After a year and half of flat traffic at HubSpot, Aja Frost, now the Head of Content SEO at HubSpot, implemented a new “organic first” strategy, which increased the organic traffic to HubSpot’s blog from 4.1 million unique monthly visitors to 6.3 million in less than 10 months. In this episode, I grill Aja on the details of how they were able to achieve that extraordinary increase in organic traffic.
By the way, Aja just wrote a new book on remote work, “Work from Home Hacks.” In it, she shares 500 easy ways to get organized, stay productive, and maintain a work/life balance while working from home. Pre-order it now.
In episode 98, you’ll learn:
- How HubSpot went from 4.1 million unique monthly visitors to 6.3 million in less than 10 months.
- Why HubSpot only publishes four main buckets of content
- How they approach deleting, merging, and updating old content
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Content treadmill is when you keep publishing content that drives traffic momentarily but flattens out over time. It’s not sustainable traffic. – @ajavuu from @GrowthToday podcast. Get the full podcast episode 👇 Click To Tweet Be really intentional with SEO. Just because it works for someone else's business doesn't mean it's going to be a lot of value for you. – @ajavuu from @GrowthToday podcast. Get the full episode 👇 Click To TweetOur sponsor for this episode
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Key Discussion Points
- [02:41] How Aja became the Head of Content SEO at HubSpot
- [04:51] How HubSpot went from 4.1 million unique monthly visitors to 6.3 million in less than 10 months
- [07:32] Why was HubSpot’s traffic flat for a year prior to that?
- [09:35] How did they get out of the “content treadmill”?
- [11:37] How does Aja perform keyword research for content?
- [15:55] What are the four main buckets of content that HubSpot publishes and why they only publish content into those buckets?
- [20:27] With Google become more strict with manipulated external links, should companies still guest blog?
- [22:37] Aja shares her thoughts on SEMRush incident with selling guest posts and links
- [27:04] What’s HubSpot’s process for historical optimization (refreshing old content for search engines)?
- [33:32] How do you increase your chance of getting your content as Google’s featured snippet?
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About Aja Frost
Aja Frost is the Head of Content SEO at HubSpot. Aja joined HubSpot in 2016 as a writer on the Sales Blog. One year later, she was promoted to Editor. Aja pioneered a new “organic first” strategy that helped the Sales Blog break through a 1.5-year traffic plateau.