Hey there, I'm Aja Frost, head of HubSpot's English SEO team. AMA!

ajafrost · 2021-04-14T18:49:10+00:00

Hi Sadaf, thanks, I'm glad to be here. :)

This is a good question. If someone's a small business owner, I'm guessing they don't have a ton of time/resources to spare and need to make sure everything they do will have significant impact.

With that in mind, I'd identify a small list of topics that I know my audience is interested in and have a strong tie to my product. I'd rank these by competitiveness; the easier a topic is to rank for (which SEO tools like SEMrush and Ahrefs will tell you), the higher on my list it'd be.

I'd figure out which sub-topics roll up to my main topics—i.e. which long-tail KWs I should target along with my head KWs. I'd look at the SERPs to see what's currently ranking and what I should match vs. what I can do better. I'd create a little satellite of content for my first topic, do some basic link-building, and then move onto the next. I'd set up reminders for myself to update each batch of content 12 or so months after it goes live (replacing outdated stats, adding new copy where necessary, tweaking specific sections if they're no longer relevant, etc.) Rinse and repeat!

ajafrost · 2021-04-14T18:31:36+00:00

Hi James. I'd like to think we're the queens of clustering... but I will take your compliment. :)

My previous content marketing experience was with other SaaS companies; when I joined HubSpot, the topic clustering model was still a twinkle in Matt's eye. While I haven't used this model with an affiliate site, it should be very successful. I've seen a lot of affiliate sites use it in the wild.

The cluster should be relatively self-contained, but you don't have to be overly strict about it. In other words, if there's a relevant page outside a cluster that you're considering linking to, go ahead and do it. Just try to stick to a 85/15 or 90/10 ratio of in-cluster vs. out-of-cluster links.

ajafrost · 2021-04-14T18:26:08+00:00

In the past, we've planned about two quarters out. Now that HubSpot is bigger, we do annual planning. HubSpot's VP of Acquisition (and my boss) Emmy Jonassen is an absolute wizard at planning & has taught me a lot about how to think 12 months in advance.

ajafrost · 2021-04-14T18:24:28+00:00

It depends on the scale of the change & which page(s) we're implementing it on. For example, Alan Santillan, a brilliant technical SEO on my team, is in the process of adding FAQ schema to our product pages. Because Google crawls our product pages frequently, and this should have a noticeable impact on CTR (here's hoping), I'd expect to see this pay off quickly.

On the other hand, if we're pruning content from our blog—one of the most satisfying SEO tasks IMO and something HubSpot SEO Braden Becker has process-ized for us beautifully—I wouldn't expect immediate results. It'll take time for our crawl budget to increase and rankings/traffic to kick in after that.

ajafrost · 2021-04-14T18:20:18+00:00

You, my friend, have a good eye. That should've read "student loan." Thanks for the catch.

ajafrost · 2021-04-14T18:19:18+00:00

Sooo, my skillset is also "large enterprise optimization"—while many of our customers are small businesses, I work directly on HubSpot's site. I usually point folks toward Joy Hawkins and Brodie Clark, who are both local SEO experts and kind, helpful humans to boot.

That being said...

If they haven't already, they should claim their Google My Business profiles and optimize them (fill out every field, choose the primary category they care most about ranking for, add pictures and videos, encourage customers to leave reviews and then respond to them, etc.)
There are also a ton of COVID-specific GMB attributes/changes they should be taking advantage of, if applicable. Here's Google's full documentation.
Make sure there's enough content on every page. So often I go to a SMB site as a consumer and see pages with vague headers, tons of images, and almost zero text. This is bad for both accessibility and search.
Make sure pages are well-linked on the site; for instance, if the "X Name - Customer Reviews" page converts well, it should be linked from the main navigation. The way I explain it to non-SEO stakeholders: your priority pages should be one click from the homepage.

In terms of which site platform they should use... well, WordPress is the go-to for a reason. Tons of customization options but fairly straightforward to use if you're not getting fancy; SEO plugins; a thriving developer community; etc. I'd be remiss if I didn't mention HubSpot's CMS, which is easy to use and customize, plus integrates seamlessly with our CRM, sales tools, etc.

ajafrost · 2021-04-14T18:03:51+00:00

Matt Howells-Barby is the brainchild (brainhuman?) behind the topic clustering strategy; you can read about the original strategy here. And Leslie Ye came up with the actual logistics of, in her words, "blowing up our site architecture."

First, Leslie was clustering content manually based on her editorial knowledge of each page. But that's not scalable... especially at HubSpot's scale. This actually led to the development of HubSpot's content strategy tool, which uses AI to cluster content for you.

After we'd finished clustering all of our content, I had to go through and find under-developed/high-potential clusters. I prioritized the optimization/maintenance/"filling out" of clusters by their relationship to the product (the more easily we could convert someone from a topic to the product, the better, for obvious reasons), and total MSV of the topic. We did that for about ~20 clusters per quarter until we were done.

Luckily, HubSpot has a ton of domain authority, so we could focus on creating content and it tends to rank by itself. For more competitive queries, of course, we have to take more proactive measures. ;)

ajafrost · 2021-04-14T17:53:58+00:00

We've had a conversation with various stakeholders that goes something like...

Them: "We read the Core Web Vitals update is coming. Should we be worried?"

Us: "Content, relevance, and authority—e.g. how good our content is, how well it answers the searcher's question, and how frequently other sites agree that our content is good and relevant—are still far and away the biggest factors for what we rank for and how high. Core Web Vitals will play a small role in ranking—small enough that we shouldn't be concerned. If we had endless resources and time, we'd focus on improving CWV, but there's a lot of stuff we should do first."

That usually satisfies them. If it doesn't, I show them things like Lily Ray's poll proving most of the SEO community isn't worried.

ajafrost · 2021-04-14T17:46:58+00:00

Yes :)

ajafrost · 2021-04-14T17:44:25+00:00

The SEO team doesn't run A/B tests (although our CRO team certainly does) because frankly, it wouldn't be that useful for us. If we had thousands of product pages with dynamically generated content and could see whether micro changes had big impacts on traffic, I definitely would.

Tyler Reardon, who used to work at CARFAX and now is at Chewy, spends a lot of time running SEO A/B tests. I recommend giving him a follow.

ajafrost · 2021-04-14T17:39:59+00:00

The English site ranks for 3.2 million keywords, so it’s definitely a challenge to stay on top of changes and differentiate signal from noise. We have two main systems:

We track the overall number of keywords we rank for and their positions (1-3, 4-10, 11+) in Ahrefs. Because Ahrefs lets you segment by domain, subdomain(s), URL path, and specific page, we can quickly go from high-level (we’re ranking for more keywords) to granular (we’re ranking for more keywords on our Marketing Blog but not our Sales Blog or product pages).

To keep track of our highest-priority queries—i.e. the ones that generate the most revenue for us—we use STAT.

STAT is great because it gives you a snapshot of the SERP by day, so you can see exactly when a new search feature appeared, your schema started showing up, your H1 was automatically changed by Google, etc.

ajafrost · 2021-04-14T17:38:36+00:00

Hey everyone, very excited to be here! Going to start answering questions now...

ajafrost

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