Sept. 7, 2017—HubSpot, a provider of inbound marketing and sales software, announced the launch of Content Strategy, a new tool that helps marketers discover and validate topics to write about that match the way people now search.
For years, the best way to solidify a spot at the top of the results was to focus on creating multiple pieces of content focused on niche, long-tail keywords. HubSpot said. However, search engines have gotten much better at serving up results that provide value to the searcher, making it much harder to build authority solely based on those specific keywords.
A new topic-based model on creating content, called topic clustering, can help adapt and provide better results for people searching, and for marketers creating content. This approach helps marketers drive more traffic and also serves the search engine with better information architecture and more content the crawler can index.
"SEO best practices have changed drastically in the past five years. Unfortunately, many marketers are still using the same old tactics that worked a decade ago, but now only serve to clog up search results with irrelevant content and keep teams from hitting their goals," said Kipp Bodnar, chief marketing officer at HubSpot. "Content Strategy was born out of our own realization that the way we approach SEO had to change. By combining machine learning and hard data, Content Strategy empowers marketers to deliver better results and more traffic with more high-quality, targeted content."
Content Strategy aims to integrate the methodology right into the tool so marketers can not only learn what works for SEO, but easily apply it without an SEO consultant. The tool uses machine learning to help surface recommendations that are relevant to a user's business, and content that will perform well in search.
Using Sontent Strategy, HubSpot said marketers can:
- Discover topics to write about that are surfaced by HubSpot's machine learning technology, then easily organize them into a topic cluster.
- Optimize existing content and build clusters that help increase authority and organic traffic.
- Track the views and clicks on each piece of content, as well as the contacts and customers being generated by each topic cluster, to clearly determine what works and what doesn't.
