π Zapier's legendary SEO playbook
Corey Haines | Swipe Files
Today's newsletter is by my friend and SaaS content marketer Emil Shour. Emil does content marketing for SaaS companies with his company Catalyst Content. He's previously worked for companies like Chili Piper and Roofstock. And for the Swipe Files audience only, he's dropping some knowledge on programmatic SEO. Zapierβs SEO playbook is the stuff of legends. If you're not familiar, they brilliantly came up with a strategy to launch thousands of pages targeting searches for "connect [x tool] with [y tool]" - which is exactly what they do. On each of these pages, they show you how their product can help you easily connect your tools. They also include CTAβs to sign up and automatically create that integration, with recommendations on popular Zaps that people use between those specific tools.
As you can imagine, the number of variations of people searching for how to connect various tools is endless, making this strategy a huge growth driver for their business. I was praying Iβd one day get to use a similar strategy for a client, but nothing really presented itselfβ¦ until recently. I took on a new client at the beginning of 2021 and we decided to take a page right out of Zapierβs playbook to drive traffic and leads from their blog. These posts now bring in about 25% of all the leads they get from their blog (and theyβre leads that actually convert to customers).
Here's what we did: Their customers use their product along with other editing tools as part of their workflows. These editing tools are powerful and need a platform designed to handle working with them, but most people don't know my client's product even exists. What they are aware of is another tool that you very likely know and have used, but is not made to work with powerful editing tools at all. So we piggybacked off their brand. We found a bunch of keywords along the lines of: "how to [desired action] with [powerful editing tool] using [well-known tool]" And we showed people some workarounds to make it kind of work, but we also showed them a much better solution (i.e. my client's product). Even though most of these keywords don't have any search volume according to the keyword research tools, we had a gut feeling that there was traffic there to win. So we started with a handful of these posts, saw they were working, and kept going through our list. I just wish this campaign was as scalable as Zapier's! We exhausted everything possible for this client after ~20 posts. However, weβre testing something similar with a new keyword variation and are seeing some good early results. My takeaways: 1) Grab inspiration from other successful SEO campaigns. This is one of my favorite things about connecting with other smart SEO's (or being on private newsletters like this π ). Some of the best strategies/campaigns aren't written about in blogs or talked about on podcasts. 2) If you have an idea for a scalable campaign ,even a smaller one like this, test it on a smaller scale to get the data you need before putting resources behind blowing it out. 3) If people don't know about your category yet or the niche you serve, see if you can piggyback off the search traffic for the bigger players in your space. This same principle works well for versus and alternatives posts too, which are typically high converters. βEmil Thanks again to Emil for sharing his knowledge on SEO. What did you think? βCorey
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