HubSpot SEO Certification Exam Answers

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You’re trying to rank for one of your target topics using a web page that contains a long, canonical piece of written content. However, when you do your research on what’s already ranking for that topic by searching for it on Google, you notice that the majority of search results on page one are videos. Which of the following actions will give your website the best chance of ranking for this topic?

• Do nothing. Because your web page is a lengthy piece of written content, Google will have more text to crawl – so eventually, it will rank your page above the video results.
• Delete the written content, and replace it with a video version of that content on the same URL. Because Google is serving up mostly videos on page 1 for this particular topic, the written content doesn’t have a place.
• Create a video about that topic, and add it to your existing written page. Because Google is serving up mostly videos on page one for this particular topic, you’ll want to have a video in there – but that doesn’t mean having written content to supplement it won’t help.

True or False? Google accounts for the majority of searches worldwide.

What is the primary goal of a search engine?

• To drive the most amount of traffic to their own pages
• To serve users the most relevant content that matches their search query
• To personalize search results for individual users
• To index pages as fast as possible

What do you need to balance when doing SEO?

• Focusing on the user and making it easy for search engines to crawl your website
• Creating lots of high quality content and personalizing it for your buyer personas
• Adding more content to your website and focusing on your social media presence
• Focusing on search engine crawlers and making it easy to share your content

True or False? The same SEO strategy will yield the same results for all websites.

Choose all that apply. Which of these factors will affect your SEO strategy?

• How established your business is online
• What resources you have to dedicate to SEO
• How many followers you have on social media
• What industry you’re in

How do you build discovery and relevance for search engines?

• By increasing the number of backlinks to your pages
• By driving as much traffic as possible to your website
• By creating lots of high-quality content on the topics you want to be known for
• By guest blogging on popular, authoritative sites

True or False? Authority directly impacts ranking strength.

Choose all that apply. How do you determine the authority of a piece of content?

• The content is optimized for search engines.
• The content is talked about often.
• The content is referred to often.
• The content is cited in other works.

What is a backlink profile?

• A list of all the sites your website is currently linking to
• A list of all the sites you are reaching out to for backlinks
• A list of all the pages on your website that need backlinks
• A list of all the sites currently linking to your site

Choose all that apply. What does your backlink profile measure?

• The number of outbound links from your website to other sites.
• The number of inbound links to your website.
• The number of unique domains that link to your website.
• The quality of inbound links to your website.

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True or False? You should optimize a single page for multiple keywords.

• To provide a hierarchical structure to a web page
• To entice readers to click through onto a page
• To accurately describe a web page’s contents
• To tell search engine crawlers information about a page

When would it be beneficial to have a different title tag than your heading tag?

• When your heading doesn’t accurately describe the contents of the page
• When your heading is too long and will get cut off in search engine results
• When your title is more interesting than your heading
• Never, the two elements should always be the same

Choose all that apply. Why are internal links important for SEO?

• They help users and search engine crawlers navigate your site.
• They tell search engine crawlers which content should not be indexed.
• They pass link authority from one page to another.
• They allow your pages to appear in search engine results.

Which of these is NOT part of a URL?

• Protocol
• Domain
• Path
• Index

Why is having duplicate content an issue for SEO?

• It can dilute your ranking potential.
• It confuses users.
• It can negatively affect your authority.
• It isn’t an issue at all.

Choose all that apply. Why is it important to have HTTPS for your website?

• It encrypts sensitive data, like passwords and credit card numbers.
• It’s required by Google.
• It increases users’ trust in your website.
• It prevents your site from receiving inadvertent penalties.

Choose all that apply. Which of these are ways to increase your site speed?

• Compress images
• Upload images at the exact dimensions they’ll be used
• Add pages to your robots.txt file
• Reduce the number of backlinks to your pages

What are the two biggest factors in the mobile user experience of your website?

• Site speed and pop-ups
• Responsive design and backlinks
• Site speed and responsive design
• Image compression and redirects

• They increase click-through rate and visits from organic search.
• They increase visits from social media.
• They increase the authority of a web page.
• They give people the right information at the right time.

How do search engines use sitemaps?

• Google uses a sitemap to locate structured data on a web page and display it in rich results.
• Web crawlers use a sitemap to understand a website’s structure so they can evaluate and rank it more easily.
• Web crawlers use a sitemap to follow backlinks from one site to another and assign authority to those pages.
• Search engines don’t use sitemaps, but SEO experts use them to determine the information architecture of a website.

Which of these teams is NOT involved in the creation of a sitemap?

• Marketing
• Development
• Sales
• Legal
• IT

True or False? The further away a page is from the homepage, the worse it is for that page’s SEO.

Choose all that apply. When should you submit your sitemap to Google and other search engines?

• When you first publish your website
• When you publish a new web page
• When you make a significant change to your site structure
• When you redesign your website

What stage of the buyer’s journey is someone searching for “what is inbound marketing?” likely in?

• Awareness
• Consideration
• Decision
• None of the above

True or False? You should emulate the top-ranking content for your target keyword, but offer unique value.

What was the purpose of the Google Hummingbird algorithm update?

• Associating past search history with similar themes and pulling together keywords and phrases
• Parsing out phrases rather than focusing on specific search queries
• Targeting link spam and manipulative link-building practices
• Serving up more personalized and relevant search results

What is a pillar page?

• A structural strategy to organize the information architecture of your website
• A page such as your home page which links out to a large number of other pages on your site
• A way to organize a site’s content pages using a cleaner and more deliberate site architecture
• A website page that covers a specific topic in depth and is linked to a cluster of related content

Google measures how interesting other people think your content is through -.

• Links
• Backlinks
• Social shares
• Page views

True or False? Google doesn’t care about the quality of backlinks, only the quantity.

What kind of content is most likely to be organically linked to?

• Informational content
• Promotional content
• Clickbait content
• All content is equally likely to be linked to.

How many links does it take to rank high in search results?

• The same number of links that other pages on your site have
• More links than your highest-ranking page has
• The same number of links that the results ranking on page one have
• None of the above

True or False? All link-building tactics require building a relationship in order to work.

When building a relationship with the goal of receiving backlinks, what is the first thing you should do?

• Request a link from them
• Deliver value to them
• Pitch an idea for a piece they can write
• Tell them how important you are

Choose all that apply. What are the most important things to do when replying to press request alerts?

• Respond quickly
• Include an image or video
• Give the journalist exactly the information they want
• Make sure they know how authoritative your site is

True or False? Backlinks build authority.

True or False? The majority of SERPs include some type of rich results.

What are rich results?

• Google’s response to a user’s search query
• Visually enhanced search results that provide supplemental information to the title, URL, and meta description of a web page
• A standardized format for providing information about a page and classifying the page content
• A markup language

Jo is a marketer at Papier, a stationery company that does most of their business online. Jo has noticed that Papier is falling behind their competitors in search results and wants to improve their ranking and clickthrough rate. How should Jo go about optimizing the Papier website for this goal?

• Add structured data to the product pages to display reviews and ratings data in rich results, and optimize the pages’ meta descriptions.
• Implement a topic cluster content strategy to create blog posts and a pillar page on the topic of stationery.
• Submit their sitemap to Google Search Console and resolve any duplicate content issues and crawling errors.

What kind of company would benefit from the site links rich snippet?

• All companies can benefit from site links rich snippets.
• A company with a large website, recognizable brand, and high search traffic.
• A company with a smaller, highly targeted website.
• A company that has an ecommerce store which sells products online.

True or False? Structured data is a markup language.

When should you decide to work with a developer to implement structured data on a page?

• When there are multiple schema markups that you want to implement on a single page
• When you are unable to use a plugin to add structured data to your website
• You should always work with a developer to implement structured data.
• When there are a large number of required or recommended properties in a markup

• Google’s Structured Data Testing Tool
• Google’s Rich Results Test
• Google’s PageSpeed Insights
• Both A & B

Why is over-optimizing bad?

• You can’t collect any impactful data to inform your next steps
• Google will be confused and unable to crawl your site
• You won’t be able to update a page after a certain number of changes
• It will trigger a penalty in Google

Choose all that apply. What data can you gather about your website from Google Search Console?

• Search impressions
• Position in SERPs
• Time spent on a page
• Clickthrough rate

If you track nothing else for SEO, make sure you track -.

• Organic traffic
• Clickthrough rate
• Conversion rate
• Impressions

Chris is a marketing manager at The Pet Box, which offers subscription boxes for pet owners. Chris wants to increase traffic to The Pet Box’s main product page. Right now that page ranks on the second page of search results for their target keyword. Chris has started improving the on-page SEO of the page, optimizing it for their target keyword, and seeking backlinks from popular pet care blogs. In order to track progress towards their goal, which metrics should Chris track?

• Organic traffic, position, impressions, backlinks
• Organic traffic, clickthrough rate, bounce rate, sales
• Organic traffic, bounce rate, time spent on page

What is the recommended format for implementing schema markup?

• Google Tag Manager
• HTML
• JSON-LD
• None of the above

What kind of heading tag should you use for subtitles on a page?

How long should your page’s title tag be?

• Under 60 characters
• Under 120 characters
• Over 60 characters
• As long as possible

Which of these is a strategy to determine the internal linking structure of a website?

• Pyramids
• Schema
• Canonicalization
• Topic clusters

Choose all that apply. Which of these tactics will help improve your website’s internal linking?

• Add a related posts section to your blog.
• Audit your robots.txt file.
• Create more blog posts and web pages.
• Create a pillar page and topic cluster.

Which of these is an example of a top-level domain?

• www.
• .org
• https://
• All of the above

True or False? It is a best practice to make your URLs as long and descriptive as possible.

What technical SEO issue can you solve with an SSL certificate?

• Slow site speed
• Lack of site security
• Duplicate content
• Negative mobile user experience

Zoe is a digital marketer at a graphic design agency, and she’s been tasked this quarter with improving the firm’s SEO. However, the only guidance she has received from her boss is to get the site to rank higher on Google. In order for Zoe to create a successful SEO strategy for the business, what should her first step be?

• Perform an SEO audit of the firm’s website to determine if there are any crawl errors or content gaps
• Set a SMART goal and establish KPI’s to track if her SEO efforts are successful
• Outline a content calendar for the quarter, including target keywords with high search volume

When performing keyword research, how can you determine which keywords you should create content for?

• Define topics that you want your business to be known for, then find long-tail keywords within that topic area.
• Perform a competitor analysis to see what keywords your competitors are ranking for.
• Identify keywords that have the highest amount of search volume, then create as much content as you can on them.
• A & B

True or False? When you make a change to a page, Google immediately crawls it.

Dr. Dave Driscoll, a very credible and well respected authority on dentistry, just linked to a blog post that you wrote about how to floss from his website. When Google assesses the authority of your post and recognizes the link from Dr. Driscoll’s website, which search engine function is at play?

• Crawling
• Ranking
• Discovering
• Indexing

True or False? You should use hyphens, underscores, or spaces between the words in your URLs.

What is the purpose of a 301 redirect?

• To temporarily redirect users from one URL to another
• To prevent search engine crawlers from indexing a page
• To resolve duplicate content issues
• To permanently redirect users from one URL to another

True or False? Don’t use a page’s URL as your link description.

The different types of keywords are:

• Fat head, chunky middle, body keywords
• Head terms, chunky middle, topic keywords
• Head terms, body keywords, long-tail keywords
• Body keywords, chunky middle, long-tail keywords

What is Schema.org?

• A standardized format for providing information about a page and classifying the page content
• A website where you can input a type of structured data and generate completed markup for your page
• The organization that creates the standardized language and rules used for structured data
• Google’s proprietary source of structured data

True or False? Domain authority is a ranking factor in Google’s algorithms.

Why would you want to run competitive analyses of keywords?

• To figure out what keywords your web pages are currently ranking for
• To determine whether you should be targeting a long tail keyword or a head term
• To ensure the keywords you’re targeting are aligned with your audience
• You shouldn’t run competitive analysis of keywords.

True or False? Adding structured data to a page guarantees that it will appear as a rich snippet in search results.

Choose all that apply. Which of these are important KPIs to consider for SEO?

• Organic traffic
• Keyword ranking
• Bounce rate
• Content length
• Page load time

When should you use a robots.txt file?

• When you have multiple versions of a page to indicate the preferred version
• When your website receives a penalty from Google
• When you have pages that you don’t want search engines to crawl and index
• Whenever you feel like it

Sam is the marketing director for StyleHub, a clothing boutique. They opened their brick and mortar store last year, but Sam only published the website a month ago and it isn’t receiving much traffic yet. Now, they’re ready to focus on SEO and have some resources to dedicate to it. Which three tactics should Sam focus on initially?

• Creating a series of blog posts and pillar pages; Reaching out to journalists for backlinks; Running a keyword competitive analysis
• Implementing structured data on the website; Optimizing the load time of the website; Guest blogging for other relevant, authoritative websites
• Optimizing the website to follow on-page SEO best practices; Making the website mobile-responsive; Setting up a Google My Business profile

Which of these is an example of a long-tail keyword?

• Glasses
• Do I need glasses
• Women’s eye glasses
• What does my glasses prescription mean