Blog Posts or a text based webpage

[MDudevoir]

Currently, my company has a few different areas where we publish content on our website.

One area, referred to as “Resources” houses data sheets, case studies, and whitepapers. The resources page has content tiles that when clicked on lead to the appropriate resource. Whitepapers and data sheets are pdfs, while case studies are text-based webpages with some graphics sprinkled in. Our “News” area is where we publish company related articles and press releases. This “News” area utilizes the Hubspot Blog function.

My company is starting to incorporate a content marketing strategy and will be publishing informative articles. We would like these articles to live in the same area a the resources as we feel the subject matter aligns better. But, since these will be text-based webpages, we are wondering if we should use the blog function of hubspot or if we should create a webpage template. Does doing one or the other have an impact on seo? Are pages tagged “blog” read differently and ranked differently by crawlers? Does anyone have a recommendation on the best course of action?

[Berangere]

Hi @MDudevoir, you are very welcome!
We are so glad to have you here!
Great question, thanks for asking the Community!
I’d like to invite a couple of subject matter experts to this conversation: Hi @Jnix284, @Phil_Vallender and @johnelmer do you have recommendations to share with @MDudevoir, please?
Also, if anybody else has anything to add and/or share, please feel free to join in the conversation
Thank you so much and have a brilliant day!
Best,
Bérangère

[jnix284]

Thanks for the tag @BérangèreL, happy to help @MDudevoir.

Unless your blog is on a separate subdomain, search bots don’t see your blog any differently than website content. If it’s the same domain, the /blog helps to organize the content so all of your content under that directory is recognized as being related to each other.

That’s why specific, relevant tags can be helpful, the user can filter for a specific tag and the URL will change to tag/business to reveal those articles. This isn’t included in the blog URL unless you add it manually, then you could have /blog/topic/article-name which further groups your content. A blog post can have more than one tag, so I think that’s why HubSpot doesn’t add the tag to the URL, so try to think of the topic as different from the tag unless you have a 1:1 relationship.

Leveraging the blog tool is a great way to handle news content, but it would be difficult to include in a directory with other content types without being a very manual process that isn’t scalable.

Another option would be to use a module that has filtering, like this resources example, that allows you to tag your content and easily group them.

What I highly recommend is that you’re grouping your content using a hierarchy in the URL.

It would be better if you use something specific like a topic, but you can still start with /news/topic/news-page-name.

To do this, you would just type that path into the content slug for the page, this will add the folders to your sitemap automatically.

The page path is what search engines use to determine how content is related, but they also look at internal links, which is why the SEO Topics Tool is so helpful.

Internal links help bots see how page content is related to each other, so links from your main website to your blog content or resources/news content, knowledge base, etc. shows that you’re talking about the same thing in different places.

You can see HubSpot does this on some of their knowledge base pages, they link to their website pages to show an overview of the tool. Likewise, in HubSpot blog articles, you’ll see links to other blog articles and knowledge base for more detailed steps.

I hope this helps, let me know if you have further questions!