January 15, 2024

I’ve finally hit the milestone: 100 blog posts for the Ahrefs blog. So, I decided to reflect on my journey. I did two Ask Me Anything (AMA) sessions to see what people wanted to know: Think of yourself as a mentor When a student approaches a mentor with problems, the mentor doesn’t lay out 200+ suggestions. It’s not helpful and causes decision paralysis. Instead, the mentor points out the exact problem and offers one or two specific pieces of advice to help the student get over the hurdle. I think our content should do the same thing: identify our reader’s exact problem and offer the best advice—not the entirety of all advice. For example, I could have listed every potential link-building strategy in my post on white hat link-building. While that might have been useful for some, it would have been overwhelming for most. Not to mention, there would have been no indication of what works in real life. So, I kept it simple and focused only on the tactics that SEOs vouched for. There’s no correlation between effort and results My best-performing article is my post on affiliate marketing. I didn’t “write” it; all I did was repurpose Sam’s video. My worst-performing article is… I have too many to count. I put a lot of work into some of them. My post on Quora marketing had me spending time on the platform, but it never got any strong traction. I had to sign up and prompt 39 AI writing tools for my post on AI writing tools, but the joke never landed. My favorite post—marketing skills—was written from my six years of experience as a digital marketer but got nowhere either. I think that’s the nature of content creation. Most things just don’t work, and for those that do, you

SaaS SEO is about making a SaaS business easy to find on Google and other search engines. The goal is to attract people who are looking for solutions that your product can provide. To put it simply, this marketing tactic works like this:  From a strategic point of view, the main benefit of investing in SEO for SaaS companies is reducing the customer acquisition cost (CAC). Reason: SEO is cheaper than most marketing tactics, and the traffic you get this way is sustainable and well-targeted. But, doing SEO for this type of business has challenges and opportunities that you won’t find elsewhere. I’ve tackled a lot of them during my 5+ years of experience in SaaS SEO for all kinds of SaaS – from startups with little organic traffic to $100M+ ARR businesses that are already at the top of their niche.  In this article, I’m sharing a step-by-step guide on how to build an effective SEO strategy for any SaaS company based on that experience.  But first, let’s briefly discuss… What’s really different about SaaS SEO? SEO for SaaS companies will be based on the same general principles as any other SEO. You still need keywords with traffic potential, optimized content, and lots of quality links. Moreover, most if not all SEO tactics that work for other companies will work here, too.  The only thing that really makes a difference is the unique ways you can leverage your product to drive targeted traffic with a higher probability of converting. This comes down to three things:  You should focus on product-led content (content that shows how to solve a problem with your product). This way, each content piece you publish provides immediate value to your audience and creates a natural path to signing up or even subscribing to your content.  You can integrate your

Over the years, I’ve created content strategies for companies like Google, Algolia, DocSend, and many more. No matter how big the company or how complicated its product, the content strategy always boiled down to answering three straightforward questions. These questions are adapted from the legendary book 1. What challenges do you want to overcome? Most companies have the same core problem: they need more customers, and they need more money from those customers. But every company is unique, and solving that problem usually requires overcoming a host of more specific challenges, like: Building a sales pipeline from scratch. Many newer companies turn to content to build demand for their product when there wasn’t demand before. Stopping reliance on advertising. It’s common for businesses to rely on paid advertising as their main source of customers, but at a certain point, it starts becoming too expensive to maintain. Getting more sales from existing traffic. In other cases, companies might generate plenty of traffic but struggle to convert those visitors into paying customers. Reducing customer churn. Some companies have plenty of visitors and leads, but struggle to keep people around once they become customers. Each of these challenges (and many others) can be helped by content. Crucially, the more specific you are with your diagnosis of your challenges, the easier it becomes to work out a solution. 2. What leverage can you exploit? The best content strategies include leverage: your company’s secret weapon, something that makes content easier to create, or helps it perform better. Virtually every company has some type of leverage to use: Unique data. Many companies have access to unique data from their users or products. Personal brands. Others have the benefit of well-known founders or team members with big social media followings. Team expertise and skills. Some teams have unique