The Huddle: What you can learn from Hubspot's SEO troubles

This edition of The Huddle was initially published and sent on January 28, 2025. To get The Huddle delivered to your inbox every 2 weeks, subscribe here.

Hey there,

Want to stand out in 2025? Start by building a community.

If you’re a mortgage originator, it’s time to flip the script. Instead of focusing on what you can do, create opportunities for others to grow. Host an event that brings real estate agents, builders, and other professionals together. Here’s exactly how you can pull it off:

Step 1: Choose Your Focus

Decide what will resonate most with your audience. Topics like:

• How to use social media to drive leads
• Open house strategies that convert
• Creative follow-up campaigns that get results

Keep it laser-focused on their success.

Step 2: Lock in Your Speakers

Make it a collaborative effort by inviting:

• A social media strategist to share actionable tips
• A standout agent with open house success stories
• A builder or lender who can provide unique insights

Tip: Ask speakers for quick, practical tips your audience can apply immediately.

Step 3: Pick a Venue

Keep it simple—a conference room, co-working space, or even your office can work. Just make sure it’s professional and easy to access.

Step 4: Market Your Event

• Email Blast: Send invites to your network of agents and builders.
• Social Media: Create a quick, casual video invite explaining the value of attending.
• Personal Invites: Reach out directly to key players you want there.

Step 5: Deliver Value Without a Hard SellWhen the event happens, remember: this isn’t about you.

• Focus on helping them grow.
• Make sure they leave with new ideas they’re excited to try.

When you create value, people naturally see you as a leader—and they’ll want to work with you.

We recently put this into action at our Thrive in 25 event, bringing together marketing leaders to share tactical tips with mortgage and real estate pros. The feedback was incredible, and we’ll definitely do it again (pic below!).

Take this as your sign—start planning, keep it simple, and build your community one event at a time.

Let’s lead by example,

Joe Wilson
Founder, SocialCoach

Who is your content actually for?

For a very long time, Hubspot has been the gold standard of quality blog content that performed well on Google. For nearly a decade I have pointed to their content in trainings, workshops and other teaching situations as content that is well-thought out, well-structured and performs incredibly well on Google.

This last week that all came crashing down.

The seemingly impenetrable stronghold of Hubspot's blog seems to have collapsed in the last week with most of their blog traffic disappearing nearly overnight.

But how is this possible?

Hubspot has been doing everything that Google has been asking for for nearly a decade -- quality content designed to answer specific questions. Why did this happen?

Because over time, Hubspot started to drift outside of their lane a little bit. The content stopped being laser-focused on what worked for them and started to be content just for the sake of ranking on Google.

20 Inspirational Quotes from Star Trek Characters can help some people, sure. But how much overlap is that with who Hubspot is trying to reach? And there was a lot of that kind of stuff that lost a lot of rankings overnight.

So what does this mean for you? Does it mean that you should only be talking about mortgage and real estate in your content?

Nope.

I think one of the best takeaways here is that Hubspot got into the habit of making content for the sake of content rather than creating content with the purpose of helping people. It got traffic, but a lot of it was just fluff without a real purpose.

The idea was to create as much content as possible throwing as wide a net as possible and now that they aren't getting traffic for that silly content anymore, they are seeing their overall traffic drop.

So for your content, ask yourself every single time: Who is this for? Is what I'm creating the type of content that would help them? Am I creating it in a way that is helpful?

Take that approach and I can promise that you won't have a day like last Friday for Hubspot. You'll have a long, healthy relationship with your content and so will your audience.

Good luck out there,

Brandon Treadway

Director of Growth, SocialCoach