The 7 On-Page SEO Factors for HubSpot CMS Hub Users
It's like someone engaging in a conversation with you. The more they enjoy the conversation, the more they want to stick around. If you're at a party and they're not enjoying your conversation, even the most polite person will eventually invent an excuse to run off. The 7 On-Page SEO Factors for HubSpot CMS Hub Users. I'm Joshua Feinberg from SP Home Run. And I've been an advanced power user of the HubSpot platform since 2010.
I hold and maintain 28 HubSpot Academy certifications, including all the non-developer certifications specific to HubSpot CMS Hub. I'm a former HubSpot User Group leader for four years, and since 2013 I have been a principal in a Certified HubSpot Solutions Partner. So in this video, we're going to talk about on-page SEO and specifically, how to apply it to your website that's hosted on the HubSpot CMS. Before we do that, can I ask you to please take a moment and Subscribe to this YouTube channel and click the Bell notification so you can be notified when new content like this becomes available. Now, companies choose to platform their websites and digital presence onto the HubSpot CMS (HubSpot's Content Management System) because they want to provide a world-class user experience that powers growth, usually in that order, hopefully in that order where you're putting users first. Now, like all HubSpot Hubs, CMS Hub empowers marketing, sales and service teams to apply the inbound methodology and its accompanying flywheel to attract, engage, and delight the right strangers, prospects, and clients with the right content at the right time.
To be effective during the attract phase of the inbound methodology, your company's website needs to be discovered when people are searching for information that your company wants to be known for. This particular article, this particular video, is going to talk about seven different facets of on-page SEO (on-page search engine optimization) that HubSpot CMS Hub does especially well and that matters to your growth. Now to make sure that you and I are on the same page, on-page search engine optimization is defined by industry leading SEO software company Moz as "the practice of optimizing individual website pages in order to rank higher and earn more relevant traffic from search engines." The first factor to think about is your word count.
Regardless of whether you're new to SEO, or you're engaging in spirited debate with a marketing professional around SEO best practices. One of the most common questions that people have about SEO is how long your content assets need to be. How many words? They don't do characters. They don't do spaces. They don't do lines. They don't do it by the ounce, by the milligram or by the pound. It's the number of words that counts. So let's set the record straight. There is no magic number of words for a website page or a blog post to have to guarantee your chances of on-page SEO success. If only it were that simple! "This particular blog post should be 713 words." "And this pillar content page should be 2,017 words" No, no, no, no. There is no magic number of words. Instead, make sure that the website pages and blog posts are long enough and detailed enough to thoroughly cover your topic and keep your readers highly engaged.
When planning your content, your goal should be to have the single best resource on the web that addresses that particular topic for that particular buyer persona at that specific stage in their buyer's journey. Now, one of the many signals that search engines utilize to determine how good your content is as they look at how long the average person spends on one of your website pages — they look at average session time, generally, more seconds. More minutes is good. Less minutes. Less seconds is bad. They also look at the bounce rate; somebody lands on that website page from a search engine, and they immediately revolt. In a way, that's a high bounce rate. You don't want to have a high bounce rate. That's not a good thing. Other things being equal, when a website visitor stays longer, they're getting more value. It's like someone engaging in a conversation with you. The more they enjoy the conversation, the more they want to stick around.
If you're at a party and they're not enjoying your conversation, even the most polite person will eventually invent an excuse to run off and go to the bathroom or get a drink. Put money in the parking meter. Right?
You want to make sure that you're sending a positive signal to search engines while simultaneously increasing the likelihood that your visitors stay around longer. Because the longer they're on your website website, the more likely it is that they notice a call to action and end up converting from an anonymous visitor to a known lead that allows you to build a relationship with them and continue to educate and build trust with them.
Over time, the HubSpot CMS Hub page editor can actually examine your page content and make recommendations. Make optimizations settings recommendations about what you should do on that page. For example, they'll tell you if your page is too short. They'll tell you if you don't have a keyword in your title, if your meta description is too long. There are a bunch of things that it can do, but just know that the HubSpot CMS Hub has your back when it comes to the basics of on-page SEO optimization and specifically, word counts.
Another factor to consider with improving your on page SEO with HubSpot CS Hub is the title. When you're looking to write an impactful title for a particular page or blog post, think about using your buyer persona's words. Their language, not what you'd like their words to be, like their language to be, but what their words actually are. Because you've done the research, you've done the customer insight research to develop and create helpful buyer personas. And again, a buyer persona is a semi-fictional representation of an ideal client based on actual research and some select educated speculation. Buyer personas need to be done before you start digging into copywriting, content creation for your website pages. From a tactical perspective, be sure that your page title is under 70 characters to avoid the dreaded truncation.
We don't want truncation, right? We don't like when people interrupt us midthought, so make sure that you include your primary longtail keywords towards the front of that title and make a promise to the user that will compel them to click through on the search engine results page or SERP. HubSpot CMS Hub page editor also has your back when it comes to titles and will let you know if your page title is too long or risking truncation. The third factor, on-page SEO factor that HubSpot CMS Hub supports you with is your meta description. Your website page's meta description summarizes what your website page or blog post is about, and it shows up on a search engine results page just below your page title. While a meta description does not directly impact your ranking and your ability to rank for a particular topic, it does have a really big impact on your ability to sell the click and get a good click through rate relative to other results that are on the same search engine results page.
So it's generally a good idea to include your longtail keyword phrase somewhere within the meta description, as search engines will typically bold that keyword phrase when it appears on a SERP in much the same way that your email subject line sells recipients why they want to open your email, the value of opening your email. Your page title combined with your meta description should sell the searcher and do the heavy lifting on the value that somebody is going to get for clicking on your results on the search engine results page. And again, the HubSpot CMS Hub can examine your meta description and let you know if it's too short. It's too long. If it risks truncation. In other words, it's helping you out with best practices.
The fourth on-page SEO factor for HubSpot CMS users is your header on a particular website page. Headers, which are often known as Heading 1 (H1), Heading 2 (H2) or perhaps Heading 3 (H3), or maybe even Heading 4 (H4). This is a hierarchical way to show a search engine the structure and content of your website pages, while simultaneously helping users to immediately recognize what your particular website content is about, how it's structured. And it's another way to sell the website visitor on why they should get out of skimming mode and hop over into actual reading mode. Heading 1 (H1) text typically has a font size. that's larger than any other text that's on the page. Heading 2 (H2) is usually the second largest font size on a particular website page. These are usually controlled by your CSS, and again, while there definitely is an argument and value around considering the user experience around aesthetics headers more broadly in Heading 1 (H1) specifically sends really powerful signals to search engines about what your website page content is all about, what the main topic is. Just with all the other aspects that we're talking about in this video helps about.
CMS Hub has your back when it comes to your header structure, and will let you know if you're falling short with on-page best practices around using effective headers. Then there is all the text. In recent years, search engines have gotten much better at recognizing what a particular image is all about on a website page. AI and machine learning are part of the reason why your photo that appears on a website page often tells the search engine like here you are.
And you probably have seen search engines where you can input the URL or upload an image and it tells you where else that appears. However, the surefire way to make sure that search engines know what a particular image on your website page is all about is to make sure that you use alt text or alternative text that describes the appearance or function of a specific image on your website page. In addition to alt text being very valuable for improving your on-page SEO, alt text also makes your website more inclusive for visually impaired people who depend on screen readers. And just as with all these other aspects, again, CMS Hub looks for alt text, and will tell you if you're doing a good job with that.
Six Links. No website page can possibly answer every particular question that a user would have directly related to the content on that particular topic.
So as a result, for decades, it's been a best practice to link out from one website page to another that can provide additional context, additional resources around a particular topic. But what you may not realize is links also help with your on-page SEO. It's hard to imagine the web being very useful without links between website pages because again, aside from this website user experience, argument for links, links also provide a valuable signal to search engines about the content on a referenced destination page and the source that's sending that link out. Now to improve your on-page SEO, where appropriate, make sure that you include internal and external links to relevant resources that help search engines contextually understand what's going on on your website page, where you're looking to provide resources on your own site or on other websites.
And generally a best practice if you're looking to stay in control of the visitor, that when you're linking to another website that you open up a new tab. And again, the HubSpot CMS Hub examines how many external links you have on a website page, and will give you a little slap on the wrist if you're not doing right by best practices around that. And the final on-page SEO factor for HubSpot CMS users to keep in mind has to do with topic clusters. Topic clusters are a valuable on-page SEO strategy that helps search engines to understand what your website as a whole is about by linking out to multiple website pages on your website that has to do with a particular topic that's related thematically to each other. So if you're just getting started with topic clusters, consider ungating one or more of your eBooks to what's known as a 10X pillar content page. The goal of a 10X pillar content page is to provide a website page that is so ridiculously valuable that it is 10 times better than anything else that somebody can find on the web on a similar topic.
In addition to reap the benefits of building a topic cluster, your website pages should be linked to each other. In other words, you have topics, you have clusters, you have pllar pages. You have pages that you're actually linking to. It's really, really important that tiy not only that link to your topic cluster, that your pillar content pages linking to the pages that are about that topic, but that they in turn link back to you as well.
This all again sends a really positive on-page search engine optimization signal that will help your website be way more likely to rank on those topics that you want to be found for. And going back several years now, the HubSpot CMS Hub has done a really great job of supporting you with tools in the SEO application to build, manage, optimize and measure what is going on with your topic clusters. Do you currently use the HubSpot CMS Hub to improve your on-page search engine optimization? If so, let me know what's been most helpful for you in making your website be able to attract more of the right visitors from the web.
Let me know in the comment section down below. And if you're looking for some one-on-one assistance with improving your on-page SEO on HubSpot CMS Hub, I may be able to help, Feel free to look me up on LinkedIn, send me a note about what you're looking for and we may be able to work together. I'm Joshua Feinberg from SP Home Run. And I look forward to hearing your great success stories around improving your on-page SEO on HubSpot CMS. Hey there. It's Joshua Feinberg from SP Home Run. And we are so glad that you stop by to watch this video today. If you got good value from its content, make sure that you hit the Like button, Subscribe to this channel and ring the Bell so that you can be notified when new videos just like this become available.
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