If you know me, you know I hate fake gurus. If you have the audacity to stand on the stage in front of a paying audience and suggest you are an expert, I hope you are. That’s why I don’t do it. I’ve been in SEO for 14 years at the time of writing, and I still have so much to learn.
brightonSEO is currently holding a conference in San Diego. They describe themselves as “the ultimate event for anyone wanting to immerse themselves in talks from the leaders in both Search, Content and Influencer Marketing” and boast over 50 speakers at the event. I was surprised to recognize few names in the SEO space. No Brian Dean, Neil Patel, or Cyrus Shepard. The only name I recognized was Danny Sullivan. I think of myself as a nobody in the SEO space, but I was shocked to see how many speakers had an even smaller audience than myself.
I looked at all 61 speakers and found 54 domains. I checked out some of their sites and realized, none of them actually have organic traffic. Isn’t that ironic? A conference with experts on organic traffic, don’t have organic traffic themselves?
Only 20 of the 54 domains had over 1,000 visitors per month in Ahrefs.
11 of them had over 10,000 visitors. That’s 20%.
In fact, the bottom half of the list averaged 88 visitors a month.
It’s not fair to judge based off of pure traffic, because every business is at different stages. So I looked at sites with over 500 traffic (a good start) but not large enough to have a DR of 40. One site! demandsphere.com has a DR of 36 and 583 traffic. The rest of them were either sitting on large DRs (which anyone can get with deep pockets) or they had minimal traffic.
The median traffic for domains over DR 40 was just 1425. There are companies on this list with less than 1000 traffic yet sitting on the power of a DR70 domain.
