The Stack is a weekly podcast where we share and discuss the latest trends, news, and content from the world of marketing, sales, and tech. In each episode, Sean, Tim, and Ryan sit down to chat about the hard-hitting questions related to sales, marketing, and tech. You can subscribe on iTunes, Soundcloud, Spotify, and Google Play Music.
In this episode, we talk about how HubSpot is changing the game in 2019, Databox integrations, how to increase your organic traffic with an SEO audit, and how the WIX Super Bowl commercial crashed and burned. We would love to hear your thoughts so make sure to comment or tweet us at @Sylvestrer1, @SeanHenri, and @Tendrecroppes or @PepperlandMKTG.
5 Reasons to Get Excited About the HubSpot Platform in 2019
Scott Brinker, VP Platform Ecosystem at HubSpot
In the past year, HubSpot has taken a strategic shift to be a better team player. Instead of trying to be an “all-in-one” suite, they decided to become an “all-in-one” platform. A big part of this shift was to double-down on building out their library of available integrations. You can read all about this shift on their original announcement on Medium from a year ago.
Since announcing this shift and hiring Scott Brinker, the Editor from ChiefMartec.com, to lead the charge, they’ve made huge strides on this journey by:
- Adding 94 new app integrations
- Adding 95 new API endpoints
- Driving record adoption of new integrations by customers
- Better connecting Platform Partners to Agency Partners
- Launching HubSpot Ventures
As Scott explains, the shift to a platform is a win-win:
“Good platforms are flywheels: More customers attract more developers, who build more apps, which attract more customers, and so on. Customers get an ever wider set of capabilities, while developers get an ever wider audience they can distribute their apps to.”
At Pepperland, we leverage dozens of integrations every single day. We also use the directory to help our clients bring together all their tools for growth in a single application. Our clients love it, and so do we. We’re excited to see what comes next.
Google Sheets, meet Databox.
Gasper Vidovic on the Databox Blog
Databox is a business analytics and KPI Dashboard platform that pulls all your data into one place, so you can track performance and discover insights in real-time.
They already allow you to pull in and visualize data from just about any tool or app you can think of – Google Analytics, HubSpot, Google Ads, Facebook, Instagram, Linkedin, Google Search Console, Shopify… if you can think of it, they likely integrate with it.
But let’s face it. Every organization out there, ours included, tracks some sort of data in old fashioned spreadsheets. And some of that data is critically important to share with the team, on the same tier of importance as your sales/marketing data like volume of traffic, leads, deals and customers, or SaaS-based metrics like customer churn and MRR.
Enter their new integration with Google Sheets. Gasper explains that while this integration has been in high demand for some time now, rolling it out wasn’t easy:
But, building a Google Sheets integration wasn’t as easy for us as building integrations with other tools. Spreadsheets can categorize data in infinite ways, presenting a much bigger development challenge for us.
Plus, to make it successful, we knew we needed to make it as easy to visualize data from Google Sheets as it is to visualize data from our other integrations. Like our other one-click integrations, we wanted to make it possible for our users to display metrics in a matter of seconds.
Fortunately, they’ve done both, and you can now give it a whirl in your Databox account if you’re on their higher paid plans. The announcement blog post includes a great tutorial on setting this up, so go check it out and let us know what you think.
How To Increase Organic Traffic With An SEO Audit
Sean Henri for DataBox
What is the purpose of creating amazing content if it isn’t accessible or use-friendly? An SEO audit is a good way to understand the things standing in your users and search engines way of finding and absorbing your content. Sean dives into how you can improve and monitor your Site Audit Score in SEMRush with a custom Databoard from Databox.
“SEO, at its heart, is all about helping searchers complete their tasks by providing them with relevant, high-quality, useful content.”
Key Takeaways:
- Understanding your Site Audit Score can add a lot of clarity to your SEO efforts.
- Databox makes it easy to understand your progress and what types of issues are plaguing your site.
- Databox’s customizable Databoards makes it easy to visualize the important metrics you want to pay attention.
Wix ‘SEO Wiz’ Stars in Big Super Bowl Ad, Fumbles with SEO Community
Kristine Schachinger for Search Engine Journal
If you were among the many who watched the Superbowl this past week, it’s likely that a few commercials caught your eye. If you have an eye for marketing, you probably noticed the WIX commercial that has the SEO community scratching their heads. The commercial talks about how easy it is for website users to rank at the top of search results with their “SEO Wiz”.
Watch for yourself:
Wix is promoting the idea that users will be getting customized SEO that is good enough to get them to the top of Page 1, when it is actually just offering a few SEO basics that any site that wants to appear in Google’s search results above the top 100 must do.
Key Takeaways:
- This SEO “Wiz” that WIX is trying to push is really just basic SEO. Basic meaning things like title tags, meta description, headers, and alt text.
- SEO Complex and cannot be thoroughly taken care of through some magical SEO tool. SEO takes time and you should invest your time in learning more about it before picking a platform.
- WIX is giving bad SEO advice, make sure you get more than one point of view when thinking about how to improve your website.
App of the Week
Buzzsumo – Topic Explorer
The Topic Explorer tool is designer to inspire your content to new levels. This tool generates ideas and topics related to your top keyword.
Key Features:
- Find topic ideas that are related to your search term.
- Understand popular content ideas and related questions so you know exactly what people are searching for.
- Once you find a topic worth exploring, quickly navigate to the content analyzer to see what topics are getting shared the most.
The Lightning Round: What We’re Reading This Week
In this section, we quickly run through some other updates that we didn’t have enough time to deep-dive on, but we still felt were noteworthy.
- Spotify Announces Strategic Acquisitions to Accelerate Growth in Podcasting
- 230 New Emojis in Final List for 2019
- Household Income By Zip Code Advertising Targeting From Facebook
- Focusing on the new Search Console
- Consolidating your website traffic on canonical URLs
- Google Produced 96% of US Mobile Search Visits in Q4 2018
- Google+ is Officially Shutting Down on April 2nd
- Live indexing for Bing & Google coming to Yoast SEO
- Brian Dean from Backlinko announces his SEO Marketing Hub
- The Laws of UX
Listen or watch for new episodes each Friday, or check out the archives to watch past episodes on-demand. Like what you hear? Leave us a review or let us know in the comments!
