Replacing HubSpot Keywords with SEMRush | Topic Cluster Strategy

HubSpot's removing  their keyword as of May 1st, 2018.  What does that mean for your keyword tracking and overall SEO initiatives? (see point #3 below especially).  We've spent some time looking at some alternatives and have concluded that SEMRush is the best replacement for the HubSpot KW tool.  

If you're considering SEMRush as a replacement for HubSpot's KW tool, here's a link to a two week free trial - when you add this to your HubSpot generated trial, it's basically 1 month free (a $99 to $199 value!).  

Here are three reasons why we chose to go with SEMRush:

1) Powerful keyword suggestion tool.  This is a great video that explains how to use the tool:

What we like most:

• Large database of KWs
• Provides keyword difficulty scores
• Analyzes your competition

2) Excellent keyword tracking.  This is a feature that's going away inside HubSpot.  This video shows you how to set up KW tracking (among a host of other important features).

What we like most:

• Losing this functionality in HubSpot
• While we shouldn't be completely devoted to individual KWs, we still need some way of knowing if our efforts are having an impact

3) Topic Cluster content strategy. This was the clincher.  This is a powerful content suggestion tool that will greatly help you build your Topic Clusters.   Topic clusters are comprised of authoritative pillar pages along with supporting blog posts.  The key to a good topic cluster is to answer the most common questions related to a particular topic.  SEMRush has Topic Research tool that does just that!

Here's an example of suggested sub topics for "Inbound Marketing" from SEMRush:

And this is how to create your topic cluster strategy right inside HubSpot using the data from SEMRush:

Why we like this:

• Immediately source topic cluster strategy and content suggestions
• Discover the questions people are asking around a particular topic - HubSpot's content strategy tool does not do this very well
• See the search volume for topics at a glance

HubSpot's topic cluster tool is quite interesting.  However, to really organize and find the right content to build out the content your targeted buyers are looking for and also resonate with Google, we suggest using SEMRush.

Here's a link to a free trial of SEMRush: 

Interested in how we do this for our clients: