Privacy.com is a consumer fintech and leader in virtual cards.
We kicked off Privacy.com’s SEO campaign in mid-2023 after being introduced to their management team by ConceptualHQ, a SaaS focused PPC agency with $100m in spend behind their belt.
In just six months, our engagement with Privacy.com has driven an increase organic traffic from 45,000 ⟶ 172,000.
With about 70ish pages of content:
❌ No backlinks
❌ No technical BS
✅ Just great content
If this sounds like a crazy outcome…….
Well, you don’t know ContentDistribution.com then.
This is the 6th brand we’ve helped add an additional 100,000+ organics/month.
⚙️ The Process
Want to know how we did it?
We can’t share all of the juicy details on this project.
But we have shared our step-by-step process on our five other 0 ⟶ 100,000 organic/month projects.
Fully managed SEO for category leaders and future category leaders with huge goals and the budget to execute. We’ll do the heavy lifting, you sit back and take the credit.
Join Bojan Maric and Nick Jordan for a workshop on “SEO Basics for Startups” where they’ll be going through the SEO tips and tricks they used to help their clients go from 0 to 100,000+ organic views a month.
A great SEO campaign for a flower shop in Seattle can influence tens of thousands of dollars in revenue.
A great SEO campaign for AirBNB can influence hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue.
A great SEO campaign for Amazon can influence billions of dollars in revenue.
We built an SEO ROI calculator to forecast various campaign outcomes so we spend our time with the companies that have the most leverage on our team’s superpower.
The TMS, or total monthly search volume, is generated using Ahrefs or SEMRush.
I had an ESOP with a 10-year exercise period. (Thanks, Geeman <3.)
This meant even though I left 6 years ago, I still got paid.
But the most valuable takeaway from my four years at BitTitan was the experience:
Working next to colleagues 20 – 30 years older at the peak of their career
Learning their best practices and watching how they make decisions
Operating at a global scale that touched millions of end-users
I negotiated legal contracts against F500 companies.
I designed and PM’d GoDaddy’s implementation of our API.
I product-managed our marketplace integrations with our CTO.
I trained AT&T’s sales team.
And Rackspace’s support team.
You probably view me as the ‘SEO Guy.’
But I identify as a founder, a marketer, and even as a sales guy more than I identify as an SEO.
And this hasn’t changed since starting an SEO agency.
Over the last five years, our team has spent thousands of hours iterating across hundreds of internal processes, and we’ve shipped the two most important SaaS products.
ClusterAi to automate keyword research.
And Workello to hire the top 1% of our job applicants.
The combined stats across both products:
7,000+ freemium users
650+ paid customers, including brands like Deel, CopyAi, and Forbes
$400,000+ total revenue
I’m not alone on this journey.
Both products were PM’d by CD’s COO, Bojan Maric.
We also host the #1 content ops community on the internet with 10,000+ members and regular AMAs with marketers from brands like G2, Ramp, Coinbase, SEMRush, and Surfer.
We’ve grown our email list to 13,000+ subscribers.
And our team’s content has reached millions of marketers and founders on LinkedIn.
❌ No backlinks
We don’t build backlinks.
We don’t need to. If we had hit a wall that we couldn’t push past, we would have iterated and experimented, eventually with backlinks. We don’t hit walls. We haven’t had to build backlinks to create the desired outcomes. What we do keeps working.
Content can convert. Content can rank and drive revenue. In the way most backlinks are built, they will usually never send a single referral visitor. Assuming a finite budget, we feel an obligation to steer the budget into the activities with the most measurable ROI.
But the biggest reason we don’t like backlinks?
Relying on backlinks means ceding some of your control over the outcome to the Google Gods.
You tithe money into a black box.
Then you pray to Larry & Sergey.
And if you’re lucky…
The Google Gods bless you with rankings.
As a founder, I would rather compete in poker than craps.
Which game would you rather play?
If your approach to SEO is 100% focused on content.
It means all of the variables that influence your success are on-site and within your control.
Seems like a pretty powerful approach to anything in life.
“Can you send me the latest version of the template?”
“What did Sally say?”
“Have you done this task yet?
“Should I do A, B, or C?”
“Did you see X?”
“Can you remind me about Y?”
“How do I do Y?”
“Did I do this correctly?”
“Can you check this before I submit it?”
“Where is the file for Y?”
This works on a small team.
But things start to break when the team grows.
A team of 4 has 6 “lines of communication”. A team of 12 has 66. A team of 50 has 1225 lines of communication. The key to exponential growth is overcoming exponential complexity. pic.twitter.com/6EdTKBODZO
There are thousands of micro-decisions that are made over the lifespan of an SEO campaign.
On day one as a freelancer, I knew I needed to build a team that could execute as well, or better than I could myself, to meet my goals. So, over the last five years, we’ve spent a lot of time thinking about:
What context our team needs
When they need it
How to deliver it
So they are empowered to make the correct decisions consistently.
Here are some of the areas in which I think we excel and punch above our weight class (company size).
Making data public by default
Documentation
Meeting recaps
Sprints
Automated notifications
Reporting
Access control
Documentation
Creating a culture of documentation is a lot of work.
But it’s the only way to enable people without your work experiences to execute as good, or better than you can yourself, consistently.
We’ve built a strong culture of documentation that spans almost every organizational function.
And today, we have over 1,000 documents in our knowledge base.
Here are some examples.
Onboarding documentation for new team members
Step-by-step guides to kicking off new projects
Keyword research to develop the content calendar.
Managing sprints.
Editing guidelines.
Everything is documented.
Our culture of documentation enables our team to execute as well or better than I could myself and to be consistent across the areas that require consistency.
Allowing us to drive successful outcomes again and again and again.
We change and manage access to all apps in this base.
To request access, a team member submits an access request form.
💯 Team
Recruiting
Over the last five years, our team has spent thousands of hours reviewing more than 10,000 applicants.
Because of my belief in two things:
My success will come from building and enabling a team of people to execute as well or better than I can.
The #1 decision I’ll make as a founder is who we hire because after that first decision, what happens next is easy, hard, or impossible.
What do those beliefs look like in practice?
We don’t hire based on portfolio, CV, past employers, work experience, or interview skills.
We test all of our applicants on the job to be done, whether it’s writing, editing, SEO, video, or VA work.
Most hiring workflows have a short unpaid test, followed by a longer paid test for applicants who excel.
We’ll evaluate approximately 300 applicants and 100 tests for each hire we make.
Retention
Once great people join our organization, we do everything we can to keep them happy and motivated.
Between holidays and PTO, our team has 38 days of paid leave per year.
As an American, it feels like everybody is always on holiday.
But as a founder, it means I’ve built a company that doesn’t depend on a single person holding everything together.
Our team can take the time they need when they need it.
And everything continues forward.
Without missing deadlines or superhuman feats of grind.
Other benefits we’re proud of:
Stipend for private health insurance
3 months of paid maternity/paternity leave for team members with 2+ years of tenure
Overtime compensated with equivalent PTO or cash bonuses
Some benefits we’re thinking about in the future:
Home office equipment stipend
Virtual cards for Uber Eats
Health insurance stipend for our team’s aging parents
📈 KPIs & Accountability
The three big revenue milestones of an SEO campaign are:
Paying back the monthly SEO spend,
Paying back the total campaign spend to date (1x ROI)
Hitting 5x ROI and above,
But it takes time to get there.
I needed to know whether I was on the right track.
So, I developed a set of KPIs that would allow me to know if the campaign was off-track within 60 days.
Today, I use these KPIs to hold my team accountable.
And now, you can use these KPIs to hold your SEO accountable, whether it’s us or someone else.
Over the last several years, I’ve been privileged to work on many very healthy SEO campaigns.
When it comes to KPIs, they all look the same.
A healthy campaign sees growth in the KPIs below most weeks and every single month.
Did we do the good work we said we would do? In the first six weeks of the campaign, we are accountable for being organized, thorough, reliable, and for delivering high-quality strategy, keyword research, documentation, and initial content.
Are impressions increasing? Before we can rank on page 1, we need to rank on page 6. An impression indicates our page has appeared somewhere in the first 10 pages of a search. Impressions should increase 7/10 weeks and increase month-over-month every month.
Are we beginning to receive clicks? At some point, we’ll begin to receive clicks. The number of clicks we receive should increase 7/10 weeks and increase month-over-month every month.
Are visitors beginning to convert? Once traffic is consistently increasing week over week and month over month, we’ll turn our attention to conversions. Is the traffic we’re generating leading to business impact?
Are conversions increasing linearly with traffic? Once we’re consistently generating conversions, is it increasing linearly with increases in traffic?
What we see when we look back at our past campaigns is that after we publish somewhere between 30 to 50 pages, impressions, clicks, and traffic all begin to increase week-over-week, most weeks, and month-over-month, every single month.
An on-track campaign is consistently hitting new ATHs.
My redline is 8 weeks.
If any key KPIs are flat for more than 8 weeks, it’s time to iterate.
95% of flat spots are fixed, and we return to growth by accelerating scoped but not yet implemented tasks. Think site structure, internal linking, or technical SEO like site speed or GSC errors.
👀 Forecasting Growth
We can confidently forecast increasing impressions, clicks, and traffic once we publish the 30th to 50th page of content.
Forecasting specific traffic numbers by specific dates is a lot harder.
Every page of content we publish can rank for hundreds of keywords
Each of those keywords has its own unique search volume
Each of those keywords has its own difficulty
And all of them move independently of one another
But top it all off.
Before we start the campaign, we don’t even know our content calendar.
Are we publishing the page with 10,000 searches/month in month 1? Or Month 2?
Are we focusing on low-traffic BOFU topics?
We just don’t have enough information in the beginning.
However, once we get some data in the door, we can start making educated guesses.
Here is a VC-backed SaaS we’re working with.
Reading this chart:
Plots out actual growth vs forecasted growth
First 4 months spent gathering data
In month 4, we hit 6,433 visitors and put together our first projections
We forecasted 30,000 visitors by month 9
We hit 30,000 visitors in month 7
Additional context:
Not pictured is the client’s conversion rate
Based on existing conversion rates, when we hit the forecast of 243,182 visitors in month 16, our campaign is contributing a significant percentage of total growth
Month-to-month growth rate is less important than maintaining an average growth rate above >30%
For example, we only grew 17% in month 7, but we grew almost 200% the two months prior
This means actual traffic is still two months ahead of forecasts
🏃 The Discovery Call
Pre-Call
We have thirty minutes together, and there is a lot to discuss.
I want to learn more about your company, goals, and growth opportunities.
Not explain how we approach SEO.
I’ve spent hundreds of hours formulating my thoughts so you can consume them before we talk.
🚀 Baby fat graphs (not big enough for their own case studies)
The Call
I have four goals on our discovery calls:
Learn more about your business and goals
Sanity check the opportunity using our ROI calculator
If it passes, discuss our different engagement models
Answer any questions you have
🔎 Engagement Overview
Full overview of our engagement.
Click the image to see it full-size.
🏃 GTM Sprint
Pre-Kickoff
Half our team has a Master’s degree in English Lit.
The other half are former English teachers.
The reason I tell you this is because structured learning is a core competency.
We have repeatable systems for transferring knowledge from you to us.
These systems have enabled us to create engaging content with the strong thoughts of stakeholders embedded into 200+ content verticals.
Legal, healthcare, medicine, dev ops, open-source software, education, gut biomes, influencer marketing.
We’ve basically done it all.
And the stakeholders we worked with were just as nuanced, and particular about content quality as you are.
Before our kickoff meeting, we’ll send out an introduction email to our team and a link to an intake questionnaire for you to fill out before the meeting.
Kickoff & Knowledge Transfer
We’ll cover 5 things in our kickoff and knowledge transfer meeting.
Meet stakeholders. Our team is small, and our team members working on your project have worked on our agency’s biggest wins. We will also confirm stakeholders on your side for approvals, dev requests, etc.
Knowledge transfer. We’ve consumed your questionnaire answers and we’ll ask any clarifying questions we need.
Timeline. We’ll review our GTM timeline with the next steps and timelines, and provide a link to access it at any time.
Enablement Documentation
In content writing, every word is a liability to get something wrong:
Messaging
Positioning
Tone/voice
Facts
Offers
CTAs
Literally every single word is a liability.
The solution?
The thing that makes it all work?
Documentation.
Everything we learned from your questionnaire answers and knowledge transfer is incorporated into 5 – 10 pages of documentation, internally referred to as, ‘The Project Bible’
This documentation enables us to integrate the strong thoughts you have about your industry, customer, competition, and products into every page of content.
As we receive feedback on publishable content, this project documentation will be kept updated as a ‘rule book’.
So you only have to give us feedback about a particular issue one time.
And you never have to correct us about the same thing twice.
Content Calendar
From a high level the process looks like this:
Build a list of all of the keywords your audience is using across the funnel
Group the large list of unstructured keywords into discrete topics
Prioritize the topics into a content calendar
We’ll take care of #1 and #2, and we’ll work with you on #3.
Everything is kept in Airtable.
Content Series Template
The content series template is another 5–10 pages of enablement documentation, this time hyper-focused on the series of topics we’re creating content on.
Pilot Articles
After the Content Series Template is approved we’ll move onto the pilot articles.
Regardless of how thorough we are in knowledge transfer and enablement documentation, once you see the words in publishable content you’ll have more opinions.
In this stage we will:
Capture your feedback
Update and re-submit the pilot articles for review
Repeat until done
Update enablement documentation with new learnings
You should expect to never provide feedback on spelling or grammar.
📝 Content Production
After the pilot articles have been finalized we onboard our writers and editors onto the project.
They’ll consume:
The knowledge transfer call
The Project Bible
The Content Series Template
Then they’ll begin writing.
Content goes through a 14-step process before it gets to you.
You’ll spend less and less time on feedback with each round of revisions.
We’ll continue to update our Project Bible & Content Series Template.
At some point between the 5th and 25th page of content, your feedback will turn into ‘Looks great folks, nice work. No additional comments.’
Technical SEO is only impactful when you have a lot of content.
Spending 10 hours fixing site speed on a 30-page website doesn’t have any leverage.
Spending 10 hours fixing site speed on 500-page websites has huge amounts of leverage.
And enormous leverage on a 10,000-page website.
Chances are your company has closer to 30 pages than 500 pages.
We want to create as much impact as possible before making requests from your development team.
For sites with a low footprint in the SERPs, we will begin tackling technical SEO issues sometime after month three after we’ve ramped up our content production engines.
PM → Dev
We will address all technical issues until a developer is required.
Once a developer is required, we will take responsibility for scoping and PMing their workload.
After implementation, we will QA their work to ensure it was implemented correctly.
🫡 Communication
We’ll meet weekly to discuss:
KPIs
Action items
Q&A
Each week you’ll receive a pre-meeting agenda calling out our discussion points. This is your chance to add anything you’d like to the agenda.
After each meeting, you’ll receive a recap with action items for us, and for you.
We’ll provide monthly reports.
And quarterly reports.
Outside of meetings, we’ll communicate via email.
🤝 Working Together
We’re motivated by impact and scale and we want to work with the most ambitious brands on the internet.
Fully Managed SEO
This is for category leaders and future category leaders with huge goals and the budget to execute. We will do everything, you sit back and take the credit.
For startups on a budget. We will partner with a stakeholder in your organization to build an in-house content team, develop institutional knowledge, and scale up SEO in-house.
Our work taking 4 brands from 0 to 100,000+ organics/month and our engagement for DoNotPay has led to working with category-leading brands like ClickUp, Privacy.com, Skiff.com, and FreeKick Bank. If this sounds like you, check out our case studies and then book a call:
Baby fat graphs (not quite big enough for their own case study)
We have a superpower to help companies win big at Search, but every month I talk to founders who have awesome products, and huge ambition, but are just too early in their company’s journey to engage us.
In early 2022 we launched the Content Ops Framework for agencies and early-stage startups to use our systems, processes, templates, and SOPs with their staff.
And since launching, we’ve helped 4 ambitious, early-stage brands hit the 100,000+ organics/month club.
What I’ve learned from taking 5 projects from 0 to 100,000+ organics/month is that Google Search uses UX metrics to influence reach and rankings.
I didn’t develop a theory and set out to prove it.
This is an observation I made from consistently winning in SEO without:
❌ Building backlinks.
❌ Doing technical BS.
❌ Doing hacks or shortcuts.
✅ Just great content.
Basically, our entire goal is to create more relevant, better quality content than any other page Google could show for the keywords we want to rank for.
If you think about it, it makes a lot of sense.
Everybody knows every major platform uses UX metrics to influence reach:
Twitter
Facebook
Instagram
TikTok
LinkedIn
And according to Mr Beast, this is how the YouTube algorithm works:
Click through rate (CTR)
Watch time
Comments
Likes
But in 2018/2019 Mr Beast wasn’t famous yet.
I didn’t have anybody to tell me what is well known.
I just knew that if I believed Google Search used UX metrics to influence reach.
And YouTube was a side experiment while I built out the SEO.
Which made Doggypedia’s YouTube channel a side-side-project.
Meaning, my goal wasn’t to just create category winning content on YouTube.
I needed to create category winning content on YouTube 👉 with as little effort as possible.
That meant:
Super simple to make
Had huge amounts of views
And I took a few shots at goal.
Dogs barking…
…to make your dog react.
Who am I to argue with 100,000,000+ people?
My job isn’t to decide what people want.
My job is to give people what they want.
First I watched all of the top performing videos (of dogs barking 🙁)
Next I built a list of the variables that I could both control and I believed would influence UX metrics.
Because if I could win on these variables, my content would have better UX metrics than the dog barking videos currently on YouTube, and I believed YouTube would promote my content instead.
Here’s the list:
The thumbnail to drive higher CTR
The length to keep users watching longer
The number of dogs referenced to be more relevant to more people
The in-video imagery that is more pleasant to look at
🚀 Warning: turn down your volume before playing.
This video did pretty good.
Racked up a cool 3,000,000 views and 800+ comments.
Hand selected job boards to find the best candidates
Your job description is pre-written, so you’ll just need to make a few adjustments to align it with your company.
After you’ve nailed the job description, it’s time to edit the skills tests and interview stages.
Creating a video editor skills test
The skills test is pre-configured for you, but you need to replace the example videos in the template with videos that align with the content you want your editor to produce.
The unpaid skills test should be extremely short and take applicants less than 30 minutes to complete.
The longer your skills test take, the less likely candidates are to do it.
Especially the best applicants.
The video we ask applicants is 37 seconds, but feel free to go down to as little as 15 seconds for best results.
Candidates that pass the free skills test will be invited to skills test #2.
In Skills Test #2 we ask candidates to edit three 60 second videos.
And it’s paid.
This allows us to vet the remaining candidates with a longer, more in-depth assignment.
Just like you did in the free skills test, replace the example videos in the template with videos that reflect the type of content you’re creating.
Automate years of keyword research with ClusterAi..
Use Workello to identify and hire the top 1% of your applicants whether they’re writers, editors , designers, marketers, customer success, or developers.
If this is your first piece of ContentDistribution.com content, here’s what you gotta know.
We’ve taken 5 projects from 0 to 100,000+ organics/month without building backlinks.
Without technical BS.
Without shortcuts.
And without hacks.
We did it by creating the highest quality, most relevant page of content Google could show for the keywords we wanted to rank for and doing that over and over again.
Today we’ve used the Content Series Template concept to publish 14,000+ pages of content across 268+ content verticals.
We’ve gotten it down to a repeatable process that enables us to come into any vertical, run knowledge transfer with stakeholders, and then create content like we had direct access to their brain.
Doggypedia has about 220 pages spread across 3 CSTs:
Basically, every keyword is structured like this: “Breed 1 + Breed 2 Mix.”
H2s. These articles are in the same format regardless of the keyword. This allowed me to pre-write the H2s. I included the main keyword in 40-60% of the H2s and left the remaining H2s unoptimized. I also jumbled the order of the H2s and the specific words in each H2 to avoid duplicate content penalties.
Images. The dog niche is visual, and every H2 included an image. I provided instructions on how to source images from Instagram. Sourcing photos from Instagram resulted in a handful of angry emails from accounts I didn’t cite, so I created instructions on how to attribute images found from Instagram.
Tables, lists, and bullets. Structured data is easier for humans and for Google to consume. I R&D’d this on Doggypedia, and four years later and with 10,000+ pages published, all of our content includes tables, lists, and bullets.
Internal links. The more internal links you have, the easier the content you link to will rank. Think of it like a vote that tells Google how important a page is to your website. The more internal links to a particular page, the more important it is to your brand, and the easier it is to rank. The opposite is also true. Pages with 0 internal links will be almost impossible to rank.
External links. Every article needed at least three links to authoritative sources. I developed a process for our writers to look up science journals published on PubMed and books published on Amazon and cite them in the content.
We had our writers scour social for the best pup memes.
🧑 Hiring Writers
The #1 choice you’ll make as a content manager is which writers you decide to hire.
Because after that first decision, everything is either easy, hard, or impossible.
Hire the wrong writer and you’ll spend tens or hundreds of hours struggling through everything.
Hire the right writer, and scaling content velocity will feel like a breeze.
Hiring GOOD writers is hard though.
The problem isn’t getting writing candidates.
Post a job ad on ProBlogger and get 300+ candidates in the next 72 hours.
The hard part is filtering out the bad writers from the good writers.
Writing is the lowest barrier WFH job
Anyone can call themselves a writer
But even 54% of Americans read below a 6th grade reading level
Writers downright fake their portfolio
Or they use published content that has gone through a 3rd party editor, and doesn’t reflect what they’ll submit to you
When I say everyone has trouble hiring good writers.
I mean everyone.
95% of writing applicants are unqualified, how do you identify the top 5%?
It goes on.
And on.
And on.
So what’s the trick?
How do you evaluate hundreds of candidates to identify and hire the top 1%?
The trick is Workello.
The secret weapon your favorite content team is using to hire great writing talent on auto-pilot.
Putting in the work up-front to hire the right person will save dozens or hundreds of hours of blood, sweat, and tears, trying to onboard, train, and mentor the wrong hire.
Here’s how it works.
Workello is a skills-testing platform that helps you identify and hire the best talent you can afford.
According to Harvard Business Review, skills tests are the #1 predictor of post-hire work performance.
More than CVs, work experience, and interview skills.
The skills test is #1.
So if you want to hire the best talent you can afford, you need to test as much talent as you can.
Workello allows you to skill-test hundreds of applicants in minutes.
So when you finally hire someone.
It’s not the best of a handful.
Or the best of a dozen.
It’s literally the best of hundreds of potential applicants.
Choose a pre-populated hiring template from Workello’s template library. Each template contains an optimized job description, writing test, candidate emails, and the best hiring resources to find them.
Spend a few minutes customizing the pre-written job description, and skills test to align with your company and industry.
Save & publish your Workello job.
Then grab the application URL.
Copy/paste your Workello job ad URL into ProBlogger.
Pay for your ProBlogger ad.
Then sit back and relax as candidates find your ad on ProBlogger, complete their application on Workello, and stream into your hiring dashboard.
1-click test to send a request to take your writing test.
1-click to send video interview invitations.
The best people want to work for the best employers.
One of the easiest things you can do to attract better talent is to treat your candidates better.
Workello helps you engage the top 5% of applicants to invest their valuable time into taking your writing test.
By addressing the #1 complaint from job seekers.
Even for experienced candidates, applying for jobs feels like sending their CVs into a black hole.
Workello’s applicant timeline tells your candidates exactly where they are in the hiring process, what to expect next, and how long it will take to hear back.
Building huge amounts of trust with your best candidates quickly & automatically.
The better your candidate experience, the more likely the best candidates are going to invest their valuable time into your hiring process.
You wouldn’t put your sales leads through a Google Form.
I’ve already told you Doggypedia grew from 0 to 100,000 organics/month in 13 months, on a new domain, without building backlinks, through a combination of
The best keyword research using ClusterAi
Crazy amounts of documentation to set up our content team for success
Hiring the best writers and editors
Using ClusterAi to optimize all of the content
Do you know what’s even cooler?
Doing it with 3x more efficiency than all of our competitors.
You see – when you follow the templates and SOPs in the Content Ops Framework.
You don’t just generate a lot of traffic.
You generate more traffic per dollar invested than your competitors.
Check it out.
I put together a list of the biggest websites in the dog niche.
I modeled their:
Domain name
DR / DA
Monthly traffic (via Ahrefs)
The total number of pages published
How much traffic do they generate per page per month
Basically, I divided the total amount of traffic by the number of pages.
This allowed me to develop an ‘efficiency score’.
More efficient SEO campaigns generated, on average, more traffic per page.
And less efficient SEO campaigns generated, on average, less traffic per page.
Doggypedia generates 570 visitors per month per page.
Certapet generates 170 visitors per month per page.
This means 3.3x more traffic per page of content published than Certapet.
Even the biggest website in the dog niche, DogTime, with 3.3m organics/month, is only generating 578 visitors per month, per page.
That’s the same traffic/page as Doggypedia.org.
But Doggypedia.org is a DR9.
And DogTime is a DR77.
Not all content is not created equally.
Content generated by us, using our systems, ranks higher and generates more traffic.
If this is your first time on ContentDistribution.com, learn why we crush:
Fully managed SEO for category leaders and future category leaders with huge goals and the budget to execute. We’ll do the heavy lifting, you sit back and take the credit.
My very first SEO project grew from 445 → 103,000 organics/month in 13 months.
I had no prior SEO experience.
And I approached the project in a way that would sound absolutely ridiculous in 2018.
❌ No backlinks.
❌ No technical BS.
❌ No hacks or shortcuts.
✅ Just great content.
Today, I call this approach content velocity, but in 2018, it didn’t have a name — because nobody was talking about it.
In this case study, I’ll show you how I crushed SEO without learning how to build backlinks or do weird technical stuff.
And this strategy still works today because I’ve used essentially the same approach to take 5 projects from 0 to 100,000+ organics/month.
🔎 Background
If this is your first piece of ContentDistribution.com content, here’s what you gotta know.
We’ve taken 5 projects from 0 to 100,000+ organics/month without building backlinks or doing technical BS.
We did it by creating the highest quality, most relevant page of content Google could show for the keywords we wanted to rank for and doing that over and over again.
Baby fat graphs (not quite big enough for their own case study)
Learn: Open up each case study in a new tab and read them too.
⚒️ The Setup
I had spent my entire career in early-stage startups, most recently as employee #8 in a startup that grew to 200 employees in 4 years, bootstrapped, raised a few rounds, and was acquired for a lot of $$$.
I joined an SEO agency to reskill my career from business development to marketing.
Because as a future founder, I realized that marketing is a stronger skill set for founders than sales.
Sales is…
One-to-one conversations
Having to live in similar time zones to your customers
Not creating value the minute you step away from your keyboard
While marketing is…
One-to-many conversations
Living anywhere in the world
Creating value while I sleep
And if I could learn SEO, I could use SEO to grow whatever business I started next, more effectively than with a sales skillset.
So that was my 5-year plan:
Sell SEO for an agency
Learn SEO at the agency
Build a SaaS product
Grow it with SEO
I’m currently in year 6 of my 5-year journey, and I’ve:
Built a content agency that employs dozens of FT team members
Shipped two SaaS products to 7,000+ users and 700+ paying customers (ClusterAi & Workello)
Then you look at all of your major platform peers.
Instagram, TikTok, LinkedIn, Facebook.
And they are all using user engagement metrics to influence reach.
They show new content to a small audience.
And if that content has good UX metrics, they’ll show that content to an ever-increasing bigger audience.
And they’ll keep increasing the amount of reach your content receives until those UX metrics fall off.
So knowing all of this.
You decide to use backlinks as the primary ranking factor in Google Search.
WHAT???
Google has the user engagement data across the entire internet stack.
All of their peers use user engagement data to influence reach.
Even YouTube uses user engagement metrics to influence reach.
Why wouldn’t Google use user engagement metrics to stack rank content in Google Search?
There is no better heuristic for whether one page is more valuable to a searcher than another page than the user engagement metrics on those two pages.
SEO without backlinks or technical BS. Stepping away from traditional SEO tactics, I’ve found a golden formula. By emphasizing user value, not only do you appeal to Google, but to other platforms too. Understand the magic of UX metrics. #seo#seostrategy#uxmetrics#ux#google
The only page of content you can’t rank is the page that hasn’t been published.
And for most businesses, there aren’t a handful of valuable pages that can drive traffic and revenue.
There are hundreds or thousands of pages.
And I can prove it.
Let’s say you sell dog food.
If you use a popular keyword research tool like Ahrefs.
There are almost 500,000 keywords containing the phrase “dog food”
Representing 7,200,000 searches/month in the USA alone.
If you export this list of keywords into ClusterAi you’ll find thousands of unique pages of content you need to create, to rank for all of the ways consumers search for “dog food”.
UpWork only gives you a handful of candidates, and if you only evaluate a handful, you’re not hiring the best you can afford. You’re hiring the least bad of the handful you talked to.
5 star reviews don’t mean anything, because the person giving the review probably doesn’t have the same perspective as you on ‘good content’.
Portfolio pieces are almost always edited by someone else before publication, and chances are the first drafts you get won’t match the portfolio pieces you hired the writer on.
I will let you in on a secret weapon 150+ content teams use to hire great writers on auto-pilot.
The more candidates you evaluate, the more likely you are to find the right mix of quality and cost.
But getting candidates is the easy part.
Post a Premium job ad on ProBlogger for $160, and you’ll have 300+ candidates. This is the easy part.
Filtering through those 300 candidates to uncover the right mix of quality and cost is the hard part.
This is where automation comes in.
We built Workello to enable content teams to filter through hundreds of candidates in just a few minutes.
Get up and running in minutes using Workello’s template library. Every template contains a pre-written job description, writing test, candidate emails, and interview questions.
Post your job ad where the writers you want to hire hang out using our hiring playbooks:
Say goodbye to half-baked writer test submissions! Dive into the key ingredients of a test that ensures completion AND helps you identify the cream of the crop. 🌟 #contentwriting#writertest#hiringhacks#hiringtips
In 2018 I presented this project to the Seattle Search Network when traffic was only 40,000/month.
You can watch the original presentation here:
The exact playbook I described back then is still relevant today.
❌ No backlinks.
❌ No technical BS.
❌ No hacks or shortcuts.
✅ Just great content.
✅ At scale.
🥇 Your Turn
Fully Managed SEO
Fully managed SEO for category leaders and future category leaders with huge goals and the budget to execute. We’ll do the heavy lifting, you sit back and take the credit.
In the last three years, dozens of people on our agency team have contributed more than one thousand knowledge base articles to our internal documentation.
Our agency wasn’t founded with one thousand KBs, but we were founded with a culture of documentation.
I knew that in order to achieve my goals, I couldn’t do it alone. I would need to build a team.
And they would need to execute as well, or better than I could.
😍 Un-ignorable Benefits
I get it – you’re busy building a business.
Trying to keep your head above water.
But chances are you don’t know how dramatically helpful documentation can be on your journey.
I’ve never worked in a business with internal documentation until I started the content agency, and the same is true for everyone I’ve polled in our organization.
But if you’ve never worked in a company with a culture of documentation – here’s what you should know.
Documenting stuff isn’t just for agencies.
It’s for every type of business – and every business function.
When you pull it off, crazy things start happening.
You enable the people you hire to do something as well, or better than you can.
Junior level team members start to punch above their weight.
You’re finally able to hold your team accountable to executing their responsibilities in a specific way, every time.
You’ll find yourself spending less time repeating repeating yourself.
It takes your team less time to ramp up new team members.
Your knowledge transfer doesn’t walk out of the door with attrition, and new team members have a base to build upon.
Your workload gets more and more async as the need for real-time collaboration decreases.
Your team spends less time organizing work in meetings and more time working.
You start to see increases in efficiency by keeping people unblocked with clear, specific instructions.
💪 Implementation
This is the first, and most important step. Everyone on your team is busy, if you don’t make time to create documentation they won’t either. Not in the beginning.
You also need to figure out your documentation standards – the level of quality that you’re going to hold your team accountable to. You’ll only develop this by digging in, and learning what it’s like to actually create good documentation.
Expect to create the first 30 – 50 docs before you can roll out creation responsibilities to your team.
There are a bunch of different approaches on where to start.
Here are some ideas to get your juices flowing.
[table “1585” not found /]
Use It
Now it’s time to get your team consuming the initial push of docs you’ve created.
Whenever anyone on the team asks a question that’s answered in the KB, link them to the KB instead of answering the question directly.
Whenever someone asks a question, makes a mistake, or improves on something that’s been documented – use that as an opportunity to make your documentation better.
Your internal KB needs to give your team the information they need – when they need – easily. This part is critical for adoption. The harder information is to find, the less usage you’ll see.
On first appearances, Google Docs seems to work.
But it doesn’t last long.
Discoverability begins to suffer at around 50 KBs across a handful of business functions.
Google Docs lacks a nested view
It’s not easy to internal link to other relevant docs
The search functionality doesn’t do the job
Shared drives have more friction than the alternative ways to silo information
We tried to stave off the inevitable by building an index of the Google Docs in Airtable.
But nobody kept it up to date.
We heard Notion was slow, and we didn’t need the PM level functionality because we’re already in-love with Airtable.
You’re finally ready to start asking your team to contribute documentation.
There’s one last step.
You need to create a doc, on how to create docs.
This doc needs to include:
Naming conventions
Internal linking requirements
Linking to required external resources
Organizational standards (where do you put the KB?)
Sharing and security policies
Alright, now you’re ready.
Start with holding your direct reports accountable.
Once they’ve gotten their reps in and built a habit, you’re ready to start rolling it out to their direct reports. The rest of the people in your organization can’t be held accountable until your direct reports are held accountable.
Scope documentation into your team’s workload
You’re almost there – but you’re not there yet. Your team actually needs to start creating documentation. And the only way that will happen is if you scope it into their weekly / monthly / quarterly goals.
If you give your team a full plate AND documentation – guess what won’t get done.
Keeping your knowledge base up to date
If your team is successful, and you do build a culture of documentation – congrats!
You earned more work.
Your documentation needs to be kept up to date.
Especially in the beginning.
Your team might be creating documentation – but it won’t be as good as it could be. There’s going to be organization and naming conventions issues. People will forget internal links, and internal links will change.
Every three to six months we map out which major processes we’d like to refresh, and map these to our bi-monthly sprints.
🥇 Your Turn
Fully Managed SEO
Fully managed SEO for category leaders and future category leaders with huge goals and the budget to execute. We’ll do the heavy lifting, you sit back and take the credit.
Meeting notes are one of the most valuable things you can do for yourself and your team.
Yet, the number of people who have sent me a recap of our meeting is closer to 0 than 1.
No one does it.
Except for me and everyone on my team, multiple times per day.
Here are a few things meeting notes will do for you:
Impress your manager
Create more value for your colleagues and peers
Hold someone accountable, especially people that don’t report to you
Communicate important rhetoric
Remember the conversation you had next month
Correct a verbal miscommunication
Take meeting notes.
Not convinced?
Here is what Michael Siebel, CEO of Ycombinator has to say about capturing notes during meetings. https://youtu.be/C27RVio2rOs?t=2030
This is one of the most impactful ways you can spend your time and multiply the value you’re already creating.
Here are the lies people tell themselves on why it’s too much work:
I’ll definitely remember everything that was discussed next week, or in 3 months
Everyone on the call will definitely walk away with the same understanding as me
Sally will definitely remember the action item I mentioned at minute 42 of our meeting and deliver it without me reminding her
This meeting was important enough to attend, but not to document
Here are a few real-life situations meeting notes have proved invaluable
Starting a new job
Joining a new company or starting a new job is often quite overwhelming. There’s so much information to take in, digest, and understand that you may feel like your head’s going to explode.
Writing things down will facilitate learning and retention, especially if you’re a newcomer to the team and don’t fully understand everything discussed in meetings.
It takes the average employee 3–6 months to ramp up to full productivity, but a new employee who accurately captures every conversation they’re a part of can add value on day one.
Impressing your manager
Managers, executives, and CEOs are likely overwhelmingly busy.
Capturing meeting notes for your manager frees them up to move onto the next thing.
Meeting recaps also allow them to stay in the loop on projects they are tracking and keep a finger on the pulse of the business, even if they weren’t physically present at the meeting.
Don’t wait for your manager to approach you and ask for information. Show initiative!
Email the meeting recap to them with all the talking points explained and all action items neatly listed. I can guarantee your manager will appreciate both the notes and the fact that you’re taking the initiative and helping improve the company’s processes.
Next time there’s talk of promotions, you’ll be at the very top of the list.
Holding everyone accountable
How do you hold someone accountable for something that hasn’t been written down?
I can tell you from experience, you really can’t.
This is especially true when the person you need to hold accountable doesn’t report to you.
It’s even worse when a project spans over several months. You can’t reasonably expect someone to remember what you said at that meeting a month and a half ago.
At that point, it’s your word against theirs. And the more someone has on their plate, the harder it is to remember all the verbal agreements.
The solution? Write everything down!
Getting commitments in writing is the foundation for holding people accountable. https://www.tiktok.com/@contentdistributioncom/video/7286779886209928480
Communicating something important
“When you’re tired of saying it, people are starting to hear it’ – Jeff Weiner, CEO of LinkedIn
Jeff goes on quote David Gergen, a recognized expert on communication, and advisor to 4 different American Presidents from both political parties, in his famous LinkedIn article,
“History teaches that almost nothing a leader says is heard if spoken only once.”
When you’re shifting the direction of your business, revamping your processes, bringing on a huge new client/account, or making any impactful changes—anything that’s particularly important, it’s not enough to communicate it once, nor is it enough to communicate it verbally.
You need to reiterate your messaging.
When you repeat something a dozen times, you reduce forgetfulness and eliminate confusion and misunderstanding. When you write it down, you don’t need to waste time and energy saying the same thing over and over again.
Taking meeting notes and documenting everything allows your team to re-read the message as many times as necessary until they understand it fully and internalize it.
Whenever you have an important announcement to share with the team, make sure to write it down!
Remembering what you did….last week
Last week I had 30 meetings. That’s approximately 6 meetings a day.
Let’s pretend each meeting is only 30 minutes. That’s 3 hours of meetings per day.
Add all other tasks on top, and by Friday, I can’t even remember my name, let alone what I discussed in every one of the 30 meetings I had.
This week looks lighter; I only have 20 meetings scheduled. But it’s only Tuesday. By Friday, this week’s schedule will probably be just as cramped.
Relying on my memory is a recipe for disaster. I talk about at least a dozen different topics every single day, and I’m blessed with a terrible memory.
But there’s no reason to let your poor memory prevent you from achieving your goals.
Rely on recaps. Save the memories for that vacation in Greece.
Did You Miscommunicate?
Regardless of what was said during the meeting, the meeting notes become the objective truth once it’s over.
Whoever writes the meeting notes controls the truth.
If I misspeak or miscommunicate in a meeting, I’m updating the meeting notes to reflect what I intended to say.
By adding a single line in the meeting recap, you can identify and correct any miscommunication issues before the communication issue becomes a problem.
That line is: “Please let me know if I forgot or misheard anything.” This encourages all the meeting participants to go over the notes and, where necessary, reply with corrections.
Skip more meetings
How often do you attend meetings where only one or two people talk, and everyone else just sits there with the “what the hell am I doing here” expression on their face?
Many people attend meetings they shouldn’t have to, where other departments talk about their projects and problems that are only relevant to three out of the fifteen people present.
Why would the entire team have to sit through an hour-long meeting when they could devote that time to actual work?
Meeting notes enable those people to skip the meeting and focus on something else.
How to build a culture of meeting notes
You can’t just show up at work one day and say: “I want everyone to take meeting notes from now on.”
Taking meeting notes is an inherently public action. The very first step in rolling out note-taking into your organization is leading by example.
The process needs to start from the top because meeting notes are a lot of work. Your team is busy with all of the other priorities you’ve communicated, and they won’t adopt note-taking unless you show it’s a priority to you by making time for it yourself.
Your consistency and attention to detail are going to impact how your team embraces note-taking.
If you rush meeting notes out with poor attention to detail and sloppy formatting, that’s what your team is going to do.
Dedicate the time to write detailed, well-formatted, and actionable meeting notes, and eventually, your team will pick up the habit.
Rolling this out to your team
Before you roll out note-taking to the team, we need to clearly define how the notes are taken, who needs to take them, what the process looks like, and how they are distributed.
We did this for you!
When notes should be captured
Who should receive the notes
When notes should be sent
Who is responsible for capturing notes
How to format the notes for clarity and information density
The best way to implement note-taking is to start with people who report directly to you. Once they get into the habit of report taking, hold your managers accountable for people who report to them.
Work your way down until everyone in the organization is taking notes.
When meeting notes should be captured
The best note-taking happens live during the call as things are discussed.
Of course, you can’t and shouldn’t write down everything. Note-taking doesn’t mean you’re transcribing everything as it’s being said.
Verbal communication exceeds the throughput of typing, so the best approach is to jot down notes as bullets, fill in the gaps, and add explanations right after the meeting.
When meeting notes should be sent
Notes should be sent the same day, ideally right after the meeting.
The idea behind the notes is to document all the crucial information shared in the meeting, to avoid miscommunication and misremembering. If you send meeting notes two days after the meeting, chances are you won’t remember everything correctly.
If notes aren’t sent soon enough, the gaps in your shorthand notes become fuzzy.
A same-day policy enables flexibility during meeting heavy days while maintaining tight expectations.
Who needs to receive the meeting notes
The answer to this question largely depends on the structure of your organization, but it boils down to everyone whose work is or will be impacted by the information shared in the meeting.
The nature of the meeting itself will also influence the decision of who to include in the email when you’re sending the meeting notes.
In general, you always want to send the notes to everyone who attended the meeting, as well as every person on the team who will benefit from the information or needs to stay in the loop.
At first, it’s best to share the information with people even if you’re not sure whether or not it’s relevant to them. As you take more and more notes, you’ll become more proficient in discerning who needs to receive the information and who doesn’t.
In our organization, I receive approximately 10 meeting recaps per week covering:
Systems & process changes
Project management updates
Hiring and HR reports
Customer meetings
Marketing updates
The meeting notes allow me to watch and understand the decision-making process of my team, jump in with an opinion on the things I’m tracking, and skip most of the meetings.
Pro tip: CC yourself when sending out the email. This sends the recap to your inbox, allowing you to archive it in a folder for easy later reference.
Who’s responsible for note taking
Note that this section is only applicable after you’ve successfully rolled out note-taking across your organization.
Until you’re there, it needs to come from the top: from you, to your reports, to their reports, etc.
Once all of your managers are consistently taking notes, it’s time to roll out responsibilities to individual contributors.
In most internal meetings, we’ll rotate between the most junior team members on the call.
That doesn’t mean managers don’t take notes; It means they take fewer notes. When my managers meet with their managers or me, they’re the ones taking notes.
With that said, when the need for clarity is high, the person with the most at stake will take notes.
If I’m leading a high-stakes discussion where misunderstanding or forgetfulness is not acceptable, I’m taking the notes and sending the recaps.
How to format meeting notes (examples)
Meeting notes need to be succinct, well-formatted, and appropriately structured. They need to cover all the talking points and provide a sufficient explanation of each topic that you discussed in the meeting.
Your goal when writing notes should be to format and structure them so that a person who didn’t attend the meeting could read them in less than five minutes but still get all the relevant information from them.
Here are some examples.
Example #0 – Very Bad
Good:
The recap was sent
Bad:
Everything else
Notes are not grouped under relevant topics
Action items (AC) are not consolidated in their own section and are mixed within notes
A follow up email indicates 99% of the discussion was not captured
Example #1 – Not Great
Good:
Notes are organized under relevant categories
Each thought is short and to the point
Bad:
No bullet points used
No action items indicated
No request to add any missing or misheard information
Example #2 – Better
Good:
Notes are grouped under relevant sections
Bullet points are used to communicate each thought
Bad:
No “Please let me know if I forgot or misheard anything”
Action items not called out
Weird, non-standardized spacing between some bullets and sections
Example #3 – Good
Good:
Topics are consolidated under relevant sections
Bullet points are used to communicate each piece of information
Highlighting is used to indicate action items
Consistent spacing between bullets and sections
Bad:
Does not start email with “Please let me know if I forgot or misheard anything”
Part 1 will show you how we went through every step of the Playbook ourselves, with multiple successful projects
Part 2, you’ll be able to see our strong thoughts on the state of the SEO industry and why our approach will help you create successful outcomes over and over again.
To read about our entire playbook, jump to Part 3, where I’ll give you our entire software stack, our knowledge transfer process for all types of projects, everything you need to hire your Content Team, and how to delegate content editing and SEO ASAP.
Part 1: We know Content Velocity works because we did it!
Would you rather watch this article instead of reading it?
Catch our presentation on YouTube.
1.1. Our claim to fame
Content Distribution ran one of the most successful SEO projects of all time, driving DoNotPay.com from 0 to 1,500,000 organic visitors per month in just 24 months.
We created content for DoNotPay ranging from legal to fintech, to online tools and converters, to daily consumer challenges, such as accessing free trials, support, neighbor disputes, etc.
Here is a short list of some of the things DoNotPay does:
Filing for unemployment
Suing anyone, or any company, in small claims court
Canceling hard to cancel services
Filing chargebacks
Securing flight compensation for delayed or canceled flights
Skipping the company’s phone queues
Scheduling DMV appointments
Studying for government tests
Communicating with inmates held in state and federal prisons
Send faxes without a fax machine
As a result, our team researched and produced content for over 153 verticals and content series.
1.2. What quality content means
Content velocity does not equal programmatic content.
It does not mean creating AI-generated content at scale.
It doesn’t mean publishing tens of thousands of nice words across multiple pages.
It means publishing content that drives conversions and revenue.
It is exactly what we did for DoNotPay.
I want to stress – this wasn’t vanity traffic.
This campaign helped DoNotPay go from a seed stage to raising a $210m series B valuation led by Andreessen Horowitz.
1.3. It doesn’t just work for DoNotPay
DoNotPay took their SEO campaign in-house November 2021, freeing us up to help other ambitious companies scale up.
Here is a pet food subscription company we published 300+ pages of content for.
Another campaign we did for TeachSimple.com – the Netflix of teaching worksheets.
A series-A mobile app for earning cash rewards, ramping up to 10,000 visitors per month in 5 months.
Part 2: Best SEO Campaigns are Content-Driven
Scaling content velocity doesn’t just work for DoNotPay, it works every-time we execute our playbook.
✔️ 0 to 40,000 organics/month in 6 months for TeachSimple.com
✔️ 0 to 47,000 organics/month in 13 months for AnyLeads.com
✔️ 0 to 103,000 organics/month in 13 months for LogicInbound.com
✔️ 0 to 116,000 organics/month in 13 months for Doggypedia.org
✔️ 0 to 150,000 organics/month in 13 months for NDA
✔️ 0 to 166,000 organics/month in 13 months for CampusReel.org
✔️ 0 to 1,500,000 organics/month in 24 months for DoNotPay.com
Did you notice something interesting here? We did…
No, we don’t think something magical happened in month 13 of publishing content.
We realized you don’t need to build backlinks, and technical SEO is mostly BS.
It’s not just us either.
Most of the highest performing SEO campaigns are content driven.
2.1. The most successful campaigns have A LOT of pages
If you look at some of the most successful campaigns in the last few years, you can see that 4 out of 7 will generate less than 500 monthly visitors per page of content.
[table “1580” not found /]
This means that to catch up with, say, Kinsta, you would need to publish 50 articles each month for four years. If you want to catch up to them in a year, you would have to publish 250 pages each month.
More content = more traffic. Simple as that.
Some of the websites like WireCutter or NerdWallet will generate more – 800-2500 monthly visitors for each page of content.
But you’re not WireCutter or NerdWallet, are you?
By the way, NerdWallet has over 130 writers!
Why?
Because you can’t rank for a keyword until you have a page about that keyword.
So start publishing.
2.2. The pet space
The above example was based across different industries – let’s do the same analysis in one industry – the pet space.
Why the pet space?
Well, I built and sold Doggypedia.org to AlphaPaw.com.
[table “1582” not found /]
Column E shows how much traffic websites in this space generate per page of content on their site. We call it Page Efficiency.
And the amount of traffic each page generates is a pretty narrow band.
On average, a top site in the dog niche will generate between 180 – 800 visitors per page of content they’ve published.
The last row — Doggypedia — that’s our project.
We grew it from 0 to over 100k organic visitors per month by publishing 200 pages.
2.3. More pages equal more authority equals easier to rank
The more pages you publish, the easier all of them rank.
The concept is called topical authority.
Basically, in 2023 anyone can create a 30 page website.
And if Google let any 30-page website rank for high value commercial keywords, two things would happen.
Google would send valuable traffic to a lot of shady websites created yesterday
You publish your 30 page website and rank today, someone publishes their 30 page website tomorrow and bumps you off
Google confirms this.
Part 3: The Content Ops Playbook
I’ve had a devoted affiliate tell me, “I have too much on my plate, I cannot do it.”
I’ve had a niche website builder tell me, “Too many systems to set up, I can’t manage that many pages or people. I’ll start writing by myself.”
I’ve had in-house SEOs and Heads of Content tell me, “There are too many variables. It’s hard to scale.”
I’ve had SaaS founders and CEOs tell me, “No way, too much product dev, cannot focus on that big of a marketing push.”
I’ve had SEO consultants and agency owners tell me, “Setting up infrastructure is HARD, I need to focus on my business.”
And they are right – systems, processes, documentation and people is the only way to make content velocity work.
Systems to make the process as automated and frictionless as possible
Processes to make sure every one knows what they need to do
Documentation to hold people accountable to writing about something in a specific way
People who care to make it all work
3.1. Intro: What you are getting yourself into
Before we dive into the strategy that will get you to 100 pages/month,I’ll show you exactly what you’re signing up for.
You will need to build a team to hit your goals.Content velocity is a team sport. You need editors and writers.The best way to find and hire amazing writers? Evaluate more candidates. I break that down below in the Hiring Writers section. The trick to hiring an editor who cares? Promote from within. More on that in the How to delegate Editing section.
People are harder to manage than 301 redirects. SEOs tend to lean towards the technical bits, and as we’ve shown – that’s not what drives incredible outcomes.
3.2. Content Ops Software Stack
Here is what our software stack looks like.
[table “1583” not found /]
Workello helps us identify and hire the absolute best writers we can afford. (Check out a demo)
Airtable is like Google Sheets on steroids, and makes managing our content calendar possible.
Slite is our knowledge base platform, with over 1,000+ process docs we use to hold our team accountable and make our outcomes repeatable. (Learn how we built a culture of documentation.)
Wise & Payoneer is how we pay our team.
Slack is how we communicate.
Geekbot enables async reporting to eliminate meetings.
Zoom is what we lean on when we just have to jump on a call. (Learn how we reduce Zoom to a minimum with a culture of meeting recaps.)
DocuSign manages our team and client contracts.
Afi.ai backs up our Google Docs.
3.3. Knowledge Transfer
3.3.1. The Importance of Enablement documentation
The only way to hold your team accountable to doing something in a particular way is to write it down.
I cannot emphasize this enough.
Still, I will say it one more time: If you don’t document everything, you cannot hold your team accountable.
When we start a new project, we always create Enablement Documentation.
It is a set of 4 to 8 project-specific documents that allow consistency across different content types, workflows, and stakeholders.
These documents are dynamic, meaning we will add information and update them whenever something changes.
Here are four examples of documents that we’ve seen across all projects:
Client questionnaire → Collect the answers to everything we need to know.
About the project → This is the deliverable from the client questionnaire.
Project Language Guidelines → Includes voice, messaging, brand guidelines, etc
Onboarding Checklist → Documents the entire GTM process.
Here’s how to make a client questionnaire:
Step 1: You and your team sit down and write down ALL of the questions you can think of, organized by type/topic.
Step 2: Send the questionnaire to all project stakeholders and ask them to answer in as much detail as possible.
Step 3: Look at the answers and jot down additional questions and notes. Make sure to leave comments on any ambiguous information or statements that are not clear. Be thorough!
Step 4: Schedule a knowledge transfer meeting and allocate at least 90 minutes.
Step 5: Record the meeting, but take notes too. Use the questionnaire to guide the conversation.
Step 6: Create written documentation that covers everything discussed.
3.3.2. Examples
If you are wondering, “well, what are all these questions?”
I got you covered.
We’ve found that if you start with these, everything else that is project-specific will fall into place:
Tell me everything you know about the industry you’re in.
Where do you fit in that industry?
Why do your customers choose you over your competitors?
What is your strong stance/opinion on the industry?
How do customers purchase this kind of product?
What are their evaluation criteria?
How do they research solutions?
What’s your tone of voice? Examples?
What are the best communities for this industry?
What are the best / most authoritative resources to learn more?
What pieces of content, either by you or someone else that everyone needs to read?
Here is a good example of the industry positioning question and answer.
To hire 45 writers and editors – we had to evaluate 3,500 candidates.
We’ve learned four important things:
Writing is the lowest barrier WFH job and 95% of your candidates won’t be qualified
Bad candidates have good portfolios, with content that was edited by someone else
The more candidates you evaluate, the better writers you’ll hire
Doing it manually is chaotic, and your qualified candidates will be lost in-between the 95% that aren’t
This is our experience – but it’s also the experience of anyone who has tried to hire writers.
Most writers can’t write.
Even if I find someone good, it takes soooo much effort → too inefficient.
Writers with good portfolios aren’t passing my writing tests
“The quality of the final draft was massively different from the sample & I had to redo it entirely”
“I tried it to do it manually, and it didn’t work.”
Most writers are scammers.
3.4.3. Hire better writers on auto-pilot
We built Workello to help us identify and hire the top 1% of our writing candidates.
Now more than 100+ content teams are using Workello to do the same.
Here’s how it works.
Your job description, writing assessment, and candidate emails are pre-written – so you can signup and start sending candidates into your funnel in minutes.
Candidates apply and land in your hiring dashboard, where all candidates, from all hiring channels are sorted by status.
Click on a candidate to pull up their application.
And send them a polite rejection email, or a writing test in 1-click.
Candidates that don’t receive your writing test – can’t take your writing test.
Say goodbye to half-baked writer test submissions! Dive into the key ingredients of a test that ensures completion AND helps you identify the cream of the crop. ???? #contentwriting#writertest#hiringhacks#hiringtips
So we’ve invested heavily into Workello’s email infrastructure so 93% of writing tests that are sent – are viewed by candidates.
We’ve spent just as much time thinking about the candidate experience too.
Workello is designed and optimized to keep your best candidates engaged and invested into taking your writing test because one of the biggest complaints from job seekers is they feel like applying for jobs is a waste of time – “it’s like sending my resume into a black hole.”
So Workello’s candidate status page tells candidates exactly where they are in the hiring process, what to expect next, and how long it will take.
This builds a lot of trust with candidates, fast.
And this is exactly what you need to do to keep your best candidates engaged and invested into taking your writing test – so you can hire them before your competitors do.
The better candidate experience you have, the better candidates you’ll hire.
Ready to start hiring great writers on auto-pilot?
In the process, building our entire 45 person content team.
Today, Gordana is co-founder of Workello helping companies repeat and execute our agency’s trajectory.
The more writers you work with, you have more surface area to find a Gordana.
3.6. Remove SEOs from the process
I know. It sounds so counter-intuitive.
As an editor and an SEO manager for such a long time, it hurts my heart to say it.
But here it goes…
The ability to scale content production and drive amazing organic traffic acquisition campaigns is so much more efficient without SEOs.
All you need is one SEO PM.
Aside from myself and Nick, no one on our team had any previous SEO experience.
The SEOs job is to empower the organization and take care of the more strategic bits:
Keyword research
Site structure
Empowering the content team with documentation
3.6.1. Automating Keyword Research and Selecting Topics
Keyword research is a process of discovering all the ways your target audience is searching for your product, service, or content using search engines.
When you publish a lot of pages, you have to do a lot of keyword research.
Nick had a 10+ year career in SaaS before learning SEO and starting ContentDistribution.com.
So he automated this too.
ClusterAi, our keyword grouping tool, uses data from Google to determine which keywords can rank together.
Spend a couple of minutes on Ahrefs, and get back a list of every topic you’ll need to write, to rank for all of the keywords your target audience is searching for.
1. Start with making an intake sheet. You should identify your main terms, i.e. terms that you expect to find in all keywords you want to target. Then, start adding terms that you expect to find alongside those main terms.
2. Import into Ahrefs or Semrush. In Ahrefs, paste your main terms into the Keyword explorer. Then go to Matching Terms and paste your included keywords. In the example below, we used 28 terms we identified in the “Repair” vertical.
3. Export your CSV and upload it into ClusterAi. Choose your Keyword list import type (in our case — Ahrefs) and click Submit File.
4. Receive the Keyword Opportunity Analysis. In less than 60 minutes, ClusterAi will group your keywords, and you will receive a spreadsheet with all the topic ideas you need. Every row in this list represents a page you can create. Column A contains your main keyword, and column C will contain variations that are grouped together with the main keyword.
Now you know every page of content you need to create, to rank for all of the ways people are searching for information related to the products/services you provide.
To get our entire process on Topic Selection, ask for access to our Content Ops Framework by clicking here.
That’s all you need to create a content plan.
Now it’s time to distribute the plan to your writers and empower them to execute it.
3.6.2. Document everything
Holding your writing and editing team accountable is possible only through detailed documentation.
If you need a refresher on how to kickstart a project, scroll back up to read about The Importance of Enablement Documentation and Examples of how to execute Knowledge Transfer.
One of the most powerful tools a team has at their disposal is a Writer’s Brief.
A quality brief:
Unifies the outcomes of SEO, editorial, and brand strategies
Sets up expectations clearly
Assists the writer in research and production
Saves time and stress in the editing process
But, what happens if you are publishing 30…
50…
100 articles…
How do you ensure a quality content brief is delivered to every single writer?
Can that one Senior Editor handle so much work? How many briefs should that editor create?
30…?
50..?
100…?
No. And I speak from previous experience.
When our team faced this challenge when we started publishing a lot of pages, we solved it with a Content Series Template — one brief for all of the pages you will publish in one series of articles.
To get our entire process of creating and distributing Content Series Templates, ask for access to our Content Ops Framework by clicking here.
3.6.3. On-page optimization essentials
Our writing and editing teams receive instructions for on-page optimization for each content series we produce.
These instructions will be part of a Content Series Template and fall into 3 groups:
Content structure and on-page basics
On-page optimization for keywords
Internal links
1. Content Structure and on-page basics
Make sure to give your team basic guidance on the structure itself and include some examples of competing content.
Start with basic writing requirements with clear outcomes.
Here is how all of our Content Series Templates start.
Here is a simple checklist to follow:
URL → use the main keyword
Meta Title → Make sure to make this catchy, as clickbaity if possible
Meta description → contains main keyword + answers intent shortly OR shows social proof
H1 → contains the main keyword in a creative informative context
First paragraph → attention-grabbing and/or proof through data
H2s → use keyword variations
Strong (bold) tags → designed for the reader to be able to skim the article.
Tables → basic structured data Google can read, aim for 2 per article
Numbered lists and bullet points → Basic UX and structure elements. Aim for 2 per article
Text is not the only content on the page. Ensure to give instructions on using visual assets, such as images and videos.
Here is an example of directions we gave for optimizing Image Alt Text in one of our campaigns.
2. On-page optimization for keywords
How often should I use my main keyword?
Should I aim to use all keyword variations?
These are the two questions I hear most often when talking to peers from the industry or those who want to start scaling content production.
And I’ve had over 250 demo calls and who knows how many DM chats with SEOs, marketers, beginners, founders…
Heard the same 2 questions.
I found myself giving somewhat cliche answers… “Don’t stuff,” “Use when it makes sense,” “Implement variations while keeping the flow of the topic”
But I would always follow up with specific examples.
Specific solutions my team executes daily.
And then it would all make sense.
Within the Google doc where they will create their articles, our writing team will receive:
On-page basics
Main keyword and the variations
Here’s what that looks like.
In the screenshot above, 10 keyword variations are highlighted. The rest of the 60+ are not. That means: in this article, with close to 1800 words, our writer was able to use a keyword variation 10 times. The rest of the variations were not used.
[quote_tip id=8076]
This wasn’t a requirement, this is something our writers started doing for their editors. <3
Here is another example, where it was easier to implement almost all variations as the number was relatively low.
Our team answers intent without overstuffing keywords and variations.
We give clear on-page optimization instructions. But, storytelling and the flow of content come first.
That’s it.
Well, that and internal linking.
3. Internal linking
Internal links can help with:
Faster indexing or your pages being discovered faster.
users navigate your website. help search engines see what your page and website is about → after all, that’s literally what a Google bot does on your page, it follows links.
building topical authority — showing the users and search engine your content covers a field or niche in depth
Control your readers’ journey
If you have a keen eye for detail, you’ve probably noticed the minimum and self-reported requirement fields for internal links in the screenshot earlier.
This is not a random “I-want-as-many-links-as-possible-I-don’t-care” requirement.
We plan out our internal linking network meticulously prior to publishing.
We know the minimum internal links we want to have in an article because we know which ones should go in every article of the series.
Internal links do what you think backlinks do! I’ve found internal links to be instrumental in improving page rankings. Learn about the strategy behind using them, their role in Cluster AI, and the art of planning content with linking in mind. #SEOTactics#seo#contentcalendar#searchengineoptimization#contentdistribution
We select pillar page(s) that need to go into every article.
We select money pages where we want to drive all our readers to.
We incorporate pillar and money pages in the brief for the writers.
We instruct the writers to contextually link these pages in all content we produce in that vertical.
Writers include them during production even before they are published.
That way, when the pages go live, these pages are already linked everywhere.
We decide which links are mandatory while doing topic selection for the vertical.
Our decision is based on the goals of the campaign.
Here is an example of mandatory links in our Content Series Templates.
Check out our full Guide on Internal Linking in the video below. We cover:
What is an Internal link
Can internal linking help drive organic traffic?
What is anchor text, and how to use it?
Internal linking tips you won’t see anywhere else!
Internal linking tips: Basics
Internal linking tips: During production
Internal linking tips: Post-publishing
Conclusion: What’s Next for You
Set up your project (if you don’t already have one) → Domain, server, set up basic WordPress
Create a 6-month content plan → If you need help with that, use ClusterAi
Create your initial enablement documentation → Use my Qs from above if you don’t have more time
Sign up for Workello → Post a job ad and choose to test 1 best out of 200 candidates (it is free, you have no other commitments here, even if you receive 1000 candidates)
Test more candidates
Hire the top 3 to 5 and assign 1 article per week
Edit those 12 to 20 articles within 4 weeks and choose your editor
Have your editor create SOPs for writers (they already know everything, they worked with you for a month now)
In this case study, I’ll show you how we took DoNotPay from 0 to 1,487,878 monthly organic visits in 24 months, drove 100,000 paying customers and helped it reach a $210M Series B valuation.
First, a warning. This is a 5,000 word article, but I promise it will teach you more about SEO, content marketing and scaling content operations than with any other piece of content on the internet.
Here’s what senior marketing and content folks said about it:
The dot / line is the week I hired someone to help me with content velocity.
See what happened next? 🙂 Thanks Nick for being the main (only?!) man advocating for and raising awareness of content velocity. pic.twitter.com/43NCvPQ7Hy
Another important disclaimer – this isn’t your typical SEO case study:
The traffic we generated wasn’t vanity traffic, it actually drove revenue
We started literally from zero, and were the only ones who worked on this project
Organic search was the main acquisition channel
We focused very little on link building and technical SEO
This is a case study on creating more value for searchers than any other page Google could show at scale only seen in media conglomerates.
I’ll share everything we did to achieve this success, will hold nothing back and by the end of the article, you’ll understand how Google really works and how you can also turn SEO into your #1 customer acquisition channel.
Here’s what we’ll cover:
Background/context/setting
Opportunity
Strategy
Execution
Keyword research
Setting up our writers for success
Scaling content production
Building our content management system
Hiring and scaling our content team
Let’s dive in. It’s gonna be fun.
Background
If this was the only project we had success with, you’d be right to think that this was probably an outlier, an exception rather than a rule.
But it wasn’t. We’ve taken several projects from 0 to +100,000 monthly organic visits in a very short frame (in under a year or two):
So, this wasn’t our first rodeo, but it was the most successful one because we were finally able to fully execute on our proven strategy with more buy-in and more resources of a VC-backed startup.
And the strategy was very simple:
Create the most valuable page of content Google could show for the topics we want to rank for
Integrate product into the content as a natural next step for the reader
Align content & SEO strategy with business goals (revenue)
Since then, we’ve worked with clients like ClickUp, Privacy, Austin Bank, achieved similar successes and figured out the exact type of client we can create the most value for.
I’m talking about +10x ROI, greatly reduced CAC and a tenfold increase in their internet brand footprint.
The Opportunity
DoNotPay has earned the title ‘robot lawyer’, and Joshua Browder, its founder, ‘The Robinhood of the Internet’ nickname, and for a good reason.
Here is a short list of some of the things DoNotPay does.
Filing for unemployment
Suing anyone, or any company, in small claims court
Canceling hard to cancel services
Filing chargebacks
Securing flight compensation for delayed or canceled flights
Skipping company’s phone queues
Scheduling DMV appointments
Studying for government tests
Communicating with inmates held in state and federal prisons
Send faxes without a fax machine
As you can see, DoNotPay helps a very specific set of people during a very specific timeframe:
Just received a parking ticket and doesn’t want to pay it
Wants to sue someone or sue a company in small claims court
Needs to request a refund or chargeback
Wants to cancel a hard to cancel membership or service
Qualifies for compensation for missed or delayed flights
Needs a virtual credit card
This obviously informed the strategy – we went with a strong demand capture play, in a channel people turn to to understand what they’re dealing with and how to solve it – Google search.
In a nutshell, our goal was to appear at the top of search results when prospects feel the above pains, show them the best page of content in order to educate and help them, and then eventually offer them a faster, better, more reliable alternative – DoNotPay.
In other words, smoothly integrate product into content as a natural next step.
The Strategy
In 2019 New York City collected 565 million dollars in parking fines. When someone searches Google for “pay NYC parking ticket”, it’s almost guaranteed that the searcher just received a parking ticket in New York City.
In that exact moment, DoNotPay might be one of the most helpful websites on the internet.
DoNotPay’s Dispute Parking Tickets product lets users appeal parking tickets in any city in the USA and UK. And there are over 19,000 cities in the US alone.
Unfortunately, Google won’t let DoNotPay rank only one page on ‘Dispute Parking Tickets’ for 19,000 cities.
Similarly, consumers are taxed tens of billions of dollars every year by morally corrupt business practices. DoNotPay’s Cancel Subscriptions, Refunds, and Chargebacks products help consumers enforce their rights against 10,000+ of America’s most popular companies.
Again, DoNotPay can’t rank only one page on Refunds or Chargebacks for the 10,000+ companies DoNotPay helps enforce consumer rights.
If DoNotPay wants to rank in Google for ‘Seattle parking tickets’, we need a page on disputing parking tickets in Seattle. If DoNotPay wants to rank for ‘Boston parking tickets’, we need a page on disputing parking tickets in Boston. If DoNotPay wants to rank for ‘cancel Planet Fitness’, we need a page on how the searcher can cancel Planet Fitness.
And on, and on, and on 10,000 times. Why? Because we can’t make a single page relevant to 19,000 cities or 10,000 companies.
When the searcher is looking for information, they’re not even looking for DoNotPay. They’re looking for resources on how to do this on their own.
And because the user’s goal is to seek information, and not necessarily use DoNotPay, if we focused on DoNotPay at the expense of helping the user, searchers wouldn’t get what they expect.
Compared against other websites Google could show, visitors would have a higher bounce rate, lower time on site, and less pages visited. And the content wouldn’t rank.
That’s why our entire organic search strategy is based on simply being the most valuable resource Google could show a searcher when looking for a particular piece of information.
This Shouldn’t Be Controversial Anymore
I am convinced that the world’s most innovative big data company isn’t using backlinks as a primary ranking signal anymore. Along with Google Search, Google also owns:
Google Analytics
Chrome
Android
What other metric better measures and compares quality of content than user experience metrics? Think about it. You have two pieces of content on the same topic:
Without ever reading either page of content, you can guess the 1st one adds more value to the reader than the first page of content.
This is how Google works. Over the last 6 years, whenever we focused on publishing the highest quality, most relevant page of content Google could show, we’d win. That’s literally it.
It’s not just us either
Dan Sanchez from Sweet Fish Media, a podcast agency for B2B brands. He crushed organic without knowing SEO. By focusing on producing high quality content at scale.
Content Production is the Biggest Bottleneck to Big Outcomes
We’ve established that DoNotPay needs a page on disputing parking tickets in every city in the US. And a page on each one of the 10,000 companies they support.
So, in order to be where DoNotPay’s audience is already searching today, DoNotPay needs to create tens of thousands of pages of content.
And that means the biggest bottleneck in reaching our audience organically is the speed at which we publish content. Let’s break it down:
If we need to create 10,000 pages to get in front of 10,000 opportunities, and we publish 100 pages a month, It will take us 100 months, or eight years, to be everywhere DoNotPay’s audience is already searching Google for today.
And it’s not just DoNotPay.
If you look at the websites generating the most organic traffic it’s always the websites with the most content. Here is a breakdown of the ten largest players in the dogs/pet niche.
There are four columns:
URL
Estimated organic traffic (Ahrefs)
Number of pages (Ahrefs)
Traffic per page per month (#2 / #3)
The most important column is E, traffic per page, per month. When you look at this list, what you don’t see is a website generating 80% of the traffic with 20% of the content.
What you do see is each of the top players in this space generate a very narrow band of 170 to 853 visitors per month per page.
And this observation has held true for every niche we’ve looked at.
The Execution
This made it clear what we had to do:
Keyword research
Setting up our writers for success
Scaling content production
Building our content management system
Hiring and scaling our content team
I’ll now walk you through the entire process.
If Backlinks are so Important, Explain This to Me
You cannot convince me that the most sophisticated big data company in the world, the same company that owns Google Analytics, Chrome, and Android is using an easily gamed metric like backlinks as a primary ranking signal.
It’s just too unbelievable. Yes, DoNotPay has an incredible backlink profile. Their earned media has gotten them natural placements in BBC, CNN, CNBC, Vice, New York Times, Washington Post, PBS, Fox, Today Show, and more.
Some of these publications featured them multiple times. And this does make our job easier. But it’s not the primary factor behind the success of the campaign. I know this because our team has created successful campaigns with a very average number of backlinks:
AnyLeads.com was a DR33
That didn’t stop us from going 0 to 47,000 monthly organic visits.
CampusReel.org was a DR33
That didn’t stop us from taking the project from 0 to 166,000 organics/month in 12 months.
Doggypedia.org was a DR9
Doggypedia started as a fresh domain at DR0. That didn’t stop us from taking the project from 0 to 116,000 monthly organic visits in 13 months.
Remember this chart?
Doggypedia generates just as much traffic per page, per month as the websites with the highest DR in the pet industry.
Because we’ve been able to crush organic search so consistently without backlinks, we never had to learn how to build them.
And this is a really powerful approach to organic search. Because it means instead of praying to the Google Gods for a great outcome, the outcome is entirely within our control.
Technical SEO is Overrated Too
Technical SEO sounds super scary, for two reasons:
The most authoritative people in SEO make it sound super scary.
The person you’re taking advice from hasn’t achieved the outcome you want to achieve
Brain Dean’s 200 ranking factors have been shared 45,000+ times on Twitter. This article has probably been read 500,000 times.
If there were really 200 factors that mattered, I would have given up a long time ago. Fortunately for all of us, our experience taking four projects from 0 to 100,000 monthly organic visits indicates you can skip Banklinko’s article on ranking factors.
The second reason is because the SEO you’re taking advice from hasn’t achieved the outcome you want to achieve.
In 2019, Rand Fishkin, founder and former CEO of Moz ran an SEO survey. The results were shocking: most SEOs on the internet aren’t actually SEOs.
Here are the areas we spend time thinking about.
Mobile speed & friendliness
URL structure
Internal linking structure
Optimizing for user experience
De-indexing thin content
Diagnosing Google Search Console errors
Mobile Speed & Friendliness
Google switched to mobile-first indexing in 2020. It doesn’t matter how fast your desktop pages are. And it doesn’t matter if a majority of your traffic is on desktop. Google says mobile page speed is what they measure.
Here are two great resources to diagnose page speed issues:
GT Metrix
Google Pagespeed Insights
URL Structure
This is SEO 101, so we’re not going to spend much time here.
Do’s
Set your page URLs as domain.com/main-keyword
Host your content on the root domain (domain.com/blog)
Don’ts
Don’t use random characters in your URL
Don’t use categories in your URLs (domain.com/category/main-keyword)
Don’t use /blog/ in your blog URL (domain.com/blog/main-keyword)
Don’t host your content on subdomains (blog.domain.com)
Internal Linking Structure
Internal links tell Google how important any given page is to your business.
Every internal linking strategy is unique, but all internal linking strategies share these three things in common:
The more internal links to a particular page, the easier that page is to rank.
The further away any page is from the homepage (clicks), the harder it is to rank
The more relevant the page the internal link is coming from, the more it helps the page that it’s linking to
Internal links basically do what people think backlinks do.
Sending dozens of internal links to high-value pages can significantly increase the rankings of the target page.
Optimize for user experience
Google strongly leverages user engagement data to determine which pages add more value to a user than other pages.
Align everything you do with:
Keeping the visitor on the site longer
Increasing the number of pages the visitor views
Decreasing your bounce rate
These three aspects are remarkably comprehensive and include a lot of the other tactics in this case study:
Site speed and mobile-friendliness
Internal links that visitors can’t resist opening
High quality, relevant content that solves the visitor’s problem better than anyone else
High converting CTAs
Social proof from earned media & user reviews
De-indexing Thin Content
An important metric to pay attention to is the percentage of content on a site that Google might consider ‘thin content’.
Thin content is a broad term that can refer to:
Pages that will never rank for non-branded searches
Pages with low amounts of unique content
Pages with low user engagement metrics
Pages with a low volume of traffic across all channels
If a website has a higher percentage of thin content, it is hard to grow it organically. But, if we cut out thin content, we’re giving strong pages a better chance to perform.
This practice is officially called content pruning, and even though it sounds daunting and can make content managers anxious, it is for the best. Just like you have to cut an avocado plant for it to grow fruit, you have to cut the branches that are weighing good content down.
According to Google, there are at least 5.4 million pages about Google Search Console.
We don’t have anything to say about Google Search Console that hasn’t already been said.
Except — If you’re resource constrained, don’t bottleneck yourself fixing technical issues before you scale up content production. When you make a technical SEO change, it will impact your traffic in as little as days or weeks. But it takes months to create a content creation and distribution infrastructure and begin ranking. Get your content production on lock first.
Keyword Research to Uncover Opportunities & Drive Relevance
You’ve seen the opportunity size on this project. Just a single product feature had 20,000 potential relevant pages to be created.
If we had to do keyword research manually, we would need an entire keyword research department. We would have half a dozen people doing nothing but keyword research.
We would very easily spend $5,000 – $10,000+ a month evaluating, hiring, training, retaining, mentoring, coaching, and doing QA on our keyword research team’s deliverables.
This didn’t seem like the right way to do it, so we automated it.
In essence, by using data from Google, we can plan a year’s worth of content in a matter of minutes. And if this sounds crazy, it’s because it is.
Doing keyword research manually comes is still the standard practice, and it comes with many problems:
Experienced SEO’s are delegating everything but keyword research because it’s too hard to get right
Keyword research deliverables are inconsistent from person to person
Inexperienced SEOs know how important keyword research is, but live with anxiety because of the long feedback cycle between investment into organic and organic results
ClusterAi, our keyword grouping tool, uses data from Google to determine which keywords can rank together. How do you know if you can rank keyword A and keyword B with one page? You analyze the number of pages that rank for both keywords.
If there are three or more individual pages that rank for both keywords, you can probably rank for both keywords with one page too.
If there are two or fewer individual pages that can rank for both keywords, you probably can’t rank for both keywords with one page. You should create two pages to rank for each keyword.
This process is not intuitive. SEOs that are manually doing keyword research are constantly screwing this up.
These sound like a subtopic of optimizing your LinkedIn profile to generate more business for an average person.
But if you Google each keyword. You’ll see that all of the pages are optimized for one keyword or the other. Never both.
There isn’t a single page ranking for both LinkedIn headline examples and Linkedin summary examples. This means if you tried to rank for both keywords with one page, you wouldn’t rank either. And the people that do manual keyword research are guessing.
They’re just guessing! Again, again and again. From the gut.
Now here’s how ClusterAi works and how it levels the playing field…
Because the keyword research process is algorithmically driven, the keyword researcher’s only job is to find all of the keywords that are being searched by qualified traffic anywhere in the funnel.
ClusterAi transforms keyword research from a time consuming, tedious guessing process to a vocabulary exercise. Let’s walk through the process.
ClusterAi simplifies how you do keyword research, no SEO skills needed
DoNotPay has a feature that helps reduce the friction of communicating between prisoners and their friends and family members.
Write a message, or snap a photo of a handwritten message
Upload a few pictures (e.g. selfies, family photos)
DoNotPay will print out and mail your photos and letter to your friend or family member in prison
We want to understand all of the ways people are making searches about communicating with state and federal prisoners. Using Ahrefs, we go as broad as possible: prisoner, prisoners, inmate, inmates
Then we use Ahref’s Having Same Terms feature. This tells us there are 1,830,320 different ways that people are using inmate, inmates, prisoner, prisoners in their searches.
Most of these 1.8 million keywords do not indicate the searcher is looking for information on communicating with prisoners.
So we’re going to use Ahrefs’ Include Keyword feature to filter out every EXCEPT keywords that contain our main keywords (inmate, inmates, prisoner, prisoners) AND our include keywords. This is where the strong vocabulary comes into play.
Think of every word someone might use when looking for information on communicating with prisoners. Here is the list we came up with:
This narrows our list down from 1,800,000 to 37,000 keywords.
That’s it. Our work here is done. We export our list. We import our list of keywords into ClusterAi. We take a nap. And we wake up to a year’s worth of keyword research. All without knowing how to do SEO. Isn’t that cool?
As you’ve seen, ClusterAi abstracts SEO skills from keyword research.
That’s not all. ClusterAi also abstracts SEO skills from optimizing content.
We use a simple formula to turn ClusterAi’s keyword groupings into a framework non-SEOs can use to optimize their content. All of the optimizations, and no experience required.
Here is a summary of our framework:
The URL of the page is always the exact match main keyword
The meta title should contain the main keyword
The meta description should contain 1-2 variations of the main keyword
The H1 should contain the main keyword
The H2s and content should contain variations of the main keyword
This simplifies our hiring and training processes. And is probably our biggest contributor to being able to ‘do SEO’ without knowing SEO.
Setting Our Writers Up For Success
After using ClusterAi to discover and group every keyword variation our target audience is searching, our editing team works to set our writers up for success.
The more work our editing team does upfront, the better outcome we’ll get from our writing team. For each content series, we create Content Series Templates (CST).
A standard Content Series Template includes:
Go-to informational resources to familiarize the writers with the broader topic
3rd party example articles that set a content quality bar we need to beat
Our competitors in the vertical
Which sites to collect data from and source
Who the audience is and the pain point they feel when they search
How DoNotPay can help the searcher
What DoNotPay can’t do
Mandatory H2 headings that will appear in most articles
Mandatory internal links
Optional H2s with a decision-making and research framework for the writer
Creating a Content Series Template is a lot of work. But you know what’s more work? Editing hundreds of pages of content from dozens of writers.
Do as much work upfront to minimize more intensive editing work later on.
Scaling Content Production
Some of our content dream team
Over the last 5 years, our content team has published 14,000 pages of content, and generated +30,000,000 organic search visits.
With a 25-person team, we’re publishing a similar amount of content as media giants like Techcrunch, WireCutter, New York Times, Washington Post, etc.
Here is what made that possible:
Building our Content Management System in Airtable
A documentation-oriented culture that has produced 350+ knowledge base articles
A streamlined recruitment funnel that has allowed us to evaluate 1,027 writers, immediately reject 595, test 352, interview 106, ban 9 for life, hire 63 and retain 25
An editing team that is passionate about great content and won’t let quality slip for any reason
Now I’ll walk you through each item in this process and show you how you can do it too.
Building our Content Management System in Airtable
I’ve previously used BaseCamp, Trello, SmartSheet, TeamWork, and Google Sheets for project management. Airtable is better than all of them.
While other PM tools require you to fit into their workflows, Airtable fits your workflow like a glove. Airtable is our centralized hub where work gets done, and powers a majority of our primary systems:
Content production
Project management
Recruitment
Team member management
Managing 3rd party services
Think Google Sheets on steroids.
You can sort, group, view, and color code data without any coding
You can link records together
You can build automations on top of it
Here’s how we’re using it for content management. Whenever a writer is assigned with writing a page of content, they get a Google doc that includes:
The main keyword (from ClusterAi)
Variations of the primary keyword to include in the content and H2s (from ClusterAi)
Link to the project brief
Link to our writing requirements
A form that indicates they have met our technical writing requirements
This process enables us to take any writer and turn them into an SEO content writer able to create the highest quality, most valuable content Google could show for any given keyword we’re targeting.
Content Management
Airtable enables anyone, anywhere, on any device, to view the current status of every page of content we’ve ever published.
We have 15+ discrete stages in the content production pipeline. As writers and editors change the status, the article re-organizes itself under the new status.
Each article has 15+ pieces of additional information we need to go live:
Author
Editor
Project
Status
First draft due date
Main keyword
Keyword variations
URL
Featured Image
Tags & categories
Meta title
Meta description
Page title
Last updated
Featured image
Project Management
Everything that isn’t content writing happens in our Activity Tracker. This view is set up to track activities by status:
Idea
Not Started
In Progress
Ready for QA
Done
As an activity changes status, Airtable moves it from group to group.
On the left side of the screenshot, we set up multiple views to quickly hop between action items for:
Different team members
Different types of activities
Activities due today / this week / this month
Recruitment Funnel
We hire writers because they’re good writers. Not because they’re ‘good at SEO’. In fact, when writers say ‘they know SEO’, This is what they mean:
We can turn any good writer into an SEO content writer, creating content that naturally ranks. What we can’t teach is:
A strong baseline writing skill
Passion for good content
Drive to learn
Consistency
What’s our secret? Quantity. That’s literally it. Quantity.
The more candidates we can source, evaluate, test, and interview, the more likely we are to find a writer that is an excellent long-term fit. Simply put, it’s a number’s game.
So how did we scale our recruitment funnel to evaluate over 1,000 candidates, test almost 600, and interview around 100? With Workello.
Workello is a hiring automation platform that helps content teams evaluate, assess, and hire better, more affordable writers with 95% less work.
Building Our Content Team
Just like the #1 lever for faster SEO results is publishing more content, the #1 lever for hiring better writers is evaluating and testing more writing candidates.
The more writers you evaluate and test, the more likely you are to find the right mix of quality, affordability and capacity.
Check out the metrics on this hiring cycle:
174 candidates
80 invited to take our pre-hire writing test
55 submitted a completed test
26 writers passed the test
We use Workello to filter through hundreds of candidates to identify and hire the top 1% in just a few minutes.
Here’s how it works.
Post your job ad on Reddit, LinkedIn, Facebook, ProBlogger, etc
Watch candidates stream into your hiring dashboard
Send pre-hire writing tests to your best candidates
Sitback, relax and wait for candidates to take your test
Hire the top 1%
Everything in Workello is pre-written and pre-optimized so you can start accepting writers into your hiring funnel in 90 seconds.
Here are some hiring guides to get you up and running ASAP:
We’ve grown from 1 to 25 full-time team members in just one year (between January and December 2020). When we tell people this, one of the first questions they ask is:
“How do you maintain content quality?”
Or, “a team in Eastern Europe can’t possibly write X type of content.”
After talking to or watching many founders of fast growing agencies, I’ve seen how incredibly difficult it is to maintain the quality that drove the growth spurt while the growth is happening.
There are a few reasons:
The founder is no longer closer to the work, and is relying on a team without the founder’s unique skills or experiences
Systems and processes to handle the increased workload grow slower than the rate of new work and team members are added
The easiest thing, and oftentimes the only thing that the team can do to deal with the growing pain and aggressive business goals is to let things slide
When I started ContentDistribution.com in 2019, I knew that I wouldn’t be able to achieve my goals for the company alone.
I spent the first 6 months building documentation to enable team members without my unique skill sets and experiences to create outcomes as good, or better than I could create on my own.
The first step was thought leadership to indoctrinate my team into my framework for understanding Google. At the same time I began creating detailed processes on how work should be done.
Our knowledge base started off in Google Docs. And that worked for about a year. But as our library of processes has grown, discovery became a major pain point. We couldn’t find the documents we had already written.
After evaluating Notion and Slite, we landed on Slite. Today we have over 350+ process documents. At this point the level of detail and sophistication is 10x more than I could have created on my own as the sole knowledge base contributor.
These documents cover nearly every aspect of every role, and every activity performed within the organization.
Job description and expectations
How to prioritize workload on a daily, weekly and monthly basis
How to use our internal systems and processes
How to do the work
How collaboration happens between team members and stakeholders
Expectations on visibility and reporting
Building a Culture of Documentation
It’s not enough to create documentation yourself. To meet ambitious goals you need to build a culture of documentation. I wrote the first 50 knowledge base articles and then my team wrote the next 1,000.
Building a culture of documentation starts from the top. I’ve never worked in a company with documentation, and neither has anyone else on the team. If you are a founder, there is no-one else that is going to build your documentation oriented culture if you don’t do it.
I get it. You’re busy, you’re really good at what you do, and you don’t have the time right now. Major growth mode.
But I can promise you if you don’t do it, you won’t be as successful as you hoped. If you’re not convinced yet, here are more things to consider:
How do you hold someone accountable to something that isn’t written down?
How do you change a process that isn’t written down?
How much extra work, friction, and anxiety is created when someone is blocked or responsible for unblocking someone due to lack of information?
How much energy are you willing to invest telling people the same thing over and over?
Alright, you’re convinced. Here is how you’re going to get started.
Create a list of all the things that you do on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis. Build your knowledge base skills by documenting the easiest things first. After you’ve written the first 25 – 50 knowledge base articles go back through them and update them with the best practices you learned along the way.
Next, create a KB on how to create KBs. And make all of this information as easy to find as possible. Ask your team to bookmark it. But creating documentation oriented culture is definitely not a one-time thing.
“When you’re tired of saying it, people are starting to hear it.” – Jeff Weiner
If someone asks a question covered in a KB, link them to the KB instead of answering the question directly. If someone asks a question that is not answered by a KB, update the KB and link it to the person asking.
And only after you’ve built the expectations, the standards, and the framework for documentation can you hold your team accountable for embracing a culture of documentation.
Find People Passionate About Great Content
A few of our team members
One of the best tools your team will have available to manage an unmanageable workload is letting things slide.
It’s easier for everyone involved when editors and our QA team lets sub standard content go live. But our editors are passionate, probably even elitist, about good content. Even if it’s more work.
Want to find passionate editors? Here is a demographic of our team:
All of our editors joined the company as writers and were promoted for high performance
All of our editors have been consuming and speaking English since childhood
Most have completed, or are enrolled in a masters degree of English Literature
Most of our editors haven’t worked in content writing before joining our team as writers
Many have previously worked as English teachers
#1 is crucial. The more writers you can evaluate, test, hire, train, and retain, the bigger pool of candidates you can recruit your editors from.
It takes us approximately 3-6 months to train a high performing writer into a self sufficient editor. In the past, our external editing candidates we hired were good editors that just didn’t care as much as we do. If you don’t already have an editing team that cares, the #1 way to find them is to work with more writers.
The Conclusion
That’s it, we’ve reached the end. I hope you’ve enjoyed it.
I won’t say this approach to SEO and scaling content production is easy to execute, but as you’ve seen, the strategy is very simple:
Create the most valuable page of content Google could show for the topics you want to rank for
Integrate product into the content as a natural next step for the reader
Align content & SEO strategy with business goals (revenue)
Just a few years after this case study was originally published, AI and ChapGPT took over. A lot of folks expected a different kind of impact, but it actually just allowed more players to produce mediocre, average content.
It didn’t take long for Google to react to these new AI realities, and a lot of sites that were carelessly pushing out AI content were completely destroyed.
Seems like with every Google update and technological innovation we’re reminded of what we should have been doing all along anyway – understand our customer and double-down on producing the highest quality content Google can show.
Fully Managed SEO
Fully managed SEO for category leaders and future category leaders with huge goals and the budget to execute. We’ll do the heavy lifting, you sit back and take the credit.
contentdistribution.com has taken 4 projects from approximately zero organic visitors per month, to more than 100,000 organic search visitors per month.
The fastest one went from 0 to 479,000 visitors per month in just 16 months.
Combined, these projects have nearly 100,000 keywords on page 1.
None of these sites spent more than $1,000 on backlinks.
And one of the sites is a DR9.
The thing all of these projects have in common.
We used ClusterAi.
ClusterAi is a keyword grouping tool that clusters large lists of keywords into unique content topics.
ClusterAi allows us to do perfect affiliate keyword research.
Every.
Single.
Time.
And when you do perfect keyword research, your content ends up outranking competitors with higher authority, more backlinks, and bigger marketing budgets.
Doggypedia.org (DR8) ranking #1 above sites with higher DRs and more backlinks
BrandChamp.io (DR30) outranking their better-funded competitors with more backlinks.
AnyLeads.com (DR36) outranking HubSpot (DR92) and LinkedIn (DR98).
DoNotPay.com (DR56) outranking Wired (DR91), Vice (DR91), Equifax (DR87), and more.
BrandChamp crushing much larger, more authoritative competitors.
And when backlinks are needed to get the outcome you desire, you need less to get there.
Keyword Research for affiliate SEO could be a lot better
Whether you know it or not, keyword research for affiliate SEO could be better.
Performing quality keyword research requires high levels of skills and experience
Keyword research strategies rely heavily on gut feelings and intuition, and mistakes are likely to happen
It’s a manual process that takes a long time to do
Experienced SEOs have a difficult time delegating high-quality keyword research to junior team members
Inexperienced affiliate SEOs know how important keyword research is, and stress about whether they did it right, or wasted their investment
When you Google keyword research there are 400 million results.
When you google affiliatekeyword research there are more than 6 million results.
We want to get more specific, so we filter down to just people searching for:
dog + food
This generates a list of 455,000 variations in the way people are searching for dog + food
We exported the top 25,000 keywords by the search volume.
Then we imported these 25,000 keywords into ClusterAi.
ClusterAi grouped that list of 25,000 keywords into unique content topics.
It shows us the data by:
Main keyword. This is the keyword in a group with the most volume.
Total search volume for every keyword in the group.
The variations that can rank with the main keyword.
To see the full list of variations, click on any cell.
Then click the icon in the right-hand corner to expand it.
That’s literally it.
We just did 1,000+ pages of keyword research.
We mapped every keyword variation on every single page.
And we did it perfectly in literally minutes.
We didn’t need extensive SEO experience
We didn’t need to spend weeks slaving away
We didn’t need to make gut decisions on keyword variations
We didn’t need to second guess our keyword research decisions
DIY affiliate keyword research
Let’s pretend we’re starting an affiliate site in the DIY niche.
We used Ahrefs Keyword Explorer to look up DIY
Then we used the ‘Having same terms feature’
This discovered 2,000,000 ways people are using DIY in their searches.
We exported the top 25,000 keywords by search volume.
Then we imported these 25,000 keywords into ClusterAi.
ClusterAi grouped that list of 25,000 keywords into unique content topics.
It shows us the data by
Main keyword. This is the keyword in a group with the most volume.
Total search volume for every keyword in the group.
The variations that can rank with the main keyword
How ClusterAi works
I think you guys get the point.
So how does it work?
ClusterAi uses data from Google to determine which keywords can rank together.
No more using your gut and intuition.
After you import your list of keywords, this is what happened under the covers:
ClusterAi scrapes the top 10 websites ranking for every keyword on our list
Then it compares every keyword against every other keyword
It looks for keywords that have URLs in common
If ClusterAi finds 3 or more URLs that rank for a set of keywords, it groups those keywords together into unique content topics
This is as data-driven as it gets.
If 3 other websites can rank for this set of keywords with one page of content, we can probably rank for that set of keywords with one page as well.
But if ClusterAi compares a set of keywords, and those keywords have 2 or fewer results (URLs) in common, we probably can’t rank for that set of keywords with one page of content either.
And we’ll need to create two pages to rank for that set of keywords.
Doing this manually, at scale is impossible, and that’s why mistakes happen.
It’s not always intuitive which keywords can rank together, and which keywords can’t.
Keyword research isn’t intuitive & based on gut feelings
Let us give you a real-life example using two keywords.
Linked Profile examples
Linkedin Headline examples
To rank for both of these keywords, you need to create two pages of content.
One page about LinkedIn profiles, and one page about LinkedIn headlines.
If you try and rank for both keywords with one page, you won’t rank for either.
How do we know?
Because we Googled it.
The search results are completely different, even though these seem like related keywords.
If you were writing an article on LinkedIn profiles you might optimize your article for both.
But if you did, you wouldn’t rank for either LinkedIn profiles or LinkedIn headlines, because there isn’t a single website that ranks for both keywords with one page.
The pages Google shows for LinkedIn Profiles are all 100% optimized for LinkedIn profiles.
And the pages Google shows for LinkedIn headlines are all 100% optimized for LinkedIn headlines.
Now multiply this effort across every keyword on your list.
Comparing every keyword against every other keyword manually is impossible.
That is why affiliate SEOs developed shortcuts and heuristics that are ultimately based on intuition and gut feelings.
And when you make decisions based on intuition you make mistakes.
The content calendar for your affiliate site is bigger than you think
Want to know what every single top affiliate SEO site has in common?
Boatloads of content.
Don’t believe us?
Let’s look at the pet space.
We analyzed all of the top dog publishers.
Column E is the publisher’s efficiency score.
This is the total traffic divided by the total number of pages.
Every top publisher generates between 170 to 870 visitors for every page of content on their site.
There is no publisher generating 80% of the traffic with 20% of the pages.
Quick side note – take a look at pet website #11, Doggypedia.org.
Doggypedia is a site we referenced at the beginning of the article, one of the projects we took from 0 to 100,000 organic visitors per month in 11 months.
We competed with the top publishers in the pet space, with a smaller budget and fewer backlinks.
One of the core reasons we were able to punch above our weight is because of ClusterAi.
We were more relevant for the content we wanted to rank for.
And if you know how Google actually works, you know that being more relevant can help you rank with fewer backlinks.
Here are a couple of other notable examples:
CreditKarma.com generates an insane 7,768,000 organic visitors per month.
But they published 24,660 pages.
NextLuxury.com is an affiliate site in the fashion niche generating 1,345,000 organic visitors each month.
From 13,453 pages.
How much time and money do you think these sites spent:
Mapping out 10,000 – 20,000 unique pages of content
Doing keyword research on a page by page basis
Hundreds, and hundreds, and hundreds of hours.
Forecasting costs and ROI
ClusterAi’s groupings make forecasting costs and ROI really simple.
Referencing our dog food keyword groupings above, the top 299 pages represent approximately 2,946,000 searchers per month.
Now we can sanity-check our costs against income on varying levels of success.
Here the variables we need to decide:
What % of the searchers can we capture?
How many searchers will click an affiliate link?
What % will purchase?
What is our average payout?
We built a guide walking through each of these variables, and build an automated calculator to help you estimate varying outcomes on your affiliate SEO investment.
B2B SaaS Keyword Research is Broken & How to Fix it
Keyword research for B2B SaaS companies is broken.
contentdistribution.com has taken three projects from 0 visitors/month to 100,000+ organic search visitors per month.
In the last year.
Our greatest project hit 479,000 organic search visitors/month in 16 months.
Here is another
And another
And keyword research sucks.
It requires a high level of skill to do correctly
Decisions are made from the gut and the process is prone to human error
It’s a manual, tedious process to cluster keywords into unique pages
Deliverables are inconsistent from person to person
Keyword research for B2B SaaS companies requires high levels of skill
High quality keyword research, like most things, requires repetition to become proficient.
If you don’t have these reps in, you’ll have to be OK doing subpar keyword research.
Subpar keyword research limits the impact of your SEO investment, because poorly optimized pages don’t rank well.
And it’s really easy to make mistakes.
And making a mistake on the foundation can impact the ROI on your entire SEO investment.
Check out the next section to learn why it’s so easy to make mistakes.
Keyword research for B2B SaaS is an art, not a science
One of the primary goals of keyword research is to identify:
Main keywords to create content around
Variations of the main keyword to use in the content
In order to rank well, you need to optimize your content for your main keyword, and all of the variations of that main keyword people use in their searches.
If you choose the wrong keyword variations the impact of your SEO investment will be minimal.
Here is an example.
You have 2 keywords:
LinkedIn profile
LinkedIn headline
This might seem like two ideas in one article.
But in order to rank for both keywords you need to publish two pages.
Not one.
Why?
Because there aren’t any pages ranking for both keywords.
Check out the search results.
Best Linkedin Profile
Best LinkedIn headline
There isn’t a single page ranking for both keywords.
Look at the URL, meta title, and meta description.
The search results for each keyword is optimized for one keyword or the other, not both.
And if you optimized one page for both keywords you wouldn’t rank for either.
Because the space to drive relevance to the keywords you want to rank for is limited to:
URL
Meta title
Meta description
H1
H2s and other headings
Internal links
External links
And if you waste your limited real estate to drive relevance by optimizing for the wrong keywords you’ll be outranked by pages that used their limited space to optimize more effectively.
In fact, being more relevant is one of our top strategies for outranking stronger, more powerful domains.
Check out this example of a piece of content we published for AnyLeads, which is currently outranking Hubspot for the keyword ‘Linkedin inmail templates‘.
We don’t have:
Higher domain authority
More backlinks
A bigger budget
A bigger team
Better writers
But we’re more relevant to the query than HubSpot’s page.
Using ClusterAi To Perform Expert Level Keyword Research For Your B2B SaaS
ClusterAi is keyword grouping tool that helps B2B SaaS companies map out every opportunity they have to drive qualified traffic, and more.
ClusterAi makes expert level keyword research accessible to anyone, regardless of SEO experience
Keyword decisions are made based on data from Google, so your keyword research is perfect each time.
ClusterAi enables you to map a 24 month content calendar, down to the exact keyword variations you’ll use on each page, in hours, not weeks
Here is how ClusterAi works:
Perform keyword research using your favorite SEO tool – Ahrefs, SEMRush, or Google Search Console
Import the list(s) of thousands of keywords you found that can drive qualified traffic to your website
ClusterAi scrapes Google for each keyword and retrieves all of the websites ranking on the first page
ClusterAi analyzes and compares websites that rank for multiple keywords
And when a pair of keywords has 3 or more websites ranking for both keywords it groups those keywords together into a unique content topic.
If 3 or more websites rank for a pair of keywords with one page, you probably can too.
But if there are 2 or fewer websites ranking for a set of keywords with one page, you probably won’t be able to rank for both keywords with one page either.
Example Keyword Research for FreshBooks (B2B Invoicing Software)
FreshBooks helps hundreds of thousands of small businesses send invoices more easily.
And they are crushing organic search with 500k+ organic search visitors every month.
FreshBooks has published more than 2,200 pages of content.
Of these 2,200 pages, 390 pages, or about 15% are focused on invoices and invoicing.
Why did FreshBooks publish 390 pages about invoicing?
Because nobody, including Freshbooks, can rank for every way people are searching for invoice and invoicing with one page.
Not even one hundred pages.
FreshBook’s SEO is being led by the very awesome Steve Toth @ theSEONotebook.com. Neither Steve or FreshBooks is a Content Distribution customer, nor did they contribute or participate in this blog post in anyway, we’re just Steve Toth’s #1 fans. 🙂
(And think he would have saved a ton of time with ClusterAi).
Look how easy this is.
Search Ahrefs for invoice, invoices and invoicing.
After you’ve built your keyword list, export your keywords from Ahrefs.
Import your keywords into ClusterAi
After a few hours of processing (it takes several hours to scrape and group your keywords) you’ll receive an email to download a CSV with your ClusterAi keyword groupings.
ClusterAi provides:
The main keyword
The total monthly search volume for the group
The variations of the main keyword
Knowing the total monthly search volume across all of the keywords in a group allows you to better prioritize your content calendar.
Plan your content calendar
There is probably going to be some irrelevant groups in your groupings.
That’s OK. Just skip them.
Next, count the number of opportunities you’ve identified.
It’s likely in the hundreds.
Now multiply that number by your cost to produce content.
If we want to tackle these opportunities in 6 months, we need to budget (200 / 6 = 33 * $150) $5,000/month.
And to write 33 pieces of content per month, we need approximately 8 writers.
Now you know:
Your total content cost
Your monthly budget
The number of pages of content you need to publish each month
How many writers you need to recruit
Knowing the total content cost gives you a lot of insight into the total cost of your campaign and allows you to forecast a variety of outcomes using contentdistribution.com’s SEO ROI calculator.
Get the keywords to your writers
Now that you’ve developed your targets and priorities, you need to communicate this information to your writers.
At contentdistribution.com we’ve automated the steps below.
Our focus on automation and streamlining processes has allowed a core team of 3 to scale to 100 pages+ of high quality, high impact content per month.
First, we import the excel sheet linked in the email into Airtable.
Then our automation creates a Google doc and adds to the link to the record in Airtable.
This Google Doc contains everything the writer needs to get started.
A link to another Google Doc with everything the writer needs to know about the project
A link to our standard writing guidelines for any content written for contentdistribution.com
A guide on sourcing and image attribution
The keyword variations for the article
A checklist the writer must be complete before submitting the work that allows them to self certify that they’ve followed our writing guidelines to the T.
And you know what?
This enables us to turn any writer into an SEO content writer, producing naturally ranking content.
Remember the screenshot above of AnyLeads outranking Hubspot?
That article was written by a writer with no SEO experience, and edited and optimized by an editor with no prior SEO experience.
Through our experience helping brands build massive audiences with organic search, we’ve developed an SEO ROI formula to help brands understand the return on their SEO investment.
Then we turned that formula into a calculator to make it easy and quick to model various SEO outcomes.
In the next 5 minutes you’re going to learn how to:
Forecasting the ROI of your organic content distribution (SEO) project
Forecasting costs to execute on that outcome
Forecasting best, middle, and worst-case outcomes
The formula to understanding different SEO ROI outcomes is:
Total Monthly Searches * Click Through Rate * Conversion Rate * Average Order Value = SEO ROI.
What are the variables in the formula for calculating SEO ROI?
Total Monthly Searches
Total monthly searches is a super simple variable.
TMS is the sum of the monthly search volume across all of the keywords you found that can drive qualified traffic.
You can figure out the Total Monthly Searches by doing keyword research using your favorite SEO tool.
Once you’ve found every keyword across the funnel, add up the number of monthly searches for each keyword.
If you’re using ahrefs, you’ll need to export this keyword list into excel, then highlight / select the ‘volume’ column.
Click-Through Rate
CTR is the percentage of searches that result in a user clicking through to your website.
Your CTR is a reflection of where your website ranks for the keywords you’re targeting.
The closer to #1 you rank, the more traffic you will receive.
In a large study by SEO superstar Brian Dean, Brian found that keywords in position #1 received roughly 30% of the clicks.
Keywords in position 5, half way down the 1st page, receive about 9.5% of clicks.
And keywords in position 10, the last result on the 1st page, receive roughly 3% of the clicks.
Some keywords are going to rank higher than other keywords, so the # you choose needs to be a blended average across all of the keywords you are targeting.
We generally forecast conservative outcomes using a CTR of 9.5%, representing an average ranking of #5 for the keywords we’re targeting.
Conversion is the percentage of visitors that convert into a customer.
If you have existing data on organic search conversion rate, great!
But make sure you filter branded searches from your analysis.
This means only measuring your conversion rate on pages that don’t rank for your brand name.
Examples of pages that do rank for your brand name, and need to be filtered from your analysis include your homepage, contact, about or FAQ pages.
An easy way to figure this out is to Google your brand name, and see which pages appear.
If you don’t have existing data conversion rate data you can use, that’s OK too.
The variable you choose represents a blended conversion rate across hundreds or thousands of keywords.
But some keywords will convert at 10%+
And some will convert at .01%.
This variance is driven in large part by how much intent to purchase is behind the prospects search.
Keywords at the top of the funnel generally have higher search volume and more traffic, but lower conversion rates.
Keywords at the bottom of the funnel generally convert at very high rates, but also have the least amount of searches.
We use .005% in conservative forecasts.
This is pretty low.
Life Time Value
Life time value is the dollar amount each customer is worth over the life time of their relationship with your company.
You can also use the Average Order Value of each purchase, but we prefer to use LTV because it more accurately forecasts ROI.
Other Variables You Might Use to Calculate SEO ROI
Average Order Value
Brands with more aggressive timelines for recouping their SEO investment, might use AOV instead of LTV to calculate the ROI of the campaign.
Conversion To Lead
You may not allow customers to purchase directly from your website.
In this case, you may want to reflect that in your ROI calculations by adding an additional variable called ‘Conversion to Lead’.
This attribute represents the conversion from website traffic to sales opportunity.
So the new formula looks like:
TMS * CTR * CTL * CR * LTV = ROI
We built a version of the calculator to calculate this extra variable.
Calculating SEO Costs
The #1 cost for any SEO campaign is generally content.
There are hundreds, or thousands of unique pages you need to create in order to rank for all of the ways your target audience is searching across the funnel.
If you are engaging an SEO agency, and content isn’t the biggest cost, I would be very skeptical.
Why?
Because how fast you publish content is the #1 lever you can pull to get the fastest SEO results.
Don’t believe me?
We’ve helped 4 companies go from approximately zero to 100,000+ organic search visitors per month.
Here are two of them.
And this is DoNotPay, the biggest one, which we grew from 500 to 479,000 monthly organics in 16 months.
Combined, these 4 projects have over 100,000 page 1 keywords, and generate nearly one million visitors per month.
And we did it without building backlinks or doing complicated technical SEO.
We did it by focusing on publishing large amounts of high quality content.
Everything on this list scales with the # of pages published which makes estimating costs easy.
And in order to minimize the complexity of estimating cost, we’re not factoring in the time required for:
Strategy
Management
Cross team collaboration
Knowledge transfer
Reporting & analytics
The reason is these costs are fluctuate from project to project, company to company and person to person depending on things like
Size of org
Type of org
Impact on org
Importance to org
Experience level of teams
Ease of cross team collaboration
We have all of these calculated because our systems are consistent and repeatable, but if you’re driving your own SEO campaign you’ll need to calculate these on your own.
Content
Content costs are calculated by multiplying your cost per page multiplied by the number of pages of content you need to publish.
One thing most SEOs have trouble with is forecasting content costs.
Why?
Because it’s very difficult to estimate the number of pages you need to write by looking at a list of thousands of keywords.
Don’t believe me?
Look at this list of 25,000 keywords related to invoicing.
If you’re invoicing software company FreshBooks, how many pages do you need to build to capture that volume?
Well, they built 390 pages targeting slightly different variations of the keyword invoicing and invoices.
And the fact FreshBooks had to publish 390 pages about invoicing to capture all of the variations in the way people search for invoicing is why content is the biggest cost to any organic search campaign.
You simply can’t rank for all of the opportunities to generate qualified, valuable traffic with one page.
Or a dozen pages.
In FreshBooks case, not even 390 pages.
FreshBooks has published over 2,000 pages of content.
And it’s paid off.
Freshbooks is generating 500,000+ qualified visitors each month.
FreshBook’s SEO is very talented, and spent a lot of time
Grouping all of the ways people search for invoicing into unique pages
Identifying variations of the main keyword to use within the content
But you don’t have to.
contentdistribution.com’s keyword grouping tool transforms large lists of keywords into unique pages.
ClusterAi does this automatically.
And it does it using data from Google to determine which keywords can rank together.
It does this by scraping the search results for each keyword, and comparing the pages ranking for each keyword.
If there are 3 or more pages that rank for a set of keywords, it groups those keywords together.
And if there are 2 or less pages that rank for a set of keywords it separates the keywords and looks for new matches.
Why?
Because if 3 or more other websites rank for 2 keywords with 1 page, you probably can too.
But if 2 or less websites rank for 2 keywords with 1 page, you might not be able to rank for both keywords with 1 page.
ClusterAi is going to save you a ton of time. And you’re going to be able to delegate keyword research to junior team members without your level of experience, and they’re going to do it perfectly.
Non SEO Pros
ClusterAi is the only viable way to do perfect keyword research without having a strong SEO background.
So how much do writers cost?
A lot.
The average content marketing salary in Austin is $50,000/year, before benefits, taxes, and paid holidays.
And the average content writer in Austin is probably writing 1,500 words per day.
This comes out to $.24 per word, or $620 for per page of content @ 2,500 words.
And at $620 per page, it’s going to be hard to execute an ROI positive SEO campaign.
Unless you have a very high conversion rate, very high search volume, and very high AOV.
Or, if you don’t have those things.
You have systems to source, evaluate, and hire the highest quality, most affordable writers on the internet.
It would be really great to integrate timeline forecasts into our estimates.
This would allow brands to forecast things like revenue expectations leading up to month 12 of the campaign, or potential year one totals.
It would probably have to be a different chart that models the % of Total Monthly Searches that click through to the website and how that variable increases over time.
This is tricky, because timelines are 100% dependent on publishing schedule, and how quickly content is published.
Because you can’t rank for a group of keywords until you have a page about that keyword.
And you have to create 390 pages about invoicing. 🙂
Our best content
Want to learn how we’ve grown 4 websites from approximately zero to 100,000 visitors per month, with the biggest one doing 500,000 in just 17 months?
Use Brand Jacking To Put Other Company’s Customers Into Your Marketing Funnel
Brand jacking is when your website appears in the search results while searchers look for information about another company’s brand.
And it’s an incredibly powerful technique.
The company you are brand jacking is putting their customers and prospects in your funnel.
The more money they spend on marketing and the more people Google their brand name, the more people end up on your website, where you can capture their contact details.
Or follow them around the internet using a LinkedIn or Facebook pixel.
Here are two examples.
Brand Jacking Microsoft
Archive360 wants to build awareness with the audience that is searching for information about a specific feature in Microsoft’s Office 365.
Archive360’s page about that feature is the first search result after Microsoft.
In order to rank well, Archive360’s page needs to give users what they’re expecting – to learn more about the Office 365 journaling feature.
Then the page transitions to educating the reader about deficiencies in Microsoft’s solution and scenarios where organizations seek 3rd party solutions like Archive360.
There are five things you need to align to implement an impactful brandjacking campaign.
Competitors OR complimentary brands
Brandjacking works best when you’re targeting competitors (self-explanatory), or complementary brands.
Complimentary brands are brands that your customers often use in conjunction with your product.
In the Archive360 example above, using Office 365 is a prerequisite of using Archive360 – they are an add-on that sits on top of Office 365.
Think about your customer’s software stack and identify overlap in buyer persona and audience.
Aligning your offer and audience
The brandjacking targets you pick must generate an audience that your offer will resonate with.
I’ve implemented campaigns that successfully generated tens of thousands of visitors searching for Instagram and Shopify branded terms.
But the traffic didn’t convert because our offer didn’t resonate.
Do 3rd party websites already rank?
If other 3rd party websites already rank for the branded search term we’re targeting, that indicates there we can also rank for that branded term.
The fact that GetHuman.com, a DoNotPay competitor, Reddit, and TrustPilot rank for uplay customer support indicated to us that we could also rank for this term.
Likewise, the fact that non-Microsoft pages were ranking for Office 365 journaling told us we could rank for that branded term too.
You need to satisfy search intent to brand jack
Google Analytics is deployed on every website that matters.
And Google uses this data to understand how users react to the pages it serves in its search results.
Pages with better bounce rates, time on site, pages visited, referral traffic and overall engagement will rank better than sites with lower user engagement metrics.
If your page doesn’t satisfy a user’s intent behind their search, Google will bounce you off the first page.
Your content needs to rank
Most companies have problems with content distribution. According to Sirius Decisions, 70% of B2B content created by marketing organizations doesn’t add business value.
And I suspect there is a similar percentage of underutilized content investments in B2C organizations.
We’ve worked with companies that have spent $250,000+ on content over 4 years created by very talented, and knowledgeable writers, that Google Analytics indicates has been viewed less than 20 times in the last 12 months – from any channel.
When your content aligns with what people are searching for, you’re creating a company asset that will create business impact 6, 12, 18, 24 months after making your investment.
I highly recommend you subscribe to stay in the loop on more actionable tactics you can begin implementing while you learn.
You can Brand Jack too
The examples shown above aren’t flukes.
Brand Jacking is consistently successful when:
You’re targeting a competitor or complementary brand
Your offer aligns with the audience you’re generating
Other 3rd party websites already rank for the branded term
Your content matches the searcher’s intent
Your content ranks
The final tip I have is Brand Jacking works best at scale.
Any given piece of content may or may not rank, but if you push out dozens and dozens of pieces of content, you will see week over week and month over month increases in qualified traffic.
The #1 lever to drive the fastest SEO results is publishing velocity
We choose the projects we work on carefully.
We have to.
We want to enjoy what we do, and the stress of under-delivering doesn’t lead to loving life.
We enjoy the recognition of our peers and clients for doing great work.
We won’t earn the right to work at larger and larger scales if we’re not successful at our current scale.
A successful outcome that doesn’t lead to twice as big opportunities in the future isn’t worth the short term revenue. We’re spinning our wheels doing our best work.
The two most important considerations are always:
Does this brand yearn to be a leader in their space, and want to be everywhere their target audience is searching?
Are we confident we can absolutely crush it?
If the answer is no to either one of these, we have to say no.
And we’re in a good spot where we can prioritize long term growth over short term business needs.
Publishing velocity
We’ve had success across B2B SaaS, B2C SaaS, mobile apps, marketing services, fashion, pets, and outdoor equipment.
And the biggest lever we have to accelerate or decelerate outcomes is publishing velocity.
In every project we have taken on in the last two years, the faster we publish content, the faster we generate rankings, traffic, and business impact.
It’s pretty intuitive — you can’t rank for a keyword until you have a page about that keyword.
And once you publish, it takes 6 – 9 months for that content to fully mature in the search results.
So if your content calendar is 100 pages of content published over a year, content published in months 7 – 12 won’t add the maximum business impact a year after beginning your organic content distribution campaign.
At that publishing velocity, it will take 18 to 20 months after the start of your campaign for your content to fully mature.
But if you front-load your content calendar and publish all 100 pages of content in 4 months, most, if not all of that content will be mature by month 12.
Pushing backlinks, updating your site structure, decreasing page load time, doing on-page optimizations will all begin to impact your rankings and traffic within weeks instead of the six month maturation time of content, plus the time content spends sitting in your content calendar queue.
So, let’s get into it.
Our worst performing project of all time.
ContentDistribution.com’s worst-performing campaign of all time
This anonymous project is our worst performing campaign of all time.
In the 11 months after beginning our engagement, we grew non-branded organic search traffic by 93%, from 887 to 1,717.
In the 11 months before our engagement, organic traffic grew by 14%, from 775 to 887.
That means non-branded organic search traffic grew 664% faster after beginning our engagement than before.
Nearly every page we published is ranking and generating traffic
But we only published 19 pieces of content in 11 months.
When we could have easily achieved 5,000, 10,000 or more qualified visitors each month in this same period.
Very successful outcomes require high rates of publishing
The time it takes to work through your content calendar, and the time it takes for content mature are your two biggest bottlenecks to seeing the business impact from your organic content distribution investment.
The most common reason brands can’t meet publishing velocity goals are:
Senior management inserts themselves in the content review process. This will always fall at the bottom of their priority list.
Too many revisions are requested by too many people at the pay rate provided.
The person responsible for reviewing and editing the content doesn’t report to a campaign stakeholder, AKA the metrics your editor is evaluated on aren’t largely influenced by the success of your campaign.
Budget. Although the rate comes out to less than the salary of a content writer whose words won’t rank.
There are at least hundreds, but probably thousands, and often tens of thousands of keywords that can send your business qualified traffic.
But you won’t rank for every keyword by writing one page of content.
Or two pages of content.
Or ten pages of content.
To capture all of the qualified searches across your funnel and truly be everywhere your target audience is searching, you probably need to publish hundreds of pages of content.
When three or more URLs or pages rank for a pair of keywords, that means we can probably rank for both keywords with one page also.
But if there are two or fewer pages that rank for both keywords, we probably can’t rank for both keywords with one page and will need to create separate content topics to rank for both keywords.
Import thousands of keywords into ClusterAi and get back groupings based on actual search data.
The groupings include the main keyword, variations, and the number of monthly searches across all keywords in a group.
This ClusterAi is for the matcha boys at TenzoTea.com.
100 pages of content * $150/page = $15,000 / 5 months = $3,000/month at 20 pages/month.
If you want to reduce risk to your production schedule, and only give each writer one article per week, you need 5 writers to produce 20 articles per month.
What’s the ROI?
The formula to understanding different SEO ROI outcomes is:
Total Monthly Searches * Click Through Rate * Conversion Rate * Average Order Value = SEO ROI.
We’ve reviewed hundreds of projects and built a handy calculator in Google Sheets to help us understand how driving large volumes of qualified traffic will translate into business success.
Get our SEO ROI calculator to forecast costs and ROI of a successful organic content distribution campaign.
Fat Graph Content Ops Community: Join 4,500+ systems focused content marketers and SEOs, and catch weekly AMAs with marketers from brands like Shopify, Intercom, Quora, Coinbase and more.
How to outrank your better-funded competitors with bigger teams, bigger budgets, and more backlinks
In our previous post on how Google works, we told that out of the 65,000+ page 1 keywords our projects currently hold, we almost always have the lowest domain authority, least amount of backlinks, the smallest budget/teams, and the newest domains.
Across B2B and B2C.
SaaS, mobile apps, services, e-commerce and publishers.
Regardless of what type of business it is.
First, we’ll explain why. Then we’ll show you two dozen examples.
Why less authoritative sites with fewer backlinks outrank more authoritative sites with more backlinks
Google doesn’t publish schematics with how it works, but our experience indicates any of these three things will help you outrank stronger sites with more backlinks:
User engagement metrics
Referral traffic
More internal links
Sometimes, you only need to nail one of these things to rank well, but the more competitive the target, the more important it is to nail as many of them as possible.
Better user engagement metrics
Google has 99.99% market penetration with Google Analytics, and they own 70% of the web browser market.
Google is at its heart, a big data company.
They would be absolutely foolish not to use data from Google Analytics, and even user data from Chrome to determine how users respond to one page vs another page.
If your page has a lower bounce rate, higher time on site, and more pages visited than your competition, that’s a pretty good indicator your page better services a user than pages with lower metrics.
And if you think about it, user engagement metrics much more closely measure user satisfaction and value than an easily gamed metric like backlinks.
Our goal with every page of content we publish is to provide more value than any other page Google could show.
By focusing on reader value, we should generate better UX metrics than a page that provides less reader value.
Referral traffic
Google has a kajillion pages in its index, and it’s discovering hundreds of millions of new pages every single day.
Most of these pages won’t ever be viewed by a real human.
So if Google notices (through Google Analytics) that your page is receiving a significant amount of referral traffic from other websites, social platforms like Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, email, or really, any other source—that’s a pretty good indicator the page being viewed has value.
Whenever we push referral traffic from one of the above sources to a new page, that page tends to rank quicker than pages we don’t drive referral traffic to.
More internal links
Internal links tell Google how important a page is to your brand. The more internal links point to a given page, the easier that page is to rank.
The inverse is also true, the fewer internal links point to a page, the harder that page is to rank.
BrandChamp.io is ranking #1 for the most valuable keyword in their industry.
Through trillions of searches, Google has a really good idea of what percentage of clicks each page will capture based on where it ranks.
If users are consistently skipping over higher results to click on your page, that’s a pretty good indication that your page is better fulfilling a user’s search than other pages Google is showing, and Google will reward you with a higher position.
Generally, when we write our meta titles and descriptions, we aim for one of two things:
More social proof than any other page ranking
More contrarian than any other page
More social proof than any other page
How can we create more social proof than any other page ranking?
This requires really understanding who your audience is. How can we build more trust than anyone else while being limited to 155 characters?
In the case of Archive360.com, we’re highlighting some of the most famous brands in the world that trust us. The brands we listed don’t work with just anyone, and the fact they chose Archive360 means you can trust us too—we’re pre-vetted.
More contrarian than any other page
When everybody is going left, we go right. When everybody is going right, we go left.
Look at this example from Doggypedia.
Every first-page result is focused on how cute and cuddly Corgi Huskys are.
We went the other direction.
“Hey Reader, here are 3 reasons you SHOULDN’T get the breed of dog you’re interested in.”
Being more relevant
The more relevant you are to what a searcher is looking for, the easier it is to rank.
But, the real estate you have to drive relevance is precious and limited to:
URL
H1 / H2s / H3s, etc
Meta title & meta description
Anchor text on internal links
Backlinks
You have complete control over 1-4, but #5 is trickier.
AnyLeads.com is outranking Hubspot for ‘Linkedin inmail templates’ because Hubspot isn’t as relevant as we are to the query.
They still rank well due to their incredible authority and well-written content, but in this case, being more relevant was enough to beat them.
More examples
As we said, 65,000 page-one keywords and our projects have less authority, fewer backlinks, smaller budgets, smaller teams, and newer domains than the pages we rank above.
This could be the longest blog post in the history of the internet.
So we’re going to limit it to a few dozen examples.
Outranking stronger B2B domains
BrandChamp.io
Need help with B2B SaaS SEO? Learn how we did it for BrandChamp.
Ambassador Program Marketing
How to create a brand ambassador program
Brand ambassador program examples
Brand ambassador program template
Successful brand ambassador programs
How to start a brand ambassador program
Learn how we helped BrandChamp outrank stronger, more powerful competitors and how we can help you with your B2B SaaS SEO campaign.
Archive360.com
Salesforce archive
Symantec enterprise vault
Mimecast alternatives
Ranking above B2C websites without backlinks
DoNotPay.com
Free trial credit card
How to sue uber
Ca DMV appointment
Uplay customer support
CampusReel.org
Need help with your B2C SaaS SEO? Learn how we helped CampusReel grow from 1,000 visitors/month to 166,000 visitors/month in 12 months.
UCLA dorms
Texas tech housing
VCU vs UCF
Compare colleges
College acceptance calculator
Need help with your B2C SaaS SEO? Learn how we helped CampusReel grow from 1,000 visitors/month to 166,000 visitors/month in 12 months.
Doggypedia.org
Corgi mix
Corgi memes
Husky Corgi mix
Husky mix
Husky poodle mix
Forecasting the ROI of your SEO campaign
If you think organic search is a viable acquisition channel, your next steps is to forecast potential impact on your organization.
Learning how to generate business impact from organic search effectively is hard.
Like really hard.
Most people who try fail.
Those that succeed did so accidentally and aren’t entirely sure how to reproduce their success.
Why is that?
It’s due to two reasons.
The first reason is that you don’t know the credentials of the person from whom you’re taking advice.
And the barrier to entry for giving bad advice is zero.
And the second reason is that even great SEO professionals make SEO a whole lot more complicated than it needs to be.
I’ll give you a great example.
When you Google ‘ranking factors,’ the #1 post is from Brian Dean.
Brian Dean is a big deal in SEO.
He is up there with Rand Fishkin and Matt Cuts in name recognition.
And his article lists over 200 different factors that can impact your rankings.
When you’re learning how to crush organic search and you stumble across this article, it makes SEO sound really hard.
200 ranking factors!
How is anyone going to find the time to learn 200 different things just to rank in Google!
They think, welp, time to give up.
Or maybe they try to start implementing some of the ranking factors they find and give up because it’s too technical.
But the truth is that Brian Dean didn’t list those rankings factors because they actually matter, or because they’re things he worries about.
He listed those 200 ranking factors in that article because he knew that one of the most effective things you can do to rank higher is writing more content than the pages currently ranking.
Why does writing more make it easier to rank?
Because longer content generally has better user engagement metrics than shorter content.
Let me back up a second and explain.
Like I said above, the barrier to providing bad SEO advice is nearly zero, so allow me to cover my credentials briefly.
For folks who aren’t exactly sure what you’re looking at:
That is a screenshot from the #1 SEO tool, Ahrefs.
The ‘DR’ column stands for ‘Domain Authority’ and is Ahrefs proprietary measure of how powerful a domain is. YouTube, Facebook, Twitter are 100s. The site you created yesterday is a 0.
The backlinks column is how many backlinks Ahrefs has discovered that link to the page highlighted, brandchamp.io/how-to-start-create-a-brand-ambassador-program
So why does BrandChamp rank above pages with more backlinks, and more authority?
Well, it’s because you’ve been lied to.
Backlinks, complicated technical concepts, and 99% of the ‘ranking factors’ listed in Brian Dean’s article don’t actually matter much.
That’s because Google’s goal isn’t to show the page with the most backlinks.
Google’s goal is surprisingly intuitive.
Google’s goal is to show the highest quality, most relevant search results for any given keyword.
Why?
It’s because Google generates 100 billion dollars per year from Google Adwords.
That means a 1% loss in market share represents over a billion dollars in high margin revenue and potentially a further erosion of market share and revenue.
So Google has a fiduciary duty to maintain its reputation as the best search engine.
And how do they do that?
We do that by consistently providing the highest quality, most relevant search results for any given search query.
So, let’s continue to think through this for a second.
What’s a better heuristic for whether a piece of content is higher quality and more relevant than other pages that Google could show for a given keyword?
Backlinks?
User engagement metrics (time on site, pages visited, bounce rate, overall site engagement, etc.)?
Well, Google knows that backlinks are easily gamed.
It’s all SEO guys talk about.
Backlinks this, backlinks that.
Backlinks, backlinks, backlinks.
There are over 16,000,000 search results about how to get backlinks.
And when you really think about it, sure, backlinks can be a heuristic for relevance and quality.
That’s because good quality content should attract more backlinks (naturally or via outreach) than lower-quality content.
But ultimately, user engagement metrics more closely measure the quality and relevance of a piece of content.
If you spend as much time in Ahrefs as we do, you’ll notice that the first time you hit the first page for an important keyword, you generally don’t just stay there.
Google bounces you on and off the first page a few times before you end up sticking somewhere.
What’s happening here?
Why does Google do this?
Google is testing and stack ranking your user engagement metrics against the other pages it could show.
When you stick on the first page, it means that you’re ultimately servicing the searcher better than pages below you.
That means your user engagement metrics were better.
And when you bounce off and stick on the second page, or maybe the third, it means you didn’t quite hit the mark with your content.
For some reason, your content didn’t quite answer the reader’s question as effectively as the content that is sticking on page one.
Even when you do stick on the first page, every once in awhile, you’ll bounce off before returning to it a few days later.
That’s Google making room on the first page to test another piece of content that it found and that it believes might be a viable candidate.
How Google actually works is GREAT news for you
Why?
Because it means that crushing organic search and generating a ton of business impact is accessible.
You don’t have to be a technical wizard (I’m not).
And you don’t have to rely on figuring how to convince (or pay) other people to link to you.
You know your industry well.
You’re not an idiot.
It’s likely you already have all the skills you need today to create higher quality, more relevant content than the pages Google is currently showing for the keywords you want to rank for.
You just need someone to show you what actually matters.
When you create content that is higher quality, and more relevant than that of your competition, instead of relying on backlinks and complicated technical concepts, it means your site is algorithm proof.
Sometimes, Google pushes an update, and everyone freaks out about decreases in traffic.
Meanwhile, you’re continuing to see improvements in traffic, rankings, and revenue.
Because ultimately, Google’s goal with each of their algorithm updates is to better surface higher quality, more relevant content to its users.
So what are the important ranking factors?
We’ve achieved our 65,000+ first page keywords by focusing on three things:
Writing higher-quality content than other pages currently ranking
Optimizing that content to be more relevant to the keyword we want to rank for
Internal links
Quality
Higher-quality content provides more value to the reader than lower-quality content.
That means better answers to the searcher’s question.
The way you figure this out is by Googling the main keyword you want to rank for, reading the pages that are missing and:
Identifying things they didn’t cover that they should have
Identifying room for improvement in terms of angle. Should they have provided more detail, or maybe less detail in a particular section?
But that’s quality from a user’s perspective.
Google doesn’t understand quality the same way as people do.
Google isn’t an AI (yet), and Google can’t naturally understand whether a piece of content is better than another piece of content until they’ve checked the user engagement metrics.
But, through trillions of searches, Google has been able to develop a model of the characteristics that content with better user engagement metrics has that content with poor user engagement metrics lacks.
Let’s highlight this with an example.
If I showed you two pieces of content in a language you can’t read, which piece of content would you assume is higher quality, providing more value to the reader?
The piece of content with 1,000 words in one giant paragraph?
Or the piece of content with 3,000 words, a table of contents, lists (1,2,3), bullets, embedded pictures and videos, tables with structured data, internal links to provide more context, and external links to authoritative sources backing up claims?
You would pick the second piece of content.
Even if it’s in a language that you don’t understand.
Google does the same thing.
When it crawls your site and discovers a new piece of content that has the characteristics of content with high user engagement metrics, it ranks and tests your page on the first page quicker than if your content is missing those characteristics.
So not only do we analyze the first page of search results to provide more value to the reader.
We also structure our content with the things that Google knows is a characteristic of high-quality content.
That means we write our content with more:
Words
Lists
Tables
Bullets
Pictures
Videos
Internal links
External links
Than any other page that Google is currently ranking for the keyword that we want to rank for.
And to be perfectly honest, sometimes just having the characteristics of high-quality content is enough to drive better user engagement metrics than other competitive pages.
That’s even true if the human evaluated quality is questionable.
Let me give you an example.
We work with ambitious, fast-growing brands much larger than ourselves.
But when we do our internal R&D projects for reverse engineering Google, we spend as little as possible on content:
We’re publishing 200+ articles and over 500,000+ words in just a few months.
We’re a young company with a finite R&D budget. The less expensive our content is, the more surface area we have for testing.
Regardless of the quality from an actual human’s perspective, the fact that it’s structured in a specific way tends to keep users engaged longer than content that isn’t structured in this specific way.
Relevance
Relevance means how relevant Google thinks you are to the keywords that you want to rank for.
The real estate you have to drive relevance is pretty limited:
Your URL
Title
Meta title
H1
H2s
Internal links
External links
Pages linking to you
#8 is hard to control, but you have 100% control over the other seven.
Becoming more relevant to a keyword that you want to rank for doesn’t mean you should be keyword stuffing everywhere you can.
It means using variations of your keyword in the areas you have available to you to drive relevance.
If I want to rank for ‘brand ambassador program,’ I’ll use that keyword in a bunch of different ways across the real estate that drives relevance:
Don’t ‘get cute’
Google isn’t a mind reader.
You need to be explicit in what you tell Google your content is about.
If you try and ‘get cute’ with the limited amount of real estate you have available, and that you can control, to drive relevance, you’re not going to achieve your desired outcome.
Here is an example.
Archive360 is a big data company.
The author of the blog post below chose to use their limited amount of real estate to drive relevance to keywords that are completely and utterly unrelated to their brand.
Example 1
The URL of this page is /dammit-jim-im-a-doctor-not-an-ai-healthcare-and-ai
And there is only one keyword this page is indexed for, ‘dammit im a doctor‘
We only have time to work with ambitious brands that want the fastest seo results possible.
Use our SEO ROI calculator to forecast the impact of organic search on your organization.
Want to crush Google and appear everywhere your target audience is searching?
We deliver successful outcomes to ambitious brands again, and again, and again. If you want to be everywhere your target audience is searching, let’s talk.
Our best content
Want to learn how we’ve grown 4 websites from approximately zero to 100,000 visitors per month, with the biggest one doing over 500,000 after 17 months?
In February 2019, we signed a contract with CampusReel. At that moment, their site was receiving around 1,000 visits per month.
Just 12 months later, their traffic exploded to 166,000 monthly organic visits.
In this case study, I’ll walk you through the exact programmatic SEO strategy we executed on this project to make this happen.
It’s also important to know that this project was done with minimal resources, no human writers and I was paid $1,500 for it. Meaning, you can almost certainly accomplish the same. Let’s dive in.
Background
If you’re reading a Content Distribution article for the first time, here’s what you gotta know.
We’ve taken several projects from 0 to +100,000 monthly organic visits in a very short frame (in under a year or two):
On most of these projects our strategy is the same:
Create the most valuable page of content Google could show for the topics we want to rank for
Integrate product into the content as a natural next step for the reader
Align content & SEO strategy with business goals (revenue)
We almost completely skip technical BS, building backlinks, hacks and shortcuts.
Having said that, this project is the biggest outlier, because it’s the only project where we really doubled-down on programmatic SEO and published no human-made content. It was a cool experiment done with minimal budget, and it paid off for the client massively.
Since then, we’ve worked with clients like ClickUp, Privacy, Austin Bank, achieved similar successes and figured out the exact type of client we can create the most value for.
I’m talking about +10x ROI, greatly reduced CAC and a tenfold increase in their internet brand footprint.
Estimated Organic Search Traffic
If you’re familiar with Ahrefs, the #1 SEO tool in the world, you can skip this next section. If you’re not, keep reading.
Ahrefs provides SEOs with data to make intelligent campaign decisions.
One of the core pieces of functionality Ahrefs provides SEOs with is estimated organic search traffic of any website on the internet.
Ahrefs estimated organic search traffic isn’t going to exactly match Google Analytics traffic, but the reason I’m showing you Ahrefs estimate organic traffic instead of Google Analytics is:
Ahrefs data is public and can be viewed by anyone with an Ahrefs account
Google Analytics data is private & generally our clients don’t want this data made publicly available (although some don’t mind)
Ahrefs data is more accurate than SimilarWeb, Moz, SEMRush, and any other tool that exists to estimate organic search traffic
Here is what Ahrefs has to say about the difference between their data & Google analytics:
CampusReel helps highschool students evaluate the universities and colleges they’re interested in attending with actual interviews, reviews, and virtual tours from real students.
When they approached us, they thought organic search could be a major growth lever, but didn’t have a clear path forward.
It’s no wonder. The SEO industry loves to overcomplicate things and make it inaccessible to people outside the space. When you Google ‘ranking factors’, you find Backlinko’s article with over 200 different ranking factors.
And like most small bootstrapped startups, CampusReel didn’t have the bandwidth to learn, test, and iterate, or the internal expertise on their team to delegate.
But their hunch was good. Their competitors were generating massive amounts of traffic:
UsNews.com
PrincetonReview.com
CampusReel’s competitors are generating these enormous amounts of traffic by ranking for the brand names of the schools they have data on.
When you Google any school in the country’s name, one of these competitors almost always show up:
Niche.com
UsNews.com
GreatSchools.org
The Challenge
CampusReel competitors produced very little content by hand and mainly focused on programmatic SEO, creating pages about every school in the country with information they scraped about the school from the Department of Education.
CampusReel didn’t do that.
Their angle on education reviews was interviews, reviews and walkthroughs from real students attending these schools by paying them to create user-generated content (UGC).
And because this means a lot of work and CampusReel is a small bootstrapped startup, they only had content from hundreds of schools, not tens of thousands like their competitors.
The next challenge was that Campus Reel mostly had video content. Their pages had almost zero written content.
Outside of a few websites like YouTube and Pinterest, Google prefers to rank websites that are rich in written content.
And so, we had to adjust our strategy to fit the needs and context of CampusReel:
Small, bootstrapped startup with limited resources
Nearly zero written content, mostly video content
The number of schools they had content for is measured in the hundreds, not tens of thousands
Execution strategy
In order to execute the campaign with the budget CampusReel had allocated we had the following limitations:
We needed to work with the content CampusReel had today, meaning no scraped data from the Department of Education.
While hiring writers to write high-quality content is less expensive than you would expect, manually producing the volume of content we needed for hundreds of schools wasn’t an option.
We had to focus on areas that could be done once, but create an impact on a site-wide basis.
Sitewide Optimizations
The more relevant we are to the keyword we want to rank for, the easier it is to rank.
But Google’s ranking algorithm can’t read minds, and if we want to be relevant to a particular school, we need to be explicit in what we tell Google our page is about.
And the areas we have to drive relevance are limited to:
URL
Title
Meta title
H1
H2s
Internal links
External links
Pages linking to you
#1 – #7 are accessible to us, whereas #8 is generally outside of our control unless your organization excels at earned media, or has the budget to pay for backlinks.
URLs
CampusReel built their app in Ruby on Rails, and when we took over the project they were using random strings in their URLs, which looked like this:
The closer a page is to the homepage, the more important Google believes that page is to your brand, and the easier it is to rank.
But we can’t link +300 universities from the homepage without wrecking the user experience.
So in order to reduce the # of clicks, it takes to get from the homepage to any school on CampusReel we created ‘hubpages’.
Hubpages are groups of similar pages under one ‘hub’.
This allows us to reduce the # of links on the homepage to a manageable amount, while still reducing the # of clicks it takes to visit any school on the site.
This was implemented in both the header and footer of the site to align with SEO best practices, but also improve the user experience.
We linked to these hub pages in the header:
And footer:
Clicking a hub page takes you to a list of all the schools tagged with a particular ‘school type’ attribute:
School pages
Previously all of the videos on a page were mixed together.
Fortunately, CampusReel had tagged each type of video on the back-end, so we sorted the videos by type and added a table of contents to the top, based on how prospective students search for information.
There were other opportunities that we wanted to cover, like GPA & SAT scores, but CampusReel’s content was primarily focused on dorms, campus social life and dining halls.
So we made due with what we had.
Metadata
CampusReel has over 300+ university profile pages, and thousands of individual video pages.
The only way this was going to work was to generate the metadata for each page programmatically, so we created a structure for each page type:
[School Name] campus reviews and video tours. Get a video tour of [School Name] life. You would never guess what [School Name]…..
We implemented a clickbait cliffhanger at the end of each university’s meta description.
Our goal here was to create something searchers would scroll down past higher search results and click through to, even if CampusReel wasn’t ranked #1.
Content
There are very, very few websites that rank well in Google without much written content. The odds were pretty much against us:
CampusReel had almost zero text content – most of their content was video UGC
We didn’t have the budget to create written content for 14,000+ pages
Even if we did, managing the manual creation and placement of that much content would have been a long, logistical slog
So we got creative. We instructed CampusReel to run all 14,000 videos through an API based transcriptions service that takes audio/video and provides written transcriptions of the content, then pushed the transcriptions all at once to 14,000 pages.
And just like that, we were able to align the site with what we know Google likes, in a massively cost-effective way.
Notice we hide text behind a button to keep the page UI clean.
This is a valid tactic, and works, as long as the text loads with the page. If the text does not load with the page, you reduce the effectiveness of hiding the text behind the button.
Gateway pages
The success of the automated page build out proved organic search was a viable acquisition channel, and CampusReel began expanding the scope of their ambitions.
The next keyword targets they executed on were:
Calculators for college prospects
Transferring to universities in their database
Once users land on the page, they are funneled to video reviews of that college.
And the page does a great job at structuring their content.
Internal linking.
And increasing user engagement metrics via embedded calculators.
Conclusion
This was a very unusual project to work on, and very fun.
It was our first project trying to rank a site with very little written content, and we’re very proud of what we were able to achieve on a shoestring budget.
Since then, we’ve figured out our sweet spot when it comes to our offering and market fit, started focusing more on publishing great content at scale and achieved successes even bigger than this one with clients like DoNotPay, ClickUp, Privacy, Austin Bank, and others.
Still, this case study serves as a reminder that you can achieve great success in SEO when you get creative, even with very limited resources.
Content Distribution publishes 400+ pages of content per month.
Our clients specifically seek to work with us because of our skill set in generating an audience through organic search.
We hire our writers because they’re good writers, not because they know anything about SEO.
Usually, when writers say they know SEO, what they mean is they’ve read some stuff and watched some videos.
What they never mean is, they have a consistent process to ensure the content they write ranks again and again and again.
When we look at their portfolio, none of their work is generating traffic from search.
But that’s OK.
So, how do we take great writers and enable each of them to create content thatranks every time?
We do it the same way that we publish 200+ pages of content per month.
We do it with processes, documentation, and systems.
If you don’t want to see:
Proof that all you need to have to rank is excellent content, not backlinks or technical SEO
Awesome Facebook groups to recruit great writers from
How much you need to pay
How to keep your writers happy and productive
And you only want the process document, then scroll to the end
What is SEO content writing?
We believe that Google’s #1 goal is to show the most relevant, highest quality content for any given search query every time.
Why do we believe that’s Google’s #1 goal?
Alphabet generates 95% of its revenue from Google Adwords
Google Adwords makes 120 billion dollars a year
A one percent loss in market share represents over a billion dollars in high margin revenue.
To maintain their brand as the #1 search engine, they need to provide better search results than everyone else
We didn’t just make up this philosophy of organic search distribution.
We’ve published hundreds of pages of content across the projects we’ve worked on, and have over 65,000 first page keywords.
Not everything ranks and not everything ranks fast, but when we publish vast amounts of highly relevant, high-quality content, it has never failed to work.
High-Quality Content
Google isn’t an AI, and it can’t intuitively identify quality content as we can.
Instead, Google relies on heuristics.
We believe the strongest heuristics of content quality are user engagement metrics, and how they compare to those for other pages that Google could show for a given keyword.
Bounce rate
Time on site
Pages visited
Overall site engagement (button clicks, CTAs, etc.)
If you closely monitor your rankings, it’s common to see your page pop on and off the first page before ultimately settling somewhere.
That is Google testing and stack-ranking your page based on user engagement metrics.
And through trillions of searches, Google has developed a pretty good idea of the characteristics of high-quality content.
Think about it this way.
Imagine we showed you two pieces of content on a topic about which you knew nothing.
Say, quantum physics, or quantum computing.
The first piece is 1,000 words in one giant paragraph.
The second piece of content is 3,000 words and has:
A table of contents
Bullet Points
Lists
Tables
Embedded YouTube videos
Pictures
Important sentences in bold
Internal links to relevant content
External links to authoritative websites
Even if you didn’t understand the topic, which would you assume is the better piece of content?
You’d pick the one with a ton of structured data.
So, when Google crawls your site, and it finds a ton of structured data like lists, tables, and bullet points, it assumes that the quality of your content is high.
It then tests you on the first page quicker than it would without these characteristics of high-quality content.
Relevance
Being relevant to a given search is just as crucial as having high-quality content.
Every day, people create content that will never rank nor attract eyeballs because Google doesn’t believe it’s relevant to a given keyword.
You only have so much real estate to drive relevance.
URL
Meta title
Meta description
H1
H2s
H3s
Internal links
Being relevant doesn’t mean using the same keyword again and again and again across your available real estate.
It means using variations of the keyword for which you want to rank.
In this article, my core keyword is ‘seo content writer.’
But I’ve also optimized the content for variations of this core keyword:
SEO content writing
SEO content writers
Writing SEO content
Writing web content for SEO
You have to be careful when you pick the variations because if you choose the wrong variations, you might not rank for anything.
It’s very counterintuitive, and today doing keyword research is more of an art than a science.
If you write a post about ‘the best LinkedIn headlines & profiles,’ your post will neither rank for ‘LinkedIn headlines’ nor for ‘LinkedIn profiles.’
Go ahead and Google each term.
The pages ranking on the first page are optimized for just one of those keywords.
LinkedIn profiles
LinkedIn headlines
They use the:
URL
Meta title
Meta description
H1s
H2s
H3s
To drive the relevance for one keyword or the other, not both.
Being relevant at scale
Today, people choose their keyword research using a ‘gut feeling.’
Over 20 SEO professionals replied to this post and gave their opinion.
Not a single one based their opinion on data. They all gave advice ‘from their gut.’
It takes a lot of time to figure this out. It’s more of an art than a science.
We weren’t satisfied with the keyword research process being an uncertain art, which takes a significant amount of time for every piece of content produced.
We turned keyword research into a science that’s based on data, not on our gut. That way, we can generate a year-long content calendar in less than an hour.
How it works:
Import as many as 10,000 relevant keywords to your business
The tool crawls Google and
Figures out which keywords can rank together
Then groups the keywords that can rank together into discrete content topics
With the exact variations to use in each piece
Here’s what that looks like:
Notice how ‘hiring writers’ and ‘hire content writers’ are separate?
Look at the variations. I see one keyword that doesn’t include ‘content’ in the ‘hire content writers’ keyword group.
Google both keywords, and you’ll see that each of the different search results contain different pages optimized for one keyword or the other.
Comparing each keyword against other keywords to get this right is tedious to the point where it’s simply not done.
So, people guess. When they screw up, they don’t rank for either keyword.
When more relevant, higher quality content isn’t enough, and why you should make it anyway
Content may not be enough if you’re operating in:
Gambling
Finance
Dating
Healthcare
Cancer lawsuits
But for most businesses, and most industries, content is enough.
That isn’t to say that backlinks don’t help, they do.
A lack of backlinks has never stopped us from ranking well before, but having a lot of backlinks makes our job easier.
Even when backlinks are necessary, highly relevant, high-quality content requires fewer backlinks to rank than less relevant, lower-quality content.
Below are examples showing the impact of content that is more relevant and higher quality than that of the competition.
In every example, you’ll note our page has less domain strength and fewer backlinks than the competition that we are beating.
Examples:
Web content
E-commerce content
B2B SaaS content
Mobile Apps content
Writing web content for SEO
Doggypedia is America’s favorite website to learn about different mixed breed dogs, with over 200 unique articles.
This keyword represents 23,000 searches a month.
Here’s a little context about what the numbers mean.
We only highlighted the columns you care about.
DR
Backlinks
DR stands for Domain Rating. It is a proprietary metric that measures the strength of a domain based on the backlink profile.
YouTube, Facebook, and Google are all 100s.
The site you created yesterday is a 0.
It’s not a metric that Google uses. It’s a metric created by Ahrefs, the tool from which we took all of the screenshots that you’ll see here.
Even though Google does not use it, it’s still a very useful metric to understand how powerful a given domain is.
Not only does Doggypedia’s domain have the weakest backlink profile as indicated by the DR (domain rating) score, but of the nine other pages, only 1 page has fewer backlinks.
And it’s not just that keyword. It’s hundreds of them, 504 position-one keywords, and thousands of keywords on the 1st page.
SEO Writing for E-Commerce
Hobanco is an outdoor e-commerce brand selling knives. We built and sold this website a few years ago.
Quick note: If you want to learn how to leverage sponsored YouTube videos as an acquisition channel for your e-commerce store, you need to read this post. Otherwise, keep reading.
When someone searches for [state knife laws], that searcher generally already owns a knife or is looking to purchase one. Our research showed that people who buy knives to carry around have a lot of knives.
Of the ten 1st page search results, Hobanco has the second-lowest DR, and the second-lowest number of backlinks – yet it outranks pages on stronger domains with many more backlinks.
By the way, that featured snippet means we appear as shown below.
Well-structured content gets you lots of featured snippets.
This site hasn’t been touched since April 2018, and yet it grows month after month after month.
That’s the power of great content.
B2B SaaS SEO Content
BrandChamp.io helps e-commerce brands create and scale ambassador programs to thousands of participants.
It’s a seriously impressive product but lacked awareness of the buyer’s life cycle.
Each customer is worth anywhere from $3,000 per year to tens of thousands per year.
This blog post alone might be worth $100,000.
But it’s not alone.
The brands that are the most successful with search don’t create one piece of content and hope it ranks. They create a piece of content for every opportunity across the buyer’s life cycle.
And again
Learn more B2B SEO tactics we’re using right now to outrank bigger brands with larger budgets
Writing SEO Content B2C SaaS companies
DoNotPay is a San Francisco based startup backed by Peter Thiel that has created the world’s first AI robot lawyer and has helped over 200,000 people dispute and beat their parking tickets (among a bunch of other cool things).
Remember what I said above about how backlinks aren’t necessary, just helpful?
This is just one of the hundreds of pages DoNotPay has page 1 keywords for.
When you create a lot of high-quality content, you can stop paying attention to individual rankings, and you can focus on:
Do we have more keywords on the first page this week than we did last week?
Did we have more organic search traffic this month than we did last month?
If you’re like the businesses we work with, your core team is best equipped to create the highest quality content, but they have the least amount of time to write it.
Writing the type of content you need to have to rank isn’t easy.
At a minimum, it’s going to take a few hours.
And if you find the time to write one page here and there, you’re not going to achieve the outcome you wanted from organic search.
So you need to hire writers to write your content for you.
Before we give you the template to turn any content writer into an SEO content writer, let’s help you find awesome writers with whom to work.
Pay your writers per word, not hourly
Paying your writers by the hour is ineffective.
They won’t be motivated to write.
The truth hurts. Every person I’ve met who pays their writers hourly gets less content for the dollar than those who pay writers per word.
For most of the content we create, we pay our writers a minimum of five cents per word, but it can go as high as ten cents per word for our enterprise SaaS projects in highly technical industries.
You won’t find the quality you’re looking for with the reliability you need for less than five cents per word.
If you want to produce more than eight pages a month, you need to hire multiple SEO content writers
We have yet to meet a writer who can create enough content for one project.
We’ve tried. They said that they could produce 3,000 words per day and handle 20 blog posts a month. They couldn’t. Not even close.
Writer’s brains began to fry, especially if they’re writing about a subject that they need to research relatively more.
When your writer doesn’t deliver, they set you back.
You then need to source, evaluate, and test another writer.
Good freelance SEO writers have a lot of clients.
And they’re not going to drop their reliable, consistent clients to write your content ‘real quick.’ They’re going to schedule you in.
So if you assign the content on a Monday, you should expect a full week to receive the first draft.
And another week after that for revisions on the feedback you provide.
If you’re producing a lot of content, you can’t risk your production schedule by giving a single writer too much work.
We hire enough writers for each project, where each writer only needs to write one article per week.
At most, two per week, and only if they’ve consistently met deadlines over the past several months.
Treat your SEO content writers like real people
Don’t treat your content writers like virtual assistants, treat them as valued members of your core team.
Good content writers for five cents a word have a higher ROI than Google stock.
Creating a lot of good quality content is expensive, and it takes time.
But it takes a lot more time if you can’t retain your writers and need to spend more time than necessary sourcing, evaluating, and testing new content writers.
Gordana, Content Distribution’s Content Manager, was a professional writer for seven years before stepping into a content management role with us. According to her, the two most important things you can do to keep your writers happy are:
Pay them on-time, as in immediately after approving their final draft, or at a minimum pay them bi-weekly
Create outlines that help them precisely understand what you want, minimizing revisions
There’s just one more thing
Alright, I know you had to read a lot to get to what you really wanted: the template that turns any writer into a great SEO content writer.
I want you to be able to use the template below as effectively as possible.
To do that, you had to read everything above.
There’s just one more thing, and to see it, I want your email address.
Don’t worry.
I’m not going to spam you.
I’m going to hook you up with the keyword research processes I use to:
I love learning, and I learn best by doing, so at any given time I’m running various micro-tests and micro-projects.
Today, I’m going to share how I leveraged affiliate marketing on YouTube to:
Drive hundreds of dollars in sales per month
Rank a website in Google faster than I’ve ever had before this point
Note – just because I made hundreds, doesn’t mean you can’t make thousands or tens of thousands of dollars a month, or more, using this tactic.
Why Didn’t I Scale This YouTube Affiliate Strategy Further?
I implemented this another side project, Hobanco.com, a dropshipping knife store.
Fun Fact: I was shipping knives to more than a dozen European countries, which I’m pretty sure makes me an international weapons dealer.
I started Hobanco because I wanted to learn more about e-commerce SEO.
It turns out there are millions of knife-related searches each month, so I chose knives not because I’m a knife nerd, but the organic search opportunity was large.
But the store was incredibly painful to scale.
Not only did it take 3-4 weeks for the knives to arrive from China via e-packet, but about 30% of my orders were confiscated by customs at the border.
Delivering such a poor customer experience was painful to my soul but refunding 30% of my orders and eating the cost was a deal-breaker.
So I never scaled this.
But you can.
Why This YouTube Affiliate Marketing Tactic Works
When people think of affiliate or influencer marketing on YouTube, they think about sponsoring new content.
But paying YouTubers to create new content for your brand is expensive.
A much cheaper way to execute a successful YouTube affiliate & influencer campaign is to sponsor old content.
Unlike Facebook and Instagram, YouTube does a fantastic job at surfacing up old content to new viewers.
YouTube has a bunch of different ways it surfaces up old content – from search to playlists, to recommended videos, to auto-playing the next video.
Which means videos published years ago can still receive thousands and thousands of views per day.
And we’re going to leverage that fact to generate affiliate revenue for a very low cost.
Why It Helped Our Organic Search Traffic
I ranked this project using the exact same playbook I had always used.
Except I did one thing different.
By sponsoring YouTube videos, I was driving referral traffic from YouTube to my website.
And my organic search rankings and traffic increased faster than any other project I had worked on before this point.
Estimated Organic Traffic (from Ahrefs):
Hobanco’s 1st-page keywords
Position 1-3 is the first half of the 1st page
Position 4 – 10 is the bottom half of the 1st page
Something like 60 million new web pages are created every single day.
How does Google know which pages matter?
I believe Google uses referral traffic.
The more referral traffic you get, and the better that traffic engages, the faster your pages will rank – assuming the page is optimized for the keywords you want to rank for.
Now, at this point, this was just a single data point.
But every single time since this experiment I’ve sent referral traffic to a given page – whether it’s from YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, email lists, other websites – whatever – those pages have ranked faster than pages that don’t receive referral traffic.
And it makes sense.
Google’s #1 goal is to provide the most relevant, highest quality search results for any given search query.
And Google is the #1 big data company.
And Google Analytics is deployed on nearly every single website that matters.
Why wouldn’t Google use user engagement metrics like # of visitors, time on site, bounce rate, pages visited, etc as a heuristic for quality?
And if you think about it, isn’t user engagement metrics ultimately a better heuristic for quality than another heuristic like backlinks?
It just doesn’t make sense that they wouldn’t use this data.
So by slamming a page with a bunch of referral traffic, Google begins to understand how users engage, and compares that data to the websites it’s currently showing on the first page for a given keyword.
And if your engagement rate is nearly as good, as good, or better, Google will start testing your page by bouncing it on and off the first page, and comparing it to competitive pages it could show users instead.
If your user engagements are better, your page will eventually stick to the first page.
Implementing This Affiliate / Influencer Marketing For YouTube Strategy
I developed this YouTube affiliate strategy over two years ago, and it’s been more than 18 months since I sold the site I used this tactic on.
So, unfortunately, I’m not going to be able to provide as much data, and as detailed of a walkthrough as I would like.
But that’s OK – you’re a smart person, you don’t need your hand held through every mouse click.
By the time you’re done reading this guide, you’re going to understand exactly how to not only replicate my results, but scale to tens of thousands of dollars a month in revenue.
High-level overview
Define your buyer persona
Build a list of keywords that buyer persona is searching for
Search YouTube and identify videos with lots of views
Check to see if those channels are consistently generating high view videos, or this video was an outlier
Reach out to channels that don’t have much traction besides that single video, or a handful of videos
Offer a small upfront payment + affiliate commission to place a link on their videos with high views
Create a custom URL including their affiliate link + UTM tags
Build A Buyer Persona
The first thing you need to understand is who your customer is.
What videos are they watching?
What keywords are they using to search?
My e-commerce store dropshipped knives.
My assumption was, is the people searching for knife videos on YouTube are knife enthusiasts, and knife enthusiasts don’t just have one knife, they have a bunch of different knives.
And determined my audience was searching for videos like ‘knife tricks’, ‘butterfly knife tricks’, etc.
Identifying High View Videos On YouTube Channels Without Much Traction
You’re looking for YouTube videos that have a high number of views but are on channels that don’t have much traction outside of that video, or a handful of videos.
Why?
YouTube channels that are consistently creating high view count videos generate more income through YouTube ads & sponsorships, so they cost more to work with them.
But the channels that have one, or a few videos with high view counts don’t make much money at all.
So we can get an affiliate link on their video for cheap.
In fact, what’s more important than the relatively small amount of monetization you can offer them, is the ‘cool factor’.
They can now tell their friends they’re a sponsored YouTuber.
And being a sponsored YouTuber is a lot cooler than not being a sponsored YouTuber.
And you might have to do this a couple of times, so I recommend keeping track of videos and channels you want to sponsor in an Excel or Google Sheet.
To make it easy on you, point them to an email address to contact you if they’re interested.
“Hey! I love your channel and would like to sponsor it! If you’re interested, please email me at xyz@xyz.com”
I recommend doing this a few times yourself to get a hang on the process, then build a process document (hint: create a video walk-through also) and delegate this to a VA.
Note that you should ask the VA to only reach out to a handful of channels per day, and that they should vary their message to avoid YouTube’s spam detection.
If they think you’re spamming, they’ll simply disappear the message, or worse – ban your Google account.
Negotiating the Sponsorship
My offer was low.
I would offer $5 to put a link with custom text on the video receiving a high number of views.
And I would offer them 5% of all sales generated by tracking purchases using an affiliate link.
Setting Up Tracking
I gave each channel a custom link they could use.
Hobanco.com/username
When someone viewed the video and clicked the link, it would 301 redirect the user to a product or category of products I was selling and append their affiliate ID + UTM tracking so I could also track the campaign in Google Analytics.
This takes the user to Hobanco’s CSGO knives category page
The rest of the URL consists of a UTM tag, enabling you to track and attribute click-throughs and sales to specific YouTubers and videos and an affiliate reference ID to track earnings and payouts.
?utm_source=youtube
This tells Google Analytics the traffic source is YouTube
&utm_medium=influencers
This tells Google Analytics the traffic source is part of my affiliate campaign, and not some other click through from YouTube
&utm_campaign=jpgessencezero
This tells Google Analytics the channel that referred the click/sale
&ref=59d4889509230
This is the code auto-generated by my affiliate tracking software to track purchase & facilitate payouts.
Later on, in the campaign I started adding an identifier for branded links (hobanco.com/username-video) if the channel had multiple videos I was placing a link on because I wanted to understand what type of content was producing the most affiliate sales, so when I did scale, I knew what videos to target.
Our best content
Want to learn how we’ve grown 4 websites from approximately zero to 100,000 visitors per month?