Google's Penguin update hit in April 2012, targeting manipulative link-building and keyword stuffing — a second major blow to spam tactics in as many years. That May, Facebook's IPO also made social media advertising a boardroom conversation rather than a marketing-team experiment.
10 Professionals
Worth Knowing This Year
- 01
International SEO Consultant
Spoke at MozCon 2012 on SEO project management, building on a growing reputation on the international SEO speaking circuit.
Focusing on the operational side of SEO, not just tactics, filled a gap most conference talks at the time skipped over: how to actually run SEO work across a real team.
- 02
Founder, SEER Interactive
Was becoming known for pushing SEOs to think beyond keywords toward real audience research.
His argument that SEO should start with understanding people, not just search terms, is nudging the discipline toward audience-first thinking that's still a hard sell for teams focused on keyword volume.
- 03
Founder & CEO, Siege Media
Founded Siege Media in August 2012, betting on a content- and link-building agency model right as Google started punishing manipulative links.
Building an agency specifically around content and link building, right as Penguin punished manipulative links, positioned Siege Media well for the more editorial approach Google was starting to reward.
- 04
Co-founder, Unbounce
Co-founded landing-page platform Unbounce in 2009 and was a leading voice on conversion optimization.
Unbounce made A/B testing a landing page accessible to marketers without a developer on hand, turning conversion rate optimization into something far more teams could actually do.
- 05
Founder, Copyhackers
Founded Copyhackers, popularizing "conversion copywriting" as a discipline.
Treating copywriting as something testable and data-driven, rather than purely creative, gave marketers a new way to think about the words on their own pages.
- 06
Co-founder & CMO, Orbit Media
Was already a decade into building the Chicago agency and writing about content strategy.
A decade of running client work alongside publishing his own research gave his content strategy writing an unusually practical, tested edge.
- 07
Influencer marketing consultant
Was an established voice on social and influencer marketing strategy.
His consulting work focused on helping brands build structured social media strategies at a point when most companies were still treating social as an afterthought.
- 08
Email marketing researcher
Was building a research-driven reputation in email marketing and deliverability.
His research pushed email marketers to look past open rates toward deliverability and lifecycle mechanics that determined whether campaigns even reached the inbox.
- 09
Founder, Stone Temple Consulting
Had run Stone Temple Consulting since 1997 and co-authored The Art of SEO.
Fifteen years running an SEO consultancy by this point made Stone Temple one of the field's most established firms, with The Art of SEO becoming a standard reference text.
- 10
Founder, BlitzMetrics
Was known for data-driven Facebook advertising frameworks.
His frameworks tried to replace guesswork in Facebook ad spend with structured, testable processes, at a point when Facebook advertising itself was still fairly new territory for most marketers.
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.