5 Lessons from Tectonic Shifts in the Marketing Landscape

Today, I want to talk about 5 lessons I've learned from some of the tectonic shifts in the marketing landscape that have happened over the years. This is represented mostly by Google updates in my talk today, and it's by no means meant to be a history lesson. I was just reflecting on the past and some of these takeaways that have really served me as a marketer and helped me do good, meaningful, impactful work for clients.

Lesson 1: Thin Content Does Not Perform (Google Panda Update)

The first one of these tectonic shifts for me was Google's Panda update, which really focused on content quality. What you're looking at on the right side here is an actual client page that I worked on, and this is all the content that's on the page. It's barely 100 words.

My big takeaway from this time period is thin content does not perform. It certainly did not perform well after Panda. I know a lot of clients are averse to having really wordy pages because they feel like their site visitors don't want a reading assignment. But if the content's really good and it's what people are looking for, they really do want to consume quite a bit of it. Sometimes they need that before they convert.

If you want to be a strong marketer, a powerful partner, or a collaborative client, it's time to embrace robustly informative pages. This could be a home page, a service page, or a blog post. Any one of those really does warrant a strong outline and deeply informative sections. It's going to be good for your customers, and it's going to be great for your SEO.

Lesson 2: Easy Links Tend Not to Help (Google Penguin Update)

The next update I wanted to talk about was the Penguin update. This one focused on backlinks, particularly low quality backlinks. This screenshot right here is just a snippet from some of the backlink removal work I did at the beginning of my career. Basically, what it represents is a large network of sites owned by a single individual who used to sell link placements to help sites rank well. Back in the day, you could rank number one if you bought enough links.

When this update came, it was pretty much overnight that sites participating in this were just knocked off the first page completely. There was a panic to remove them all. Unfortunately, individuals like this made a lot of money not only selling the links in the first place, but charging to remove them when everyone panicked and tried to get them scraped from their backlink profile.

The takeaway here was that easy links tend not to help. Essentially, any link worth having was going to be more difficult to get, if not really hard. And that's kind of the way it should be. Anything worth having shouldn't really be easy to get.

There are still links that are fairly easy to get, and some of them are pay-to-play. If you're a local site, you might purchase a link on a chamber of commerce site or something like that. But this was a completely different thing. This was just spam, and I'm glad Google made this change.

The takeaway for marketers and clients is that we really want to get authoritative, relevant, high-quality backlinks into our profile.

Lesson 3: Keyword Stuffing Is Dead (Google Hummingbird Update)

The next update that was significant for me was the Hummingbird update. This was Google's way of getting more sophisticated in applying context to a user's query. But it kind of extended for me to a philosophical change where we were once focused on keywords and using exact match keywords in the copy of our content, using them a lot—even keyword stuffing, if that's a term you're familiar with.

After this update happened, it really helped a lot of marketers mature into the next phase of optimizing content, which is to make sure that content is meeting the user's search intent. Personally, I not only like to meet their intent—I like to anticipate it.

If I'm creating a page outline, I'll do audience research into things like People Also Ask questions, and I will try to make sure that the subsections of my page anticipate the next thing the user would be wondering about. What's the next most likely thing they might want to read? How can I draw them into the next section of the page to keep them engaged, keep them on the page, and develop a good relationship between that user and the brand?

This is also a period of time where I started utilizing more natural language processing, like keywords and entities, and incorporating those kinds of things into my content. It wasn't just relevant for the user, but it could be relevant for search engines as well.

Big takeaway here: keyword stuffing is dead. That didn't make keywords unimportant. They're still important, and you can still win with exact match keywords. But the emphasis has been greatly reduced. In fact, when I produce content now, I just do audience research and write first. Then I use keywords kind of like a final treatment just to make sure that we've got those signals somewhere on the page.

Lesson 4: Always Lead with Expertise (EEAT Updates)

The next tectonic shift had to do with a couple of Google updates like the Helpful Content update and the Medic update. I'm not sure if those were the official names—I can't remember anymore. But this was all about EEAT: Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness. Getting those kinds of signals into your content and onto your website, along with things like proper author bios, credentials, and professional titles.

What I started to do in this era was source my content from the experts first. Make sure I'm collaborating with the client. Make sure I'm getting in front of the experts and having them source the content and the writing that's going to go on the website.

The results were far better, and it got me further away from that sort of "set it and forget it" marketing where some intern from an agency is writing content about plumbing in a certain area when they don't have that expertise and they haven't lived in that area.

If you want to write great content, you need to lead with expertise.

Lesson 5: Amplify Your Signal Across Platforms (LLM & AI Search Era)

The final lesson is one that a lot of marketers have neglected for a while because we didn't really have to think too much about it, but it's becoming more and more essential. If you're someone who can crack this code and figure it out—because it is high effort—you are going to outperform the competition.

Your footprint is going to be much larger if you've got a website, you've got mentions on the web, plus a presence in whatever platforms are relevant to your business.

That's why I've incorporated a workflow that allows me to interview an expert for just 30 minutes every month and then utilize and repurpose that information across a number of platforms. Really powerful. It helps a lot with your presence in LLM search, like ChatGPT web search. Honestly, it's just downright fun. Once you start doing it, the old way of just focusing on the website kind of feels stale.