The digital marketing experts featured for 2013 are Dharmesh Shah, Brian Dean, Eric Siu, Tim Soulo, Danny Sullivan, Richard Baxter, Karen McGrane, Bill Slawski, Aaron Wall and Seth Godin.
What changed in digital marketing in 2013
Google's Hummingbird update, released in August 2013, was a ground-up rewrite of the core search algorithm built to understand full queries and conversational language rather than matching individual keywords for the first time.
10 Professionals
Worth Knowing This Year
- 01
Dharmesh Shah
Co-founder & CTO, HubSpot
Spoke at MozCon 2013, bringing a software-company perspective to a conference historically focused on SEO.
HubSpot's inbound marketing pitch was, by this point, pulling SEO into a broader conversation about lead generation and marketing software rather than treating it as a standalone discipline.
- 02
Brian Dean
Founder, Backlinko
Launched Backlinko in 2013, which quickly became one of the SEO community's most-cited resources for actionable, tested tactics.
His case-study-driven format, publishing what worked rather than general advice, already stands apart from most SEO blogs' general how-to advice.
- 03
- 04
- 05
Danny Sullivan
Founder, Search Engine Land
Continued as founding editor of Search Engine Land, a leading source of search marketing news.
Hummingbird's rollout that year gave him plenty to cover, as the industry worked through what a semantic, intent-driven search algorithm meant for SEO practice.
Also featured in 2000, 2003, 2004, 2007, 2010, 2018, 2020 and 2026
- 06
Richard Baxter
Founder, Builtvisible
Continued growing Builtvisible from a one-person operation into a globally recognized agency.
The agency's research-heavy content and technical SEO work built a reputation well beyond its size, punching above its weight against much larger firms.
Also featured in 2011
- 07
Karen McGrane
Content strategy consultant
Remained a widely cited voice in content strategy and adaptive content.
As mobile traffic kept growing, her push for structured, reusable content became more relevant to organizations struggling to serve the same content across many screen sizes.
- 08
Bill Slawski
Founder, SEO by the Sea
Kept publishing patent analysis on SEO by the Sea, a resource with no real peer in the industry.
Reading Google's own patent filings for ranking signals remained a niche skill, and his willingness to do it kept the site required reading for technical SEOs.
- 09
Aaron Wall
Creator, SEO Book
Continued running SEO Book, one of the longest-running independent SEO resources.
A decade running the site independently gave him the freedom to critique Google's algorithm changes more directly than vendor-funded publications typically could.
- 10
Seth Godin
Author & entrepreneur
Published multiple bestsellers this era, continuing to shape how marketers thought about permission and remarkability.
His steady output of books and blog posts kept his ideas about permission marketing circulating well past the point most marketing trends fade.
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.
