Hey everyone! Katie Cort from the Onboarding Team at HubSpot- today I would like to write about the benefits of migrating your blog over to HubSpot and the concept of pillar pages.
Starting with some background- I work with a range of customers on a day to day basis. Sometimes customers want to start from scratch with a blog in HubSpot, other times they are happy with their current blog setup and it doesn’t make sense to move it to HubSpot CMS. However there are certaintly situations where we must consider the pros and cons of moving a blog to HubSpot versus keeping it where it is. If your blog is not getting views, converting, and helping the bottom line, it may make sense to reconsider your strategy. HubSpot tools can help!
Let’s go over some of the benefits of moving your blog to HubSpot:
- Helps with indexing
- Become a thought leader
- Good top of the funnel content to attract
- Tags-> like theme posts so people can easily find the content they are looking for
- Blog subscriber email
- Topics: build authority in the topics you want to be known for
- Pull blog posts into HubSpot Campaigns easily without needing to generate unique tracking URLs each time
- On page SEO recommendations and topic recommendations
- Be able to host videos, measure watching and clicks
Question: But wait! If my blog has to be hosted on a subdomain versus a subdirectory (blog.hubspot.com rather than The HubSpot Marketing Blog) won’t that hurt my SEO?
Answer: Not neccesarily. Assuming content is optimized for SEO best practices, is relevant to contact during the buyer’s journey, and is answering common topics that are googled, content posted through HubSpot on a subdomain that links to main website will help SEO. It will increase the likelihood someone finds you through organic search. Google scans the subdomain vs. subdirectory in the same way and can make the connection between subdomain and brand domain.
I am ready to move my blog to HubSpot! Where should I start? Here is your checklist:
- If your blog is hosted on Wordpress, use our Wordpress Importer tool. It makes it very easy to bring historical posts into HubSpot!
- Pick a theme for your blog or consider a blog migration service where our team will recreate the current look and feel of your blog+migrate existing content.
- Setup your blog settings
- See this article. After the migration, you will want to ensure your blog is indexed by Google
- Use HubSpot’s topic tool to see the difficulty of topics. Don’t try to rank for anything that has a difficulty above 70 right away. How can your blog be something interesting/fresh
Let’s dive into the concept of pillar pages/topic clusters further! This is something I enjoy coaching my customers on.
Why Pillar pages and topic clusters instead of keywords? Here is the scoop:
Keyword stuffing does not work.
- Hummingbird update in 2013. The search algorithm began parsing out phrases rather than focusing solely on keywords. Many SEO professionals see Hummingbird as Google’s official switch from a keyword to a topic focus.
- Launched in 2015, RankBrain is Google’s machine learning algorithm designed to understand the context of people’s search queries. It associates past searches with similar themes and pulls multiple keywords and phrases that are associated with the search query to find the best results.
Questions to consider when creating a pillar page:
- What do you want to be known as an expert or thought leader in?
- Who are your buyer personas and what are they searching for?
Resources:
I hope this helps get you started and you consider moving your blog to HubSpot and implementing a pillar page to help with organic traffic! With any questions or feedback, please leave it below 