

Yeah, that we've got five minutes.

We could squeeze one in at least. Yeah. And you know, I can always take a look at the questions. We'll see if we can export them and if there's a follow up.

The.

Ones that we don't get to if.

We look at most voted. Can you speak to the Google Search Console SEO tools integration and how to best utilize it? Great. Chad, good question.

Yeah, really good question. So Google Search Console integration shows up in HubSpot in a few different places. The most prominent place that it shows up is in the Analyze tab for the SEO tool. And so if you go in here and if you have Google Search Console connected, you will see that we will basically pull in Google Search Console data directly into HubSpot so you don't have to switch back and forth between the two tools. So the way that I would recommend using this is one you can keep an eye on sort of your pages and how they're doing and get a sense for your top ranking pages. But this can also be helpful to use in tandem with the recommendations page pages. So maybe you want to start with your pages that are getting the most impressions and identify what those are or the pages that are ranking the best or have the most clicks. If those are pages that you consider to be, quote, unquote, your most important pages, then those can be good to start with for the SEO recommendations tool. So maybe I say, wow, this, this page here has 41,000 impressions. This is a really important page to me. That might be a page that I want to keep a close eye on. So if I go into the recommendations tool, we have this by page view as well and you can search for that page and then click. I know this isn't the same page that I just showed, but for the sake of example, you can sort of go through and focus on the most important pages that are the biggest conversion points, that are the biggest source of organic traffic for you and start there. So that's one way that you can use Google Search Console. It can also be helpful if you're planning content. One thing that a lot of people don't know about this tool is if you click on one of the metrics in the metrics walls here we actually have a drill down where we will show the search queries that people are using to find that page. So this can be really helpful if you want to either further optimize your page for SEO. A lot of people are finding my page through the query Instagram. Maybe I want to optimize for that query a little bit better on this page. Or maybe there are some other queries that people are using that could be good sort of subtopic content if you have like sort of pillar page and like topic cluster type of model. So that's another way that this can be really valuable. And you can also just sort of keep an eye on overall trends for your most important pages as well. If you're seeing that your average position is going slowly down over time, then that can be something that could spark like an audit for that page. Maybe you do a little bit of a content audit, decide it's time to refresh the content, repurpose it and all those sorts of things. So Google Search Console is integrated with this tab and this is the sort of main place to see Google Search Console data. There are two other places that you can see Google Search Console data. The first is in top of clusters. So once you have integrated Google search console with HubSpot, you can actually see Google Search Console data in your topic clusters table here. So you can view the average position total impressions from Google Search Console at the topic cluster level in this tool. And then last, another place that you can view Google Search Console data. And also funny enough, you can view your SEO recommendations. Here is inside of content details for page. So what I just did is I went to Website page, I clicked details and there's this optimization tab inside of here. So I can see all of my recommendations for this specific page. Similar to in the RECS by page view that I just showed in RECS home. You can also do a single page rescan in here, which is a really, really handy tip if you don't Want to wait 45 minutes for your scan to complete and you just want to check this one page. But Google Search Console also shows the search queries for the page here in addition to the SEO analytics tool. Mine isn't set up right right now, but that is where they would be if it was working correctly.

Love it. Again, amazing, amazing, amazing. Kyle or Deanna, one of you want to close us out for today? We have reached the limit.

We are at time. Thank you both so much for being here. Amanda, we totally can export out the the Q and A. So I'll send that over to you. George, thanks for recommending this. Thanks for hosting it. It's been great both of you. If people want to connect with you after this, what's the best place to find you on?

Yeah, so if you want to connect with me after this, feel free to reach out to me over email asumacherubspot.com or you can feel free to connect with me on LinkedIn. Either way we can definitely keep the conversation going.

Yeah, definitely. LinkedIn is always good. George B. Thomas or GeorgeB. Thomas.com is the email as well. So hit me up if you have questions. Thanks Kyle. Thanks.

Yeah, amazing. Thank you both. Thanks everyone and we'll see you all again next week, hopefully. Bye everyone.

Bye everybody. Thank you all. Bye.