HubShots Episode 60: SEO in 2017, HubSpot Marketing Free, Ideal Content Lengths, How Not To Die

Welcome to Episode 60 of HubShots!

Welcome to HubShots, the podcast for marketing managers who use HubSpot hosted by Ian Jacob from Search and Be Found and Craig Bailey from XEN Systems.

Recorded: Monday 21 November 2016 | Published: Thursday 24 November 2016

Shot 1: Inbound Thought of the Week

Inbound quick takeaways.

Key value points from Rand Fishkin’s session:

http://content.inbound.com/content/how-to-keep-up-with-google

http://www.slideshare.net/randfish/keepng-up-wth-seo-n-2017-beyond

Keeping Up With SEO in 2017 & Beyond from Rand Fishkin

Some stats:

1.19% of searches on Google.com in US result in an ad click => ie 98% of searches don’t click on an ad.
51% of Google.com US search clicks, click on an organic link.
40% of searches result in no clicks eg weather results
25% of searches are in progress eg Chrome instant, so the searcher is still refining their search

Google’s keyword planner tool is becoming less useful (vague ranges) – https://moz.com/blog/google-keyword-planner-dirty-secrets

Tip:

Put your video on Wistia first and embed that on your website to get links and build your asset. Then add it to YouTube 3 months later.
Don’t ignore search channels just because they are not Google!
Understand searcher intent. Google is mastering this.
Links still matter. So be strategic about it. See Link Builder Strategic Roadmap:

Want more? Watch this from Rand about On-Page SEO in 2016: The 8 Principles for Success – Whiteboard Friday

Shot 2: HubSpot Feature/Tip of the Week

Lots of new stuff announced:

http://hubspot.com/new

HubSpot Marketing Free:

http://www.hubspot.com/products/marketing/free

Basically just LeadIn rebadged, but also cut down (eg only keeps 7 days of history in Free version).

Shot 3: Challenge of the Week

Emoji in podcast show notes will break iTunes parsing of the feed.

Apologies to our listeners when our last 3 episodes disappeared for a while.

Shot 4: Stat of the Week

Rand had a stat about blog post length in his session – but it was from 2015:

http://contentmarketinginstitute.com/2015/11/latest-blogging-trends/

According to an @orbiteers survey, a typical blog post is almost 900 words – 10% longer than in 2014

SnapAgency have an update for 2017 on what the best length is for 2017:

https://www.snapagency.com/blog/blog-posts-2017-whats-best-length-seo/

“Size does matter, but quality matters more. When you’re writing a blog post, remember that length is secondary to the quality of your post, the structure of the article, its readability, and its engagement level. In other words, focus on how long people actually spend on your post checking out images, video, or eye-catching lists and stats.

That being said, it pays to heed the fact that people like reading long form content. If you can regularly hit 1,000-1,500 words, along with occasional 2,500 words posts, I believe your overall results will be better.

Since prevalent stats generally indicate that 2,500 is really an ideal word count for a post in regards to search engine traffic, we’ll add this: for keywords you’ve identified as definite opportunities and that face a lot of competition, the ideal remains 2,500. “

Here’s a slightly dated chart of ideal lengths for content types:

Shot 5: Opinion(s) of the Week

If you want to appear smart about marketing, just talk about bots:

http://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/bots-major-growth-opportunity-agencies

Craig: I feel like Bots are this year’s snapchat. Last year I didn’t *get* snapchat, this year I do. At the moment I feel like I have no opinion about bots… I need to investigate further, deeply, quickly.