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.