Howdy all!

Today let’s discuss website design. HubSpot promotes a philosophy called Growth Driven Design (GDD), which is a strategy for building, launching and continuously improving your website.

GDD ensures that once you launch a website, it doesn’t sit static—it’s a living, breathing entity, and requires maintenance, improvement and updates.

Following the GDD framework has helped our design team stay creatively engaged with their work. 

Internally, we’re discussing the next phase of one of our web properties, so it had me thinking about what areas we should be considering for optimization, as we undergo this new iteration.

Here are a few tips I jotted down that we’ll be using to guide the website update process:

• Assess the navigation. Are the most important pages easy to access?
  
  
• Double down on user experience. Is the site user friendly and easily navigable? 
  
  
• Optimize for mobile. As websites grow and change, the mobile experience needs to stay top of mind.
  
  
• Maintain your branding. When switching to new fonts, colors, etc., make sure that everything reflects the new branding (hint: double-check old blogs to make sure there wasn’t any inline styling used).
  
  
• Don’t forget about load speed. No one likes a slow website!
  
  
• Strategically employ calls-to-action (CTAs). What action are you asking users to take, and has that been working? Try new verbiage.

Obviously, this is not a comprehensive list, but these elements are always good to keep top of mind—even if you’re not going through a major redesign. Your website is the 24/7 salesperson for your company, and should always look its best!

-Sage Levene, VP of Marketing, Hypha HubSpot Development

Open Mic 🎤

YouTube as a Tool for SEO

By Jed Morey, CEO, Hypha HubSpot Development

Those of us in the SEO business have whiplash from the changes related to search over the past year. Three massive core updates, the infusion of AI results and the overall clutter and confusion on the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) have been a challenge for SEOs, clients and users alike.

Google is taking a lot of (deserved) heat for how confusing and user-UNfriendly things have become. But they recently did something pretty cool that deserves a shout out.

Most people don’t think of YouTube as a search engine when in fact it’s the second largest next to big sister Google. Until recently it was extremely difficult to rank on YouTube without a well-crafted plan and reasonable production value. And even then it took months, if not years, to gain traction with videos purely from a search perspective. 

There are two sides to this equation. The first is on Google itself. Google continues to prioritize video content in its results, though this is still harder to win because it favors authority and size over content. But it’s possible. 

However, YouTube recently implemented a significant change. For the first time in its history, YouTube opened the algorithm to allow for small channels to be discovered on its main feed. This is a massive shift for the platform and one that SEOs should consider when building out a content strategy for clients. 

No big-budget productions are required, either. You don’t need a magic number of subscribers or a history of uploading videos with consistency. Sometimes you don’t even need an actual video, just a voiceover with on-screen captions and related (licensed!) images! What’s required is a foundational SEO strategy (title, meta, keywords, script and a solid thumbnail image) and a story. This is big news in the B2C world but you can see how this could be important in B2B as well. 

Food for thought. And good to know that there are still some in the Alphabet universe committed to quality, informational, user-generated content.

Second Hand News 📰

Digiday: After years of uncertainty, Google says it won’t be ‘deprecating third-party cookies’ in Chrome ↠

This took me by surprise a bit. Industry reactions have been mixed, as so many were already working on plans to account for the deprecation, but the company assures that that work was not wasted.

The Verge: OpenAI announces SearchGPT, its AI-powered search engine ↠

It was only a matter of time! Even though OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said (only a few months ago) that the company was not working on a search engine, the “prototype” has arrived. This is definitely something to keep watch on, as it could be a true disruptor for Google.

“OpenAI is announcing its much-anticipated entry into the search market, SearchGPT, an AI-powered search engine with real-time access to information across the internet.

“The search engine starts with a large textbox that asks the user ‘What are you looking for?’ But rather than returning a plain list of links, SearchGPT tries to organize and make sense of them.”

Hypha Highlights 🖊️

We’ve recently been leveraging HubSpot’s workflow automation for many of our clients. As the name suggests, workflows automate tasks that you would otherwise have to delegate to someone on your team. For example, if your team needs to set reminders to touch base with a client every two weeks—workflow automation can do that.

There are even more complicated use cases that can be accomplished through automation. For those, you can leverage custom-coded actions in the workflow to get even more hands-on with the data in your CRM.

In this article, Hypha Integrations Developer, Zachary Lyons, will break down a recent encounter with a client: a manufacturing shop that produces custom parts, sometimes manufacturing the same part for different customers. They needed a workflow to determine which of their customers takes priority, and allocate any available quantity for the part to the first in line. He’ll cover how to set up a blank workflow, trigger to enroll the right records, and custom code block to get hands-on with the data!

Read: Implementing Business Logic With HubSpot Workflow Automation & Custom-Coded Actions ↠

5 Star Review ⭐

It has been a pleasure working with Hypha. Kevin is a fantastic resource when it comes to all things HubSpot. Dynamic trainer, very resourceful and knowledgeable, and truly helped us get our CRM implementation off the ground in record time. You definitely want a Kevin by your side if you’re in need of any HubSport training, onboarding, and implementation support! -S. Rorie, Industry: Technology - Software

Services provided: CRM Implementation and HubSpot Onboarding

We’re excited to share that our Senior Platform Specialist, Kevin Campbell, is an official HubSpot Certified Trainer!

Check out his Trainer profile here.

The Coaching Habit: Say Less, Ask More & Change the Way You Lead Forever by Michael Bungay Stanier

“Drawing on years of experience training more than 10,000 busy managers from around the globe in practical, everyday coaching skills, Bungay Stanier reveals how to unlock your peoples' potential. He unpacks seven essential coaching questions to demonstrate how--by saying less and asking more--you can develop coaching methods that produce great results.”

How can we help you?

Industry Spotlight: VoIP + Cloud Software

CCi Voice has established itself as an indispensable partner for businesses, schools, nonprofits, and municipalities in Southern New England, New York, and New Jersey, providing state-of-the-art VoIP and cloud-connected communications technology. Hypha HubSpot Development was tasked with a comprehensive overhaul of CCi Voice's digital presence.

Hypha’s Solution

• Logo Design/Branding
• Corporate Messaging
• Website Redesign
• Website Migration
• User Journey Mapping
• Core Site Content
• Lead Generation
• SEO
• Content Creation
• Collateral & Graphic Design

Tech Stack

• CMS Hub
• Marketing Hub

Thanks for reading! We’ll catch you in next week’s edition.

-Team Hypha