Sinan Yaman

For months, we were building features based on what users said they wanted. Feature requests.
Sales calls. "It would be great if you added X."

We built X. Nobody used it.

So we stopped trusting what people said and started tracking what they actually did.

The dataset

Formally, I studied marketing, but honestly, that stuff from textbooks didn't help me at all. :D (sounds like wasting 5 years of my life, nwm)

The best marketing things I have learned weren't from courses, but through:
own projects

calls with someone better than me

I'll start.

I believed that "keyword density" mattered. I spent hours making sure our target keyword appeared exactly 3-4 times per 500 words. I used tools that highlighted which words were "under-optimized." I even re-wrote paragraphs to squeeze in one more mention.

Turns out that hasn't been a real ranking factor for over a decade. Google's RankBrain (2015) and BERT (2019) made keyword density obsolete. These models understand context, synonyms, and user intent. They don't need you to say "best CRM for small business" five times. They know that "top CRM for startups" means the same thing.

What actually matters is topic coverage. Does your page answer the question completely? Do you cover related subtopics that a user would expect to see? Do you use natural language that matches how people actually ask questions?