Experience with HubSpot subdomain, external website and SEO/authority

[Afd-mark]

Hi,

I would like to know what your experience is with SEO/authority, external website and the subdomain in HubSpot.

We have several clients and they all use Marketing Professional, not CMS. We use for all a subdomain, like 'info', 'blog' or 'articles'. 

Our clients are all small MKB's and have an external domain. There authority is not that high, but we see after we publish a lot (in HubSpot), including pillar pages, that the SEO is not going much better. Sometimes we can't even find the blogs.

Also in Search console we have for all domains a separate part.

My question is, whether the authority of all domains (of a company) add up? 

The question than is, does it have any added value to build the blogs and pillarpages in hubspot? Or is it better to add it on the excisting external domain with the existing authority.

We hear this form more and more companies.

Or do we all have to buy HubSpot CMS to avoid this??

Onother question: I think we have to use a subdomain in HubSpot when there is also an external domain. Is that correct?

Thanks for helping me out,

Leanne

[Josh · Accepted solution]

Hi @Afd-mark,

Here's a good article from Neil Patel on subdomains that is fairly descriptive. 

A couple of notes...

• Publishing content won't necessarily impact domain authority...you'll need the inbound links. Even creating pillar content and linking back from the primary domain won't help much if those domains don't have much authority either.
• It will be harder to build domain authority across several different properties so your growth may end up being slower than expected.
• At the same time if you can successfully build authority on a sub-domain you can positively impact your primary domain through your internal linking structure.
• As you stated, if you move to HubSpot CMS you wouldn't need to use a subdomain as your primary content and articles, blogs, etc. can all live in the same place. 

There are a lot of variables to consider here and I don't believe there's only one answer but hopefully this helps your decision making!

Josh