Is HubSpot Good for SEO?

The HubSpot CMS is versatile and flexible, providing opportunities to enhance inbound marketing, sales management and integrations that other CMSs don’t. Inbound aside, SEO is one of the main channels used to bring people to your website, so, is HubSpot good for SEO?

Stick around for all of your questions and more answered from a search engine marketing agency with actual experience in optimising HubSpot websites.

Key SEO Features in HubSpot

HubSpot is stylised as a customer platform, with all of the software, integrations and resources that a business needs to harmonise its marketing, sales, content and customer service. All with the aim of expanding and improving your business online, and offline too.

With this comes SEO features specifically built into the CMS to help you optimise your website for organic search. Here are those features, with a little about how beneficial and effective they are.

On-Page SEO

Much like other CMSs out there, you can edit pretty much everything in regard to your on-page SEO. That means you can edit and improve your:

1. Meta Titles
2. Meta Descriptions
3. Website Copy
4. Internal Linking
5. Adding and optimising visual content

..To name a few.

On-page SEO is important because it helps search engines like Google understand your content and your website as a whole. If you optimise your on-page SEO correctly, this will help search engines identify whether your website content is relevant to search queries.

Technical SEO 

Possibly the least understood aspect of the three types of SEO and the area with the steepest learning curve. But, you can easily manage certain aspects of your technical SEO with the HubSpot CMS. You will be able to manage:

1. Website performance
2. Website speed and optimisation
3. Mobile responsiveness

…Though, the HubSpot CMS is possibly less flexible than others regarding the technical build or layout of your website. A CMS like web flow or WordPress, for example, are a bit more flexible with how you could build and organise your website with technical SEO in mind.

Technical SEO is one of the most important parts of search engine optimisation. It ensures that your site is free of any technical issues that could negatively affect users and search engines, which could prevent it from being understood and ranked effectively.

SEO Recommendations

If you have a website on HubSpot, you can scan your content for SEO recommendations. These recommendations are provided by the platform based on their best practices. Depending on the size of your website, a scan can take between 3 and 6 hours to complete

We think this is a great tool, but you are limited to recommendations defined by HubSpot. As we all know, there’s not always a definitive answer to every ranking factor, best practice etc. So, while this is a great start to help you cover the basics of SEO, you’ll need to look elsewhere for more advanced SEO recommendations.

Content 

When we say content in this instance, we mean more than just the website copy. We mean the ability to add and build solid, robust web pages, which the HubSpot CMS offers to easily build pages that meet basic requirements for SEO content optimisation.

HubSpot also offers content optimisation suggestions, much like their SEO recommendations. Again, with this, we’d advise caution and prioritise ensuring that you find a balance between how your brand is seen and the language you use, and accepting some of the content optimisation suggestions.

You can learn more about a HubSpot content marketing strategy over on our recent blog, ‘Maximise Your HubSpot Content Marketing Strategy‘.

Analysing SEO Performance

This is the weakest part of considering the HubSpot CMS for SEO. The SEO analysis is poor. There’s not a great deal of built-in support for analysing your SEO performance. There’s always the option of an integration in the future, but right now, all you can do is feed your Google Search Console into the CMS and view the information there.

Now, Search Console is excellent to help you see an overview of organic performance on Google, but you won’t see ranking data or any keyword analysis here, nor will you be able to see data from any other search engines.

So, HubSpot’s SEO performance analysis is quite poor.

Our Experience and Case Studies

As mentioned previously, when trying to answer ‘Is HubSpot good for SEO’, we’re going to pull in from actual experience using the CMS for ourselves and our clients to help answer the question definitively.

First, let’s look at a software development company based in London. This company built their site on HubSpot, and we were brought on to help improve its organic visibility. Immediately, we noticed that from a technical aspect, their website structure was very hard to navigate and manage with HubSpot.

When it came to the SEO recommendations, we found that the quality was poor because of how long it took the platform to scan the website. As mentioned, the recommendations had some value, but you wouldn’t get very far with the recommendations alone.

On the positive side, ranking content was very straightforward. We encountered very few problems when trying to get pages into SERPs, quickly. If anything, this is probably a huge benefit of the CMS; we found that the HubSpot site held a lot of weight in search engine results pages. Building and optimising new pages was also much more efficient and easier with HubSpot.

So, overall, we found that while it could be restrictive at times, the CMS was actually a useful and often easy-to-use system to get positive organic results, sometimes quicker, on average, than other CMSs.

Integrations and SEO Tools

One thing that HubSpot does across the board is allow for a plethora of integrations and tools. Both free and paid tools are available, but some of the most notable and recognised SEO platforms can be integrated into HubSpot.

The app marketplace is probably your key to going above the best practices. Investigating and researching tools or apps that could integrate with HubSpot and take you one step further, all within the same CMS, will help improve your organic rankings drastically.

Adding more integrations and tools to your arsenal is one thing, but what if your team needs more support with not just your SEO but your HubSpot as a whole? 

As a partnered agency, our HubSpot management services are second to none. Enquire today to realise your potential. 

The Content Management System 

As a CMS alone, HubSpot is great, one of the most robust and effective on the market. Now, from an SEO perspective, there are two ways to look at the HubSpot CMS.

On the one hand, it’s a great CMS for a basic SEO-level website. If you want to get the basics covered and get your website into organic search results, then that’s great.

However, if you want to take your SEO to the next level, for an advanced SEO, the CMS is limited.

Knowledge and Learning

HubSpot is a fantastic resource for enhancing your understanding of digital marketing, with a particular emphasis on crafting content strategies geared towards optimising search engines.

So, in assessing whether HubSpot is effective for SEO, we affirm that it is good at bolstering your knowledge and skill set in SEO. This makes it a very valuable learning resource and a tool for improvement.

Analytics and Reporting

HubSpot offers a suite of tools to help with SEO analytics and reporting. These tools cover essential aspects such as website analytics, keyword research, and content performance analysis.

While HubSpot provides valuable insights, we recommend considering other platforms and tools specifically dedicated to reporting and in-depth keyword performance analysis for a more comprehensive and specialised approach to optimising your SEO strategy.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

• HubSpot is a robust CMS with features for basic SEO requirements.
• For businesses aiming to establish a presence in organic search results and seeking a user-friendly content management system, HubSpot proves to be effective.
• for those with more advanced SEO needs, it’s essential to recognise the platform’s limitations and consider external tools and platforms dedicated to in-depth analysis and reporting.
• HubSpot’s role as a learning resource and its capacity to streamline various aspects of online presence makes it a valuable tool in the digital marketing landscape.

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