199 Inspiring Digital Marketing & SEO Quotes

Having said that, it’s very important for us to take the advice of experts in the field. Simply because they’ve been there and they’ve done that. They can help us understand digital marketing and SEO better and lead us straight ahead.

The road to Digital Marketing and SEO success is very broad and complex. Converting traffic into sales are not heaven sent. I’ve seen a lot of never-ending debates about SEO and digital marketing from leading sites. These debates led many practitioners to scratch their heads, I for one.

Here are all 200 Inspiring Digital Marketing & SEO Quotes from prominent marketers. All here, all in one place!

[Content Marketing] a more competitive environment certainly, but those who have real empathy for web users and influencers AND have the SEO skills to infuse their work with great keyword targeting, search accessibility, etc., are going to have ongoing success.

Rand Fishkin

90% trust peers on social networks (even strangers); only 15–18% trust brands.

Danny Brown

A common mistake that people make when trying to design something completely foolproof is to underestimate the ingenuity of complete fools.

Douglas Adams

A company that builds a loyal social following has a built-in army to promote their content, day in and day out. That content will get shared, get links, send social signals…all of which can’t be a bad thing.  

Will Reynolds

Always seek for link opportunities and suitable linking targets; because once you’ve reached the top, your competitors will never stop in trying to outrank you – make this part of your campaign’s daily tasks.

Jason Acidre

As social media grows and matures, showing a return becomes critical.

Heidi Cohen

As you go about creating new customer engagement programs and direct marketing packages for your brand, look for opportunities to give rather than to get. Whoever makes the first kind gesture, as studies show, tends to gain the most.

Jeanette McMurtry

Authenticity, honesty, and personal voice underlie much of what’s successful on the Web.

Rick Levine

Before you create any more “great content,” figure out how you are going to market it first.

Joe Pulizzi

Bring the best of your authentic self to every opportunity.

John Jantsch

Build it, and the will come only works in the movies. Social Media is a built it, nurture it, engage them, and them may come & stay.

Seth Godin

But let’s pretend there was a secret set of rules. Ten things that everyone said you absolutely HAD to do. Would you do them? Would you really? Would you voluntarily follow the exact same template that everyone else was using so that you had zero chance of standing out? If you would, you’re a moron.

Lisa Barone

By creating and publishing remarkable content in the form that educates, informs, inspires and entertains, marketers can begin to build relationships with prospects early on in the buying cycle.

Jonathon Lister

By listening, marketing will re-learn how to talk.

Doc Searls & David Weinberger

Commit to a niche; try to stop being everything to everyone.

Andrew Davis

Companies are rushing headlong into content today, and rightly so. It’s a battle to get noticed online amidst the noise and crowds.

Adam Audette

Companies need to lighten up and take themselves less seriously. They need to get a sense of humor.

The Cluetrain Manifesto

Content builds relationships. Relationships are built on trust. Trust drives revenue.

Andrew Davis

Content comes in many forms; we tend to think of written content when the term is used, but the reality is, video and image content can be more useful when it comes to influencing search and social results.

Debra Mastaler

Content is anything that adds value to the reader’s life.

Avinash Kaushik

Content is ANYTHING that creates a compelling experience. But it’s so much more, because you quickly realize that you can’t really know which content types to create until you understand which content types people want. 

Adam Audette

Content is fire, social media is gasoline.

Jay Baer

Content is King but engagement is Queen, and the lady rules the house!

Mari Smith

Content is king, but marketing is queen, and runs the household.

Gary Vaynerchuk

Content is not king, but a president elected by the votes of those whom it aims to rule.

Raheel Farooq

Content is the key, because it’s how a website creates an online experience.

Adam Audette

Content is the reason search began in the first place.

Lee Odden

Content Marketing has become the catalyst that fuels search and social media activity. 

Jim Yu

Content marketing is a commitment, not a campaign.

Jon Buscall

Content marketing is more than a buzzword. It is the hottest trend in marketing because it is the biggest gap between what buyers want and brands produce.

Michael Brenner

Content marketing needs to be at the heart of your SEO efforts. It has always been that way, but is even more so now because Google is so much more effective at understanding the context of content and how it is shared, etc.

Chris Bennett

Content: there is no easy button.

Scott Abel

Crawling is not a guarantee you’re indexed.

Rand Fishkin

Create something people want to share.

John Jantsch

Do not address your readers as though they were gathered together in a stadium. When people read your copy, they are alone. Pretend you are writing to each of them a letter on behalf of your client.

David Ogilvy

Don’t be afraid to get creative and experiment with your marketing.

Mike Volpe

Don’t Build Links. Build Relationships.

Rand Fishkin

Don’t say anything online that you wouldn’t want plastered on a billboard with your face (or logo) on it.

Erin Bury

Effective questioning brings insight, which fuels curiosity, which cultivates wisdom.

Chip Bell

Empower your readers with social sharing buttons.

Mike Stelzner

Even the best SEOs are not magicians. They can’t simply place a site at the top of the engines when there are hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of others that offer basically the same thing, and provide basically the same information. If they could, you’d see a whole lot more millionaire SEOs.

Jill Whalen

Every day I feel really great to work with the team I work with and the clients I work with; it’s like my job is just to match great clients with great people.

Wil Reynolds

Everyone has their own code. Mine personally is started with – ‘their are no hats, only1 goals.’

Todd Malicoat

Everything you do has to drive content, and the rest takes care of itself.

Chris Bennett

Focus on how to be social, not how to do social.

Jay Baer

Focus on the core problem your business solves and put out lots of content and enthusiasm and ideas about how to solve that problem.

Laura Fitton

Getting the Like is easy. It’s a light action. Anything else requires trust. 

Jon Loomer

Give them quality. That’s the best kind of advertising.

Milton Hershey

Going viral is not an outcome; it’s a happening. Sometimes it happens; sometimes it doesn’t. Just remember, fans are vanity and sales are sanity.

Lori Taylor

Good content isn’t about good storytelling. It’s about telling a true story well.

Ann Handley

Good design is a renaissance attitude that combines technology, cognitive science, human need, and beauty to produce something that the world didn’t know it was missing.

Paola Antonelli

Good SEO work only gets better over time. It’s only search engine tricks that need to keep changing when the ranking algorithms change.

Jill Whalen

Google only loves you when everyone else loves you first.

Wendy Piersall

Here’s the thing: the term ‘content marketing’ is just a rebranding of what good digital marketers already know and have been acting on for years.

Marshall Simmonds

I am all for conversations. But you need to have a message.

Renee Blodgett

If I spent my time reporting every competitor of mine breaking a rule, that’s all I’d EVER do and my own sites would suck because they’d be getting no attention.

Rae Hoffman

If I spent my time reporting every competitor of mine breaking a rule, that’s all I’d EVER do and my own sites would suck because they’d be getting no attention.

Ray Hoeffman

If search is amazing for knowing a person’s intent, social media is amazing for finding out what’s important to people, and what’s important to people they’re connected to.

Adam Audette

If there’s a lot of buzz around one form of marketing, I tend to look for what makes it effective and use that information to branch into a different promotional area.

Debra Mastaler

If you build it…you may still need Google AdWords.

Jennifer Mesenbrink

If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it.

Peter Drucker

If you have more money than brains, you should focus on outbound marketing. If you have more brains than money, you should focus on inbound marketing.

Guy Kawasaki

If you have sufficient PageRank and you regularly publish new content – yes, Googlebot will return frequently to your site to crawl your articles, which will then be indexed. But if you just have plenty of content – even if you publish 5 new unique, original articles a day – Google doesn’t care. No one hears your tree falling.

Gab Goldenberg

If you make listening and observation your occupation, you will gain much more than you can by talk.

Robert Baden-Powell

If you want to succeed you must take action now and start learning from your failures. This doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t learn, what it means is that you need to implement what you learn and see what works best for you and your market.

Garret Peirson

If you want to understand how a lion hunts don’t go to the zoo. Go to the jungle.

Jim Stengel

In 2004, good SEO made you remarkable on the web. In 2014, good SEO is a result of being remarkable on the web.

Rand Fishkin

In a way, the Web is like your Hollywood agent: It speaks for you whenever you’re not around to comment.

Chris Brogan & Julien Smith

In today’s information age of marketing and Web 2.0, a company’s website is the key to their entire business.

Marcus Sheridan

Increasingly, the mass marketing is turning into a mass of niches.

Chris Anderson

Innovation needs to be part of your culture. Consumers are transforming faster than we are, and if we dont catch up, we’re in trouble.

Ian Schafer

Instead of one-way interruption, Web marketing is about delivering useful content at just the precise moment that a buyer needs it.

David Meerman Scott

Integrating your online marketing efforts is all about breaking down silos and delivering amazing results. Social and SEO marketers are a big part of this.

Jim Yu

Integrating your search and social efforts brings better brand visibility and higher conversion rates.

Jim Yu

It is essential that marketers dig deeper into search, social, local mobile data to understand how they all work in tandem to impact ranking.

Jim Yu

It is just like people writing about social media, but giving you a half-truth about how it organically spreads rather than mentioning what they really do to seed it…and where one rats out the next while selling himself to the highest bidder.

Aaron Wall

It is no coincidence that the increasing focus on content marketing closely follows the significant Google algorithmic changes aiming to give users a better search experience.

Jim Yu

It is not the job of search engine optimization to make a pig fly. It is the job of the SEO to genetically re-engineer the Web site so that it becomes an eagle.

Bruce Clay

It’s much easier to double your business by doubling your conversion rate than by doubling your traffic.

Jeff Eisenberg

It’s not that ‘content is king,’ but content certainly is The Hand of the King.

Marshall Simmonds

It’s a good idea to understand how to work [Bing and Google] for maximum SEO and ranking benefit.

Debra Mastaler

Just as conventional advertising must recognize and address cultural cues, digital marketing will increasingly be compelled to do so as well.

Christian Kugel

Just as you don’t need to be on every single TV channel, I don’t believe a brand needs to be on every single social media one in a big way.

Shiv Singh

Know what your customers want most and what your company does best. Focus on where those two meet.

Kevin Stirtz

Know your market, have access to them directly and provide content and promotions you know will evoke an emotional response.

Debra Mastaler

Less is more. Keeping it simple takes time and effort.

Jeff Bullas

Leverage the strength that you have: that no one else can be you.

Todd Wheatland

Make the customer the hero of your story.

Ann Handley

Make the prospect a more informed buyer with content.

Robert Simon

Marketing is not a task. Marketing is not a department. Marketing is not a job. Marketing happens every time you engage (or not) with your past, present, and potential customers.

Scott Stratten

Marketing is really just about sharing your passion.

Michael Hyatt

Marketing is telling the world you’re a rock star. Content Marketing is showing the world you are one.

Robert Rose

Markets need to build digital relationships and reputation before closing the sale.

Chris Brogan

Measurement is like laundry. It piles up the longer you wait to do it.

Amber Naslund

Most analogue marketing hits the wrong people, or the right people at the wrong time. Digital is more efficient and more impactful because it can hit only the right people, and only at the right time.

Simon Silvester

My real passion lies in SEO. I can’t help but get my hands dirty when it comes to ranking websites and it turns out I’m pretty good at it as well! SEO has changed wildly across the last 18 months and it’s this constant change that keeps me hooked, testing and experimenting as I go.

Matthew Woodward

My rule of thumb is build a site for a user not a spider. 

Dave Naylor

Never let your ads write checks that your website can’t cash.

Avinash Kaushik

No matter what anyone tells you, it takes a lot of hard work, patience, trial and error. It takes a belief in yourself that you can do it because the truth is that if you don’t think you can – then you’re pro1bably right.

Pat Flynn

No matter what, the very first piece of social media real estate I’d start with is a blog.

Chris Brogan

Not viewing your email marketing as content is a mistake.

Chris Baggott

On a broad scale, I see SEO becoming a normalized marketing tactic, the same way TV, radio, and print are traditionally thought of as marketing tactics.

Duane Forrester

On average, 8 out of 10 people will read your headline copy, but only 2 out 10 will read the rest.

Brian Clark

Once you have your questions and stories, map them to the buying process – just as your prospects will experience them.

Ardath Albee

One way to sell a consumer something in the future is simply to get his or her permission in advance.

Seth Godin

Organizations who can’t match up in content creation and promotion may find themselves losing out to content marketers who learn the basics of SEO. Rand Fishkin

Our digital future is about enabling better productivity and decisions making to enjoy a better quality of life.

Yacine Baroudi

Over the last two years, 90% of global data has been produced by digital, search, and social content.

Jim Yu

People don’t want to be marketed at in the social channel. This is where they want to talk to each other, and brands are there by invitation. They have to be a great guest at the table.

Veronica Fielding

People ignore design that ignores people.

Frank Chimero

People share, read and generally engage more, when content is surfaced through those they know and trust.

Malorie Lucich

People shop and learn in a whole new way compared to just a few years ago, so marketers need to adapt or risk extinction.

Brian Halligan

People who don’t know the good and bad side of SEO thinks that it’s all the same banana and they could simply hire the cheapest provider with the most promises. While this is a sad truth that’s happening today, we can do something about it.

Sean Si

People will come to your site because you have good compelling content. You need to hit it from all angles: blog posts, articles, graphs, data, infographics, and interactive content – even short pictures when you Tweet.

Chris Bennett

Privacy is dead, and social media holds the smoking gun.

Pete Cashmore

Running with the herd is not always a great idea; be unique, and the links will come.

Debra Mastaler

Search is an integral part of truly integrated marketing campaigns that ties offline and online elements together, pushing consumers to engage with static media, or giving them the option of responding to offers or ideas promoted by them.

Joe Mandese

Search marketing only has a 1.5% mindshare of the average Fortune 500 CMO.

Brian Featherstonhaugh

Sell-sell-sell sales methods simply do not work on social media.

Kim Garst

SEO can be broken down into profitable activities, but when combined, is associated with third party controlled risk.

Col Skinner

SEO is a marketing function for sure, but it needs to be baked into a product, not slapped on like icing after the cake is baked.

Duane Forrester

SEO is a noun, verb and adjective.

Todd Malicoat

SEO is an every changing world, what’s best now may not become the best tomorrow.

SEO is fundamentally a set of methodologies that make it easier for search engines to find, include, categorize and rank your web content.

Lee Odden

SEO is not rocket science, you just need to use your head.

SEO is only not seen as rocket science BY THOSE WHO ALREADY KNOW IT.

Danny Sullivan

SEO stuff is okay. It is okay. This is something that we are used to. We are used to change. If there’s anything that SEO’s can be assured of, it’s that things will change tomorrow, that things will change next week. No one is better prepared to handle change than we are.

Rand Fishkin

SEO’s are the new real estate developers. Our skillset gives us an amazing opportunity to develop an audience on the cheap.

Brian Provost

Since John Deere published The Furrow in 1895, content marketing has been right in front of the consumer eye.

Jim Yu

Since people tend to share links (content) that affect them emotionally, it’s more important than ever to understand the demographic you’re selling to.

Debra Mastaler

Smartphones are reinventing the connection between companies and their customers.

Rich Miner

Social is the way our work gets discovered. Content that is truly exceptional, unique, and useful can earn tremendous awareness through social media, and that social amplification often leads to great links, which leads to great rankings.

Rand Fishkin

Social media creates communities, not markets.

Don Schultz

Social media is about connecting with customers in a meaningful way – a way the customer determines is meaningful.

Duane Forrester

Social media is about sociology and psychology more than technology.

Brian Solis

Social media marketers now have a huge opportunity to impact SEO, improve search rankings, and increase revenue generated through organic search.

Jim Yu

Social media marketers that partner with their search marketer counterparts are finding success by focusing on the content that fuels social media activities and analyzing trends to unlock opportunities and maximize impact and revenue.

Jim Yu

Social networks are a terrific window into human behavior; you can judge what a niche responds to and market to it more effectively by watching for trends and interacting with influential people in the network.

Debra Mastaler

Sometimes when you innovate, you make mistakes. It is best to admit them quickly, and get on with improving your other innovations.

Steve Jobs

Start an editorial calendar that everyone involved in your blog (writers, editors, marketing team, etc.) can access. 

Kristi Hines

Stay focused on creating engaging content experiences and impress visitors with thoughtful usability, making their job (answering their question) easier.

Duane Forrester

Strong customer relationships drive sales, sustainability, and growth.

Tom Cates

Take a risk and keep testing, because what works today won’t work tomorrow, but what worked yesterday may work again.

Amrita Sahasrabudhe

The attention economy is not growing, which means we have to grab the attention that someone else has today.

Brent Leary

The best marketing doesn’t feel like marketing.

Tom Fishburne

The best place to hide a dead body is the second page of Google search.

The big thing is that the future of digital will be about marketing. It won’t be about advertising.

Rishad Tobaccowala

The cost of being wrong is less than the cost of doing nothing.

Seth Godin

The days of SEO being a game outsmarting algorithms are over. Today content strategy and valuable, sustainable strategies are essential, not just tricks and links.

Adam Audette

The future of business is social.

barry libert

The future of content marketing is in your hands.

David Hahn

The future of SEO is here: understanding and marketing to specific and defined audiences through search engines.

Adam Audette

The key is to present the right content to the users at the time they need it in an engaging manner, across all channels they visit.

Jim Yu

The objective is not to ‘make your links appear natural’; the objective is that your links are natural.

Matt Cutts

The overarching problem is that everyone sees and uses social media from a different perspective. 

Neal Schaffer

The paradox is the more info you give away, the more people will buy what you have to give …

brian clark

The success of a page should be measured by one criteria: Does the visitor do what you want them to do?

Aaron Wall

The three essential elements of an effective SEO are effective communication, useful information and high quality backlinks.

SEO Refugee

The time has come to ask yourselves does your blog suck … and what are you doing to change it?

Michael Gray

There are three objectives for content marketing: reach engagement conversion. Define key metrics for each.

Michael Brenner

There is no black magic to successfully attracting customers via the Web.

Rand Fishkin

There was a brief time in SEO history where you could build thousands of spam links and watch your site climb to the top of the first page2. Those days are long gone. SEOs that do well today dedicate serious resources (time, money, and skilled labor) towards their link building campaigns.

Brian Dean

There’s a lot of fear-mongering about losing control of your brand online, when, in fact, you’ve got control over as much as you always have: how you present your business and how you act.

Jay Baer & Amber Naslund

There’s been so much fear pushed around the web about reciprocal link exchanges and link trading programs that the message has been muddled up into the completely nonsensical “never link to someone who links to you.” To my mind, that’s a touch of lunacy.

Rand Fishkin

Think like a customer.

Paul Gillin

Think like a publisher, not a marketer.

David Meerman Scott

This is a learning process and sometimes you have to fall in order to learn things.

Christine Korda

This is the era of less is more with SEO.

Adam Audette

This type of person thinks that they need to know everything and never implement anything that they learn. If you want to succeed you must take action now and start learning from your failures. This doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t learn, what it means is that you need to implement what you learn and see what works best for you and your market.

Garret Peirson

To accompany the four Ps of classical marketing, marketers would do well to instil the digital four Cs, around conversation, collaboration, culture and compensation.

Zaid Al-Zaidy

To be successful and grow your business and revenues, you must match the way you market your products with the way your prospects learn about and shop for your products.

Brian Halligan

Today it’s not about ‘get the traffic’ — it’s about ‘get the targeted and relevant traffic.’

Adam Audette

Traditional marketing talks at people. Content marketing talks with them.

Doug Kessler

Twitter is like hugging. Just because it’s hard to measure the return on investment doesn’t mean there isn’t value there.

Tony Hsiesh

Until Facebook came along, there was hardly anywhere on the public Internet where you had to operate with your real name. 

David Kirkpatrick

We embed social media inside our processes. Let’s look at our processes and see how we can enhance them with social.

Sandy Carter

We have embarked upon the world’s largest and longest cocktail party, and every issue imaginable is up for grabs.

Geoffrey Moore

We must move from numbers keeping score to numbers that drive better actions.

David Walmsley

We should be thinking about social and search as channels that need a unified approach, because the best content should appeal to both channels and the cross-over benefits/economies of scale are potentially huge.

Will Critchlow

We should be thinking about social and search as channels that need a unified approach, because the best content should appeal to both channels and the cross-over benefits/economies of scale are potentially huge.

Will Critchlow

We want to know what consumers are looking for, what their values are, and how can we meet their needs. It’s not just about Big Data; it’s about translating that into the truth.

Gayle Fuguitt

We’re all learning here; the best listeners will end up the smartest.

Charlene Li

We’re sharing things in our lives every day that we wouldn’t have picked up the phone to talk about ten years ago.

Gary Vaynerchuk

What continues to plague search marketers is the adherence to old-think issues: ‘Content is too hard to create.’ ‘Links are too hard to build organically.’ This type of focus blinds you to more important things.

Duane Forrester

What we really need is a mindset shift that will make us relevant to today’s consumers, a mindset shift from ‘telling & selling’ to building relationships.

Jim Stengel

When people feel insecure about something, they look around for validation. Show them that other people trust you.

Francisco Rosales

When you break down all the fluff, there are two ways to promote and market your business: dumber, slower, and expensive — or smarter, faster, and cheaper.

David Siteman Garland

White hat SEO is not about manually submitting and being squeaky clean. It’s not about wasting your time doing pointless bullshit in hopes you rank a year from now. It’s about crushing Google with extremely strategic links.

Alex Becker

Word of mouth can be as important, if not more important, for neighborhood businesses as traditional advertising.

Ekaterina Walter

You can chase whatever keywords and phrases you like, but at the end of the day it’s all about those conversions.

Matt Webb

You can never go wrong by investing in communities and the human beings within them.

Pam Moore

You can’t expect to just write and have visitors come to you- that’s too passive.

Anita Campbell

You can’t just place a few Buy buttons on your website and expect your visitors to buy.

Neil Patel

You can’t push your sales messages on your fans too often.

Andrea Vahl

You can’t expect to just write and have visitors come to you – that’s too passive.

Anita Campbell

You have to stand apart by offering high quality, relevant experiences to audiences that you truly understand.

Adam Audette

You want to invent new ideas, not new rules.

Dan Heath

Your customers are not you. They don’t look like you, they don’t think like you, they don’t do the things that you do and they don’t have your expectations or assumptions. If they did, they wouldn’t be your customers; they’d be your competitors.

Mike Kuniavsky

Your top of the funnel content must be intellectually divorced from your product but emotionally wed to it.

Joe Chernov

What do you think? What was your favourite quote? Do you have any inspiring digital marketing quotes to add? Comments below:

Ara Ohanian

Founder & CEO at Aragil Marketing agency | Marketing Strategist | Over $30M spent on ads and counting! | Saving the internet from boring ads.

Ara Ohanian

Founder & CEO at Aragil Marketing agency | Marketing Strategist | Over $30M spent on ads and counting! | Saving the internet from boring ads.

Recommended Posts

User-generated Content (UGC): Harnessing the Power of Your Audience in Digital Marketing

September 21, 2023

Connected TV Advertising: The Next Big Thing in Digital Marketing

September 18, 2023

Google’s AI Revolution: Introducing Demand Gen Campaign

September 15, 2023