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:
- 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.
- Convert to Leads – Once you have qualified visitors, convert them into sales opportunities.
- 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.
Technorati Tags: HubSpot, inbound marketing, internet marketing, seo
{ 1 trackback }
{ 7 comments }
Great summary, Sarah. All of us at HubSpot appreciate you taking the time to understand and write this up. Let us know if we can help you with anything.
Also, it’s probably important to note that we work with a lot of web design, development and internet marketing services firms. Many times, it makes sense for small and mid sized businesses to use HubSpot for their infrastructure, tap the training as needed and hire a 3rd party firm to help them use our tools more effectively. We think these firms add a lot of value and we’re much more interested in working together to help our mutual clients.
Peter – Thanks so much taking the time to share the extra information. I agree that businesses should only take on as much as they feel comfortable with. If they decide to use a 3rd party firm, HubSpot may still be a great way to check up on what they’re doing or at least to gain a better understanding of how customers and visitors are using their website.
I ran across another set of analytics tool recently. http://www.rhinoseo.com I created an account just to test it out since it was free. I’ve had experience with hubspot’s 2 weeks of setup and hours of consulting, but with Rhino Analytics I was up and running in about ten minutes. They seem to provide every service of hubspot’s $250 monthly plan… only that is is free. It did say it was in beta though. Cosidering the price, I don’t mind the few ads, which I assume is to make some kind of income off it?
Anyway… I’d say check them out.
Bill, Rhino Analytics looks interesting. I’ll take a closer look. Thanks for the comment and for reading.
RhinoSEO free? Now it's $500/month minimum and given that I didn't find them when I search for inbound marketing, I don't know how good they could possibly be at doing their own SEO.
Hubspot is undoubtedly a great system. The problem I had was the fact that as a marketing person who needs the tools to use for several clients, the monthly price and demand of a year upfront pay put too much overhead into providing the service for my clients.
If you like Hubspot you should give rhinoseo.com a try. The tools are very similar to hubspot, but not as expensive and a marketing person has the ability to add multiple domains and ‘white label’ brand it
Read more: http://www.brighthub.com/internet/web-developme...
It's not really a product, though. And they're not entirely honest in the way that they sell it. In their dog & pony shows, they say things like “the hubspot blog is on YOUR SITE” shortly before they say “and we host it all” — these are fundamentally inconsistent statements.
It's also really hard to get quality information about how it works. I've spent several hours trying to evaluate it so far because some sales person convinced one of my bosses that hubspot would solve all our problems, and I'm having a hard time seeing how it even begins to address them. Our problem: Rouding up and tracking all the social media traffic on our clients' blogs & sites. Hours into the eval, after two hours of webinars (that were not easy to get to), I still don't know if we can do that without converting our clients to “the Hubspot software.” (I.e., spending from $3k to $6k per year to put our client's content into Hubspot's database.)
Also, on that note, this hosted solution thing is a dead loss, as far as I'm concerned. They need to integrate with major CMSs like Wordpress, Drupal, DotNetNuke, Joomla, etc., rather than trying to force people to use their hosted solution. People would still pay for that. (The multiple platform support issue is really more of a non-issue if you understand the technology. Even the optimization widget could be implemented using shared code — see Zemanta for an example of how.)
Comments on this entry are closed.