Introduction
Many freelancers and businesses do not know or have the time to learn enough HTML, CSS, and JavaScript to code a website from the ground up — and that is perfectly fine. The right tools will enable you to quickly and easily build a unique website that offers seamless interactions for both users and visitors.
CMS Hub by HubSpot, the only combined CMS, and CRM, is designed to help businesses easily build and manage a website that is optimized for every device and every visitor.
In the previous blog, we discussed HubSpot’s Marketing, Sales, and Service Hubs. In this blog, we’ll discuss HubSpot’s CMS Hub for Marketers.
Benefits of HubSpot CMS Hub
The HubSpot CMS's beauty is that all of the tools you need to create, manage, optimize, and analyze your content are in one place and fully integrated.
When combined, these tools form the powerful engine that drives your entire website strategy. Let's go over each of the CMS Hub tools and their functions.
Domain Manager
To go live, you must connect your domain to HubSpot. Setting up your website's domain is critical because it serves as your internet address.
You can also add multiple domains in a single HubSpot Account.
You can host up to ten additional brand domains if you have a CMS Hub Enterprise subscription.
You can add more brand domains to your CMS Hub Enterprise or Marketing Hub Enterprise subscription by purchasing the domain limits increase or the business units add-on.
Design Manager
Developers can use the design manager to create, manage, and store CMS assets.
You will then have access to these CMS assets through the content creation tools. CMS assets purchased from the marketplace will be downloaded to a folder in the design manager as well.
As a marketer, you're unlikely to spend much time as the design manager, but it's important to be aware that it exists. If you're a developer, the CMS for Developers Certification will teach you how to build on the HubSpot CMS.
File Manager
You can upload files to HubSpot's files tool and use them in your HubSpot content. Your images, fonts, audio files, PDFs, and other files will be hosted on HubSpot's content delivery network servers once uploaded.
You can organize, edit, and delete your files after uploading them, or you can insert them into your content. You can also directly share files by providing a download link to a file.
SEO Tool
Organize your content to make it more search engine friendly, and audit your website's SEO.
The SEO tool assists you in developing a topic cluster content strategy, which is a method of organizing your site architecture to make it easier to navigate for both search engines and searchers. The tool also audits your website and makes recommendations on how to improve your SEO performance.
Web Content Tools
As a marketer, you will spend the majority of your time here creating, editing, and publishing web content.
Your blog posts, landing pages, and regular website pages are all separated so that your content is well-organized.
Each of these tools has simple yet powerful features that allow you to easily create content, style it, and publish it with a single click.
Forms and CTAs
Using the drag-and-drop form builder, you can quickly create free online forms in seconds. Customize the width, fonts, and colors to create beautiful forms that complement your brand's design and personality.
You can also, create professional-looking CTA buttons or pop-ups in a few simple steps with the CTA builder - no technical or design skills are required. With a few clicks, you can also upload your custom button design or image-based CTA.
Then easily insert CTAs into web pages, landing pages, blog posts, and emails to turn any piece of content into a conversion gateway.
Conversations
HubSpot Conversations includes free tools for live chat, Facebook Messenger, chatbots, and team email, as well as a universal inbox that provides sales, marketing, and customer service teams with a single location to view, manage, and respond to all conversations — regardless of the messaging channel from which they originated.
Ads Tools
Using features like ad optimization events, campaign management, and lookalike audiences, you can create deeply segmented audiences and personalized ads.
Create custom lists based on CRM data to target visitors at various stages of their journey, and use CRM and web analytics data to inform your ad campaigns and increase conversion.
Email Marketing
Create professional email campaigns that look great on any device. Begin with one of our goal-based email templates, or browse our marketplace for dozens of free templates that have been proven to convert. Then, using our drag-and-drop editor, you can change the layout, calls to action, and branding.
HubSpot Marketplace
You can browse thousands of available integrations via the app marketplace. As a result, all of the tools you require can be integrated directly into your CMS.
You can, for example, use the HubSpot integration with Zapier to automate and integrate the majority of your apps/software.
HubSpot Themes
A theme is a collection of assets that work together to provide a marketer-friendly content editing experience.
A theme's assets include templates, modules, images, and global content. When it comes to the overall design of your website, your theme is your source of truth.
While you can change the style and layout of individual pages, your theme determines your site's overall design and branding.
CMS developers can use themes to create a site-wide content editing experience that gives marketers control over their websites.
If you work with a developer, they will design a custom theme to match your brand. HubSpot also offers pre-built themes for marketers who do not have access to a developer.
Themes also allow marketers to make larger changes to their web content without the need for a developer or knowledge of CSS.
Templates
Templates are files that represent the look and feel of your pages.
A template is used to create each page published in the CMS. However, the relationship between templates and pages is one-to-many rather than one-to-one. A single template can be used to create dozens of unique pages.
Modules
Templates are constructed from modules. Modules are reusable content blocks that can take various forms, such as a block of text, an image, a form, and so on.
With a few simple clicks, you can also add modules, remove modules, and change the layout of your pages. As a result, while templates serve as the foundation for the layout of your pages, they are completely customizable.
On-Page SEO Optimization
Today's search engines are extremely intelligent. They understand synonyms and related keywords and use that knowledge to serve up the most relevant content to accomplish the goal that someone searched for.
Rather than simply stuffing your content with keywords, you should optimize it for both searcher intent and accessibility to search engine crawlers.
This can be accomplished by adhering to on-page SEO best practices.
The Optimize panel in the HubSpot CMS is there to help you improve the on-page SEO of your pages and blog posts while you're creating content.
HubSpot will automatically scan your content and provide you with a list of recommendations.
Examine this list down below to ensure you're adhering to SEO best practices:
- Word count
- Title
- Meta description
- Headers
- Alt text
- Links
- Topic clusters
The Optimize panel will also test the load time of your page to ensure that it loads as quickly as possible so that visitors don't leave.
The final option in the Optimize panel is to link your content to an existing topic cluster created by the SEO tool.
You can also add a new topic cluster from within the content editors.
HubSpot will look at what themes are covered in other top-ranking content for that search term based on your selected topic and subtopic keyword. The themes will then be displayed in a list. This list can be used to collect content ideas for this page or future content within the same topic cluster.
After you've published your content, go to the page details and use the optimization screen to check your on-page SEO, inbound links, and internal links.
Technical SEO
Your content is what will propel you to the top of the rankings. However, to rank first, your technical SEO must be excellent.
This may sound intimidating, but fortunately, the HubSpot CMS includes a lot of technical SEO by default.
The HubSpot CMS includes built-in SEO features such as:
- Automatic SSL provisioning
- Global content delivery
- Page speed optimizations
There are several additional options in the CMS that you can configure if you want to get more granular with your technical SEO.
Analyzing Performance
Analyze how your SEO topics perform in search results to determine the impact of your content strategy. This will assist you in determining which topics are most important to your target audience.
Organic Search refers to traffic to your website from a search results page.
The Topics dashboard provides a high-level overview of how your topics are performing overall in search results. For the content you've attached to your topic, you can see the total number of sessions, average session length, and bounce rate.
Monthly search volume for topics in search engines can be viewed and compared.
Reporting
Reporting alone will not improve the performance of your website, but it will provide you with the information you need to make informed decisions. What is measured can be improved with the right combination of data and website optimization strategies.
There are numerous analytics tools and metrics you could be monitoring on your website, and it can be difficult to know where to begin.
At a high level, you should monitor:
- Where are your visitors coming from?
- Which pages are they landing on?
- What kind of content are they interested in?
Website Metrics
Website Metrics describe the journey of your website visitors to becoming customers. They demonstrate whether your marketing efforts are successful, and if not, where they can be improved.
The information you gather about your website will show you how effectively your visitors are progressing through the buying journey, from the Attract stage to the Delight stage.
Website Data
When properly measured, your website analytics will be the objective voice that tells you what is and isn't working.
This information will keep you informed so you can meet your objectives, identify new areas for improvement, and see how visitors react to changes you make.
This ongoing dialogue between the improvements you're making to your site and the feedback provided by reporting will ultimately keep you better informed about the return on investment of your website.
Organizing and Managing Assets
In HubSpot, you can organize your website assets in a variety of ways. Let us now go over them.
Create naming guidelines for your CMS assets. You'll create consistency and make it easier to find things. It is entirely up to you how you name your files — you can group them by product, by different parts of your business, by date, or by something else entirely.
Make sure that the names are descriptive, that you and your team agree on a single system, and that you stick to it.
Make use of folders wherever they are available. You can create folders in the HubSpot CMS's file manager, design tools, forms tool, and landing pages tool. There are also folders built into the website and landing page tools, as well as the blogging tool, that organizes your content by status.
Use these folders to quickly see the status of your entire website and easily access assets in various states.
Let's dig a little deeper into content status. HubSpot has five main content statuses:
- Drafts: Drafts are your unpublished works in progress.
- Scheduled: Scheduled content is content that you have completed and have scheduled to be published at a later time.
- Published content is content that is currently available on the internet.
- Unpublished. Unpublishing live, published content removes it from the web and returns it to draft mode.
- Archived: When you archive content, it is moved to the "Archived" folder.
Cloning is another important feature of the CMS. Cloning is a feature in HubSpot that allows you to create a duplicate version of almost any asset.
This reduces the amount of time required to create content. For example, if you like the structure and style of a page, you can clone it and swap out the content instead of starting from scratch.
When you clone an asset, HubSpot creates a draft copy of it and adds the word "Clone" to the end of the original name.
For example, if I clone a blog post called "All About Inbound," it will create a new draft page called "All About Inbound (Clone)" that is identical to the original.
This name can be changed before it is created. Give the new asset a new, distinct name that adheres to the naming conventions you've established for your CMS. Because you won't have to go back and rename assets after they've been created, this will help keep your CMS organized from the start.
Conclusion
In short, the HubSpot CMS is packed with enterprise-level features, but without the complexity found in other content management systems.
The HubSpot CMS allows you to manage and update content without the need for a developer, and it integrates with the Marketing, Sales, and Service Hubs.
If you want a powerful CMS for your Inbound Business then look no further, HubSpot CMS got you covered!
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