Aja Frost (@ajavuu) is the senior SEO strategies at Hubspot, she joined the SEO team there 1.5 years ago but has been with HubSpot for over three years. Aja comes from a freelance writing background before she did SEO.
Aja saw that the company's blog traffic was pretty flat and noticed that Google organic traffic can be a nice driver of traffic. She came up with a content SEO strategy while at that team and then moved over to the SEO team to lead up this initiative more company wide. She partnered up the blogging team and the SEO team to create a "search insights report" that the blogging team used as a map for developing new content. The SEO team would feed all the SEO relevant details the blogger needed for SEO purposes to write excellent search friendly content. This lead to almost immediate results in organic search. Specifically 4.1 million unique monthly visitors to the blog to 6.3 million in a short period of time.
Topic Cluster Framework - also known as content silos. You create content universes, with pillar pages that have higher level content on the topic and then you drill deeper into that topic into the subtopics with blog posts. She describes a lot of how SEOs are now building content for sites, and she did this well before it was popular to do so.
We then talked about featured snippets, and HubSpot will optimize for one featured snippet per content page. HubSpot said featured snippets do drive a significant amount of traffic and it is something HubSpot finds it to be important.
HubSpot also looks to see what images rank in the core search results and if there are images ranking there, HubSpot will aim to optimize for those images. The company set up templates to easily make these images so the company can quickly make images that would rank well for those images. They also reach out to those who use their images and ask those people to link back to the source, which helps with links. The company is also optimizing for Google video suggested clips and is testing it significantly, by answering specific questions.
Here is the video:
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Forum discussion at YouTube.
