How to Optimize Your Website Pages with HubSpot SEO

Did you know that 70-80% of search engine users are only focusing on the organic results?

With this many people ignoring ads, this is not only an opportunity to save money by reducing ad spend, but you can drastically increase leads to your website by dedicating a consistent amount of time each week to increasing your organic traffic.

For all my HubSpot CMS users out there, learn how to optimize your website pages and increase organic traffic to your site with HubSpot SEO.

How to Optimize 101

When you host your website on the HubSpot CMS, you are pretty spoiled with a variety of SEO features that help you optimize and rank your pages. These become available to you directly after you publish a page and include:

• Performance
• Optimization
• A/B Tests

Next well go through these each in detail so you can get to ranking.

Performance Tab

The performance tab starts with the ability to select a date and frequency range to filter the timeframe of analytics you'd like to see.

Once you determine this, you can filter frequency by daily, weekly, or monthly.

Under this section, you'll see a white box that hosts various types of page stats like the ones below. You can use these to then determine if the performance of your page is where you expect it to be or if it needs improvement.

• Views: the number of times your page was loaded in a visitor's browser.
• Total submissions: the number of submissions on a form on your page.
• New contacts: the number of new contacts created from this page during the selected timeframe.
• Customers: the number of customers created from this page, whose first conversion occurred during the selected timeframe.
• Average bounce rate: the percentage of sessions that started on this page and did not move to another page on your site.
• Time on page: the total amount of time visitors spent viewing this page, divided by the total number of views. This calculation excludes exits.
• Exit rate: the percent of views on this page that were the last in a visitor's session on your site.
• Entrances: the number of sessions where this was the first page viewed.

Analytic metrics that you'll want higher numbers for are:

• Views: High views typically mean your SEO is working and people are discovering your content!
• Time on Page: High numbers for this metric mean people are enjoying what they are reading, so keep it up.
• Submissions: High submissions means your content is relevant and valuable enough for people to give you their email address.
• Contacts: A submission equals a contact, so high submissions will mean a high number of contacts.
• Customers: A customer is going to happen a lot less frequent than a contact, but a large amount of customers means you are doing everything right!

An analytic metric you'll want a lower number for is:

• Average bounce rate: When people are entering and exiting your website and only viewing one page. A high bounce rate could indicate something isn't right. Your content might need some work, the user experience might need help, or there could be another technical reason. Take some time to research potential factors causing this to happen.

Analytic metrics that could have high or lower numbers:

• Exit rate: This could be high or low depending on where this page falls in your buyer's journey. If this is the 'Contact Us' page or a 'Book A Demo' page, it might make sense that the numbers are high here because these are typically the end of the journey for someone on a website. If we are talking about your 'Homepage', you would want the exit rate to be low because you want this page to guide leads to other pages, not leave.
• Entrance metric: This metric is pretty much the opposite of your 'Exit Rate'. Again, for awareness stage pages like your 'Homepage' and 'About Us' pages, this number will most likely be higher, because it's the beginning of the journey for leads on your website, but for decision stage pages like 'Contact Us' and 'Book A Demo' this number should be lower because they are the end of the leads journey.
• *HOT TIP: Your numbers for entrance and exit rates can also be affected by whether or not you are directly promoting a page. If you are, your entrance rate will be higher because you are directly asking people to go to the specific page. If you are promoting one page to be the entrance point and then you have a second page you want people to view and convert on, then your entrances will be lower on the second page and your exit rates might be higher.

Below the first performance metric section, there is a second area where you can get a visual display of any of the above statistics you'd like. This comes in handy for reports, sharing the information with others and if you want to compare time periods to each other like:

• Days during a month
• Months throughout the year
• Years compared to the beginning of time

Analyzing this data can help you determine how your efforts are performing and it will allow you to make changes if necessary.

The next section is the heart and soul of your page's performance analytics. This is where you can view the types of sources driving traffic to your webpage:

• Direct traffic: people who typed your URL directly in their browser, or removed all query parameters before entering a site.
• Referrals: external sites that link to your website.
• Social Media: social media websites or apps.
• Organic search: non-paid search results in known search engines, such as Google.
• Email Marketing: HubSpot marketing emails or emails that used the "utm_campaign" parameter in the URL the visitor used to arrive at your site.
• Paid Search: paid search campaigns (e.g., Google AdWords).
• Paid Social: paid social campaign.
• Other Campaigns: tracking URLs created in HubSpot.
• Offline Sources: contacts who were first added to HubSpot via a list import, CRM integration (including Salesforce), or an API may have an original source of Offline Source.

Optimization Tab

This is the second tab on your published website pages and where more specific SEO features come into play. Here you get to review things like:

• Search Queries: these are the search terms where your content appears in Google search results. To view search queries, you need to activate HubSpot's integration with Google Search Console. This integration brings data from Google searches into HubSpot. Google Search Console is a free tool that can be used for any website in your Google account.
  Set up Google Search Console, and then activate your integration with HubSpot.

Within search queries, you can also see analytics like:

• Average position: the average spot in the list of Google search results where the pages in this topic appear. If this number gets lower, it means your pages are showing up earlier in search results. If it gets higher, it means there’s more competition for this topic.
• Clicks: The number of clicks that took someone to your page.
• Impressions: The total number of times the pages in this topic have shown up in Google search results.
• Click-through-rate: The total number of times people have clicked on your pages in Google search results divided by the total number of times your pages have appeared in Google search results. A high clickthrough rate means your page titles and meta descriptions match what people are searching for.
• On-Page SEO: this is where you will see on-page SEO recommendations for your content. If nothing is in this section, you are good to go. If you need help with on-page SEO, check out article on how to increase rankings and leads with on-page SEO in HubSpot.
• Inbound Links: (External Links/ Backlinks): are links to your webpage from other websites.

According to HubSpot's Director of Acquisition, Matthew Howells-Barby:

"Google doesn't care how interesting your content is, they care about how interesting other people think your content is" ...and they determine this by the number of your backlinks."

MOZ, one of the leading SEO agencies, also agrees. They state that:

"Backlinks are especially valuable for SEO because they represent a "vote of confidence" from one site to another."

And finally, Google openly admits:

"Webmasters can improve the rank of their sites by increasing the number of high-quality sites that link to their pages."

The bottom-line is that the quality and quantity of your content means nothing, if other online sources don't think it's good enough to link to.

So you might be thinking now, how do I get backlinks?!

The process of acquiring backlinks is called link building.

Link building is a manual and proactive process of encouraging others to link to your website from theirs. This can include reaching out to review sites, industry leaders and experts, and other high quality sources to simply ask for a link to your site. Another tactic is to reach out to media and provide them valuable information for an article. If they accept, they will naturally link back to your site.

Internal Links: links to your webpage from other parts of your website. Internal links show search engines how your content is organized around your main topics and pillar pages.

For more information about internal links and how you can add internal and external links to your website pages in HubSpot, check out our blog titled, 'Increase Rankings and Leads With On-page SEO in HubSpot.'

A/B Tests Tab

Last but not least, you have the A/B Tests tab for your website pages.

This is where you can create a variation of an existing page, and test these changes in the page's layout or content.

Once you decide to proceed you have 2 options:

• A/B Test: you manually choose the winner and the loser is shown until you do this, then you choose to end the test, or re-run it for further analysis.
• Adaptive Test: here traffic is split evenly between page variations at first, then as HubSpot learns how these variations are performing, they adjust the traffic automatically, so that better-performing variations are shown more and poorer-performing variations are shown less.

Learn more about A/B and Adaptive testing.

Conclusion

This concludes our discussion of HubSpot SEO strategy and what to focus on to rank higher on SERPs.