Sazbean

As Dharmesh Shah said in our interview, HubSpot sells a product, not a service, and intends on giving small businesses the tools they need to do their own search engine optimization (SEO).  HubSpot Inbound Marketing System has a three step approach:

1. Qualified Traffic – Traffic is nice, but if the visitors to your website are not going to purchase from you, they won’t make you any money.
2. Convert to Leads – Once you have qualified visitors, convert them into sales opportunities.
3. Measure & Optimize – Take a look at how well your strategy is doing, make adjustments and continue to improve.

How HubSpot helps accomplish these steps:

Qualified Traffic

• Keyword Grader – Keywords are very important to SEO, but need to be implemented properly to avoid spamming search engines (and getting blacklisted) and, more importantly, annoying your customers.  HubSpot’s keyword grader lets you enter up to 500 keywords which are then each graded based on their relevance (which you can assign), monthly search volume (how often is the keyword being searched on), difficulty (how many competitors are there for that keyword), cost per click (if you want to buy the keyword), and competitors view (which allows you to track keywords for up to 5 different websites).  The keyword grader will give you an idea of what keywords to use in content on your website in order to build up organic authority for those keywords.
• Link Grader Tool - Websites that link to your website help improve your search engine rankings.  This tool shows those incoming links and their quality in terms of SEO (the anchor text and title tags).
• Blog – One of the best ways to increase SEO is to post relevant content as frequently as possible.  Blogging is an easy way to regularly post valuable content.  HubSpot provides a hosted blogging platform which is very easy to use and incorporates proper SEO functionality and links to social networks.  Although hosted on HubSpot’s servers, the blog is counted in your SEO by using a sub-domain of your site (ex. blog.sazbean.com) and is fully compatible with outside analytics that use tagging methods (such as Google Analytics).

Convert to Leads

• Forms – Providing a way for your potential customers to make requests from your website is key to generating leads from your visitors.  Obviously the best way to get people to provide you with their information through a form is to offer them something in return – a free white paper, consultation, etc.
• Information – What your leads looked at, which forms they submitted, etc. helps you get a better idea of what each particular lead is interested in to help you tailor your communications to their needs.
• Conversions graph – How many of your visitors are converting to leads, and how many leads are converting to customers.
• Lead Funnel – Where and how many leads are in the process of converting them to a customer.

Measure & Optimize

• Traffic – Views, visits, leads, customers for your website.  This is pretty similar to other analytics programs (like Google), but it does allow you to add events to the graphs so you can account for marketing campaigns, blog entries, etc.
• Referrers – Understanding where you are getting traffic from is important since these links help your search engine ranking.
• Visits by Keywords – This will show you which keywords are working as far as getting traffic and converting to leads/customers.

Conclusion

HubSpot nicely integrates SEO information into one easy-to-use product. The pricetag, $750 for the first month, $250/month thereafter, includes about 4 hours of consulting time on SEO practices and how to effectively use HubSpot’s product.   Most companies will make up the $3500, which is cheaper than most SEO services, in converting just one lead to a customer.  If you are willing to dedicate 4-5 hours per week to SEO, HubSpot’s ease-of-use, dedication to educating their customers and the several hours of included consulting time are worth a look.

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