I have been struggling to find a clear answer on my question. We are currently running our blogs in WordPress. I know and understand the amazing benefits on utilizing the HubSpot Blog tool. Before we make the switch to port all of our resource center over to HubSpot, we need to know:
What would it cost us from an SEO perspective?
Are there any gains/losses here?
How does this effect our site score?
Do we lose SEO credibility?
I am sure there is more to the story here. I am fully committed to porting over my resource center but just need to understand the full picture here of what we may lose or gain.
We want to be able to use HubSpot to track and analyze blog effectiveness with it’s tools and at the moment we can not do that as it is not integrated. I saw we can import with WordPress Connect, but is that just an import? Does this effectively bring in SEO data that has been set before?
These are the questions I can not find through my research.
I’m not sure what amazing benefits you are looking for with utilizing the Hubspot tool. I’ve worked with many tools and there are benefits and drawbacks to each. The first question I would ask you in considering Hubspot and being as concerned with SEO as you are is what prompting you to start this discussion? Are you running into hurdles with Wordpress with regards to technical obstacles, or are there process pain points you are trying to solve for?
Next, what is your website running on? Are you using the Hubspot CMS and looking to bring all web hosted properties to Hubspot, or are you considering to separate your properties onto another server/subdomain? If the latter, is your current blog in a subfolder (ie: /blog) or on a subdomain (ie: blog.domain.com )?
By answering these foundational questions, we would have more information to guide you and answer the impact it could potentially have to your SEO.
In terms of blogs only, personally, the two biggest advantages of HubSpot over WordPress are enterprise hosting and integrated marketing (including SEO tools and analytics). These features alone could cost hundreds of dollars monthly if you were to implement these on WordPress.
Based on our experience, Google considers how well a website’s setup is implemented. The more premium the setup, the higher the authority. So, if you plan long-term for growth, I would say HubSpot is a great platform as it has no cap on the number of visitors, and you can really set and forget.
The costs or gains/losses depend on the execution level. If executed properly, there should be minimal to no permanent losses; it should be the opposite. While there may be short-term fluctuations in rankings, these should stabilize as Google re-crawls your entire website.
HubSpot’s WordPress importer works great. There may be some formatting issues due to inline HTML, but all images, meta data (title, description, slug/path), and contents can be automatically imported.