Hubspot SEO Dominance Is Over: What Happened & How We’d Fix It

I’ve always loved the concept of “category ownership”. Category ownership is achieved when a company’s product becomes the standard for its category, up to a point where “brand equals category”. It’s the reason why people often crave M&Ms but are rarely in the mood for “sugar-coated dragée chocolate confectionery”.

There’s another way to achieve legibility arbitrage: By creating proprietary concepts that turn common practices into something easy to define. That’s exactly what Hubspot did with the term “inbound marketing” in 2005. And throughout the next 20 years, Hubspot became the inbound platform of choice for over 200k companies worldwide. 

But, can you believe that the inbound marketing leader has been bleeding organic traffic since March? 

In this post, we’ll cover:

• What’s going on with Hubspot’s SEO
• What may be behind this loss of traffic
• What it means for the future of Hubspot in particular - and SEO in general

Let’s dive in.

Inside the Hubspot SEO Catastrophe

In December 2024, Hubspot had over 15M organic visitors per month. As of this writing, traffic’s down by over 70%. This sort of loss of traffic is quite alarming. But considering Hubspot’s status as the company that practically invented inbound marketing as we know it today, it’s outright shocking.

Even if you’ve never logged into Hubspot, you’ve probably used terms and concepts created by the company. And, of course, as part of inbound marketing, SEO has always been one of Hubspot’s strong suits. So, what’s going on? Has the game changed this much?! And why didn’t Hubspot adapt to the new playbook?

The only way to answer this question is to look “inside” Hubspot’s SEO efforts - or rather, get as close as we can. Let’s log into SEMRush and see what’s going on:

Just today, Hubspot saw positioning improvements across 2.3k keywords - but they’re also experiencing decreased positioning across 2.4k keywords.

A closer look at their declined positions shows that:

• Hubspot ranks for some very vague keywords - but also for great ones, such as “CRM software”, for which Hubspot unbelievably has lost positioning.
• The blog seems to be the main culprit for the lost keywords.

So, let’s check out Hubspot’s blog on SEMRush.

Against most SEO’s better judgement, Hubspot’s blog is hosted on a subdomain. But that doesn’t really matter. At its most bearish, the blog ranks for over 624k keywords and has over half a million organic visitors per month. In spite of the traffic losses, Hubspot is still an industry mammoth. 

But, let’s take a closer look at the blog’s top keywords. They are:

• email
• gmail email
• instagram
• branding
• github

Mmm… they’re not really related to Hubspot’s value proposition, are they? Let’s just visit the Hubspot blog and see what type of content we find.

First impressions:

• Hubspot’s content seems to lack a clear focus. It’s about marketing at large.
• Most of the content is really top-of-funnel and general.
• They’re still doing listicles - a dozen Mean Girls-style jokes are now brewing inside of me, but I’ll keep them to myself.

Of course, the Hubspot blog includes some interesting articles, such as their introduction to the 2025 State of Marketing & Trends Report, and a couple of first-person blog posts from company founders. But most of the content is unopinionated, generic and forgettable.

If I had to attribute Hubspot’s decline in traffic to a single issue, it’d be that they built a very robust marketing playbook for a previous era and executed it perfectly. So their content library is full of content that used to be competitive, but that now just weighs them down. 

This content is:

• Overly optimized
• A bit bland, written by people but with a noticeable corporate affectation
• Unactionable and distant, providing loose tips “bird's eye view” insights

And don’t get me started on The Hustle, The Pipeline & Masters in Marketing. Hubspot’s acquired publications suffer from the very same flaws. It’s generic content, for a foregone era of the internet. Written by talented and intelligent people, constrained by outdated guidelines.

The New SEO Playbook 

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If Hubspot’s playbook is outdated - what will replace it? 

Let’s see what Hubspot has been doing so far:

• Producing as much content as possible
• Covering everything related to sales, customer service & marketing from a theoretical perspective, “educating” the customer
• Including 3-4 CTAs before the end of the introduction
• Focusing on “evergreen”, long-form content

And here’s what our most successful clients have been doing:

• Producing up to 4 posts per week - and focusing on distribution
• Covering their niche - and their niche’s niche, from an actionable perspective, helping customers achieve a concrete goal
• Using UI elements for CTAs rather than constantly embedding them into the content
• Focusing on opinionated, scannable & interactive content

The way users discover content has changed a lot in the last few years. We’re currently experiencing the consolidation of a new content discovery paradigm where:

• Users will value social platforms & specialized directories that allow them to discover quality content
• Brand will be a key differentiating factor in a sea of anonymous AI-generated content
• Authorship will gain importance, as writers have to bring something unique to the table to set themselves apart
• Top-of-funnel queries will be mostly answered by AI overviews & conversational AI
• Curation, specialization and human touch will be more important than volume
• Actionable content will be more effective than long-form static content

Fantasy Football SEO: How We’d Reimagine the Hubspot SEO Strategy

Welcome to our fan fiction. Let’s imagine we get a call from Hubspot’s leadership asking for a renewed SEO strategy. Recently, we’ve been working with a large company with a huge legacy content library. The strategy we’ve developed for them is very similar to what we’d develop for Hubspot.

Here’s (a partial look) at our blueprint:

1. Discovery

First, we meet with every team involved in marketing, growth & content. 

We open our hearts and minds to have sincere conversations about:

• Past SEO efforts & victories
• Content governance
• How the product and the market changed over time
• Adoption & retention stats
• User feedback
• Product roadmap

Parallely, our SEO team will:

• Audit the website’s SEO performance
• Assess its compliance with technical best practices

2. Content audit

Then, we audit the content and sort it into four buckets:

1. Consolidate - For redundant content pieces that we can unify into a better, more competitive post.
2. Delete & redirect - For unsalvageable outdated content. 
3. Revamp - For powerful content that has lost its shine.
4. Don’t touch - For recently published content that’s performing well.

You may wonder if this tedious work must be done manually or can be delegated to AI. AI can do some of the filtering, but this is the type of precise decision-making that requires human experts. We usually share the workload with in-house teams. 

3. Strategy

At this point, we’ll be empowered by:

• A throughout understanding of the company’s SEO history, challenges, and business objectives.
• Precise data on the website’s SEO performance and average content quality
• User insights
• Content operations blueprints

A strategy is not a plan, it’s a set of principles that will get us from point A to point B.  So we’ll develop:

• A new content hub structure
• Content standards
• A content revamping checklist
• New content ideation, production & distribution guidelines

Additionally, we’ll design a blog relaunch plan.

5. Content design 

Renew the blog’s UX to facilitate:

• Peaceful and comfortable content consumption (without aggressive CTAs)
• Intuitive content discovery

You don’t have to go mad developing everything in one go. Growth-driven design is your friend.

Side note: The growth-driven design methodology was also developed by Hubspot. We’re witnessing the fall of a giant.

This is only half of the process

We’d tell you the rest, but it’s top secret. If you’re looking to bring new life to our underperforming content library, apply for a workshop today.

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