Fighting to be on the number one Google search results page can be tricky, however, it can be seriously helpful with increasing the sales of your products.
In HubSpot's state of marketing report 2021, 61% of B2B marketers stated that SEO and organic traffic generate more leads than any other marketing initiative.On the first page, the first five results account for 67.60% of all the clicks for that search term. Furthermore,75% of users never scroll past the first page of search results.
There are a number of statistics that prove SEO is the most effective way to increase visits to your website and you should do everything in your power to make sure your website is performing at its best.
In this guide I will take you through how to use the SEO recommendations tab in HubSpot. I will explain how to fix some of the issues you may come across. So let's get started!
1) In HubSpot go to Marketing > Website > SEO
2) Scan or re-scan your website - this can take some time so leave it running and come back to it after a few hours.
3) Once it has finished scanning, click view recommendations
On the left hand side you can see this menu with the breakdown of recommendations.
Most of the recommendations have a good description to help you fix the issues. Below is a more thorough list of helpful information to fix some of the issues you may encounter.
Generally, this means some online content is wider than a mobile screen. In this screenshot below you can see the text is too big for mobile devices which creates this white block on the right hand side.
Alternatively, you can set the font size in the content editor of the page by highlighting the text > more > px drop down.
Bear in mind, it won’t always be the text size that causes these issues. If you do get into difficulty, seek the help of a developer or contact HubSpot support.
HubSpot recommends a minimum of 48px by 48px for buttons; this includes calls to actions, slider arrows, navigation buttons, menu items, footer links and anything else that might be clickable.
To fix these issues you can:
Click view pages > find the first page > click view elements
This will give you a list of elements that need to be made bigger on mobile devices.
In most cases it will be obvious which button needs attention. However if you struggle to find it you can follow the steps below.
Links become broken if someone has deleted a page or it simply doesn’t exist.
Next to each page in your list in the SEO tools, there should be a button to view the broken link.
1) Copy the broken link.
2) Click the link to open that page.
3) Right click and select inspect (right at the bottom).
4) Hold ctrl (PC) or cmd (MAC) on your keyboard and hit the ‘f’ key.
5) Paste your link and it should now highlight the link that is broken.
This tool checks how images are being displayed and detects if they are distorted. Click on the view image button on the first page in the list.
This gives you really useful information about the image and how it is displayed. To fix this problem you could resize the image as 100 x 100px, for example, and replace it in the file manager, or in this case I opened the affected page and edited the code surrounding the image.
You can see that the width and height of the image is set to 100px and I will change that to 118 x 99.
Reminder: Do not forget to check your page again after changing the image or width and height to make sure everything is ok.
Reducing layout shifts is a part of page speed: I have written a separate blog called How to speed up your HubSpot website.
This can happen when there are broken links or the images and/or files have been moved and are not updated on the page.
If you need to fix images:
If you need to fix CSS or JS files:
If you link to external websites (such as Twitter) and make it open in a new tab you should add the rel="noopener" or rel="noreferrer" to the link.
To do that, go to the page with the link > open the edit page > find the link.
Tick the ‘open link in a new tab’ - then go to advanced and make sure regular or no follow is ticked.
Regular will add “noopener” which helps with security, and no follow will add noreferrer which stops data from being sent to the next website.
For example, if you have a link that goes to Twitter but you do not want to tell Twitter that it came from your website, you would add a noreferrer.
In most cases you just want the noopener on external links so in this case select “regular”.
Every page on your website should have a H1 (title) which is needed to achieve good SEO rankings. If your page does not have this HubSpot will highlight this.
If the page is a blog post or a standard page you should be able to add a h1 tag in the editor on a page-by-page basis:
If it is a system page such as 404 or search results
Once there, you will be met with the template manager inside of design tools. On the right hand side you can search for modules (like you would in a page) and add or update them by clicking on them. You can drag and drop new modules into the template. Once done, hit publish and check it has worked.
Other on-page SEO issues can be fixed by using the techniques above and the list in the SEO tab should tell you what needs to be done.
SEO is so important for your website and is the best tool for improving web traffic and sales online. If you have a HubSpot website you can utilise the SEO recommendations tool to improve your website in a number of ways. It may take time but will be worth it in the long run.
Once you have gone through the list of problems on your site and fixed them you can rescan your site to see if they are fixed.
Interested in building a HubSpot website? We are here to help. As a platinum partner, we have the experience and expertise to help you get started with HubSpot.