Using HubSpot for SEO in Education

We all know how important it is to be as high on the search engine results page as possible. By making adjustments to your website and the content that's on it, you can assist your school, college or university in being shown when a prospective parent or student is looking online. This optimisation is known as 'SEO'. (We have some great topics surrounding SEO below, which we also recommend you read)

• How to: Local SEO - quick tips for education marketers

• On-page SEO: an action plan for education marketers

• SEO: making the most of your school website

Search Engine Optimisation (or SEO) is a great cost-effective form of marketing, and often you can see positive results relatively quickly by making several adjustments to your website. There are a few great tools out there that specialise in helping businesses with their SEO (SEMRush & Moz for example).

These tools are often expensive, however, and can be overwhelming for those new to online website optimisation. HubSpot is fantastic for a lot of things, and its SEO tools are no exception. Whilst we wouldn't necessarily recommend buying HubSpot exclusively for this tool, it is fantastic for those already using the CRM or looking to move.

I've also made this video guide which covers the SEO tools if you'd prefer to watch that instead. Feel free to have a look through, and get in touch if you have any questions:

Recommendations tab

The recommendations tab is great for quickly identifying quick wins that you can make to your website, to improve its performance within search engine results pages. With this tool, you can scan your website, revealing a list of improvements you can make to improve its speed, accessibility or experience. It's common for HubSpot to throw up quite a large number of errors even for well-optimised websites, so don't be alarmed if you see 10s, or even 100s of errors after scanning your school, college or university.

Some of these changes may be outside of your skillset, which is why you can filter by job role, to find improvements you can make yourself. 'Marketer' & 'Marketer*' roles are suited for those who know their way around their website and are confident making adjustments.

The 'Developer' role, however, is suited for those with more of a technical understanding of how websites are built. You can also filter by impact and difficulty, which is fantastic for finding higher priority changes. We always recommend filtering these by a 'low difficulty' and a 'high impact' first, as these are often relatively low-effort changes which can have a big impact. If you've made some changes and want to update the recommendations tab, you can do so by rescanning.

Whilst a website is under a rescan, you won't be able to see any recommendations, so we would only suggest doing this if you're planning to continue your on-site SEO optimisation. It's a great place to start if you're looking to improve your website.

Analyse tab

HubSpot's second SEO tool is a fairly new one, which is called the Analyse tab. This essentially allows you to link your Google Search Console account (a great free SEO tool!) to your HubSpot account, to view various statistics on your website's performance.

Once connected, you're presented with an area graph to view your website analytics, which can be filtered by impressions, clicks or even average search position. Below the graph, there's also a table showing your web pages driving the most traffic to your website, which can be useful when figuring out which aspects of your website may require the most attention. We recommend you connect your Google Search Console account if you have one and give this tool a go!

Topics tab

Topic clusters are a great tool to use when putting together an SEO strategy. Essentially, a topic cluster is a group of content (webpages or blogs) which centres around one key topic; this topic usually sits on what's known as a 'Pillar page'. The goal is to pick a topic or phrase that is relevant to your school, college or university, and create content to support this topic to build your website's relevance to the keyword.

For example, if you're a school in Leeds, you may want to increase your position in SERPs (search engine results pages) for the keyword of 'Best School in Leeds'. In order to do this, you'd first choose or create a page from your site which is relevant to this topic, and then you'd build and internally link other relevant website content. For example, this school could create a blog article focused on 'What School X does differently to other schools in Leeds'. The blog can link to the pillar page, and vice versa. Each time a relevant internal link is added to your website, you strengthen your website by showing to SERPs that your website considers an array of relevant content relating to that topic. The more of this you do, the more success you'll have when it comes to search engine optimisation.

A tip...

The links between the pieces of content on your website are visualised with lines connected back to the key topic. If the line is green, it indicates that a webpage, blog or knowledge base article is linking back to your pillar page. However, we do recommend your pillar page also link back to these pages, but only where it is relevant to do so. Remember, these internal links should bring value to those viewing your website.

Another bonus of using the topic cluster tool is that it can inadvertently help you to find gaps within your content. When connecting relevant pages and articles together on your site, you may realise that more content could be needed in order to support a specific topic, or you may find a keyword with a great search volume, which could make up its own topic cluster.

The topic cluster allows you to visualise the connections between pieces of content on your site, and whilst the tool won't directly have a positive impact on your optimisation, it can help to map out your plan for success. For each cluster, HubSpot pulls insights into a keyword's monthly search volume, which can be fantastic for identifying which phrases to target based on their popularity. Unlike recommendations, the topic clusters won't allow you to make any 'quick wins' but long term, this is something that can have a big impact on your visibility in search engines.

To conclude...

At the time of writing this blog, these are all of the SEO tools that HubSpot have to offer, and whilst they may not be as in-depth as specialist tools, they certainly give you actionable insight into your web optimisation, so you can start taking action when it comes to climbing the search ladder. You also have tools to measure the success of your changes, which can be great for identifying how successful your optimisation has been. We highly encourage all schools, colleges and universities to begin looking at optimising their website and its content if they haven't already. Of course, if you have any questions on anything SEO-related (HubSpot or not) feel free to get in touch, and I'd be happy to answer any questions!