New Hubspot Website Poor Search Performance

[BWorsley]

We launched our new Hubspot CMS website in October and have been running a fairly aggressive content marketing campaign since then. And it’s just not garnering results. I realize these kinds of efforts take time but after 3 months we’re not even seeing incremental increases.

Our old website followed about zero SEO best practices, to the point that we didn’t have unique page titles, H1 tags, and alt images. The new site has a few SEO issues (LCP for example) but for the most part scores pretty highly.

Here is our Google Search Console performance report before and after relaunch:

The one major shift that happened is that our old site used a “more is more” content strategy, with thousands of pages of (frankly) garbage content. We got rid of all that and set up redirects.

My Question: Am I just being impatient, or is there something wrong somewhere? We’re considering hiring an SEO consultant, but before we make that kind of investment, perhaps I should just wait and continue developing our content strategy (pillar pages, etc.).

Domain: https://masterplans.com/

Thanks in advance, and happy new year!

[jnix284]

Hi @BWorsley

I would definitely give it more time, 3 months is very small in the grand scheme of things - especially if you removed a lot of content.

Setting up redirects for the deleted content is the right way to go, but removing those pages also removes your traffic to those pages.

You won’t start to see results until you start building content that is relevant and drives the traffic you’re looking for, and then it will still take many months to see an impact.

I would be curious if you dig into the data, looking at the “garbage” content stats to see how many page views/sessions they generated and compared that with the drop to see if it is a direct relationship.

[BWorsley]

Thank you so much @Jnix284. I think I’ll give it a few more months before I take major steps.

I am wondering, if you had an opinion on redirects vs removals. It looks like Google Search Console can’t validate the redirects (see attached photo). I’m not sure why it’s having trouble. My question is, do you think that these failed redirects are hurting our performance, and would I be better off using the “Removals” tool and getting rid of those URLs altogether?

[jnix284]

Hi @BWorsley no problem, happy to help!

The removals is only going to temporarily hide those URLs from search, it’s not going to help with the failed redirects issue in the long run.

If search engines have indexed those pages, then you have to tell them where to look instead when you remove the page.

It’s best if your redirects are setup to go to the closest content match vs having them all go to the home page, what I would look at is how you have the redirects configured in HubSpot - start by exporting your URL redirects and scrubbing through to verify the 121 that failed to see if you can determine whether there is a syntax issue with the redirected URL or something else that might cause them to fail.

Ultimately, the failed redirects shouldn’t hurt your performance, but it will be worth getting them sorted to resolve the issues.

When it comes to redirects, the big things you want to look for are:

1 - that you’re using them properly, 301 for permanent, 302 for temporary.

2 - that you’ve cleaned up internal links to go to the correct URL and not rely on redirects for your own content/links to work properly

3 - that you haven’t created a chain of redirects, where page A redirects to page B, but page B redirects to page C. This should be cleaned up so that page A redirects to page C and page B remains redirected to page C.

How long you retain the redirects really depends on how much traffic those pages are driving to your website via backlinks.

If you created a blog article and it only had 1 view, unpublishing it without a redirect is not going to break anything as long as any internal links are updated. You can also update these to have the lowest priority before taking the step to remove them completely.

If you created a blog article with thousands of views and hundreds of backlinks, and then you unpublish it, you’re going to have to keep the redirect as long as possible - in this case, reach out to the high value backlinks and have them link to some other more relevant content you’ve kept, rather than the old content that you’ve removed.

Depending on your content publishing (and unpublishing) schedule, I would recommend auditing your redirects at least annually, if not semi-annually or even quarterly.

[BWorsley]

Thank you Jennifer for the feedback. In hindsight I really wish I had made simple pages to refer the old content to. When we were launching it was a full-on scramble so we could have the website live in time for our transition from Salesforce to Hubpost. You know what they say about hindsight.

I’m going to export those links now and see what I can figure out. Thank you again!

Right now, I have the unpublished pages relinking to similar topics but definitely wish I had more specific relevante content to link to (they mostly link to the same couple pages)

[BWorsley]

So quick question: I exported the Google Search Console results and looked up the “dairy-queen” url in Hubpot:

Do you think it could be something as simple as Google seeing “https://” and the redirect saying “http://”?

UPDATE:

It won’t let me add an “s” and even if i delete it and recreate it, it removes the “s” … So even if that is the issue, I’m not sure I can fix it.

[jnix284]

@BWorsley I would try fixing it by adding the full URL on the redirect:

http://masterplans.com/business-plans/sample-plans vs. just using the /business-plans/sample-plans because if it is an http vs https issue, that would be resolved by the main redirect for that.

[BWorsley]

Great idea! I’ll give it a shot! Thanks @Jnix284

[BWorsley]

Hi @Jnix284 ,

I wanted to thank you again for your advice and support on this. I wanted to give you the latest update. I went thru and added the full URL redirect in hubspot to all of our pages, and GSC was able to validate the Soft 404s. But for some inexplicable reason, it still won’t validate my Pages with Redirects. So frustrating, since they can’t tell me why they won’t validate.

Here’s an example of one that failed:

At this point, I am about out of ideas, but thought I’d post one last time to see if you or any other community members have experienced this before.

Thank you!

[jnix284]

Hi @BWorsley I’m glad you could get some of the issues resolved.

I tested the Original URL and the redirect is working as expected.

Can you share a screenshot of what it is showing in GSC?

[BWorsley]

Hi Jennifer,

Here’s what I see in GSC:

Perhaps having a failed validation doesn’t matter, but I’m just trying to make sure I’m not giving Google any reason to downgrade our website.

Have a great weekend!

[jnix284]

Hi @BWorsley

is there any chance you have the same URL redirect twice?

have you already tried to validate the fix:

[BWorsley]

OMG i think you’re right. I have a bunch of flexible (*rest-of-url) redirects with relative URLs that I bet are causing the issue! I’m gonna give that a shot and I’ll let you know! Thank you!

And yes I’ve been trying “validate fix” each time I make changes.

Thanks again for your time!

[jnix284]

@BWorsley ah yes, the flexible redirects could be causing a duplicate, nice catch!

Definitely curious to know if that’s the case

[BWorsley]

@Jnix284 uggghh failed again. I just wish it would tell me why!

Here’s the GSC record:

Here’s the corresponding HS redirect:

At this point I can only think of 2 possibilities:

1. HS won’t let me save “https” in the original url (it just changes back to "http)
2. I noticed that i have some of the same priorities in my records (a bunch are “999999”)

Other than that, I am chock out of guesses.

Thanks again for all of your help. Much appreciated!

[jnix284]

HI @BWorsley Ugh! I’m sorry! I really thought we had it figured out

Last thing I can think of since it won’t let you save with https, does your existing URL redirect have "Ignore protocal (HTTP or HTTPS) checked:

[BWorsley]

@Jnix284 yes i have that checked. Do you think I should uncheck it and see if it’ll let me make them “https”:

[jnix284]

@BWorsley no, if it’s checked, HS is doing the work for you, I highly doubt creating two separate would fix the issue.

Do you have redirects already configured with lower priority? have you used all of the lower 100s and 1000s for more important redirects?

Also, have you verified that the redirected URLs are showing on your sitemap?

[BWorsley]

No, not at all. I just let HS set it for me, so I have a 1, then a 3, then I jump to 999999:

I don’t even know how I’d begin prioritizing, but do you think it would help if i had lower numbers?

[jnix284]

@BWorsley I’ve been managing redirects for so long and doing things by habit, I had to google this one.

This is what HubSpot says about priority:

I typically use blocks of 100 to prioritize, for example, any redirects for a primary domain (http to https, or changes that impact the home page, like moving from staging to live) I set in the first 10.

From there, I use the next block of 10 for the highest converting pages, and so on.

I typically jump to 500 to start on blog, etc.

For me, the priority helps with my sanity, I do a lot of URL redirect work in excel (export existing, modify in excel, import updated) - this makes it easier to sort, filter, and bulk update, especially priority.

Here’s what I can attest to from experience, without knowing a solid reason:

whenever I have trouble with getting a URL redirect to pickup in GSC, I lower the priority and it resolves the issue.

I didn’t initially suggest this because GSC is clearly picking up on the redirect, it’s just saying there is an error, so long story short, no, I don’t think it’s going to solve it in this situation, but since we’ve tried everything else, I thought maybe if we lowered it, GSC might see it as new/updated and force it to accept it without the error…real long shot…

We’ve tried all this and I feel like maybe we’ve missed something obvious

Maybe there’s another community champion who can shed some light on this, I’ve shared it with the group to see if anyone has an idea.