Google's mobile-friendly update, nicknamed "Mobilegeddon," rolled out on April 21, 2015, rewarding mobile-optimized sites with better rankings and forcing marketers to treat mobile as the default experience rather than an afterthought.
10 Professionals
Worth Knowing This Year
- 01
President & Partner, Kick Point
Spoke at MozCon 2015. With over 20 years in the industry, she's built a reputation for translating complex analytics tools into practical guidance marketers can actually use.
Making analytics approachable, rather than just accurate, was a genuinely useful skill at a time when most marketers had access to more data than they knew what to do with.
- 02
CEO, Moz
Is CEO of Moz and spoke at this year's MozCon.
By this point Moz had grown well past its SEOmoz roots, and Fishkin's talks were increasingly about the broader marketing landscape, not just search rankings.
- 03
Founder, SEER Interactive
Also spoke at MozCon 2015.
SEER's continued growth through the mid-2010s tracked the broader shift toward SEO agencies built around audience research rather than pure link building.
- 04
Founder, iPullRank
Was building a reputation for data-driven link building and technical SEO.
His focus on treating link building as a measurable, testable practice pushed back against the more manual, relationship-driven tactics that had dominated the field.
- 05
Co-founder, Unbounce
Continued shaping conversion optimization thinking through Unbounce.
Unbounce's growing library of landing page benchmarks and examples gave marketers a reference point for what actually converted, rather than relying on guesswork.
- 06
Founder, WordStream
Was a leading voice in PPC through WordStream.
His widely shared research on AdWords benchmarks gave advertisers a rare external yardstick for judging their own account performance.
- 07
Founder, Paid Search Magic
Was deep into Google Ads conversion consulting.
Her focus stayed on what happened after the click, helping clients fix conversion paths that traffic-focused PPC advice usually ignored.
- 08
Founder, Copyhackers
Was formalizing conversion copywriting frameworks through Copyhackers.
Turning copywriting instinct into repeatable frameworks made the discipline something teams could actually train for, rather than relying on a single gifted writer.
- 09
Founder, Search Engine Roundtable
Continued as one of the industry's most consistent daily chroniclers of search news.
Twelve years of daily posts by this point made the Roundtable a de facto historical record of every minor Google update the industry noticed.
- 10
VP of Marketing, Drift
Was helping popularize conversational marketing.
Drift's bet that chat, not forms, was the future of B2B lead generation was still a contrarian one at the time, and Gerhardt's marketing made the case loudly.
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