The digital marketing experts featured for 2011 are Will Critchlow, Richard Baxter, Sarah Bird, Joanna Lord, Gary Vaynerchuk, Mari Smith, Pam Moore, Larry Kim, Jay Baer and Spencer Haws.
What changed in digital marketing in 2011
Google's Panda update rolled out in February 2011, the first major algorithm change built specifically to penalize thin, low-quality content and content farms. It reshaped SEO overnight and forced a generation of marketers to think seriously about content quality rather than just keyword volume.
10 Professionals
Worth Knowing This Year
- 01
Will Critchlow
Co-founder, Distilled
Co-founded the SEO agency Distilled in 2005 and started the SearchLove conference series in 2009, and was a speaker at MozCon 2011.
Distilled's research-heavy approach to SEO, tested through its own conferences, helped push the discipline away from guesswork and toward something closer to a measurable practice.
Also featured in 2020
- 02
Richard Baxter
Founder, Builtvisible
Founded Builtvisible in 2009 and spoke at MozCon 2011 on automating and scaling keyword research; also contributed to that year's SEOmoz Search Ranking Factors.
Contributing to the annual Ranking Factors survey put his findings alongside the industry's other most-cited voices on what moved rankings.
Also featured in 2013
- 03
Sarah Bird
Executive, Moz
Had joined Moz in 2007 and is rising through its leadership ranks as the company grows.
Her steady climb through the company gave her an inside view of Moz's transition from a scrappy SEOmoz blog into a full software business.
- 04
Joanna Lord
VP of Growth Marketing, SEOmoz
Is VP of Growth Marketing at SEOmoz, applying the company's own SEO tactics to grow SEOmoz's business.
Leading growth marketing at a company built on SEO gave her practical experience applying the same tactics SEOmoz's audience was reading about to grow its own business.
- 05
Gary Vaynerchuk
CEO, VaynerMedia
Was building VaynerMedia and becoming one of the most recognizable voices on social media strategy.
His early bet that brands needed to treat every social platform differently, rather than repurposing the same content everywhere, still runs against how most brands operate.
- 06
Mari Smith
Facebook marketing consultant
Known for her Facebook marketing expertise, had already been named a global social media leader by Forbes.
As Facebook's advertising tools grew more complex, her consulting work helped translate the platform's mechanics into strategy brands could execute.
- 07
- 08
- 09
Jay Baer
Founder, Convince & Convert
Founded Convince & Convert in 2008, now a widely followed source on tying content directly to business results.
The blog's focus on tying content directly to business results helped separate serious content marketing practice from the "just blog more" advice common at the time.
- 10
Spencer Haws
Founder, Niche Pursuits
Founded Niche Pursuits, documenting SEO and niche-site building in public.
Publishing real traffic and income numbers from his own sites gave readers a transparent, first-hand look at SEO tactics most practitioners kept private.
Also featured in 2023
This page is an independent editorial mention published by Digital Business Marketing. The numbering above is a browsing order, not a formal award, contest, vote, or ranking, and inclusion does not imply any named person endorses Digital Business Marketing.
