Hubspot’s Blog Organic Search Traffic Drop: What happened? Is it really that bad? What does it mean for SEO?

Since Ryan Law’s LinkedIn post three days ago, the SEO community has been discussing the significant drop in organic search traffic of the HubSpot blog.

Unfortunately, I’ve come across some wild (and outright bad) takes claiming this marks the end of HubSpot’s organic search traffic or even the death of SEO. Thankfully, there are also some like Gaetano DiNardi, who shared insights in LinkedIn that I’m aligned with.

This is why I wanted to go through Hubspot’s (public) rankings and traffic data through diverse tools, showing whether it’s truly that bad for HubSpot’s SEO efforts and business, and explore what it means for SEO as a whole—especially since the HubSpot Blog has often been highlighted as one of the best examples and references for successful SEO strategies; while also understanding that this and any other “external” analysis will still be lacking knowledge of their internal strategy and business, which only their SEO team knows, to assess the actual impact of the dropped traffic toward the business.

Let’s go through it!

What happened?

The Hubspot blog (although not the www main subdomain) had a substantial organic search rankings drop coinciding in time with last year Google’s December updates.

However, as can be seen in Sistrix’s organic search visibility shifts below, the blog organic search visibility had been shifting already along with previous Google Core Updates:

  • A drop in August 2023 (Core Update August 2023)
  • An increase in November 2023 (Core Update November 2023)
  • A decrease in March 2024 (Core Update March 2024)

With a negative trend since March 2024 update until now, so this drop is not something that happened from one day to another.

For context, it’s also important to highlight the blog importance to the Hubspot site overall organic search traffic and how it decreased in the last year. When checking with Semrush, it can be seen how in January 2024 the blog subdomain accounted for 77% (3.94M) of the overall organic search traffic, followed by the main www subdomain with +16% (839K) of it.

In December 2024, the blog subdomain now accounted for 42% (1.1M) of the site organic search traffic share, while the main www subdomain for 30% (819K) of it.

When taking a look in Ahrefs at which have been the blog pages that have dropped in the last 6 months, we can see that many are about very popular but not so relevant topics for Hubspot business:

  • The 100+ Most Famous Quotes of All Time
  • How to Type the Shrug Emoji ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ in 2 Seconds Flat
  • What Are Good Weaknesses to Say in an Interview That Aren’t “I’m a Perfectionist”?

These articles were ranking in top Google search positions for their very popular broader not so very relevant queries for Hubspot, like “shrug emoji”, “famous quotes” or “shrug”, although also for others for which they’re also more relevant like “small business ideas” or “customer experience”.

On the other hand, during the last 6 months, the Hubspot blog has also improved in organic search traffic and rankings with other guides, in this case, much more on topic and aligned with Hubspot business offering:

  • Email Analytics [Research]: 8 Email Marketing Metrics You Should Track
  • 7 Habits of a Highly Effective Landing Page
  • 20 Great Examples of PowerPoint Presentation Design [+ Templates]

But what sites have won for the queries for which the Hubspot blog posts have dropped?

I created a keyword list in SimilarWeb to take a look at the organic search traffic evolution of the sites ranking for them where we can see how while Hubspot dropped, players like Microsoft, Adobe, Reddit and Zapier won:

  • In December 2023: Microsoft attracted 4% of their organic search clicks, Hubspot 7%, Adobe 0.35%, Reddit 0,35%, Zapier 1%
  • In December 2024: Microsoft attracted 7% of the organic search clicks, Hubspot  3%, Adobe 3%, Reddit 3%, Zapier 2%

For example, Microsoft is now ranking better for excel related queries (excel, vlookup excel, xlookup, etc.) with excel related landing pages or guides from their support center, which are more relevant and authoritative to rank for them vs a Hubspot blog post:

There’s then clearly a pattern showing that although Google has not only decrease the rankings for “out of topic” queries, due to their popularity, they accounted for the biggest hit.

What to do in these cases? I recommend to ask a few questions I’ve shared through the following “What to do when hit by a Google Core Update?” flowchart to facilitate decision making:

  • Have the rankings dropped from relevant/meaningful queries for your site business?
  • Are the pages that dropped optimized/actively targeting irrelevant/non-meaningful queries for your business for which you don’t have expertise/authority?
  • Are the pages that dropped for relevant queries the meant to be ranked ones for them to fulfill users search needs at that stage of the customer journey?
  • Do the pages that can meet users’ needs for the queries that experienced a drop already exist on the site?
  • Are the pages optimized from a tech, content, experience standpoint to fulfill the users need for the relevant topic and provide a higher quality, authoritative and comprehensive answer / offering than the best ranked competitors?

Based on the answers of the above questions, you should take one or many of these actions specified in the flowchart, from pruning/removing the content, to not doing anything, optimizing existing content or even creating new content:

When taking a look at some of these pages, I noticed that it seems that Hubspot is already taking action, by removing the “not so relevant” pages that dropped (which is a decision we would have arrived by following the flowchart above) by temporarily 302-redirecting to a (surprise) Content Audits Guide, for example, the former Shrug Emoji guide:

Or the Famous quotes blog post:

It’s interesting to note how these were temporarily 302 redirected in the last few days since when checking in Ahrefs Inspect Content functionality, the last HTML snapshot available is from Januar 23rd for the Famous Quotes article:

As well as with the Shrug Emoji guide, for which a snapshot was taken still on January 23rd:

Is it really that bad for Hubspot traffic as a whole?

Although the blog accounted (and still accounts) for the highest share of organic search traffic for Hubspot and dropped for many very popular, although many not so relevant queries as well, the www subdomain rankings haven’t meaningfully dropped at the end of last year as the blog did, showing just a slight negative shift but a relatively steady trend:

The www subdomain still ranks pretty well for most of the commercial, transactional and navigational relevant queries, from branded terms like “hubspot crm”, “hubspot pricing” to non-branded ones like “crm”, “marketing automation”, “email marketing”

The www subdomain has also been able to keep the very relevant commercially focused software / tools / platform popular queries for which the site ranks well like “marketing software”, “sales software” or “best crm software for small business”:

So, although the overall organic search traffic drop has been meaningful, most of these were of high level informational queries, many of not so relevant topics, while the most meaningful “money making” terms have been kept well ranked by the www pages.

Looking at the bigger picture with Similarweb at Hubspot overall traffic beyond just organic search, we can see that it brought 162.3M visits from January to December 2024, with a 3.94% drop shown in December MoM.

When comparing the overall traffic in January vs December 2024, we can see how it went from 14.6M vs 11.2M monthly visits, a 23.2% decrease.

When taking a closer look at the different marketing channels, we can see how most of the traffic is direct, followed by organic search, with both channels dropping from January 2024 to December 2024:

  • January 2024: Direct 9.5M and Organic Search 4.22M
  • December 2024: Direct 7,7M and Organic Search 2.56M

So although we can see that the blog organic search rankings drops have certainly hit the site overall traffic, it hasn’t certainly “killed” it, with the most important brand and non-branded commercial/transactional queries also kept by the main www pages.

To put things further into perspective, I want to highlight the insights from someone who actually worked at Hubspot: David Ly Khim, who worked at Hubspot during +5 years in Growth until 2020, shared a few insights based on his experience:

“HubSpot’s playbook worked magically and generated billions in revenue. However, it doesn’t, didn’t, and won’t work for other companies. Especially not now (see my post on the traffic trap)” … 

“People who harp on traffic miss the fact that HubSpot’s business model and unit economics allowed the SEO team to run the strategy and reap the benefits: REVENUE.” …

“At that scale, we knew what % of traffic would convert to leads, had a great product, and had a great sales team that could convert leads into revenue. The CAC:LTV was *chef’s kiss* and the playbook printed money. … At that scale, SEO becomes a massive brand play. If Google search is a billboard (it is), HubSpot was plastered on every billboard… The strategy wasn’t perfect and some content was of questionable relevance. But the business results? “

“It’s definitely time to evolve, but HubSpot’s SEO is not dead (they still own a ton of money keywords).”

“HubSpot’s SEO team is smart and capable and will continue to evolve the program. At their scale, they can run experiments more quickly than most of us and scale what works.”

What does it mean for SEO processes?

Google is doing a better job at ranking content that showcases real subject matter expertise, independently of their overall brand popularity and better enforcing their “Creating helpful, reliable, people-first content” guidelines, in particular in this case, to avoid creating “search engine-first content made primarily to gain search engine rankings” for which Google provides useful questions to self-assess, such as:

  • Are you writing about things simply because they seem trending and not because you’d write about them otherwise for your existing audience?
  • Did you decide to enter some niche topic area without any real expertise, but instead mainly because you thought you’d get search traffic?

It has then become more critical than ever (independently of how big your brand is) to ensure topical relevance, focusing on aligning our SEO processes with the sites’ actual business goals and brand positioning, targeting queries for which it has real expertise and authoritativeness, optimizing the Web and content experience to showcase the business existing real experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness for them (for which I’ve put together this checklist to help with).

So, does this mean SEO is dead?

No if you do SEO for a real business and brand. Just be careful to better follow Google’s users first, content quality and EEAT guidelines above and picking topics for which your business has actual expertise and experience on, which are the ones that will likely be more profitable to target anyway… even if you’re a big brand.

It might be time to shift your approach if you have been “over-reliant” on these tactics to achieve organic search traffic goals, and probably also an opportunity to focus on better KPIs and goals depending on your business model, focusing on conversion and revenue, rather than just organic search traffic growth.

However, if you have been doing SEO mainly to profit by creating content for which you don’t have real experience or expertise, without a real product or service offering behind to really fulfill users search needs, then probably yes, this is the time to look for another traffic channel.

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