Should HubSpot add built-in SEO recommendations

Developer Support CMS Development
1

Should HubSpot add built-in SEO recommendations for interactive tools like calculators and generators, instead of focusing mainly on blog content?

4

Yes 100% - that’s the goal inbound right?

5

We found that recommendations are useful, but they only help after you’ve identified the right content opportunities. For us, topical authority, internal linking, and regularly refreshing high-intent pages made a much bigger difference than chasing individual SEO suggestions. Curious how others balance built-in recommendations with external SEO workflows.

6

Hey @Zeeshan91,

could you please explain this a bit more in detail?

Just asking because interactive tools like calculators, generators and such are something that’s being created in custom development or embedded from an external source.

Therefore the developer(s) or tool providers are responsible for the tech. SEO optimization. HubSpot, technically can only control their own stuff. One reason for utilizing variables like {{ content.post_body }}

While I fully support the idea of better SEO recommendations, I can see that technically it would super hard /almost impossible for HubSpot to implement.

Just an example:
Two marketplace themes. Both have something like a headline-text module. Seems super simple right?
But what happens under the hood?
Theme A might have a setup like

<h2>{{module.headline}}</h2>
<p>{{module.text}}</p>

Theme B might have a setup like

{% from '../../_macros/headlines.html' import simple_headline %}

{% set h_tag = module.headline_tag %}
{% set h_class = module.headline_class %}
{% set h_content = module.simple_headline %}
{% set text = module.text_content %}

<article class="headline-text-wrapper">
   {% if h_content %}
      <div class="headline">
         {{ simple_headline(h_tag, h_class, h_content) }}
      </div>
   {% endif %}
   {% if text %}
      <div class="content">
         {{ text }}
      </div>
   {% endif %}
</article>

^ and this is not even the most complex way of writing a simple headline-text module I could think of :slight_smile:

Now think of a more complex thing like a calculator or something with countless HubL variables, developer writing style and many more variables to count in.
Therefore, what should HubSpot look for in order to provide SEO recommendations? Is it the variable? I’d say it will be hard since there is no rule stating that headlines (in this example) must always be called “headlines”. Developer A named it “headline”, Developer B “Simple Headline”, Developer C might call it Überschrift (German word for headline). In this simple example, HubL variables are not the way to look for. Now scale it to around 150k (only 50% of every HubSpot portal; HubSpot got ~300k portals), and I’d say every portal/page has it’s unique stuff.

So the only way would be to render the whole page as the browser would do. Possible, but only if these two criteria are met:

  1. It’s not an external embed as most of them are iFrames. Something you can’t really control from the software you’re embedding it into.
  2. The content is not being added to the rendered page while the user scrolls (edge case, but it could be done by building everything in JavaScript/react…)

But the next thing you’ll most likely face is performance, if the SEO recommendation starts every time you change something on a page, this puts massive amount of stress onto the server(s). Again, remember that there are hundreds of thousands portals - if they constantly running SEO recommendation, they’d shut down due to stress and energy consumption. :slight_smile:

Again, don’t get me wrong - I fully support the better SEO Recommendation idea, but technically I’d super hard to implement and easier to implement witha developer on a portal based level

best,
Anton

7

Hey Anton, thanks for the detailed explanation — I agree that trying to analyze the actual HubL/JavaScript implementation of every calculator or generator would be far too complex, especially with external embeds and different developer implementations.
What I had in mind was less about HubSpot understanding how the tool is built, and more about giving page-level SEO recommendations around the interactive tool. For example, checking whether the page has a clear search-intent-focused title, relevant supporting text, internal links, structured data where applicable, descriptive headings, and enough crawlable context around the tool.
In other words, HubSpot wouldn’t need to understand whether a developer calls something headline, simple_headline, or something else. It could evaluate the rendered/indexable page and the elements HubSpot itself can control, while leaving the actual calculator functionality to the developer.
I’m working with a calculator-based site myself, so this is something I’ve noticed in practice: https://mygardencalculator.com/
So I definitely agree that fully analyzing custom tools would be difficult. My suggestion was more about helping users optimize the SEO layer surrounding those tools, rather than trying to optimize the tool’s underlying code.
Thanks again for pointing out the technical limitations — that makes the distinction much clearer.