Podcast With Victor Pan

AI in SEO: HubSpot’s Cautious Yet Innovative Strategy with Victor Pan

Show Notes

Unlock HubSpot's SEO secrets and discover how to turn branded traffic into a gold mine with Victor Pan, Principal Marketing Manager for SEO at HubSpot. In this exclusive interview, Victor shares invaluable insights from his journey from startup SEO to managing global search strategies for one of tech's biggest brands.

Learn how HubSpot approaches branded traffic optimization, international SEO challenges, and the evolution of search intent. Victor reveals surprising discoveries about login page optimization and knowledge base content that generated significant revenue. Get insider perspectives on how HubSpot handles multilingual SEO across different markets and adapts to Google's evolving search landscape.

Gain practical insights on:

• Maximizing branded search traffic potential
• International SEO strategy implementation
• Knowledge base optimization for revenue
• Login page conversion opportunities
• Cross-team collaboration for SEO success
• AI's impact on search behavior
• Future of SEO and content strategy

Perfect for digital marketers, SEO professionals, and business owners looking to enhance their search presence. Victor shares candid experiences from his time at WordStream, and HubSpot, offering a unique perspective on both agency and in-house SEO strategies.

Join us for this knowledge-packed session where we explore how HubSpot maintains its dominant search presence while adapting to the changing SEO landscape and emerging AI technologies.

Chapters:

00:00 - Intro

00:47 - Early Days of SEO

05:59 - HubSpot SEO Team

07:27 - Agency vs In-House SEO

10:10 - Changes in SEO Over the Years

12:27 - Key Factors for SEO Success

15:38 - HubSpot's Evolving SEO Approach

20:48 - International SEO Challenges

30:00 - Successful SEO Strategies

30:12 - Measuring SEO Value

32:50 - Q&A on SEO Topics

34:36 - Evolution of Search Intent

38:33 - SEO and User Experience

42:18 - AI in SEO Strategies

46:21 - Importance of Backlinks

48:59 - Rapid Fire Insights

52:50 - Final Question

53:05 - Closing Remarks

54:20 - Thank You to Victor Pan

54:25 - End

Transcript

Intro

0:00 welcome to the agency Insider show where we dive deep into the world of digital marketing and SE I'm your host nnit

0:06 kosel and today we have a very special guest joining us Victor ban principal

0:12 Marketing Manager for SEO at HubSpot Victor has an impressive background in the industry having worked with Fortune

0:17 500 companies and being interviewed by Major Publications like routers and Mashable he's known for his Innovative

0:24 approach to SEO and his commitment to creating a Kinder gentler internet

0:32 [Applause] [Music]

0:37 [Applause] [Music] Victor welcome to the show oh thanks for

0:43 having me uh glad to be here yeah Victor you had a quite an interesting journey

Early Days of SEO

0:48 in the world of su can you take us through your career path from your early days to your current role at H sport

0:55 yeah sure uh so uh I'm tanese American and I grew up in Taiwan in an

1:01 international school and so hence you might notice I don't really have an accent uh and after I graduated from

1:09 college in Boston uh I went to work at a startup uh by the name of wstream some

1:15 of uh the internet marketing folks might know because back in the day that was a site that ranked for a lot of internet

1:21 marketing ter um terms and right I remember there were about

1:26 like 32 people in the office when I went in and I went in as an unpa intern and

1:32 two weeks in they're like we're going to hire you so uh I got to uh learn a lot

1:38 from a mentor uh uh who was a CTO of the company at the time um Larry Kim and we

1:45 had really aggressive goals like we had to grow double digits month over month because you're in a startup and so

1:52 anything was fair game and back then uh SEO back then was uh a lot of more

2:00 spammy things right uh Google Plus was just coming out and we're like okay are

2:05 these signals can we game these signals we didn't really think about like whether or not I was right or wrong we

2:11 were just trying to rank better and so uh I was there for two years I tested a

2:16 lot of things learned a lot of things uh we ranked for a lot of keywords then I worked at uh Catalyst search marketing

2:25 that was then rebranded to Catalyst digital they're part of group M which is also a part of uh wpp PLC uh one of the

2:33 largest media buying agencies in the world that's publicly traded based in the UK and that was where I uh got to

2:40 work with Fortune 500 companies as you mentioned in uh the intro um my main

2:46 clients were in Oral Care so in the US or internationally that would be your Crest properties so Crest toothpaste

2:53 oral be to electric toothbrushes and my favorite was actually uh denture cream

2:59 um fix it in and that's my favorite because it's different like usage data

3:05 there you're like oh these people are coming from Internet Explorer or like oh these people don't like modern web

3:12 design they like their website the way they are and it was really funny because that was one of these subsites that

3:19 actually had a forum where their customers were going in and sharing with

3:24 other customers like uh life without you know uh life with basically and it was

3:31 kind of cute right but of course once you Rebrand or you update things all these older generation folks I don't

3:37 know if you ever played like tech support for your parents or your grandparents they're always calling you like why is this this working anymore we

3:43 lost a lot of those uh those people um when we did a whole redesign but that's another thing altoe and that after a

3:51 stint of doing like a major migration where Crest properties had like Crest 3D

3:56 Health Crest Complete um Prest Pro Health we actually merged

4:02 all those sites into one site we saw a huge traffic boost uh when we did that

4:09 consolidation and uh it was funny because uh I remember there were like five different articles on gingivitis

4:15 for all these different sub Brands and we had Consolidated into one we had started building out topic clusters of

4:22 like content in a library that made a lot more sense uh that had mentions of

4:27 uh you know related products to what Crest offers and we also had like you know PDF printable

4:34 versions for these different dental offices again thinking about like who your audience is and how to make that

4:40 content helpful uh so that was like a great experience and traffic was up everyone's really happy but uh HubSpot

4:48 had an opportunity I was reached out uh who then on someone who then became my manager uh Matthew Barbie and he was

4:55 saying like hey here's HubSpot um hubspot's changed a lot back then it was only selling a single piece of marketing

5:03 software and there's this almost like a startup inside of HubSpot that was doing a sales or CRM software and we'd like

5:12 you to join the team and rank for CRM keywords and uh for the next eight years

5:18 uh you know uh I've been at HubSpot doing a lot of interesting

5:24 things yes I mean I remember when we were doing optimization H sport with pop

5:29 up everywhere and now I know the reason why uh I wouldn't say so that it's all

5:35 me I would definitely say everything takes a team and when you have a strong brand uh it makes life a lot easier than

5:42 if you were a startup that had to figure out how to get a lot of back links how to really have a catered uh like an

5:50 audience that you could email and that would stay engaged and uh having a social presence that you know again

5:56 you're starting from scratch you have to build a lot of those things up so now how big is the Su team at

HubSpot SEO Team

6:02 HubSpot uh that's a great question uh there are a lot of gross marketers in

6:08 HubSpot right now that have an SEO skill set so uh that's uh I would say it's you

6:17 know as the number of people that have like an SEO background I'd say it's probably over two dozen and that's

6:23 because we also have International Teams where we don't think it's right for like someone like me who only speaks Mandarin

6:31 and English to optimize content from like uh different locals where there's

6:37 cultural implications that you know I would definitely miss than someone else uh who was more familiar with those

6:44 markets or like just just think about Spanish like the way our sites are set up it's not we're targeted for just

6:53 Spain there's also like Mexican Spanish which is very different from like

7:00 uh you know European Spanish and then uh Southern Americans like South American

7:08 Spanish and those are nuances that I would I know they exist but I wouldn't

7:13 be able to do correct do that Justice uh and yeah therefore it's very

7:19 important to have people that speak and understand that language okay now uh now having worked

Agency vs In-House SEO

7:28 with both agencies and in-house teams what do you see as the main difference and challenges in these environments uh

7:35 when it comes to se uh yeah I think with agencies you're limited to your statement of work or

7:43 sfw um and you want to please your client right

7:50 like and your client uh depending on the size of your client uh has limited

7:56 resources or is stuck to uh uh uh a Cadence maybe like maybe a

8:04 yearly planning cycle or that was the case for pro and gamble like May was

8:09 kind of when we knew what our budgets would be whether or not the content briefs we were pitching would go through

8:15 or all these other things and if your client just doesn't have that brand manager doesn't have that budget then

8:21 you know nothing's gonna be moving and if they do and they're happy with that relationship you

8:28 um uh kind of raise with them then they can Implement whereas an

8:33 in-house uh at least at HubSpot it's about prioritization right like hey what is

8:40 the ROI of this thing that you forecast can actually do and then based off of all these other priorities let's figure

8:46 out what we should be doing uh and how much of this requires cross team collaboration versus what are things you

8:52 can jump to do today and validate with something what we call like a MVP a

8:58 minimal viable product or experience where uh maybe it was back

9:03 then we're like hey can we consistently rank better for Featured snippet what is that process look like can we have a win

9:09 rate higher than average where it's not just a coin flip and only then when you can prove that yes we can consistently

9:16 do that what are the elements of that do we then invest and say like hey this role is out across the hbot blog for

9:22 example um so I guess that's like the big difference right when it's in-house

9:27 you can have these little tests roll up bigger things and to pitch that as a bigger project in an agency you're the

9:33 subject matter expert you need to come in with like this is going to work

9:39 versus this might work I need you to put in like several bets of like this could or could not work um and startups that's

9:47 a whole Nutter story that's different from typical in-house and for like a

9:53 startup is anything goes right you have to grow you figure out how to get the resources and if it makes sense we'll

10:00 throw some money at it and see like if I put a dollar in we I'll get $2 dollars back and if it does we just keep playing

10:07 that game right right right now uh of course you had uh won different hat startups

Changes in SEO Over the Years

10:14 agency and now at a bigger company where you do inhouse SEO how has the field of

10:20 SEO changed since you started your career and what do you think are the most significant shifts you have seen I

10:27 think the biggest shift is just how complicated search is now at this point

10:33 uh in the beginning in my SEO career most of us would just be like SEO is

10:39 just working on Google as I've progressed through the years maybe it's

10:44 the upcoming of App Store optimization which is now its own thing right maybe it's e-commerce SEO where right now

10:51 you're seeing all these AI inclusions of how Google wants to shape product searches to really compete against uh at

10:58 least in the us Amazon where a lot of people go to Amazon to do those searches

11:04 again Amazon search optimizations is his own thing 89 um which is the name of their search engine and likewise for

11:11 some people it's like oh actually we're listed on Walmarts which is another uh major uh e-commerce and Retail Store in

11:20 the United States they have their own search as well site search and there are ways to optimize for that same thing

11:26 with eBay same thing with all these even like word press plugins those things have their own ranking factors and if

11:32 you're a developer on that there's an element of SEO in there so when you're saying like how's it different now

11:39 versus then it's so fragmented and there's a specialization in there that

11:44 isn't isn't fully transferable where you're like oh I can just add keywords to this page and it

11:50 work or like oh maybe this search engine isn't quite there yet with um uh using

11:59 Vector embeddings to figure out like relevance for keywords they're still using you know the count of keywords and

12:05 some other weights like there's a lot of differences and nuances where uh some

12:10 things are transferable some things uh are just totally different and having a subject matter expert on that vertical

12:18 of search uh is the way to go versus back then it's like oh you're an SEO you can

12:23 do everything right now now uh let's talk about the current state of SEO uh

Key Factors for SEO Success

12:30 what do you believe are the most crucial factors for success in SEO today uh would say this is a great

12:39 question personally there's this old saying

12:45 where you want to be where your customers will

12:52 be and right now with AI overviews with

12:58 llms and chat we are seeing a shift in Searcher

13:03 behavior and their preferences and search will have to

13:08 evolve again to understand what that looks like that's one shift where you

13:15 want to be where those people will be in the future and we're in the early stages of that and therefore it's really hard to

13:22 say this is the way to optimize for uh artificial intelligence generated

13:28 results that being said that's one the other thing that is harder to do now is

13:35 attribution right so that's always been getting harder ever since you know the

13:41 old days of keyword not provided in paid search you can always see the keywords that drive that uh end sale in organic

13:49 search you know the page but it's a topic or a plethora of keywords and you roughly know where that is uh as you go

13:58 into to AI generated results a lot of times

14:03 the user is going from conversational searches which is very informational and

14:09 then they may be able to reach a conclusion and decide like this is what I want to do and that you're going to

14:16 see a lot of Brands show up being mentioned left and right uh and that's still optimizations

14:23 you did to try to surface that to show up in an AI result right but those have

14:28 no click so all that work you're doing is really more like brand marketing where your

14:34 brand is mentioned and if and you need several mentions to make that Searcher

14:40 feel like oh this is a brand uh back in my PNG days we like to call it uh big

14:47 and popular so it feels safe when you are following the crowd when you are

14:53 inundated with all these options to look for and when you're uncertain with all

14:59 your options in this world um that's the Paradox of choice right you'd rather go

15:05 with something safe than uh when you're given a 100 different options uh then

15:10 you are to say like I'm going to find that one that is perfect for me actually I'd rather choose the one that you know

15:16 four out of five dentists recommend and that's the reason why you know for a lot of these Dental ads Proctor and gble

15:23 really pushes that it's like what do you trust what is this claim that I can back legally and how do I uh have people

15:29 choose that default where they feel safe when they have so much information and options where they default that to

15:36 what's safe so so with all these changes how has approach of hub spot changed

HubSpot's Evolving SEO Approach

15:42 towards the SEO A and B have you seen shift in because I think the more uh in

15:49 as you said of course the informational keywords are the one which got uh the traffic based on those is the one which

15:55 got hit more because of these AI overviews so how do you see are you seeing that at HubSpot and how are you

16:01 doing things differently now or are you doing things differently So currently I

16:06 think I'm not doing anything differently yet and the yet is because we have to

16:12 see where things are moving including where customers or Searchers are moving

16:19 towards I think the telling thing for me as a father of kids and um the partner

16:27 of my wife who ALS also uses search like I know for a fact the way I

16:32 search is abnormal right and then I know the way that uh other people search are

16:39 kind of weird and I kind of Judge them but that's the normal way a lot of people search right and when you look at

16:45 that you're like oh AI overviews can hallucinate or whatever and it's like no these people don't want to click on

16:51 websites they like seeing where things are um and sometimes they dig deeper

16:59 sometimes they don't right and the question for me is really is that a ship

17:04 that has sailed and that will stay there and if so I need adapt with that as well

17:10 or is that something where the people that actually control the money and will spend um they're stubborn like me and

17:17 they aren't changing right so uh if it's a bunch of college students that are

17:23 doing that shift and you're in the educational space that makes a lot of sense right right if you're like in B2B

17:29 SAS and the uh buying Center is a bunch of Executives maybe in their 40s or 50s

17:36 that's that might be a different story because maybe they aren't as big of a fan on AI overviews maybe they haven't

17:42 won that over there's a whole subsection of people on the web right now uh that

17:48 are appending a parameter uh I forgot what the exact parameter is but right now in Google search there is a web tab

17:55 and if you click on that uh and do your searches there there are no AI overviews it's just almost like your traditional

18:02 10 Blue Links and some people are just loving it especially the people that just hate having AI overviews in their

18:08 search results so so H so with chat GPT launching their Ro search have you

18:13 started looking into it or you still think it's too early uh I like to be a slow mover on

18:22 Tech things but I like to also read about it um because my experience has

18:28 has been uh when things are up in the air with a lot of variables it's very easy to have what we

18:36 call like s um shining object syndrome right and I'm not a thought

18:42 leader in this space where I need to go like hey this is how this could be a huge paradigm shift and everything we do

18:49 changes right what I can do though is really focus on the fundamentals of human behavior right

18:57 where is that going and then thinking about how I can be more thoughtful about the content that gets created right so

19:05 ailm require scraping and indexing of content on the web that's not changing

19:12 so AI overviews kind of again because it's or AI lmm results are kind of uh as

19:21 AI researchers like to say it's they're they're a uh stochastic parrot right so it's more about probabilities of things

19:28 showing up so the fundamentals of that is if you're a marketer you kind of already know this

19:34 and that is you need to be your brand needs to be out there everywhere wherever you can find them to be going

19:40 back to where we're just talking about big and popular right right the fundamentals of that marketing actually

19:46 hasn't changed right there's still an SEO element to it which is are these AI Bots able to technically discover your

19:53 content and are is that you know Corpus of documents higher than you know other

20:00 places they're searching for content and if it is your chance of showing up as a brand increases and that's just still

20:08 really marketing if you think about it is your stuff everywhere around for all the people that care about

20:14 it so to really answer your questions like I'm following it but I'm not like in the weeds going like oh this is how

20:20 they're doing it technically I can do that but I also understand like if I

20:26 focus on that those fundamentals in search uh I'm in a good position right I'll be

20:32 optimizing for the search that is today which is what I'm gold on today and I'll be in a good position to win when AI

20:40 overviews rolls out to a larger audience because the fundamentals are solid for what I'm working on right now uh uh at

International SEO Challenges

20:49 HubSpot you are dealing with SE on a global scale and I know you mentioned you have teams for different languages

20:55 as well now what unique challenges does International presents and how do you

21:00 approach them so just an example you gave for Mexican Spanish and European Spanish do you I mean how do you

21:06 approach International UE and the challenges oh yeah here's a fun anecdote um that we've been vocalizing uh more

21:15 frequently [Music] uh one example is if you search for

21:21 HubSpot right now okay uh in some countries such as in India and the

21:27 United States our home page often does not rank number one our product page on

21:32 our free CRM does and so for a company that's is very results driven we're

21:39 looking at you know the amount of people that visit our pages and sign up to

21:44 become a free customer or they sign up to get a demo with one of our sales reps which be um

21:52 which our sales people based off of the information they input May reach out and say like hey one of our paid is better

21:59 fit for what you're trying to do right and when uh you default to a free

22:05 product that obviously hurts uh kind of uh our whole business model versus if

22:12 you were to go to our homepage really get our messaging and positioning and decide hey this is the right fit for a

22:18 demo uh and so that's an interesting challenge that we're seeing only in English-speaking markets and only in

22:25 specific countries and it's interesting because uh part of

22:31 it is user behavior that is different by country right and we saw this shift uh

22:40 starting around July is end of uh June early

22:45 July and it was interesting because it started in India and then started to spread to like other english- speaking

22:51 countries I just searched I could see that you were right the CRM page comes in not the homepage I just searched

22:58 while talking yeah and it's and it's something that's actually happened before in search

23:03 engine uh round table or Journal covered it like Barry SW covered it some one time

23:09 ago and it's one of those things where you're like is this a user Behavior change thing where if you search for hub

23:15 spot really I'm just thinking about your product because it's free and it's very popular and versus oh uh I'm actually

23:24 looking for your whole brand and the suit of products that you offer uh because you're a platform there's

23:29 marketing there's sales there's service software I'm not just looking for the CRM right and that's really interesting

23:37 because again uh we need to factor in both how you know people are searching

23:44 and clicking versus how a search engine uh we can send signals to it and say

23:50 like oh no no no this is a branded search the homepage really needs to be on top not one of our product

23:56 pages uh and it's interesting because that's like an SEO fundamental right you're like oh is

24:03 your homepage the most linked to page of all your sites and the interesting thing

24:09 about as you're saying like how's it different doing things at a global scale is as you get more specialized different

24:16 teams will prefer their navs to reflect kind of that user experience so at there

24:23 was a point where the HubSpot uh Blog the nav ation link that

24:30 logo links to just itself right so it's a separate subdomain and that's a lot of backlinks

24:37 in because of how much content the HubSpot Blog has right uh

24:43 so in a way it was kind of separated from hub.com in terms of internal

24:49 linking right and we have a lot more of those other subdomains run by different

24:54 teams with different goals and so again as a sign to Google figuring out you

25:01 know what is a site what are the pages of a site what's the hierarchy of how things should be we realize like oh uh a

25:08 lot of times we do these redesigns but we don't really think about all how these large properties may not seem like it rolls up

25:16 to Google anymore uh to one home homepage Google May treat these as multiple several different websites or

25:24 homepages right just like how and it's like in this the case of the

25:29 uh the subfolder which is CRM there was one time where that same surf of just H

25:36 spot was showing the product page and it had organic site links as you would see

25:41 like for a homepage and we was like it's like that's not what we want but we can

25:46 see howar might get confused because of how frequently we're uh linked to that

25:51 page to rank better for free CRM which is an important term for us and we're

25:57 just like okay it has to be some sort of balance and we have to help uh really think about just these nav redesigns and

26:04 how we link so again it's an interesting Global challenge that's unique to HubSpot we're still trying to sort this

26:09 out um and there's no stone being uh left unturned to uh resolve this so so

26:19 this this product thing now the CRM page comes so did you happen to try changing

26:24 it by somehow I mean using an href Lang or you just let it be like

26:29 that uh so we're trying to change this and it's a work in progress I think at

26:34 its worse our hom page actually disappeared from page

26:40 one and then it was just the product page in position one I would Panic if my

26:46 hom page doesn't rank I would say what kind of a penalty is this went going

26:51 like okay let's check search console is there a hidden message of any sort of penalty right is there

26:58 there is there um you know someone flagging this this was a tip from

27:05 um Rachel uh forgetting her last name that I met at Tech SEO connect and she

27:10 was like oh there was this one time where our homepage disappeared because someone had flagged our homepage as

27:17 having outdated content I was like wait that can like so if I don't see like a

27:22 negative peny on the homepage it could be that um and it was it was one of those things where you know if you see

27:29 something on Google being weird the tip is go check Bing right to see if it's a

27:35 Google thing or it's a bing thing or is it both right in our case I was like no it's a Google thing we're like all right

27:41 cool let's let's try to figure out what what this Google thing is that's different from being um but again uh

27:48 there's a lot of different hypotheses on like whether it's user Behavior or whether it's um website fundamentals and

27:53 internal linking uh along with uh just you know other SEO ranking

28:02 factors such as uh user experience I think user experience

28:09 playing more important role here of course yeah and it's it's funny uh you

28:15 say that because if you look at B2B software companies versus b2c it's very

28:21 different right uh a lot of B Toc software companies if you look at their

28:27 homepages they're login Pages they're navigational yes that is so different

28:34 [Music] from need to have good content right it's like no these people are just

28:41 navigating the login it's they're they're playing a different game they've saturated the market and they more about

28:47 retention than they do uh growing uh you know more customers

28:55 so so here is one thing I had one of the client which had same problem so he was

29:00 and we continued why the homepage is not ranking we continued uh submitting in then eventually we realized somebody not

29:08 from our team but from client team has actually uh blocked the homepage in the

29:14 search console so it was there but in the search console you know you can block the pages from indexing so they

29:20 have just blocked that page and we said what and we just unblocked the URL and boof in like two hours the rankings were

29:29 was this the uh temporary removal tool that you're talking about or yes okay

29:34 yeah I know I know so that's the thing we looked at we looked at you know uh your robot.txt but again remember this

29:41 is region specific and we looked at the gear thing that could happen we're like

29:47 no not there either so as I said we we we turned every stone we knew there's a lot of really experienced seos at hot

29:54 and I'm just one of many right right right so so let's talk some positives now for

Successful SEO Strategies

30:01 the SEO in terms of now can you share an example of an SEO strategy or a tactics that you have implemented at HubSpot

30:08 that that yielded particularly impressive results uh and a recent one please a

Measuring SEO Value

30:17 recent one so that's the fun thing um recently I've been less focused on

30:24 search and More in General on acquisition and so what does that mean that means I

30:30 care more about you know is it generating uh a bottom line for the

30:36 business right uh and the big one and you can see this is uh previously there

30:43 was a disconnect between well I wouldn't say disconnect but we just weren't tracking it on how our support teams

30:49 were actually generating revenue for HubSpot as a business so a lot of times you would think about like a knowledge

30:55 base that could rank for keywords that are branded in traditional SEO you would just say like hey that's branded

31:02 keywords that's not like net new these people are going to come anyways so we're going to look at unbranded

31:08 keywords but no actually um sometimes people look at uh branded search they

31:15 look at documentation they want to be really sure what they're search um what they're buying it has the capabilities

31:21 they care about and just by adding um a point of purchase there like a sign up

31:26 for free or a demo uh we generated uh a lot of you know conversions from doing that so A lot of

31:34 times people kind of think like oh Brandon we're GNA rank for that anyways uh no you can optimize for that you you

31:41 should really think about that user journey and make it easy for that path of purchase and it was a great uh thing

31:47 we did because uh anecdotally that service team and those Tech writers

31:52 they're like I'm sure we are doing something for the company and anecdotally we feel like it is but they

31:57 just didn't know how much that was they didn't know the additional value they were doing in addition to you know

32:03 creating less tickets for the organization um using Less hours from the support team because there was

32:09 documentation out that people could selfs serve right right they could now then say in addition to that I'm

32:15 actually generating revenue for HubSpot so I think that's something if you're working you know on SEO to not uh

32:24 underestimate which is like the value of a optimized knowledge base and then having

32:31 Paths of conversions or uh disambiguations so that you get better

32:36 quality fit customers versus someone who signs up and then eventually goes like this was not what I was

32:43 promised um it can't even do these things it's like oh it's in the knowledge dox and you knew exactly what you're getting to because it's all there

Q&A on SEO Topics

32:50 very transparently so I I would say that's kind of the biggest wi this year uh one of the bigger ones um another fun

32:57 one one is actually these login Pages which only works if you're at a certain

33:03 scale so a lot of people will search for Brand Plus login if they're a B2B SAS

33:11 company we ran paid ads on just exactly that Search In traditional search Theory

33:18 would say that's a navigational search right there's no transactional intent our paid ads disproved that there are

33:25 people are searching that and converting as customers and paying money on that so

33:32 with you know working we're like okay that's very interesting let's let's right dig in deeper and we saw that some

33:39 of our competitors uh on their login pages did

33:44 also offer a point of conversion and that was our Q saying

33:50 okay we need to test this test our assumptions on what we generally hold true in SEO and see if we could drive

33:56 Revenue again on a branded search something we often take uh for granted

34:02 uh and uh yeah and we learned something from that um and I would say use your

34:09 own judgment on testing this and see uh what the results are for you uh for

34:15 doing this so those are the two things I would share there that's you know on branded traffic that are very

34:21 interesting and not as conventional as people would think about and I I love I I I myself have not heard about them

34:28 before so I'll be honest they yeah they are very different and I think yes

34:33 people should try that right now in one of your past discussions you talked

Evolution of Search Intent

34:38 about the intricacies of search intent uh could you elaborate on how

34:44 understanding search intents intent has shifted in recent years uh sure

34:52 uh there's a acronym that Google uses

34:58 called Nora no one right answer I think

35:04 or something along those lines okay and for a lot of head terms you'll see in

35:11 search results that there are a lot of different document types by document

35:17 types I mean this could be a web page this could be a news type A Blog article

35:23 an image pack a local map different met types are better answering

35:32 different intents of the user right if I'm discovering something I'm trying to go somewhere if I'm trying to purchase

35:39 something to solve my problem uh there's a lot of hints on what the possible user

35:45 intents are to a query based off of the Ser feature that shows

35:51 up so that would be the biggest Evolution from 10 Blue Links if you think about it right 10 Blue Links was

35:58 just these are websites and now with no one right answer it's uh maybe it's a head term

36:03 maybe it's a term you traditionally think uh it's uh

36:08 transactional there there's now a lot more variety it's like do I want to buy

36:13 by going to a product page a thirdparty review site with you know stars on it as

36:19 a uh Rich product uh snippit or am I going to watch that YouTube unboxing

36:25 video or something that is also showing off right there there's there's the intent or uh what we like to often talk

36:32 about is uh Kay christenson's framework of jobs to be done of what is that

36:39 Searcher trying to do at the end of the day when they make that search what is that job to be done are they just

36:45 looking for information but what's the information for like at the end of the day what is that information for is it

36:51 just because they're bored which is sometimes a thing is it because they're a student and they have an assignment to

36:56 have their so it's research to finish writing a paper or are you a uh Company

37:04 employee that has to make a purchase decision on software and you are one of six other people that have to make that

37:10 decision and what are the things you care about is it's um other companies

37:15 like case studies like so there's the keyword and then there's all the other pieces of content you as a

37:22 website would be able to provide them that would not be totally clear in that search query

37:28 and understanding that you need all those pieces of content to really satisfy that user's intent from their

37:35 original search uh that's your uh you

37:41 know retail storefront right from a website they go in it's never always

37:47 just the homepage and from there you need to be able to be like oh that person actually needs a case study that

37:54 they can then hand up to their boss do I have links that point to there does that

37:59 article give enough uh you know for them to be more knowledgeable informationally

38:05 about the subject matter and for them to take the next steps going like actually I really trust HubSpot after I read this

38:10 or is that something that happens a month later and they see more of our articles elsewhere where they do a much

38:16 more refined search maybe via llm or in Google search that they come across

38:22 these other asset types that are much more conversion friendly than you know

38:28 what is the CRM okay now uh with the increasing

SEO and User Experience

38:35 importance of user experience in SEO how do you see the relationship between SEO and other disciplines like ux design

38:44 evolving I see them as uh a team that

38:50 has to work together there are Decisions by other

38:55 teams where sometimes they forget that a search engine is another user

39:00 type you have to optimize for right and so we're the bot Whisperers if you want

39:05 to call us that like we know if uh you know visually this is

39:11 what this looks like but on the back end this is the way you would have to write that so that a search engine would be

39:18 able to see the content of it right so we're a team on that um and you know ux

39:27 uh all these like marketing like legal like everything

39:33 SEO can add value in any of those disciplines as long as we understand

39:39 what the end goal or objective is so do you have your as as you said

39:44 the growth marketers are doing SEO so do they look into the ux part as well now

39:51 the sxo is becoming a part of those team members daily routines when they are optimizing a page

39:58 so the way HubSpot is structured right now uh we have people that own projects

40:08 right and the Lines within HubSpot are not as rigid as people might

40:16 think we align on solving for our customers which is the same we say a lot

40:23 and the end goal isn't to win as yourself in your own teams in your own

40:29 orgs the end goal is for the customer to win so that HubSpot wins right so when

40:35 you optimize for your company's results you forget your

40:40 customers and then things go bad right uh a good example you see with is a lot

40:48 of uh online website online websites with a lot of content that have to monetize with ads and when you're

40:55 monetizing and you're like how do I make that number go up as an Roi when you forget about the

41:01 users long term you're going to suffer but if you always focus on the users first and the monetization second um

41:09 then you always have like this very solid foundation right so that's kind of how I explain uh you

41:17 know this cross team collaboration uh where if our user study groups have

41:23 something that's not something that is just shared within product if we do a SE of marketing research on where our

41:30 customers thinks that's not something that only that team hogs on to that is shared wide

41:37 and you know being connected to all those teams understanding the work they do being able to then go like hey I

41:43 could use this for the you know automation team to send to people that are in this segment or hey we have Pages

41:52 uh that compare different software Solutions and this is a statistic that

41:57 would be good for this page and I would help the customer there uh to make a decision it's it's truly cross team and

42:05 collaborative at hutspot and yeah that that that basically answers kind of like

42:10 how are things different at hpot and why you know you you focus on growth less so

42:16 than say like oh you're just on search so so when you say focus on growth my

AI in SEO Strategies

42:21 question is that have you started you using Ai and into what all processes while doing SU is it content is it

42:28 technical or you are just using it to analyze things I know HubSpot has an AI uh tool writer as well but do you

42:35 incorporate it into your blogs so are those blogs published through the AI or how uh so the specifics on how AI is

42:43 being used on the hpot blog I believe our blog team has their stance uh and

42:49 that's published somewhere maybe that that's a link I could share with you at a later Point uh personally I like to

42:56 use it as a thinking tool um so one of the prps I like to

43:04 just say is like you know you are Socrates right and we're GNA go through the Socratic method and then this is the

43:10 thing I'm working on try to poke holes by asking me questions on how I can make this better um maybe it's a presentation

43:17 I have to have or maybe it's something that's going to Executives or maybe I have all the technical details down but

43:23 I need to summarize that into something succinct and more helpful those are very basic ways that we're using llms on just

43:30 personal day-to-day things when it comes to SEO um you can use it as like an

43:35 empathy agent so here's this topic what are some things that you know could be

43:41 needed and again because it's statistical it's just you know what's the most likely word to come out uh and

43:47 so those are ideas again to help our writers be more empathetic or at least myself on what are things people could

43:55 be looking to solve that problem and those are just hints of like the keyword research you could do on a Ser

44:02 traditional keyword research isn't going anywhere um uh so yeah those are just

44:07 very simple things you could do uh with ails right now um I'm not going to go

44:14 too much into like vector embeddings and all those other things I think that's just changing really crazily right now

44:20 there are people that are more technical than me that are finding uh the a Google

44:25 version of vector vings for passage uh passage indexing I don't know if you're

44:31 familiar with that I am right and so they found the library Deon seo's been

44:37 de he's been sharing that and and I was like everyone's like all right what is my similarity score on my content how am

44:43 I get gonna tweak it like I get that I see all that I know that's where things could be going and I'm a little bit

44:49 afraid of that right now because um when it becomes very

44:55 accessible to everyone and um it can

45:01 scale and we are actually just a few steps away from spam that's my personal

45:06 opinion because if you think about it uh if everyone can do it they will because

45:13 it's the next shiny thing and it's so easy you're just feeding into this

45:20 machine right and it becomes uh the the the thing people worry about is this uh

45:26 concept of hallway of mirrors or you're just creating the same thing over and over and over and over because everyone

45:31 just put in as like that's the best answer that's the best answer that's the best answer and that is the opposite of

45:37 no one right answer right we want those different perspectives and all that so I see that I understand that's going on uh

45:45 I'm monitoring as I said I still think the fundamentals are important but I am

45:51 not you know as the uh idiom is like I'm not an ostrich and my head on the floor

45:57 not looking around um I'm focused on what I do know which is human behavior and fundamentals of search of crawling

46:05 and indexing and how all thems have the same fundamentals uh to again be in that

46:11 right position for when this is a dominance user behavior and we need to

46:17 be everywhere what do we do then okay now uh what is the role of

Importance of Backlinks

46:24 backlinks you think now plays in the ranking is that still a factor are you guys actively doing that or no not

46:32 actively pursuing uh back links would just be page Rank and Page rank is just

46:38 still a ranking Factor so uh I think web

46:44 graphs are the foundation of the web and if you looked at the yanex links um for

46:51 those in the audience that didn't know there was a leak of yandex's uh ranking factors and

46:57 uh there was one period of time where there's like oh we're going to get rid of links as like a factor we don't need it anymore and then I was like oh no

47:03 actually we kind of do uh all that kind of went on I think there's still a place for links I think there's still a place

47:10 for nuance as well of like when do you need more backlinks versus when do you don't really need much more to to rank

47:19 uh and I think uh there's different queries where it matters more than

47:24 others so if it's like a time sensitive uh trending search there's not going to

47:31 be much back links coming from it there's going to be a lot of mentions on the web right um and it's going to vary

47:36 by region as well like where I'm from the news websites don't ever back link to their sources they just reference it

47:43 and I was like wait how does that work so there's there's definitely regionally differences and I can't really speak for

47:49 local SEO I don't really work on that right so right do backlinks still have a role yes uh they still form form kind of

47:57 web graphs of relationships between documents and all that right are they less important depends on where you are

48:04 in the world and how evolved search is uh and should you still care about it

48:10 does HubSpot still care about it HubSpot still cares about it right like we're not one of those Publishers that are

48:17 like oh we will no follow links out unless it's like you know uh

48:25 sponsored or something we're we're not we're not going to be like you're our competitor in the serp we're gonna put a

48:31 no fall on it because we don't want you to rank higher than us with more pank but like

48:36 really it's again it's it defeats the whole thing and you know okay it's

48:42 you've gotta keep the web a healthy web right okay we're gonna come we are I

48:50 know we just ran out of time so this is just my final segment I'm going to have some rapid fire questions so you tell me

48:56 when you're ready sure go for it okay what's your goto tool that you can't

Rapid Fire Insights

49:01 live without Chrome Dev tools okay if you could change one thing

49:08 about Google algorithm what would it be

49:14 uh that is a great question I would change uh hubspot's

49:19 [Laughter] ranking right just the home page just the H page I've been working on it with

49:25 a lot of colleagues it's on our mind right what's the best piece of career

49:30 advice you have ever received you will always be able to find

49:38 mentors in this industry as long as you ask for help wow that's good advice outside of

49:45 work what's the hobby or interest that you are passionate about uh my profile is actually Kendo

49:54 which is Japanese uh sword fighting so you do that uh yes ah okay so I saw

50:02 your LinkedIn profile as well so yes it's been around for so long that I cannot remove it at this

50:08 [Laughter] point okay because I actually have to go and see in the YouTube is this guy for

50:17 real right now uh which which of the llm is your favorite right now or

50:24 the uh I don't have one so no answer to that no comment okay they all have their

50:30 use cases but yeah it's like would you choose like who your favorite child is come on and and they're all evolving too

50:38 so like yeah so yeah I would choose my favorite child based on how they are growing the youngest one might be

50:44 favorite now once they grow up it will change just like llms you know how they keep on coming with Chad gp4 CLA CLA AI

50:52 3.5 so that way right uh there there is one that is up been interesting uh

50:58 Google is doing a uh experiment that's being uh oh I forgot what the UR is like

51:04 learn. gooogle do something it's a Google experiment and it's their take on you

51:12 know helping people learn topics um okay and the way they've done it is very

51:18 clever and personalized uh I will have to send you a link to that it's very different and it's on top of mind for me

51:25 because my kids are using LMS a lot to learn topics and they will go so many

51:31 levels deep that whenever they meet Professionals in a specific field they have very specific

51:36 questions um which is awesome in that you know kids that have deeper uh

51:45 understanding of subjects are are just like smarter um and they're GNA you know be so much more than me in the future

51:51 because of llms because they're just not like doing surface level things they're going very down deep

51:57 like I the other day was learning about zonic diseases like diseases that transfer between animals and humans I

52:03 was like oh okay how old are you again so two two links you have to send

52:10 one for the blogs you said the optimiz that yep blog policy on AI with hpot and

52:16 uh this uh interesting experiment that Google is doing right right now very last question if you weren't in the Su

52:22 what career part do you think you might have pursued uh I would likely have been a

52:28 starving artist doing some sort of uh play sculpting or something I lose time

52:36 when I'm doing things that are creative lose track of time when I'm doing something creative right which

52:42 fortunately SEO allows you to be plenty creative too yes with so many things coming

52:48 around definitely we have to be right uh Victor it's been an absolute pleasure

Final Question

52:54 having you on the show your Insight into the word of SEO are truly valuable and of course your insights into how Hab

53:01 spot rankings and what all you have done are amazing uh before we wrap up is

Closing Remarks

53:07 there anything else you would like to share with our listeners perhaps a final P final piece of advice or a resource

53:13 you would recommend uh I would say

53:18 uh you can be the change that you want to see and if you're not doing that

53:25 right then what you want to see just won't happen by chance right

53:32 so take your Reigns on your own destiny uh share that with the world and

53:38 the people that align with you will come to you and that only happens if you say that's what I want it won't happen

53:45 magically if nobody knows that those are the things you care about so I want a Kinder and gentler internet after I say

53:53 that like and I live that through what I do uh people that align with my values that

53:59 make my life and career happier come towards me uh when I'm able to spread that word right so it's like aligning

54:06 the universe in a way that it helps you and your thought process right yeah and

54:12 all right yeah for sure yeah okay uh listeners don't forget to subscribe to

54:17 our podcast for more deep Dives with the industry expert once again a big thank you to Victor pan for joining us today

Thank You to Victor Pan

54:23 until next time keep optimizing