HubSpot Certification

HubSpot ( www.hubspot.com ) is cool. The quality of the learning material and the tools is top-notch. They practice what they preach, and it’s very likely that you’ll run across their blog posts from time to time. They are trying to promote themselves with the concept of “inbound marketing”. They do it in a way that reflects their core philosophy and best practices that they encourage—make your content relevant and helpful, and when you do, customers will follow.

When you visit their site, you’ll see something like this.

You may want to just go ahead and try some of their products, just to get familiar. They have a free CRM (customer relationship management) tool that can be used to track customers and relationships. Ultimately, they have tools that can help with inbound marketing, which is the process of doing everything you can to get people to visit your web site, using good content—and then measuring and optimizing the process.

If SEO is the process of optimizing a web site for higher rankings on Google, and if good quality content is the best way to do it, then inbound marketing is taking things to the next level. It’s the way you can do “content marketing” and work on not just getting higher search engine rankings, but look at ways to help generate and track sales using a platform like HubSpot. Sometimes they call it “marketing automation”. (If you want to learn more about marketing automation, HubSpot has a lot of material, and if you want a conversational introduction to HubSpot and its alternatives, see Intro to Marketing Automation by Todd Kelsey.)

In general, marketing automation, inbound marketing, is worth looking at, regardless of your business size, but it’s probably better to look at it after you have a solid foundation of other things. Being aware of the possibilities is a good thing. HubSpot and its competitors are best for businesses that have a B2B focus, where you have leads, a sales force, and the need to help increase the conversion of leads into customers. Marketing automation helps a lot of this, based on the idea that 98 percent of the people who visit your site aren’t ready to buy. If you’ve invested in getting them to visit (with SEO, SEM), how can you increase the conversion rate? The answer is lead nurturing, and marketing automation helps with that.

The reason I think the HubSpot learning material is a good foundation for SEO is because it places SEO in context, and the emphasis is on content. Not just doing it, but planning things so that it is relevant and helpful to people. Their training material and certification is excellent at giving a foundation in these concepts, and I strongly recommend it. It introduces things like Personas. If you want to explore the material and take a look at Personas, for example, go to http://certification.hubspot.com/inbound-certification . You can also just visit certification.hubspot.com and choose the inbound certification.

Go ahead and click Start the Course. Then follow the registration process.

As a side note, one of the things to file away at the border of SEO and overall content marketing is the idea of getting people’s contact information in return for something. That’s a fundamental principle in inbound marketing, and that’s what’s happening with the HubSpot registration process. They offer free certification, they ask for your contact information, and they try to send helpful resources along the way. They recognize that at some point you might be a potential customer or in the position to recommend HubSpot to someone else.

As part of the registration process, you pick a password. I recommend writing it down so you can more easily come back in later.

You’ll end up seeing something like this, and I suggest choosing the Inbound material.

Then at this point what I suggest you do is bookmark the link to this page, the course hub, so you can come back to it later:

Download the study guide and then check out one or two of the videos just to see what it’s like, maybe starting at the beginning. When you’re ready, spend some time each day or each week going through the material. It’s excellent, and it will lead to a HubSpot Inbound Certification that you can and should list on your resume. For fun, try doing a job search on LinkedIn for the term “hubspot”.

I don’t own any stock in HubSpot and I’m not an employee. I’ve just found the material to be that good. They do well with visuals and simplify things to be sensible. There are also good sections in the training manual that cover important concepts of digital marketing, like stages of awareness.

For example, at one point in the material you learn about the “buyer’s journey,” which helps you to realize that when you have content and advertising, it’s not “one size fits all” and people are at different stages of the buying process. Knowing this, and strategically developing content based on this knowledge, is very powerful, and produces results.

It goes beyond SEO. If you’re in an SEO position and the company is not doing inbound marketing, you might want to start the conversation. If the company is doing inbound, you will have some knowledge about how to collaborate. If you’re selling digital marketing services, a client relationship might start with SEO, but you may be able to upsell the client on exploring inbound marketing and marketing automation .

The learning material also contains helps context, where the “tactical” things you are learning are placed in the context of an overall marketing strategy. There’s certainly strategy within SEO, but it doesn’t hurt to know how SEO fits into the larger picture, and how various aspects of digital marketing can combine to help generate revenue for a company. Knowledge is power—the power to help a company or a client succeed.

Don’t worry about necessarily “mastering” all these stages—I recommend becoming familiar with them. It’s knowledge that can help you as you grow in your skills and career.

One of my favorite parts of the HubSpot material that they do well is with buyer personas. In some ways you can simplify this to “listening to your customer”.

Buyer personas represent a concept called segmentation, and as you learn more about SEM and SEO, you’ll see how important it is. When you get to know your customers, when you go beyond the “one size fits all” mentality, you realize that not every customer is the same. Oftentimes there are segments. For example in a T-shirt business, part of the customer base might include coaches of local sports teams. Another segment might be bands that want to sell T-shirts to fans. When you start to learn more about your customers and tailor resources and marketing messages to their needs, the targeting becomes very powerful. It makes marketing and content more relevant to particular audiences, and therefore more valuable to them and to you.

The HubSpot material has an entire section in the study guide and videos that deals with SEO, and it’s good reinforcement of best practices.

So have at it! Work on the certification, and best wishes in the process!

SEO Certification

SEO certification is a little harder to find, and generally what I’ve seen is that the companies that offer it are used to charging higher prices for training, webinars, and workshops, so it’s out of reach for most of my students (although it’s worth looking into if you’re a working professional).

Search Engine News is one example: https://www.searchenginenews.com/

Conclusion

This chapter covered two possibilities for SEO certification and there may be more as time goes on. Whatever you do, make sure that the company that offers certification has pertinent and current material (if you’re in doubt, ask them the last time they updated it). HubSpot is a pretty good, fairly stable company that should be around for a while, and Search Engine News is smaller, but also good, so we’ll see. There are also many courses you can take online, (at Moz, some free, some not), but I like the idea of an actual certification, as a goal to work toward and to get managers’ and recruiters’ attention.

In the end, getting experience using actual tools is as, or more, important than the certification. But getting a certification can be an excellent way to supplement experience.

On that note, depending on what your goals are, if you are learning things on the side and intending to bring the skill into the workplace, if you are doing it for yourself, or seeking a new career, I do think that internships are a good thing to go for. Another excellent way to get experience is to look around for a non-profit organization in your area and see if they want some free or discounted help working with SEO and/or content marketing. Oftentimes they prioritize their budget to direct mission, and may welcome having some help on their web site.

If you’re just starting out on your career, another issue to consider is the question of whether to seek a job as a dedicated SEO or look for a job where you wear multiple hats. A dedicated role focuses solely on SEO, whereas a multiple hats role might include SEO, but also include other areas. My general advice is to seek a multiple hats role, which is a little easier to break into, including by through an internship. This can help you get experience in each of the different areas. Positions such as “digital marketing coordinator” and “Internet marketing coordinator” usually indicate the multiple hats role. You can search keywords like SEO or Google Analytics and often find them mentioned in the context of a multiple hats role.

Then, if you particularly like SEO, you might want to find a dedicated role. Depending on the size of the company, it might be “all technical tweaks,” but there might also be some room to get involved with content, and you can ask those questions in an interview. A company or organization or potential client might know that “they want to do SEO,” but not really be aware about things like inbound marketing. With your fancy new HubSpot certification, you might be in a position to help them grow. This is also true if you are already in a marketing department and people are talking about doing SEO. You might bring inbound marketing into the conversation or raise the possibility of things like creating a company-wide task force to help strategically identify and develop content that could be used to help boost SEO rank.

The world’s your oyster and I wish you the best. Feel free to connect with me on LinkedIn if you like ( http://linkedin.com/in/tekelsey ).

Thanks for reading this book, and best wishes in your career!