HubSpot SEO Tools: Easy to Use, But Are You Making These SEO Mistakes?

If your B2B website is built with HubSpot CMS, then this post is a MUST for you!

Being a Diamond Partner of HubSpot, we at Penguin provide various HubSpot implementation services including website building and SEO.

This post gathers the most common mistakes and misuses in the HubSpot CMS related to SEO.

HubSpot SEO - easy to use, easy to do wrong

HubSpot CMS is a great tool for maintaining a good B2B website for two main reasons: one: is the fact that it seamlessly integrates with all HubSpot marketing automation features. The other is the super-convenient content creation interface.

This interface is so convenient that in many cases the person creating or uploading the content to the website makes SEO mistakes with the same ease.

HubSpot SEO tools are available to every CMS user; however, many of them simply don’t use their SEO tools or tend to ignore them. Fixing SEO mistakes is doable, of course, we do it all the time, but why should you pay someone to fix mistakes that could be avoided? 

Even more important, if you make fewer SEO mistakes while uploading content, you have a chance to rank higher on the search results page (SERP) from the start –- now this is a great incentive to avoid HubSpot SEO mistakes.

Here are the most common HubSpot SEO mistakes we encounter daily:

HubSpot SEO mistakes with images

Common SEO practices pay attention to several parameters of images. These also apply to HubSpot SEO, of course.

Image Weight - Large images slow page upload speed and affect both user experience and search engine ranking.

A common SEO mistake we see is huge images (sometimes even 12Mb in weight) downloaded from an image stock service and uploaded as is to a blog post. Optimize the image! Example: a featured image of a blog post, 1200px wide should weigh around 100Kb….not 10MB.

A single website image shouldn’t be heavier than 100Kb or so. This is totally doable, it’s only a matter of attention and a tool. One free tool we recommend is EZGif.com.

Note: Although HubSpot CMS can automatically optimize image weight by converting it to WEBP format, search engines find the original image file with its original large weight.

ALT Text - This nice parameter was used to describe the image in times when it took ages to download it. Today, it is important for website accessibility and…. SEO.

ALT text is an additional text field in which we can describe the image to visitors with disabilities and search engines. Why should we skip such an important SEO opportunity?

Videos & Animated GIFs - The issue of page load time intensifies with the use of videos and animated GIFs. These can weigh much more than images.

A common mistake we see is a blurred video as a background of the hero header. Videos and GIFs are important, of course, but they also need to be optimized.

Here is an example taken from our own website showing two classic SEO mistakes in one image: This image screen size is 600px in width, yet the actual image uploaded to the page was 2400px wide (!) and almost 1Mb in weight.

The other mistake is the misuse of the ALT text field.

And here is the corrected version - it was converted to WEBP format, and now weighs only 26Kb (38 times lighter than the original) and a relevant ALT text was inserted.

No reduction in image quality on the screen.

HubSpot SEO mistakes with links

Hyperlinks, or put simply, links, are the basic building blocks of the world wide web. We all use them all the time in digital communications.

SEO defines best practices for using links inside our website content - here are some common HubSpot SEO mistakes with links:

Too many “dofollow” links - if your page/post contains a lot of external links, links to websites outside of yours, consider marking some of them as “No Follow”. This will instruct the search engine robot to continue crawling your website with fewer “distractions.” HubSpot provides a great tool to define the type of link—much more convenient than WordPress. (See example below.)

External links opened on the same window - This is a basic yet big mistake. External links from your website that are opened in the same window lead the visitor away from your website ( increasing the bounce rate at the same time).

Always use the HubSpot option of opening the link in a new window. Here is an example of a post built with a lot of external links (it is actually the most popular post on our blog “2023 Social Media Facts and Stats”).

Most of these links are defined as “nofollow”

HubSpot SEO mistakes with page settings

HubSpot CMS includes a setting tab for each page/post. The fields inside the settings tab are extremely essential for SEO, yet in many cases, they are wrongly configured or even worse, totally neglected.

Make sure that ALL of your pages or posts include the correct text fields inside the setting tab: title, meta description, and a featured image with ALT text as the main keyword. We recommend using a featured image even if it is not necessary for the specific page template - this image is displayed on social media when the content is shared. Needless to say that the featured image should not exceed 100Kb in weight. 

Pages with no meta title and a meta description will always rank in a low place, if at all.

HubSpot SEO mistakes with drafted content

This is definitely an interesting SEO mistake you should be aware of with HubSpot CMS. When we create drafted content. i.e., content that is still in design that is not public, we have to make sure that it is defined as “No Index.” Google will find such content (even if it’s a draft duplicate of the original one) and rank it as new fresh content.

In summary, organic traffic is very important for every website owner. Therefore, SEO should be done right. Since ranking high on SERPs can take time, usually months, the sooner you start your SEO effort the better - this includes avoiding mistakes in the uploading stage. HubSpot SEO tools are easy to use when you know which SEO mistakes to avoid. 

Need help with your SEO? Request an SEO Audit to get started.