A CERN physicist turned digital marketing leader, Irina Papuc brings a unique view to her work as a data-driven growth marketer. Irina co-founded GalacticFed to provide clients a better solution for on-demand, scaleable growth marketing teams. Previously she led SEO teams at Toptal, a $1 billion online services business. Irina has designed and operationalized full SEO programs of every size and scale, and built high-powered virtual teams for hyper-growth Bay Area companies.
In Part 1 of our two-part SEO webinar series, we talked to Brendan Baker from Stitch Fix about the fundamentals of organic search in 2021. The second part of our series builds on that knowledge to get tactical on boosting brand authority, building links, and creating content Google loves. We particularly love how Irina leans on her science background - looking for patterns, building hypotheses, running scientific experiments, and making educated guesses - to break down organic search strategy.
Listen to Jamie’s detailed conversation with Irina on specific tactical considerations, then read on for advice you can put into motion right away.
Put the effort into understanding your customers
A successful SEO content strategy is more complex than simply brainstorming a bunch of words associated with your product and sprinkling them throughout every blog post you publish. Before you can create quality content, you have to understand user intent. For B2B companies, your target audience is likely to be a very specific type of decision maker within a company. This type of person might use industry jargon and narrow, high-intent questions instead of broad, general search terms. Those long-tail queries will be a better target than the short-tail keywords that are harder to rank for. For B2C companies, understanding your customer journeys and pain points is key. Taking the time to do some persona research will help you understand how to segment and target these searchers. For example, there’s a big difference between the pain points of an armchair athlete and a triathlon runner. A stay-at-home mom has different needs than a working mother who travels a lot. What makes your brand special to each of these personas? Once you understand your customers, you’ll be better able to spot patterns and opportunities in what Google serves up for specific queries. For keyword research, Irina’s go-to resource is Ahrefs.
Give Google what it wants
Google is just an algorithm, and it’s not perfect at picking up every quality signal. But to give your content the best chance of boosting your page ranks, it’s important to take Google at its word - the search giant actually has very detailed quality guidelines around good content. Basically, Google wants E-A-T (Expertise, Authority, and Trust). E-A-T is a very big consideration (especially in spaces like health and finance). Google wants you to demonstrate expertise with easy-to-follow answers to the searcher’s questions. Author bios, references, and backlinks from established websites also help establish trust. In addition, Google wants to be sure searchers have a good experience on the pages it sends them to. Fast loading, mobile-friendly pages with easy navigation and no code errors or pop-ups do the trick.
Go beyond your homepage
SEO is a multi-front war. For B2B brands, it’s important to identify where your users are asking questions. Third-party sites can play an important role in lead generation as they frequently rank in the top spots for long-tail Google queries. Go to where the decision makers are (for example, Quora or Reddit can be gathering places for important decision makers asking high-intent questions), and bring that traffic home by using your blog to deliver high-quality answers to those questions. B2C companies can also make use of third-party platforms. Looking at where your customers gather online and establishing an active presence in those communities is a great way to stoke conversation and build awareness of your brand. Reviews are another form of user-generated content you can optimize. Obviously you want to encourage positive reviews as much as possible, but responding to critical reviews can actually demonstrate authenticity to potential customers.
Gather your troops
You don’t need to have a dedicated 10-person SEO team to get traction. At a minimum, you’ll need a domain expert. This is a person who is a true expert on your market/industry and target customer. In an early-stage startup, it’s likely this person is one of your founders or early hires. The domain expert acts as a generative source of ideas, and will also review every piece of content you create. The second key human resource is a solid writer who is also a great researcher. There’s no need for a huge stable of writers - most brands (especially B2B brands) can get real traction with a few thoughtfully written articles and optimized landing pages. In the best case scenario, your domain expert and writer are the same person. You’ll also need access to a designer for visual content, a developer for implementation, and a marketer to consult with on strategy.
Optimize your app store listing
Your SEO strategy should be 100% aligned with your business development goals. That means if you’re marketing a B2C app, getting traffic to your website is not nearly as important as funneling potential customers to the various app stores. But what about optimizing for search inside the App and Google Play stores? The first thing you’ll need to do is review your competitors. Be creative with how you define “competitor” and take a look at brands targeting multiple niches. Study their keywords, the kind of persuasive language they use, how they present their product offerings. Pay careful attention to the “top fold” of their listing - that’s everything that is visible before the scroll (most of your potential audience makes a decision before scrolling). Then build something better. Include quality images, links, and a great opening paragraph that speaks to your target customers’ journeys.
Own your blog
For early-stage startups, launching a company blog might seem like an unwise use of development resources when third-party platforms (like Medium) can serve a similar purpose. Sure, it’s possible to get some earlier initial readership by taking advantage of a third-party platform’s existing authority and user base, but that won’t serve you in the long run. Owning your own blog is how you build your brand’s domain authority. In addition to giving you control of the branding, navigation, and format, a company-hosted blog gives you access to all the spoils that come with developing great content. The most effective distribution strategy is to publish content on your own blog and promote that content through third-party channels (like Medium, LinkedIn, and Twitter).
Be intentional about link building
Links are one of the main ranking factors in Google’s algorithm, and that’s not likely to change any time soon. Links act as “votes of confidence” from one site to another, and help convince Google that you are recognized by other authorities in your space and worthy of attention. Once upon a time you could spam links in forums, directories, and throw-away websites but Google now reliably catches and devalues these types of link-building schemes. Google works like a matchmaker - its job is to match the content with the person looking for that content - and hacky tactics or buying links can make Google think you’re a bad match for its searchers. Instead, intentionally gather the links you deserve. Launch a dedicated campaign asking anyone who’s ever mentioned you to link back to your site. Earned editorial links are the most valuable (think a TechCrunch blog post on your launch, an industry publication’s coverage of your new exec, or your CEO’s guest post on Forbes), so be sure to request a link. Note that some publications have policies against linking, but most will happily include your URL.
Measure the right things
Ultimately, the metric that matters the most is revenue. But since it can be a long journey from consuming that first piece of content to buying, we have to find other numbers to track. Try to resist opening up Google Search Console and obsessing about your site-wide average position - this number averages all keywords together and isn’t really a good indicator of progress. For an instructive metric on your organic search, pay attention to your non-branded clicks. These are clicks to your site that don’t contain any branded elements (such as the name of your company, product, or founder). This number weeds out the people using Google to navigate to your page, which makes it a better measure of how well people are discovering your brand through search. Building up Google search rankings can take weeks or months, and non-branded impressions for individual keywords can serve as an early indicator of growth.