How HubSpot CMS helps with SEO performance

HubSpot CMS Hub makes it easier for marketers to create, publish and promote content and make changes to website pages without the need for developer time or coding skills.

But creating all the content in the world won't benefit your company unless you are optimising it for SEO and performance in search.

Along with making content creation easier, HubSpot CMS Hub also comes with an array of tools which can not only help you scale and grow, but help ensure that the content you are creating is optimised for SEO, and that your site is performing quickly and optimally to improve your chances of creeping up the search ranking.

That's not to say that HubSpot has neglected SEO up to now, if you've used Marketing Hub before you know that SEO recommendations have long been a part of the HubSpot DNA, but CMS Hub has added to that even more.

You can carry on reading about those changes and what they mean, or you can watch and listen to our Head of Design and Development Chris Knowles talk you through them in this video:

What SEO tools does the Marketing Hub already offer?

As we've said, if you've used HubSpot before, you probably already know about all of the great SEO tools that the HubSpot Marketing platform brings to the table.

We recently spoke with Luke Summerfield about the changes to HubSpot CMS Hub, including the SEO tools. You can read what he had to say here.

But just in case you don't, we'll do a quick run through of our favourites:

SEO Recommendations

For a start, HubSpot's SEO tool can give you a complete list of SEO recommendations for your entire website. The tool can analyse all the content hosted on HubSpot, and recommend how to improve it to improve your chances of ranking.

This could be anything from meta titles and descriptions, to tags and url.

To use the tool, just go to the Marketing tab, then go to Planning and Strategy, SEO and click on Recommendations.

The tool then automatically scans your HubSpot hosted content and fires back a list of recommendations.

If you want to analyse another domain, click "add a URL" in the upper right of the page and enter the URL you want to scan.

Then you just need to go to "view recommendations" for see the list of improvements you could make.

SEO Optimise panel

Whenever you create a piece of content on HubSpot, whether it's a landing page, website page or blog, you will always get the option to view how you can optimise the content before publishing it.

Or, you can view how to optimise it while editing the content.

If you're doing this prior to publishing, all you need to do is click on the "Optimise" tab on the left hand side of the page when reviewing your content.

You'll be presented with a number of considerations and the tool will tell you whether you have optimised the content correctly, or whether you should make any changes.

SEO recommendations that you've done will have a green tick, if they don't, you need to take the action.

If you're doing this after publishing the content, simply go to the "edit page" tab and then follow the same process.

Content Strategy tool

One of the best tools in the SEO toolkit of HubSpot Marketing, is the content strategy and planning tool which makes it simple to plan and execute your pillar page and topic cluster strategy.

Using the tool, you can identify your primary keyword that you want to focus on, and then use the tool to plan your SEO content around it.

All you need to do is go to Marketing - Planning and Strategy - SEO - Topics.

Once here, you can view your existing topic clusters, or add a new topic to start planning a new one.

What you get with HubSpot CMS, is all these existing tools boosted to further improve your SEO performance.

The HubSpot CMS is boosting everything

In the background, the HubSpot CMS is boosting everything.

It's delivering your web pages quickly, efficiently and satisfying the Google Search Ranking Indicator that keeps developers up at night... page speed optimisation.

This is important because page speed serves two critical purposes when it comes to SEO, and user experience.

First, users are more likely to leave a webpage if it takes a long time to load.

We've all experienced this in the past and we know people are not inclined to wait for a slow web page when there are so many more to choose from.

Secondly, page load speed is an important factor when it comes to search ranking. Google analyses the page load speed of websites and those which load quickly are favoured over those that don't - when all other things are equal.

For HubSpot this change is important because in previous years, the results thrown up by putting a HubSpot CMS site through Google Page Speed Optimiser were not a pretty sight.

Trust us, we got held up by this time and time again.

But in true HubSpot fashion, they listened to their customer feedback and the developer community.

The result is drastic changes to how everything works under the hood.

What's changed

What are these drastic changes and how are they revolutionising the way you work in HubSpot?

Here's the top changes that we think really make all the difference:

• They partnered with CloudFlare - the industry leader in distributed content delivery. This ensures that every single script, image and video is delivered to users' eyes via a lightning fast Content Delivery Network.
• They put in place automatic minifying of files and image etc, and combination of CSS and Javascript files.
• Advanced image compression that can handle almost anything an excitable marketer can throw at it. 

The best part is that you can enjoy all of this right out of the box, there's no need to configure any plugins or upgrade to use any add-ons, it just works... and your developers will love you for it just as they'll love you for the secure and reliable hosting.

And it gets better.

All of these improvements, and believe us, there are more to come, happen in the background without any need to manually update your site or install any new patches.

Your site simply keeps getting faster without you doing anything at all.

Ultimately this is another string in the bow of HubSpot CMS and is another reason it is getting further ahead of the other CMS platforms out there.

Yes, open-sourced alternatives like Wordpress still offer value depending on the type and complexity of site you're looking to build.

By the way, we've done a comparison between HubSpot CMS and Wordpress here so you can see how they stand up against each other.

But for the most part, the new features in HubSpot CMS Hub, particularly when it comes to increasing customisation options, makes it a safe bet for growing websites whether you're a scaling SME or established large scale enterprise.

If you're thinking about moving over to HubSpot, or don't think you're getting the most out of it, you might want to consider using a HubSpot Partner.

Download our guide below to find out the benefits of using a HubSpot Partner.