Have you heard the canary chirping in the marketing coal mine?
He became a little stronger last month after Ahrefs published a report Display of a decrease of 32% from month to month in research traffic on HubSpot.com, the website of the site of the popular customer relationship management software. (January 2025 experienced 5.7 million visits and December 2024 saw 8.7 million visits.)
Marketing specialists have done a lot of howl, sharing statistics with surface answers and proclaiming results as an indicator that SEO is dead.
Why should you worry about what’s going on with the HubSpot website? You shouldn’t. After all, you are probably not in the CRM industry, and you do not know in detail what is the marketing strategy of the company.
But you shouldn’t ignore the potential implications. Deborah Carver of the written content technologist: “In favor of the rapid deletion of content for a zero player click on (prominent referencing influencers and their content marketing acolytes) have forgotten that other areas, tactics and ideas exist outside the Internet.”
See the recent research Hullabaloo for what it really is – an early alert sign that marketing specialists are in tumult on the rapid development of how consumers find a business and its content, its products and its services.
It’s time to stop your (probably) long -standing traditional referencing approach. Here are five questions to answer to prepare your brand for the future:
1. Does your audience behave in the same way as?
Before diving into the way your audience members use research, explore all their interactions with your business. Many things have happened in recent years, changes in the place where people are working (Remote vs Company Office) to the way they learn (online and in person) and how they get answers (Generative AI tools Compared to traditional search engines). Add the legal and social challenges concerning social media, from the prohibition of tiktok to platform owners, and you can see that your audience crosses a lot.
Has this change affected the way he engages with your business? An audit of the behavior of your audience can respond to this. Examine the 2023, 2024 data points today for your marketing tactics. What has increased? What has decreased? What remained the same? Do figures indicate significant behavior changes that deserve to be noted (and to answer)?
With this large -scale view, you can now deepen the details, and in this process, it is a reference traffic to your website.
2. Does your reference traffic really deliver?
Go under the surface of the website traffic numbers to understand which visitors really count for your organization.
Research reference traffic Bring visitors to take the measures you want?
Otherwise, you may have to adjust your SEO investment and put (or all) in your marketing strategy components that provide results.
If the reference traffic is useful, explore to understand which segments of visitors really deliver. What are the intentions of these coveted researchers? Is it informative, commercial or transactional?
What are the most effective keywords? After all, it is not because your site ranks well for certain keywords that it is useful for the company.
Szymon Slowik illustrates this in his In -depth analysis of new hubspot on surfer referencing. He underlines how HubSpot lost its n ° 1 ranking for the “marketing strategy model” as well as for “quotes” and notes that one is probably more important than the other for HubSpot affairs.
With this new analysis, locate your list of keywords to underline those with the greatest impact and delete those which are not relevant.
This leads to the next step.
3. Do your measurements really measure success?
Metrics for the success of SEO Center generally keywords and rankings. The bosses are impressed by the number of rankings of the first three appear on a apparently endless list of words in the quarterly report. Of course, none of this matters if the high rankings do not serve the business.
This is why you must revise the measurement plan to make sure it intends to what contributes to the business marketing objectives. Of course, you cannot just unilaterally revise the measurements for yourself. Talk to the business leaders to get their comments, explain your new recommended report system and get their OK before implementing the more useful report.
4. What about your content competition?
With a better understanding of your audience’s behavior and your newly priority keyword list, you are ready to explore wider research behavior.
Enter each keyword to find out what content of the sites is already classified for that. What does this search results page look like? Is there a preview of AI at the top? If so, does it include only one or more source links? Visit these sources and one of the best rankings not mentioned in AIO. Analyze the content itself (including integrated links, images, videos and headers), as well as the metadata available, to find opportunities for your brand to improve or create new content.
ADVICE: Do not forget to do an audio search for your keywords to understand what is revealed in the ears of your audience.
5. What is in the name of SEO?
Your business has probably codified SEO and SEM in the marketing structure. Employee titles may include acronyms. You can contract with SEO agencies or SEM specialists.
This is the right time to start the conversation on the update of the title, recognizing that SEO and SEM are not partitioned activities. But do not simply implement a change of title. Ask these employees to describe their work without using “SEO” or “SEM”. Do the same with all external partners. Evaluate these descriptions, add your own modifications and collaborate to achieve a role name which more precisely reflects what they do or accomplishes.
ADVICE: If the conversation on a new name reveals that they only do the work of traditional referencing, it is time to update the description of the position or to find a new agency.
Sing a modern marketing song
You don’t have to worry about the great drop in hubspot traffic. It is for the CRM supplier to do (or not). However, you can hear all the Hullabaloo as a warning call.
It is time to better understand how the evolution of your audience’s behavior and how brand marketing should react. Then you can sing a melody that will be greeted by the applause of your audience and your leaders.
Conversely sorted on the pane content:
Joseph Kalinowski / Content Marketing Institute cover image
