Instagram launched Reels in August 2020, its answer to TikTok, right as the pandemic pushed a decade's worth of e-commerce growth into a single year and rewrote most marketing budgets overnight.
10 Professionals
Worth Knowing This Year
- 01
Founder & CEO, SearchPilot
Spun the SEO A/B testing platform SearchPilot out as an independent business in February 2020, the same month the rest of Distilled and SearchLove were acquired by Brainlabs.
Building SearchPilot around statistically testing SEO changes, rather than just implementing best practices on faith, gave the platform a rigor most SEO tools didn't attempt.
- 02
Search Liaison, Google
Had joined Google as its Search Liaison in 2017 and spent 2020 translating the company's ranking systems for a public hungry for answers during a chaotic year.
Explaining Google's ranking systems from inside the company, rather than as an outside journalist, put him in a genuinely unusual position after two decades covering search from the other side.
- 03
Author & entrepreneur
Published widely read commentary on marketing at a moment when most businesses were rethinking their entire strategy.
His long-running argument for building something remarkable, rather than just advertising louder, found a receptive audience among businesses forced to rethink their whole playbook that year.
- 04
Creator, SEO Book
Kept SEO Book running as an independent resource.
Seventeen years running the site independently meant he'd already seen several industry upheavals before 2020's disruption, giving his commentary a long-view perspective.
- 05
Founder, SEO by the Sea
Continued his patent-based SEO analysis on SEO by the Sea.
His patent research stayed a rare, evidence-grounded counterpoint to the mostly correlational SEO advice that circulated elsewhere in the industry.
- 06
Founder, Search Engine Roundtable
Stayed the industry's most consistent daily chronicler of search engine news.
Seventeen years of daily posts made the Roundtable one of the only continuous public records of how Google's search results kept shifting.
- 07
Founder, Foundation Marketing
Was becoming known for his work on content distribution.
His argument that distribution deserved as much attention as content creation itself pushed back against an industry that mostly measured success by publishing volume.
- 08
Founder, Copyhackers
Kept teaching conversion copywriting through Copyhackers.
Her frameworks kept spreading well beyond her own client work, cited widely as businesses leaned harder on ecommerce copy during a year of accelerated online shopping.
- 09
Entrepreneur & video marketing educator
Had published Everything Is Figureoutable the year before and kept building one of the most-watched business education platforms online.
Her platform's growth accelerated as more entrepreneurs turned to online business education during a year when in-person options largely disappeared.
- 10
Co-founder & CMO, Orbit Media
Published widely cited content marketing research through Orbit Media.
Orbit's annual surveys remained a go-to benchmark source for content marketers trying to gauge whether their own output was typical or an outlier.
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.