Content with your content?

Driving qualified visitors to your website depends on valuable content, not SEO hacks.

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Issue № 122 | London, Sunday 26 January 2025

Read on to learn why:

① Updates to Google’s core and AI are making SEO redundant.

② Quality content trumps SEO hacks every time.

③ Maybe globalisation wasn’t such a bad idea after all.

④ AI’s next challenge is steeping itself in distinct corporate culture.

⑤ Video will continue to dominate social media, regardless of TikTok’s fate.

⑥ Pay transparency is like sunlight: lovely but can cause damage.

⑦ The UK has an opportunity to stand out economically.

?? But first flashback to last year, when I told you that the decline of the UK’s capital markets is a deep-rooted cultural problem, because British institutional investors are ultra-conservative and British retail investors are ill-informed and blinkered. This week, former chief global equity strategist at Citigroup Robert Buckland adds that the waning of active funds is drying up the UK’s IPO market. Monzo’s CEO has noticed: he’s fighting with his board to list in the US instead.

What's new

HubSpot has seen organic website traffic drop precipitously, MarTech reports.

In short:

• “Organic traffic appears to have declined sharply, dropping from 13.5 million in November to 8.6 million in December, according to Semrush. HubSpot’s blog seems to have taken most of the impact.”
• “It may be that Google wants to stop rewarding websites that publish content outside their area of expertise – that lack depth and topical authority on. The type of content that is more geared toward getting Google organic traffic than being written for people. What Google might call ‘SEO-first content’ (or helpful content).”
• “Some of the topics seeing huge declines for HubSpot appear to be blogs about famous quotes, writing a resignation letter, and cover letter examples. Some are blaming the huge traffic drop on HubSpot’s lack of topical authority, while others pointed to possible ‘thin content’ issues.”

Why it matters

For nearly as long as there’s been an internet, there have been expensive ‘SEO consultants’ selling snake oil to marketers. The promise is straightforward: these gurus know something you don’t about search engines and can trick them into driving more traffic to your website. The catch? It’s not a one-off fix but a never-ending task, a retainer-requiring service that will sap your marketing budget for as long as you let it.

This story matters because it reminds us that if even the brand that many consider to be the gold standard of B2B vendor blogs can stumble like this, anyone can. For years, Hubspot had been increasingly producing content better suited to impressing a search engine than a potential customer: it was short, high-level, and frequently too far removed from its product offering.

① SEO was always a dark art. But the truth is that, with Google updating its core regularly and AI assistants increasingly taking over from search engines, it’s now more critical than ever to focus on the depth and relevance of your content, as opposed to going broad to try to ‘hack’ the system.

What to do about it

Take action

② When it comes to website visitors, quality trumps quantity every time. Why waste time sifting through visitors who are there because your content mislead them? That’s why quality content trumps SEO hacks every time too. Start with the people you’re trying to attract, develop content that adds real value to them, before you even consider the technical hacks.

1. Think deeply about your target audience: Pinpoint the roles, industries, and pain points of your target customers. Research the keywords they are likely to be searching for as a result. Analyse your competitors’ websites to discover opportunities you might have for topics and keywords not well catered for.
2. Develop content that has genuine and unique value: Step one means you can now create content that addresses your target customers’ specific challenges and provide actionable insights for them. Remove fluffy, generic writing and replace it with expert insights that you’re uniquely positioned to provide. Don’t shy away from detail. Indeed, with AI increasingly providing summaries to casual browsers, useful detail may be the only thing that does get someone to actually visit your site.
3. Optimise with technical tweaks: Once you’ve got the right content that will attract the right people - but only then - by all means tweak for SEO. There is value in looking at your meta descriptions, optimising your load times, fixing broken links, creating a content hub, and using analytics to understand what’s working and what’s not. But content must come first.

Get help

IMTW is brought to you by InMarketing, a strategic advisory service for senior leadership teams in B2B finance and technology. It can help you with:

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To learn why:

③ Maybe globalisation wasn’t such a bad idea after all.

④ AI’s next challenge is steeping itself in distinct corporate culture.

⑤ Video will continue to dominate social media, regardless of TikTok’s fate.

⑥ Pay transparency is like sunlight: lovely but can cause damage.

⑦ The UK has an opportunity to stand out economically.

Visit InMarketing This Week for the rest of this issue >

About

Written for senior leadership teams in finance and technology, InMarketing This Week is a showcase for news likely to impact you - delivered with insight on why it matters and ideas on what to do about it. It’s published every Sunday at six to give you a head start on the week. Read extracts?here on LinkedIn, or subscribe to?have each full issue delivered straight to your inbox, before it's available anywhere else.