5 Quick Tuneups to Audit Your HubSpot Portal

When you're stuck in a slump, you might not have the motivation to jump over life's biggest hurdles. But there may be simple, almost mindless tasks that feel OK — and can jumpstart you into a more ambitious place.

For me, it's a quick yoga session, time with my dog, or cooking a healthy dinner. (Or, lately, a breeze around the block catching Pokemon... no shame.)

Marketers need to stay close to the data and make constant improvements. I try to keep a backlog of long-term ideas to make my HubSpot portal better.

Such as: Next month, I'll finally rework those old nurture workflows with a new template and better offers. Or, I'm going to curate all of our old posts into beautiful SlideShares. I've got a Google doc teeming with dreamy long-term improvements that I'll get to someday.

But those big "wow" ideas don't come all the time. You might not be ready to take on the world today, but there are quick tuneups to perform a mini marketing audit in your portal.

They can be done in 5-10 minutes each, and can give you the boost of inspiration you need to take on bigger challenges.

Follow the contact path

You might have so many elements to your HubSpot portal — offers, landing pages, nurture workflows, blog posts — that you feel paralyzed knowing what to analyze next.

When I feel stuck, I take an anecdotal approach to kickstart my mini marketing audit.

There's a quick trick I've used to identify holes in our funnel, broken links, and missed conversion opportunities: follow a few contacts down their path of recent actions.

Following individual contacts down the path they take can reveal greater trends — like how your current strategy leads contacts through the marketing funnel.

Your HubSpot's Contacts panel is a goldmine of real-life case studies on how your marketing is working (or not working).

You can look at individual contacts over the past few weeks or even months to see how they've been engaging — it's a quick, mini HubSpot marketing audit. Pick a handful of diverse contacts, and then follow the path they took with your brand.

Really dig in: Click the links they clicked, expand the form fields they submitted, and breeze back in through the emails or blogs they read.

Watch your contact's "path" for these things:

• What was the contact's first touchpoint with your brand? (Does this correlate to how qualified the contact is? If yes, make a note to really boost this page or offer in the future.)
• Which eBooks or other offers did the contact download, and in which order?
• Which emails enticed the contact, and which drove him/her to unsubscribe or disengage?
• Was there a period of time when the contact poked around your website extensively, and then left? (What was that point, and is there an opportunity to create a new offer or CTA to prevent bouncing?)
• Are there leads that seem qualified, but that aren't making it through your funnel to the bottom?
• Are they effectively making it into the proper lists, and are lifecycle stages updating accordingly?

I like to work through a dozen recent contacts at a time. I look at the previous few weeks of engagement, and I note where they converted, what first brought them in, and where they fell (if they fell) out of the proverbial marketing funnel.

Answering these questions often gives me a bulleted list of things to tweak, remove, and improve my marketing elements. It might just give you your next big idea.

Optimize blog posts with high views, low click-throughs

Blog posts that meet this criteria are potential conversion goldmines for your company. These metrics indicate that your blog post is a popular topic among your readers (or is ranking highly for a search keyword) but is missing on a conversion opportunity.

These posts may be older and have high organic search traffic. For example, our old post about small business branding pulls in lots of organic traffic — even though we don't promote it anymore. It's a great chance for conversion!

How do you find your own blog jackpot opportunities? In your HubSpot blog dashboard, view the "analyze" tab. In the "top posts by view" section, sort by "all time." Click through your posts with high views and note those with low click-through rates. This list is your focus!

Now, your task is to experiment with conversion elements — tighter writing, better CTAs, and appealing buttons.

You can update old "goldmine" blog posts by asking:

• Have you published any more relevant offers in the meantime? Maybe there's a new offer you can create that pinpoints the article's topic and makes a closer connection to your product or service.
• Have you experimented with a different CTA style (like in-text CTAs, or different graphic styles) that you can implement?
• If you don't have any updated offers, can you find new ways to incorporate internal links into your copy? This will drive traffic back into your site.
• Is there an option to subscribe to your blog on the page and browse related blog posts?

Update a handful of blog posts and pay attention to the metrics for a while.

I followed this process for our small business branding post. With updated copy and a tie-in to a relevant CTA, I saw conversions improve almost immediately. I nurtured this new list with another, more middle-of-funnel offer, and qualified a number of contacts that I wouldn't have had before.

Boost your landing pages up to 30%

Landing pages are key for conversions. They're a necessary part of your marketing funnel, and you should shoot for at least 30% conversion on your pages.

Recently I scanned through our high-traffic landing pages and found a handful that weren't performing up to this metric. I spent a few minutes per page tightening up my writing, tweaking the form or page title, and refreshing images. We've bumped up those landing pages to 30% or higher conversions just thanks to my mini-tweaks. That's a big conversion opportunity for a small amount of work!

What should you do if your landing page isn't performing up to speed? Let's look at HubSpot's landing page best practices that you should tweak for.

Make sure your landing pages all include:

• No navigation bar or links that pull visitors away
• Images and video to break up text
• Bulleted list highlighting main takeaways
• Social proof, such as testimonials
• Appealing button color and copy
• Appropriate form length that matches the gated content's value

"Best practices" are just a starting point, not law. Play around with these elements on your page to find the best performance for your company.

Your best-performing landing pages are probably a good starting point. Take a minute to ask, what's setting those apart? Is it the design? A certain phrase being used? Compelling imagery?

I also recommend optimizing your landing page around a keyword, which can be done in just a few minutes. If this keyword is tied in closely to your ideal buyer persona, you'll be drawing in more qualified traffic from search — and converting at a higher rate.

Check the rankings in your keywords tool

If you're utilizing HubSpot's keyword tool to track a slew of keywords, this is a spot in your portal that will change day-to-day. This makes it a go-to for me when I want to track our marketing progress and brainstorm new campaigns.

I like to spend a few minutes each day breezing through the keyword tool and making note of big rises and falls. I click through each page of keywords and hover over red or green arrows.

In your keywords tool, pay attention to:

• Green arrows (search engine spot "rises") that indicate my SEO rank is improving — I make a point to visit pages using this keyword and make sure their conversion rates are sound, to make sure I'm maximizing potential for my new search spot!
• Red arrows (search engine spot "falls") that are significant, aka a slip of more than just a few spots — I try to re-optimize pages using this keyword, or introduce new keywords on those pages.
• Stagnated keywords that I've been trying to shoot for — If they haven't budged despite my efforts, I take a look back at these pages and posts and make sure they're truly optimized.

For example, I had an eBook on defining leads in the Customer Lifecycle Stages and the entire campaign around it was about lifecycle-related keywords.

Some of these keywords were performing really well after the campaign rolled out. Some related keywords, though, weren't budging. I optimized campaign materials around these new keywords to expand my reach, and have seen greater traffic growth!

Aim for 100% in your blog SEO optimization tool

When you're breezing through whipping out new content all the time, you can forget essential pieces — and, sometimes, SEO optimization slips by the wayside. Thankfully, your HubSpot portal makes this really easy to fix.

When browsing through your blog posts, the "optimization" panel has some really great insights to make your pages rock. I periodically check through a handful of posts and ensure that SEO optimization is at 100%. With built-in suggestions, there's no reason not to use this awesome tool. A long-term goal of mine is to get all pages to 100%.

If you chip off a few blog posts per day, you'll be fully optimized and ready to roll in no time.

For example, we implemented a new pop-up on our blog that encourages readers to subscribe. It was very effective — but the SEO optimization panel showed that it's slowing down our page load, and therefore denting our SEO. Voila... a five-minute check-up led to a long-term improvement goal.

OK – now I'm ready for the big improvements.

HubSpot has a plethora of tools and panels to identify problem areas in your marketing funnel. By performing these quick tuneups, you can gain the insight of a mini marketing audit and find ways to improve.

But when you feel inspired and you're ready to really improve your HubSpot portal, you should start thinking big.