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3 mistakes HubSpot made
If you’ve been on marketing Twitter (X) or LinkedIn, there’s a good chance you’ve heard about it already.
The HubSpot blog recently lost +80% of its SEO traffic. 👇
Oof. That really sucks. :(
The winner?
👆 Zapier’s blog! Insane.
As someone who’s been doing SEO for nearly a decade, I’m going to go over 3 reasons why I think this happened and what you can do to avoid it for your own website.
First off, in SEO, when someone loses it mean someone else is winning. The amount of people searching for things doesn’t change that fast (the demand). But Google has the power to change what it shows to its users (the supply).
Historically, HubSpot has been known to pioneer the way SEO is done for software companies.
What no one is talking about is the fact that HubSpot has been aggressively trying to game Google the past couple of years. I’ll explain more in mistake #1 (something I don’t see a lot of people talk about).
Mistake #1
What no one is really talking about is how HubSpot’s blog does aggressive link building.
I know this because (sorry HubSpot employees that are reading this) they parter with link building agencies and I’ve even been approached multiple times to engage in link building schemes.
Check out how many backlinks and referring domains HubSpot’s blog has:
Now, look at Zapier (who now has 10X the organic traffic):
A great way to analyze sites in a niche is to look at the volume of backlinks they have compared to their traffic. When sites have a low number of backlinks but a high amount of traffic, it’s a clear sign that the links are clean and honest.
When another site has a similar amount of traffic, but a way larger volume of backlinks, it signals that there’s something fishy going on.
But it’s not just too many bad backlinks from other sites that can hurt your domain reputation in Google’s eyes. It’s also the types of websites you link out to. And when you engage it link building schemes at scale, there’s a chance you might link out to a bad egg.
All of this goes against Google’s guidelines.
And eventually, when you get really big, either the algorithm flags you or someone at Google does it manually.
What to do instead: Build up your domain authority though actual PR (check out Featured), do co-marketing campaigns with other brands that brings real value in your space (not just link insertions), don’t link out to spammy sites or publish nonsense guest posts on your website.
Mistake #2
One of the main things I teach in my content marketing course is how to create a proper SEO strategy. It makes or breaks your entire SEO growth engine.
What HubSpot has going on is a problem I see with many large websites — even many of my clients: Too many cooks in the kitchen with no proper content strategy.
Take a look at the search results for “how to learn SEO” and you’ll see what I mean.
Lots of content that is the same — aka duplicate content.
This generally happens when a company has people come and go over the years. This could be multiple different agencies or individual contributors. The people who laid the foundations don’t do a great job of passing the baton. Or, the new people don’t care enough dive deep and understand what the previous strategy was.
In other words, either communication is bad or people aren’t great at auditing things.
This all leads to bad SEO hygiene and a lot of useless content debt. A waste of time, energy, money, and ranking potential.
What to do instead: Always have a north star for your content strategy and document everything in a place that can be accessed by anyone who works on a site after you. Also, regularly audit your content to clean up redundancies and keep your SEO hygiene in check.
Mistake #3
Domain authority abuse.
HubSpot’s focus on random top-of-funnel (ToF) content that’s far from their core product is another major misstep. This scattershot approach confuses both Google and readers about what your brand truly represents.
This is the basis of a proper content marketing strategy, and what I go over with all my clients and students. The APTK framework is something I created a few years ago to make sure this never happens.
APTK: Audiences → Products → Topics → Keywords
What to do instead: Map out all of your audiences first. Then map at each product or feature suite that aligns with each audience. From there, you derive all the possible topics you can cover. And then you start doing keyword research within those topics at each stage of the user search journey.
If you Google “B2B SaaS SEO” or “SaaS content marketing” I have a couple guides on this that go more in depth. I also do the APTK live for a real company in my course.
And that’s it.
Mistake 1: Engaging it high velocity link building activities.
Mistake 2: No clear content strategy or documentation, leading to duplicate content.
Mistake 3: Creating content outside of your core audience and product offerings.
HubSpot’s SEO crash is a wake-up call. The tactics that worked a few years ago — like aggressive link building and broad content strategies — are becoming high-risk moves.
Of course, I’m not going to act like I know all the answers. These are just my observations from the outside attempting to look in.
Catch yourself when you notice you want to chase algorithms instead of creating strategic art — real value for people that is packaged in a way so it can be distributed to reach the people who need it most.
Next week, I’ll talk about a new workflow I’ve been experimenting with and a growth strategy that I think is quite genius.
With that, let's get into what we have in store this week (lots of good stuff):
Marketing news from the past week
3 stages of you GTM strategy
Copywriting examples from real companies
An SEO strategy of ranking in LLMs
Product page UX insights for 2025
Ad in the wild
Website of the week
Cool marketing jobs
And much more
🗞 In the news
🚀 All things growth & product
10 growth tactics that don’t work, the three stages of your startup GTM strategy, the most important SaaS metric, and making marketing feel personal again.
💭 Guess the riddle
What walks on four legs in the morning, two legs in the afternoon, and three legs in the evening?
Answer is at the bottom of this email
💌 Email marketing & copywriting
Understanding Gmail’s new tab changes, copywriting examples from companies doing it right, and writing to tell the truth.
✍️ SEO & content marketing
An SEO strategy for ranking in LLMs, how AI is not going to kill SEO, and how AI content detectors actually work.
How to know when to invest in paid marketing, the process behind employee content on social media, product page UX best practices, and how Sophie Bambuck builds brands.
🧠 For your career
📣 Ad in the wild
Enron billboard I spotted last week in Soho, NYC 👀
Spotted an ad in the wild that caught your eye? Reply to this email with the ad and your @ for credit to get it featured!
💻 Website of the week
🏝 Cool marketing jobs
Okay, that's it for now 🖤. See you next Tuesday!
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“Despite how open, peaceful, and loving you attempt to be, people can only meet you, as deeply as they've met themselves. This is the heart of clarity.” — Matt Kahn
Riddle answer: A human.