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The HubSpot Blog is one of the largest and most visited
B2B sites on the internet.
Want to know how we did it?
Well, I've got good news.
The answer isn't just more blogging.
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What's up?
It's Jamal from HubSpot.
In this video, I'm going to walk you
through some of the techniques HubSpot uses
to earn organic blog traffic that top seven million views
month after month.
Check out the links in the description for tools
you can use to start increasing your traffic right now.
And as always, if you like this video,
give it a like and subscribe to the HubSpot YouTube channel.
If you're watching this video, you probably
already understand the importance
of blogging to your inbound marketing strategy.
A high performing blog brings traffic to your business,
establishes authority with potential customers,
and drives leads that can turn into real dollars.
And this isn't monopoly money, because if it was, I'd be rich.
But blog traffic doesn't appear overnight.
Even HubSpot started from scratch,
posting consistent content since before we even
had a product to sell.
Over the past 15 years, we've learned a lot about what works
and what doesn't to make your blog a success.
So if you've been blogging for a while
and you're having a hard time getting to that next level,
we have some strategies that will work.
And if you're new to the blogging game,
consider what I'm about to teach you
to be a shortcut that will help you catch
the competition in no time.
The strategy I'm going to explain
can be divided into four tactics--
pillar-cluster construction, organic-first content,
optimizing for search engine results page, or SERP,
and historical optimization.
These methods can all be applied to your existing blog practice.
You don't have to do any additional blogging.
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How do we know it works?
Because we used these methods to revive the HubSpot Blog.
Let's go back to the year of 2017,
before Dogecoin was a thing.
After a decade of steady growth, the HubSpot Blog hit a slump.
Suddenly traffic was not just plateauing but actually
declining.
Oh no.
And it wasn't just the HubSpot Blog.
Blogs across the internet were losing steam
as conversational search evolved, SERP pages changed,
and social media algorithms began
to favor more native content.
What were the hardworking bloggers of the internet to do?
At HubSpot, we got busy figuring out solutions,
and they're still working today.
The first step is organizing your blog
into a pillar-cluster model.
In a pillar-cluster model, your blog
is organized into a collection of pillar-content
around which clusters of related posts are written.
For example, you might have a pillar topic
like Instagram marketing.
So you have a page with a really clear URL path,
like /instagram-marketing.
This pillar page offers a broad overview of the topic.
Next, write a cluster of related blog posts
that take deeper dives into specific parts of the pillar
topic.
Things like, "The Anatomy of the Perfect Instagram
Profile," "How to Write Good Instagram Captions," "8
Bookmarkable Tips for Perfecting Your Copy," and, "How to Use
Instagram Stories--
A Simple Guide for Marketers."
As you're writing these cluster pages,
you want to create hyperlinks between each blog post
in the pillar page as well as between the cluster
pages themselves.
When you're done, you'll have created an elaborate web
of information that captures the attention of your users
and the search engine bots.
Yeah, I feel like they should call this, like,
the webslinging method, right?
It was staring them in the face, and they fumbled that one.
Not only does the pillar-content model
create a great user experience that works well with search,
it's also a convenient way to plan content in the future.
HubSpot Blog has over 10,000 posts
and we're still finding pillars and clusters
to create every quarter.
If your blog is new, you might wonder how many pillars
you should start with.
Honestly, it depends on your business.
One way to think about it is every product
or service you provide should have at least two topic
pillars.
Or think about it as one topic pillar per feature.
So if your product is, say a fitness app,
your blog should have at least two pillars-- one about
exercise and one about diet.
In truth, you'd probably want to break it
down into dozens of pillars, like strength, cardio,
recovery, carbs, hydration, recipes, so on and so forth.
Any subject that you could write multiple articles
about from different angles deserves its own pillar.
Consider any topic gap or something
that is interesting to your audience
and relevant to your product as a potential content
pillar for your blog.
With so much potential material, you
might need help deciding what topics to focus on each month.
The answer is the same no matter how big
or how small your blog is.
It's called organic-first content.
Organic-first content means selecting your content based
primarily on how it will perform in search, either now
or in the future.
Most blogs chase traffic based on trending topics.
Instead, we focus on content that will draw eyeballs
over the long term.
Long-term eyeballs.
That can mean researching relevant topics that
might not have high search volume now but will
in the coming months and years.
Things like artificial intelligence and blockchain.
Could also mean identifying gaps in content
where there is already interest in a topic but nobody
is adequately covering it.
They're playing checkers while we're over here playing chess.
It's not even regular chess, it's 4D chess.
Chess through space-time.
That's a checkmate in the past.
Google that.
HubSpot's organic-first method starts
with something we like to call the "Blog Insights Report."
The "Blog Insights Report" is a document
we use to identify what we should be blogging
about each quarter based on opportunities
for organic search.
Our team does this systematically
by identifying SEO-friendly keywords
based on metrics like monthly search volume, MSV,
and keyword difficulty.
And the "Blog Insights Report" doesn't just
focus on keywords that are popular now.
It helps identify search queries that
will be more popular in the future, helping you
get ahead of the competition in the race for that number
one search engine result.
Now, the question is how effective is the "Blog Insights
Report."
Since we started using it in 2018 to plan our content,
the organic keywords we rank for on page one of Google
have grown substantially.
That is incredible growth for a blog that was losing traffic
just one year earlier.
If you're ready to try your hand at creating your own "Blog
Insights Report," then check out the link
to the Search Insights Report course at HubSpot Academy
in the description below.
It'll take you step-by-step through creating your own
"Blog Insights Report," which provide a clear path for what
you need to be blogging about.
Once you're creating organic-first content focused
on SEO, you want to format that content to maximize stickiness
on Google search engine result page.
It used to be that the first page for any query
contain 10 results, with possibly
an ad or two at the top.
All you had to do was get your content
into the top few results using traditional SEO practices,
and you were guaranteed traffic.
Yeah, it ain't really like that anymore.
In recent years, Google has been adding features
that take up space and attention that would otherwise
go to your content.
Tools like featured snippet, related questions, and image
packs all push organic results farther down the page.
And they even reduce the number of organic search results
that appear on the first page.
According to one study, the number
of organic listings displayed on the first Google results page
was reduced from 10 to 7 on more than 18% of searches.
That's an overall reduction in organic search results
of 5.5%, which makes some SEO marketers more than a little
nervous.
Personally, I'm paralyzed with fear.
Good news is HubSpot has figured out
how to take advantage of these new SERP tools
to actually increase your organic reach.
Start by taking a look at featured snippets
as well as related questions, which are actually just
a series of featured snippets.
The function of the featured snippet
is to give users quick answers to their questions
without having to leave Google.
This was first implemented so that voice assistance
devices like Google Home could function properly.
Hey Google, what is inbound marketing?
Inbound marketing is a business methodology
that attracts customers by creating valuable content
and experiences tailored to them.
Featured snippets were later integrated
into desktop and mobile search, and to everyone's surprise,
the snippets actually increased the click-through rate
by an average of 114%.
Dang.
That means capturing the featured snippets
lot can be a big way to drive traffic to your blog.
That's why we created the Featured Snippet module
as part of the HubSpot CMS.
Just format the headline of the module as a question
and make the answer 54 to 58 words long.
Even if you don't use the HubSpot CMS-- which you should
consider doing-- applying best practices for headings
and paragraph tags will greatly increase
your chances of earning that coveted featured snippets spot.
Another best practice that too many bloggers skip
is properly tagging images to get into the SERP image pack.
So make sure that the images in your blog posts
have descriptive filenames and clear Alt text.
That provides both context and clarity to the image.
You can try including keywords but don't force it
or Google could actually end up penalizing you.
Every technique we've talked about so far
is designed to help you make your new content more
effective.
But what if I told you there's something
you can do to improve your blog traffic that doesn't involve
writing new posts at all?
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I'm talking about historical optimization.
Historical optimization is a process
by which you revisit your old blog content, updating
it to improve both traffic and lead generation
based on the data.
We started doing historical optimization on the HubSpot
Blog as part of the overall growth strategy,
and the results were genuinely jaw dropping.
Leads generated by the freshly optimized content more than
doubled, and organic search views
on that historical content grew by 104%.
To conduct your own historical organization,
start by reviewing your high-intent, high-lead
generating posts to make sure the content remains relevant.
You can also identify falling traffic posts
and identify them to stay competitive in SERP.
When updating a post, be sure to do the following-- add
fresh content and make sure that all existing content is still
relevant, check that any data is high quality and no more
than two years old, update images and make
sure they're optimized for the SERPs, and make sure
all links are still working.
There's a lesson on historical optimization
in HubSpot Academy's SEO Training course
that'll walk you step-by-step through the entire process.
Can find a link in the description below.
Of course, you'll still need to create new content
while optimizing the old.
But by combining historical optimization
with pillar-cluster construction,
organic-first content, and SERP optimization,
you'll be on the same path that took
HubSpot's Blog to over seven million viewers each and every
month.
Now, I'll see you at the top of the search,
just not above mine.
See next time.
It's dusty in this house.
Words aren't hard.
Once you're creating--
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