CMS Development

dennisedson
Équipe de développement de HubSpot
Équipe de développement de HubSpot

HubSpot Community Developer Show | SEO with Rikki Lear of Digital 22

Hey friends! 

Episode 2, Email with Alyssa Wilie of Lynton Web is in the books and we are turning to our next topic, SEO which I will be the first to admit is not my strongest capability so I am going to be learning a lot this time.

 

To school me, I will be joined by some incredibly gifted people.  Rikki Lear, @rikkilear is Founder and Director at Digital 22 bringing to the table a wealth of experience in marketing. 

 

Victor Pan,, @VictorPan , - Principle Marketer atHubSpot, currently working on technical SEO.  Previously Search Director at Catalyst Digital, managing multi-million dollar ad budgets P&G's oral care brands (e.g. Crest, Oral-B, Fixodent) and executing a 7-sites-to-1 "migration" with 0 traffic loss.

No animals were harmed in the process.

Start-up grunt at WordStream, a PPC SaaS company which was acquired by Gannett Co. (US News), earning enough media mentions to rank for almost any online marketing search terms.

 

Last, and certainly not least, AJ LaPorte, @AJLaPorte , is a Senior Developer Advocate at HubSpot, when not waxing poetic on SEO, he can be found under a pile of his twins, dreaming of the fjords of Norway. 

 

@rikkilear recently did an AMA on SEO in the Community and I am going to move that conversation over here.  A lot of good questions have already been asked and I can't wait to read more of your questions! 

30 Réponses
rikkilear
Contributeur de premier rang | Partenaire solutions Elite
Contributeur de premier rang | Partenaire solutions Elite

HubSpot Community Developer Show | SEO with Rikki Lear of Digital 22

Hey, thanks for taking the time to ask a question.

1 - That's a really interesting question. Based on what you have said I would say the best approach is to use the www.site.com/product/call-tracking structure. This is based on your logic of needing multiple different uses of a page called call tracking. My opinion more broadly on this is shorter URLs are not a cause or metric of better rankings, more so it's purely correlation that shorter URLs are the ones that tend to rank better because they are typically more easily accessed by navigation and are more important pages. In truth, I don't believe the URL length matters at all as long as it isn't taken to the extreme. Having a subfolder in the URL v not having a subfolder in the URL will have no positive or negative difference (unless the sub-folder is part of the keyword targeting strategy). What I believe is more important here is a logical, clear, scalable URL structuring strategy.

 

2. I'd say using or not using call tracking on a site will have no positive or negative direct impact on SEO. It's likely the way a search engine will crawl a website with call tracking is it will see the default phone number with the script to change it to the dynamic one. There are a couple of very slight indirect negatives to consider but all in all they are not something I would worry about (ourselves and clients have used call tracking for years, we recommend it):
- If the script is heavy and used frequently on a page it could slow down the site and have an indirect impact, very unlikely as call tracking scripts are usually very lightweight but possible
- You could have an indirect negative impact on local SEO by having an inconsistent NAP profile across the web if people regularly post about you using dynamic numbers (more on NAP here: https://www.brightedge.com/glossary/importance-accurate-name-address-phone-number). It's not something I would personally worry about as you need to be a specific type of company for people to post about you by copying and pasting a phone number but it's possible.

They were good questions to think about. Thank you



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kdieny
Participant

HubSpot Community Developer Show | SEO with Rikki Lear of Digital 22

Rikki - Thanks for taking the time to answer my questions!

 

I was leaning towards a subfolder-based URL structure since there are many dimensions to some of our business's core topics (aka call tracking). I really appreciate the insights you bring up on the page length as well. I hope it's not just me but one of the most fascinating and simultaneously frustrating aspects of SEO is never being able to get or give a straight answer. Usually, I'm explaining this to stakeholders as, "Based on the evidence we have seen..." or "To the best of our knowledge...."

 

As for the second answer I wanted to say that I 100% agree. You bring up some great pros and cons of dynamic personalization. The problems with NAP consistency are there and of someone else posting the tracking numbers instead of the true target numbers. At the end of the day, I believe the best business decisions are made with all the available facts. It is just difficult to get that :p.

 

- Kevin

 

rikkilear
Contributeur de premier rang | Partenaire solutions Elite
Contributeur de premier rang | Partenaire solutions Elite

HubSpot Community Developer Show | SEO with Rikki Lear of Digital 22

Yeah, totally hear you there. The challenge with SEO is there are no definitive answers. That's because its people making educated guesses about how they think an algorithm works. All we can do is look at correlation data and try take extract what we believe are the causes of those results.

That's why meme's like this exist in the SEO world 😁


the-definitive-guide-to-javascript-seo-2021-edition-700x783.png



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sharonlicari
Gestionnaire de communauté
Gestionnaire de communauté

HubSpot Community Developer Show | SEO with Rikki Lear of Digital 22

Thank you @rikkilear for hosting this AMA!

 

Hey @Carloberg @GTerry @kmares @Diana1 @JJace @JWyatt @Ben_M @KTownsend @webdew @Aakar I want to bring this AMA to your attention! All the questions are welcome, don't miss the opportunity to learn from Rikki!

 

Thanks

Sharon 


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jmclaren
HubSpot Employee
HubSpot Employee

HubSpot Community Developer Show | SEO with Rikki Lear of Digital 22

Love that you're sharing what you know!
Do you have any tips/tricks your team's picked up for SEOing CMS Hub sites?

Jon McLaren

Sr. CMS Developer Advocate

Get started developing on the HubSpot CMS Developer Changelog
How to optimize your CMS Hub site for speed

If my reply answered your question, please mark it as a solution, to make it easier for others to find.

rikkilear
Contributeur de premier rang | Partenaire solutions Elite
Contributeur de premier rang | Partenaire solutions Elite

HubSpot Community Developer Show | SEO with Rikki Lear of Digital 22

Hey Jon,

 

Thanks for the question 👍

 

I'd say the biggest HubSpot CMS specific tip is how the site is actually built. While HubSpot sites tend to be very quick because of their hosting and infrastructure they can be hard to optimize further for speed if they are built some ways. We have found using the boilerplate as a starting point and developing from there leads to the best results - ie really highly optimised sites of 90+ on Google PageInsights.

The other one I'll mention is around the HubSpot SEO tool for topic clustering. Topic clustering is a big topic in itself so for now I'll just say make sure you take advantage of the tool and organize your content this way. It's a big job but long term it drives more value from SEO and it's very trackable.



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Jake_Lett
Guide | Partenaire solutions
Guide | Partenaire solutions

HubSpot Community Developer Show | SEO with Rikki Lear of Digital 22

Hi Rikki. Thank you for offering to share your advice.

With so much data to analyze how do you prioritize what to optimize? How do you make sure your time spent is actually going to drive leads/sales instead of just traffic.

rikkilear
Contributeur de premier rang | Partenaire solutions Elite
Contributeur de premier rang | Partenaire solutions Elite

HubSpot Community Developer Show | SEO with Rikki Lear of Digital 22

Hey Jacob,

That's a brilliant question. You are totally right that SEO is something that you can spend a lot of time on (there's a never ending list of things to do 😃) but not everything is going to move the needle.

For people new to SEO most tools (Moz, SEMRush etc) do a decent job of priority scoring the errors lists into those which have a big impact, to those which have a small impact.

In terms of making sure SEO drives sales / leads, instead of just traffic, I'd say you need to spend a good amount of time on strategy and research. A lot of people just ahead and starting building links, 'optimising' pages etc without truly understanding how it's going to impact sales.

 

The best example of this is keyword research. Spending as much time as possible at this stage is critical to the projects success as everything from that point onwards is going to centred around it - if the keywords you select at this stage aren't commercially correct (actually target people who can and do convert into sales) then you are only going to drive traffic at best.

Thanks for kicking us off with a great question 👏



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rikkilear
Contributeur de premier rang | Partenaire solutions Elite
Contributeur de premier rang | Partenaire solutions Elite

HubSpot Community Developer Show | SEO with Rikki Lear of Digital 22

Google used to have a fixed character limit for meta titles and descriptions which made these types of questions easier.

 

Now Google uses pixel length plus makes the odd expectation to display longer descriptions on the odd occasion when they believe it to be beneficial for the user. The average snippet is displayed at 155–160 characters so I agree with the HubSpot tool here, keep it under 155 and you are likely to have your whole description show without it truncating.

I'd also add, remember the role of a meta description. It isn't a ranking factor so you don't need to get keywords into it. It's simply your 'shop window' to entice someone to click your result over someone elses.



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rikkilear
Contributeur de premier rang | Partenaire solutions Elite
Contributeur de premier rang | Partenaire solutions Elite

HubSpot Community Developer Show | SEO with Rikki Lear of Digital 22

Hey Crystal,

Great question. I certainly understand what you mean - I hear people tell me they "have done SEO" in the checkbox like manner you suggest. In terms of the two questions you asked:

 

  • Where should they put their effort for visible quick outcomes: I actually did a 15min talk on this very question not too long ago which can be watched on video here (https://video.digital22.com/watch/ZK8tuHcqWL7EQDTAe9UkEA) - long story short = keyword research > basic on-page optimisation still gets good results fast for people who haven't started the process yet.
  • Where can they grow their understanding of this topic: If they want to conceptually understand it Brian Dean does a good job (https://backlinko.com/hub/seo/what-is-seo). If they want to understand it to actually do it I suggest starting with the Moz begginers guide (https://moz.com/beginners-guide-to-seo).


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