By John Bonini
Jan 3, 2013
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The following is an excerpt from IMPACT's popular ebook, "The Essential Guide for Mastering HubSpot." For more expert tips on strengthening the performance of your website, be sure to check out the full ebook.
It's 2013. And while the world certainly didn't end as the Mayan's predicted (or did they?), the world of marketing has certainly changed.
Your website should be acting as the central hub of your entire business. More and more consumers are conducting product research online, with Google all but replacing the Yellow Pages as the main source of consumer research.
Not sure how your website stacks up for having a strong year? Everything you need is right under your nose, as the HubSpot tools featured in the software all but guarantee successful tracking, measuring, and improvement of your website performance. All you need is a little guidance. That's where we come in!
If you're interested in turning the following tips into actual results, continue reading the full ebook.
Page Performance Tool
A lot of clients come to us here at IMPACT absolutely mystified by the whole SEO “thing”, and the HubSpot Page Performance Tool is one tool that we often use to help explain exactly what on-page SEO is and what each business owner needs to be reviewing and checking on his or her website to ensure that their site is ranking as high as it should.
The Page Performance Tool will:
- Check a page’s title, ensuring that it’s properly tagged and that it is of a good character length (for example, you never want your headline to exceed 70 characters)
- Review any meta descriptions and ensure that they aren’t too long, that they’re unique, and that it doesn’t contain the page title
- Ensure that header tags are optimized (i.e. that H1, H2, etc. tags are being utilized)
- Make sure that all Alt Tags for images are included (having Alt Tags can be one of the quickest and easiest ways to increase your SEO)
- Grade you on your page’s link anchor text
All of the above “check points” are necessary to ensure that your page is getting the best exposure possible. This tool, as with all other HubSpot tools, is fully integrated with other HubSpot tools. The tracking code (primarily for keyword tracking) and the CTA code make it easy for business owners and web developers to track the success of every aspect of the page, allowing people like yourself to make decisions on what needs to be changed, what doesn’t, and where the most (and least) conversions are coming in from.
The HubSpot Keyword Grader tool is also a “must have” as it works perfectly in conjunction with the Page Performance tool. Most of our clients find that using both tools alone can significantly improve both their understanding of how well their online marketing campaign is working, and their ROI.
While the Page Performance tool will answer several of the questions that you may have about the effectiveness of any given web page, it can be easy to get caught up in the data provided and feel a bit lost in the details. Our suggestion to our clients is to always start from the top to the bottom, meaning to start with the page title, then move to the meta description, and so on.
Some additional tips:
- To get a good “grade” on your page, make sure that you include your keyword phrase.
- If you use a different CRM, you can usually include the HubSpot tracking code to any website by logging into HubSpot, clicking on “Settings” and then clicking on “External Site Traffic Logging”. You can then copy the code from the HubSpot tracking pages and then past the tracking code in before the </body> tag on your page.If you need any additional help with your Page Performance tool, or need any help with further optimizing your page, give us here at IMPACT a shout for a free consultation.
Link Grader
The clients that we have who have never been involved with inbound marketing before are often perplexed by “inbound links”. Inbound links are incredibly important to your site’s ranking in search engines. Depending on the “quality” of the link that you receive from a visitor, your site can receive a “vote” which tells search engines like Google and Bing that yes, your site is a credible, quality website that’s worth a high page rank.
Unless you’ve invested a lot of time in online marketing courses or have studied the subject, you may have a hard time with actually being able to see which links are “good” and which aren’t – that is, until the HubSpot Link Grader was released. This tool really gives our clients a good understanding of how valuable the links that you are receiving are, whether it’s from visitors, from other people linking to you, and how many leads you’ve gotten from those sites that are linking to you. You can even see the anchor text of the link so that you can further work with the website to improve that link and get more “clicks”.
As with everything HubSpot, along with the tools comes important analytical data that you want and need that will allow you to not only see how many new links you’ve gotten and how you’re improving, but it also will help you spot new opportunities to get more inbound links too.
For example, if one page in particular isn’t driving in the inbound links, you can either choose to invest more time into optimizing and advertising that page to increase the amount of inbound links you get, or choose to ditch it altogether. Or seeing that you’re receiving a ton of links from one site (particularly if you run more than one page for a product, such as if you’re an affiliate marketer) may help you determine when to increase the push to sell more of a particular product or service.
Another great benefit to this tool is that seeing which web pages are getting more quality links can often help you determine what you’ve done “right” with one page, and where other pages can use some improvement.
Be on the look out for things like which CTAs you’re using, how a particular page is being promoted on your social media networks and blogs, as well as the web page design. If you feel that you need a second or third or tenth set of eyes to help you create the best pages possible, grab an associate or contact us at IMPACT for help on how to increase your ROI.
Keyword Analysis
Keywords are the root of success when it comes to your website. They’re important for search engine optimization, lead generation, blogging, and a number of other key aspects of any company’s online marketing campaign. As you likely already know, if you aren’t using the right keywords with your website, then your online business will suffer enormously.
If you’ve already dabbled with some of the many keyword tools out there, then you have probably already discovered that HubSpot’s Keyword Grader is one of the best (and definitely our preferred) keyword analysis tools out there. Using the Keyword Grader will help you:
- Get better page rankings
- Target the specific visitors and leads that you want
- Organize the content on your site or blog
- Create profitable PPC and other marketing campaigns
This keyword analysis tool not only allows you to find the best keywords for your site and track their progress over time (i.e. you can see the number of leads you generate per keyword or keyword phrase), but you can also check out things like the keywords that your competitors are ranking for. This is important, since you can then plan out exactly how you can target those keywords and take them out from the top ranking spots in the search engines and put your website in their place.
That being said, it’s easy for us at IMPACT who work with keywords daily to say “choose the best keywords”. How do you know which keywords are the best for you and which aren’t? As you can see from the picture above, the Keyword Grader lays everything out easily for you. You can choose keywords based on the CPC (cost per click) for your PPC (pay per click), campaign, choose the keyword by relevancy to your site, by the monthly searches or difficulty... the list goes on and on. Business owners can then decide which keywords they choose to us based on these statistics, or they can call us up here at IMPACT for a free consultation. We’ll discuss how you should be choosing the best keywords for your site and how to make full use of the Keyword Grader tool.
This tool supports all of the other HubSpot tools by providing you with the information that you need to know in order to get your site, your blog, your PPC campaigns, your landing pages, and other inbound marketing strategies ranking high in the search engines and getting found. What’s even more important is that this tool will show you exactly how the keywords are affecting your bottom line, and what your return on investment is for each keyword or keyword phrase that you use.
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