Owning the SERP: Lessons from HubSpot‘s Surround Sound Strategy

As the world of search continues to evolve, so too must our approach to SEO. Gone are the days of gaming the system with keyword stuffing and spammy links. Modern search is all about quality, authority, and a holistic view of how your brand shows up across the web for relevant topics.

Enter the surround sound strategy. The goal is simple but powerful: maximize your visibility in all the top search results for keywords that matter to your business. Earn mentions, links, and coverage across the SERP, not just in the #1 spot.

At HubSpot, we‘ve been implementing surround sound for the past year with incredible results. Not only have we increased our overall search presence, but we‘ve seen compounding gains in organic traffic, leads, and revenue from our target topics.

A key enabler of the strategy has been our custom-built SERP tracker tool. It gives us daily visibility into our surround sound progress and helps identify new opportunities. As part of our Made @ HubSpot series, we‘re excited to pull back the curtain on this tool and our wider surround sound approach.

Why Surround Sound Matters

Before diving into the tactical details, let‘s zoom out and discuss why more brands should be prioritizing surround sound in their SEO efforts.

The reality is, earning the featured snippet or #1 organic spot on Google is harder than ever. SERP features continue to grow more prominent, with things like People Also Ask boxes, image packs, and paid ads pushing traditional blue links further down the page.

In fact, a recent study found that the #1 organic search result now earns just 20% of clicks on average, down from 30% a few years ago. And for competitive commercial keywords, paid ads often comprise the entire above-the-fold view.

So while that top spot is still valuable, it‘s no longer the end-all-be-all of SEO. There‘s incredible opportunity in owning more real estate across page one with your own site, earned media, and third-party mentions.

Consider this: 60% of people need to see a brand 2-3 times before they trust it. Each of those touchpoints matters. When evaluating a purchase, 95% of buyers read reviews and 85% compare multiple vendors. If you‘re not present across those moments, you‘re leaving opportunity on the table.

Plus, being mentioned by respected third-party sources and earning quality referral traffic is still one of the top signals to Google that your site is authoritative and should rank well. A surround sound approach feeds your flywheel from all angles.

So how exactly do you "do" surround sound? It requires tight orchestration between content, SEO, PR, and web teams. But at the center is a strong SERP tracking process to measure progress and spot opportunities. Let‘s take a look at how we built that system at HubSpot.

Inside the SERP Tracker

When we first launched our surround sound program, we realized pretty quickly that we‘d need a way to efficiently monitor our presence across multiple SERPs. Manually checking each keyword and documenting sites that mentioned us would be incredibly time consuming. We needed to automate.

Enter the SERP tracker, our custom-built internal tool for measuring surround sound visibility at scale. It allows us to track daily rankings for hundreds of keywords and see how often HubSpot appears across page one, whether on our own properties or third-party sites.

The tool consists of a few key components:

  1. Keyword Database: We started by identifying our core set of surround sound keywords across the main HubSpot product lines (Marketing Hub, Sales Hub, Service Hub, CMS Hub, Operations Hub). These range from high-intent commercial terms like "best crm software" to broader topics like "inbound marketing". In total, we currently track around 800 keywords globally.

  2. SERP Scraper: The heart of the tool is a script that scrapes Google‘s results for each of our target keywords on a daily basis. It‘s written in Python and uses the SerpApi to pull in ranking data. Some key details:

  • Runs automatically every 24 hours to ensure freshness
  • Extracts the top 100 organic results for each keyword
  • Identifies if HubSpot is mentioned in the title, URL, or meta description
  • Stores all the data in a PostgreSQL database
  • Handles checks for 20+ country-level Google domains (.com, .co.uk, .fr, etc.)

Here‘s a simplified version of the core scraping logic:

import requests

def serp_scrape(keyword):
    params = {
        "q": keyword,
        "hl": "en",
        "gl": "us",
        "api_key": API_KEY
    }

    result = requests.get("https://serpapi.com/search", params=params)
    return result.json()

def process_results(keyword, json):
    output = []

    for result in json["organic_results"]:
        title = result.get("title")
        url = result.get("link")
        snippet = result.get("snippet") 

        hubspot_mention = 0
        if "hubspot" in title or "hubspot" in url or "hubspot" in snippet:
            hubspot_mention = 1

        row = {
            "keyword": keyword,
            "rank": result["position"],
            "url": url,
            "title": title,
            "hubspot_mention": hubspot_mention
        }
        output.append(row)

    return output
  1. Dashboard and Reporting: With all the raw SERP data flowing into our database each day, the next step was to make it easily accessible and actionable for teams across HubSpot. We leverage Google Data Studio to visualize the data in a set of dashboards and scheduled reports.

Some of the key views we‘ve built out include:

  • Overall surround sound visibility by product line and keyword category
  • Visibility trends over time to track progress
  • Page one visibility vs competitors for priority keywords
  • Highest opportunity keywords where our visibility is low but search volume is high
  • Breakdown of owned vs earned (third-party) visibility

Here‘s a snapshot of one of our main dashboard views:

surround sound dashboard

To power these Data Studio views, we pre-process and aggregate the raw data using BigQuery. This allows us to combine the SERP data with other key inputs like keyword search volume estimates to better prioritize.

Hitting the Right Notes: Results & Impact

With the SERP tracking infrastructure in place, we were able to quickly start identifying gaps and executing targeted surround sound campaigns. The results have been incredibly encouraging.

Some key highlights over the last 12 months:

  • Overall surround sound visibility up 65%. For our basket of 800 global keywords, we‘ve grown from 20% average page-one visibility to 33%. Basically 1 in every 3 page-one search results now mentions HubSpot in some form.

  • Significant gains for high-priority product terms. For many of our most valuable product keywords, we were able to move visibility from sub-20% to 40%+. For example, visibility for "crm software" went from 15% to 42% globally. This was powered by optimizations on our own site, earned placements in 3rd party software roundups, and review site improvements.

  • Visibility translating to traffic and leads. It‘s one thing to improve SERP presence for vanity‘s sake. But we‘ve seen the gains convert to meaningful business results. Organic traffic to our product pages from non-branded searches has increased 25% YoY. And 30% of closed leads now have a view of a surround sound article in their firs 30 days.

Beyond the quantitative gains, the strategy has helped level-up how our teams work cross-functionally towards common SEO goals. By having shared visibility metrics, content, web, product marketing, and localization are all bought in to the surround sound mission.

Tips for Orchestrating Your Own Surround Sound

Hopefully our results have you excited to implement surround sound in your own marketing. Let‘s discuss some lessons and tips to get you started:

1. Align on a targeted keyword list

Don‘t boil the ocean with thousands of keywords to start. Identify a focused set of 20-30 top terms that are most critical to your business. Solidify your page-one presence there first before expanding out. Your target list should be a healthy mix of top-of-funnel informational terms and high-intent commercial phrases.

2. Track SERP presence religiously

Invest in some form of SERP tracking early on, whether building your own tool or leveraging a platform like STAT. You can‘t improve what you don‘t measure. Have clear benchmarks of your current presence for target terms and share updates on progress regularly.

3. Don‘t sleep on YouTube and image results

Google universal search results like video and image carousels are only becoming more prominent. Ensure you‘re tracking presence beyond the standard blue links. Prioritize video and visual content creation to boost your SERP real estate. We‘ve seen up to 20% gains for some keywords by securing these universal placements.

4. Activate your fans and partners

Some of the most impactful earned placements will come from your customers and ecosystem. Make it easy for them to advocate for you with review site templates, partner toolkits, and content collaboration. An incentivized review program has been a huge win for us to scale SERP visibility.

5. Evaluate and optimize constantly

Surround sound isn‘t a set-it-and-forget-it tactic. SERPs are constantly evolving, so your approach needs to as well. Set a cadence to review keyword lists, evaluate visibility gaps, and test new optimizations. We‘ve established a monthly surround sound check-in between SEO, content, and web to keep the flywheel moving.

Surround Sound Off

Reaching your audience across the entire search experience has never been more critical. By building surround sound measurement into the fabric of our SEO program, HubSpot has been able to make massive gains in overall search presence and resulting business impact.

The custom SERP tracker tool has been key to operationalizing the strategy at scale. It provides our teams with the visibility to take action and clearly report on progress up to the C-suite. What started as an SEO-led initiative is now firmly embedded across functions.

While our exact approach may not fit every org, the principles are universally applicable. Hopefully our experience and open-source starter code inspire you to sound off in the SERPs. By embracing a surround sound mindset, you‘ll be well-poised to hit the right notes with searchers for years to come.

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