Webinar: How to Grow Organic Traffic with Less Content

Fed up with the pressure to produce endless content? What if you could grow your traffic by working smarter, not harder?

This session, with Victor Pan, is built for start-ups, agencies, and in-house pros keen to rank for more keywords, using less effort.

Discover how to spot the best business opportunities with Total Addressable Market Analysis, organise your content priorities with ICE, and automate those tedious traffic checks.

You’ll also learn to rescue old content, fix technical headaches, and collaborate with non-SEO teams to expand your reach.

By the end, you’ll have a toolkit to master efficient SEO—so your resources go further than ever.

Full Transcript for the How to Grow Organic Traffic with Less Content Webinar

Peter Mead:
We are live! It’s Peter Mead, and welcome to the Australian Search Marketing Academy. Today, we have a really interesting topic every SEO wants to know about: how to grow organic traffic with less content. We’re joined by Victor Pan, Principal SEO Manager at HubSpot. I also have my co-host, Nik. This is really, really intriguing. I mean, lots of SEO people are always thinking about content, but, you know, so we’ll get into the presentation. I’m really fascinated to see how it unfolds. But first, let me just do some introductions. I’d like to introduce the co-host, Nik Ranger, SEO Specialist at Studio Hawk. It feels like that some days—I don’t know, the SEO Hawks. She’s overseeing digital strategy, data analysis, content, site architecture for large enterprise and local businesses, focused on data-driven results. She does a brilliant SEO audit, very focused on technical issues, and a terrific co-host. So, welcome to the show, Nik Ranger. How are you today?

Nik Ranger:
Thank you so much for having me! Cue the clapping noises—no, we don’t have that installed yet, but it’s great to be here. HubSpot—I’ve got a lot of clients who use HubSpot. I love the interface, and I’m really, really excited to be here today to chat with you, Victor, about HubSpot and all things that we can do with growing organic traffic with less content, which I think for all of us—content can be a really big challenge to add to, for whatever reason. I mean, you know, us as SEO consultants, we’re always talking to in-house teams, and one of the things that they always struggle with is, like, “Okay, I can either put more resources to this, but that’s going to cost money and it’s going to have time.” So there’s going to be a lot of really, really great things that I’m really looking forward to coming out of today. Great to have you.

Peter Mead:
It’s great to be here. Thanks, Nik. No worries. This is always terrific to co-host with you. So, Victor, I’ll introduce Victor Pan, Principal SEO Manager at HubSpot. Victor is a cross-disciplinary search marketer who loves talking about business strategy and trade-off decisions from multiple vantage points of view. He believes in a kind of gentle internet that starts from awareness, and he’s always looking for ways to give back to the community. I just love the sound of that. Also, before we started, Victor, you were saying you’re in the Boston area. We just couldn’t get a kangaroo to join us because we’re in Australia—all the kangaroos are in lockdown. But anyway, that’s a bit of a joke. But no, I love the idea that we can all be a bit kinder on the internet and make things work a bit better for all of us. So, welcome, Victor. How are you today?

Victor Pan:
I’m doing good, thanks, Peter. Yeah, Boston—we don’t have any kangaroos, you probably know that. I think there is one in the zoo, but that’s about it. What we have in this season right now are wandering turkeys that go along the street, just walking up traffic, given that people aren’t outside anymore and the wilderness has kind of taken over. But yeah, I’m right now in Boston, and I’ve been in Boston and these three jobs that I’ve kind of just worked in—in terms of being in a startup or in an agency, working with Fortune 500 clients. Right now, I work at HubSpot, as you’ve mentioned, as an in-house SEO. So, I’m actually a very lazy SEO, to be honest with you, and that’s why I’m always looking for ways to do more with a lot less. And a huge disclaimer here: there is going to be a lot of screen captures of Semrush, but really, you can use whatever tools you need to get the job done. I wouldn’t discriminate on how you get the process done. I think the important thing is the concepts are carried through.

So again, it’s like, why should you listen to me? I’m not saying correlation is causation, but, you know, that’s roughly when I started joining HubSpot, and then this is where we are now. I’m pretty proud of that. Again, not saying because of that, but really, when it comes to SEO, we’re always thinking about how do I get more out of less work. I feel like we talk about that so much, and there’s actually a lot of fundamental stuff that gets missed out because we’re chasing the next hack, right? The thing that really matters for you to really understand when you’re doing search is you actually need to know the landscape that you’re trying to rank for. And to know that landscape, you need to know who your enemies are in this landscape—who you’re competing against. But most of all, you really need to know what state your website is currently in. If you don’t know your website that well and the content that you have yourself, you’re not going to be able to rank very well because you overestimate or underestimate yourself all the time.

So, there’s this quote from Sun Tzu’s Art of War, and the translation there is, like, you gotta listen to history, otherwise you’re doomed to repeat it and make a lot of SEO mistakes. So, I get this question a lot: what’s the best way to do keyword research, right? And a lot of SEOs would be like, “Well, it depends—what kind of business are you?” And that’s true, but that’s kind of a cop-out answer. What you should do is ask more questions, like, what’s your goal? What are you trying to do? Depending on what your goals are, the best way to do keyword research is very different. So, I’m going to introduce this concept of a total addressable market. It is a term generally used for SaaS—so, software as a service. Think about Spotify, or even your Amazon account, or what have you—these are a lot of subscription-based services.

And the way we look at it—because that’s what HubSpot does—the way we look at the industry is, you know, how much out there is there for my business to capture, and of that size, how much of that is actually reachable through search, right? And so that’s your SEO total addressable market. Then, of all those things online, how much can you actually capture organically with your website? So, when you’re thinking about, well, how big is the landscape—I mean, there’s physical retail, and then there’s digital for some businesses. We’re right now only looking at digital. If you only look at digital, when you’re looking at all these search terms, you have direct competitors that sell similar things to you or are close replacements. Then you have these non-competing businesses—a lot of times, there are news websites, non-profit organizations, sometimes government organizations too. Understanding that whole landscape really helps you zero in on what are your strengths of your website and where areas are that you have opportunities.

So again, simple definition: SEO TAM is the organic traffic you have, plus your competitors, plus non-competing businesses, minus whatever overlaps you have. The fastest way to do TAM analysis is really the magic keyword tool in Semrush. Just throw in a topic, filter out anything that doesn’t quite fit in what you’re targeting, and then select all the keywords you care about, then export it. All of a sudden, you have the digital equivalent of how much online opportunity you have. This works very well for startups—they’re trying to get investors interested in your idea, they’re asking you, “Well, how big is the market?” You want this feasibly large number to impress them so that they’ll invest in your company. As you iterate, you’re going to figure out which topics really work for your startup versus the ones that don’t.

I chose fried chicken as an example because my family has a family business—they actually sell fried chicken, and that’s actually run on my cousin’s side of the family. But, you know, maybe they’ll branch into Korean fried chicken, which also spells out as KFC, which is really funny, or maybe they’ll just feel like that’s not our niche, and then you can filter out as you need to. So that’s just the fastest method via tools. Again, use tools—they save you so much time.

The other thing you can think about in terms of TAM is, why don’t you start looking at all the non-competing businesses for a given topic? It doesn’t have to start with, “Oh, here’s the magical tool, it spits out something I don’t really trust.” Why don’t I look at all the things in that topic and all the sites that show up? Again, there’s this section in Semrush where you can find all the businesses that show up for that topic, and you can go through them one by one to figure out which of these are what we would call content competitors. Sometimes they are direct competitors, like they sell the same things as you, but most of the times they’re not. Semrush sorts them out by the amount of overlap that they do have with your website. Again, very easy tool to do a lot of keywords to export one by one from all these sources, but the more you do, the better of an idea you have of what the landscape is like. This method makes a lot of sense for in-house marketers or SEOs because you care not just about the competitors you’re going against—sometimes you care about partnerships that you might be able to do, and I’ll get to that a little bit later.

Next up for TAM is, why don’t we just only look at competitors? If you’re in an agency, this is often the way you get things done. When I was working at Catalyst, which is a part of Group M, which is part of WPP PLC—the largest media buying agency conglomerate in the world—Procter & Gamble is a client, and I was managing Crest and Oral-B and all these other fun oral care brands like Fixodent (trust me, you don’t want to need that). The way we got things done was we looked at where our competitors were doing that sold similar oral care products, and we showed our clients: this is where you were, this is where our competition is, here’s what they’re doing that’s different. Tom’s of Maine is a toothbrush/toothpaste brand in the United States. There’s a lot of opportunity for us to look at those topics that haven’t been covered, whereas, oh, you’re totally covering a lot more things than, say, Sensodyne. So, this is a quick way to not pull all the keywords in the possible space, but only narrow in on the competitors, and that’s what your client cares about, and therefore you don’t have to overcomplicate things.

Last but not least, while working at Catalyst, I was working with Paul Shapiro, and we’re like, “Hey, we do a lot of keyword research, why don’t we figure out the total addressable market in a more systematic way?” So, if you’re working in an environment where you have development resources or you are familiar with writing code and automating things, then you can definitely leverage a lot of the online marketing tools that are out there that can pull all these search terms data. Again, use Google autocomplete to fill out even more variations and get extremely granular on all the terms that could be searched for on a given topic space. After you pull out that data, there’s a lot of deduping that you need to do, but if you figure out how to do this, then it becomes a click of a button. It makes sense for agencies to do this; it probably doesn’t make sense if you’re in-house, because once you really know your site, you really know your site. But it is another approach that people have tried to use to solve for what does total addressable market look like.

Peter Mead:
Just a quick interjection, Victor. Do you mind making your presentation into full screen so we can use more of the screen? Thank you. I want to see all these cool numbers on screen.

Victor Pan:
This is funny. Let me see—it’s not letting me. Interesting. Okay, let me see. If it’s a problem, we will keep going, but yeah, let me see if I can jump out. Is it full screen now? Oh, there we go. Perfect. It’s great. Yeah, there we are. All right, and we’re back to—okay.

At this point, you have all these keywords, you have all these exports. You need to convert now everything to dollar signs. Again, it’s all about prioritization. A lot of times, as a career SEO, the problem that I ran into is, like, I can get you traffic, but a lot of management issues is they’re wondering, “Well, what does that traffic convert to, right? What does it actually—what’s an equivalent for it?” Without really clear numbers, the first step is to use cost per click, which is the amount that you would be spending on average to run a Google Ad on that keyword, and then use as an equivalent. Again, this is just a starting point for you to make decisions and compare them to what the alternatives are. Once you have things in dollar amounts, it’s much easier to say, “Hey, I can bring in $135,000 worth of value in organic traffic, but in order for me to do this, I might need headcount to accomplish this, or I can do that right now, but I can do so much more if we have more people on the team, or if we had a development resource, or if we had a full-time writer.” These are how you can make those discussions happen.

Now that you have all these search terms and you have these topics, and you’re like, “Okay, I have this giant list, where do I start?” The answer isn’t “it depends.” Remember, we turned everything to dollar values, right? So the question is, well, which of these can we rank for that would have the highest dollar impact, that we’re confident that we can actually get that traffic, and it’s easy to do. So, three things—and that’s where the ICE framework comes in: the Impact that it can create in dollar values, the Confidence that you have on ranking for that (so if you have more experienced SEOs on your team, you’ll be more confident about that; if you have a lot of experimental data on running similar tests on, “Hey, doing this leads to X, at least to Y,” you’ll be more confident about that; and if you are an established site versus someone that’s brand new, you’ll feel more confident about that). Last but not least, there’s also Ease—so, time, expertise, can we even promote that? These are all things that impact whether or not you feel what you’re trying to do with these search terms will actually create the desired effects. You add these points up—they’re from 3 to 30—and the highest one wins. Again, this is the general framework. Feel free to weight it or change it however you need to fit your business needs, but the important thing is to have a list of things you want to accomplish and be able to move that up or down based off of new information that you might get.

What do I mean by that? Well, how do you actually determine impact or ease? Well, again, a lot of these things you can find in Semrush, and these are third-party metrics. Semrush has come up with them; you can find other metrics to use to kind of evaluate ease as well. I like keyword difficulty—so, how many backlinks do you really need in that topic? Do you have that foundation to actually rank for these things? I also like competition, which is a metric where it’s how many advertisers are there bidding for this search term and how competitive is it—because if they’re willing to spend money in Google Ads for it, then it’s likely fairly competitive. Likewise, the last feature that I really like that’s in that export is the SERP features that you see for a certain keyword. So, if you know that there is a local image pack—that is, a local search result—you pretty much have no chance to rank for that because you’re not a local business. Then you know the ease of ranking for that just increased sky high. Whereas if you have excellent photography, you think you have a chance for people to link to a lot of the images, maybe you can rank through your images and along with your site. Feature snippets—same things. Again, this is how you would evaluate, “Hey, is there an opportunity where I know that I’m really good at doing this or I’ve never done this, I don’t know if this would be easier or not.”

Oh, wait, we’re missing something. We’re actually not sure about how confident we are on actually ranking for the impact that we said we would get and how easy it would be to actually do these things. At all the places that I’ve worked at, what I’ve always done is iterate on an experiment. So, rich results—which is sometimes those radio stars, you get breadcrumbs, you get, and they search; sometimes it’s social media profiles on your branded search or an organic site search result—all these things can be tested, and you can see if you can actually rank for them. Once you figure out the formula to get that ranking—the example that I’m using here is review structured data, so that we would show up with review stars—then you can see what the impact is. In this example that I have here, we did this, we got the review stars, our click-through rates didn’t really change that much. As a matter of fact, they actually got worse. So we decided, hey, even though we could mark up our page to be more accurate to search engines, because our competitors—which I’ll also allude to later on—were all doing review stars, the SERPs looked almost homogenous, and adding that actually detracted from how attractive our page was in terms of getting clicks. So we got rid of it and said, “Hey, we’re not going to actually prioritize on marking out pages that could have review structured data because we tested it.”

Nik Ranger:
Can I ask something, Victor? Sorry to interrupt your flow, but I just noticed a lot of this stuff—something came to mind, and that is, well, first of all, if you don’t mind, on your screen that says “stop sharing,” and next to it is a little “hide.” Could you click on “hide” to hide that?

Victor Pan:
Oh, sorry about that. Yeah, I just—we just noticed that.

Nik Ranger:
But what I’m wondering is how, I mean, in my mind, the search intention—how does that factor in in all of this? It’s an idea that got planted in my mind, and I’m trying to think, how does the search intention factor in, or is that really just the different content types, I’m wondering?

Victor Pan:
Yeah, when you look at a search results page and you have all these different search features, you can get a sense of how fractured the intent of the search term is. The way I like to think about a SERP is you have text documents, you have image documents, and then you have video documents. The more variations you have of these three, plus news—which is the fourth one—and these search verticals in that universal search result, the more competitive it generally is, because you have to pick and choose which of those intent types could rank well, right? Some sites are able to capture—like, you’re a news website and you have videos and images in the reporting you’re doing, you can hit all four of those—but, you know, not everyone is Google News validated, right? Not everyone has unique photography—maybe you’re using stock photography and you just don’t have the right to rank for this term. You don’t have a video team, you’re just down to text now, right? So the ease for you to rank in a crowded SERP where there’s all these features increases—it’s just harder. That’s something to keep in mind in terms of intent: the more features you see that are very asset-heavy (so images, video, or requires you to be a news website, or in some cases requires you to be a shopping destination because Google just rolled out shopping, Google merchandise inclusion if you want to go there), so, you know, it’s a crowded SERP, but there’s still some good news, and we’ll get there.

Nik Ranger:
Yeah, I think if I can also add something as well, I think that addresses competitiveness in the SERP, whereas I think with search intent, that pertains to relevancy. So when you’re selecting your keywords of which ones to go after—I mean, you know, you had that really, really great little thing where it’s like, you know, one, three, two to thirty kind of unit of measurement—but maybe just a little thing, just to go back to, like, you know, when you’re assessing which keywords to go after, what is, like, the primary thing to really, really look at as far as search relevancy and search intent?

Victor Pan:
Yep, that makes a ton of sense. The way I would think about how that intent fits in goes back to impact. I mentioned that CPC is an imperfect number, right? Because it assumes everyone’s willing to pay the same amount for traffic, when different businesses will weigh things a lot heavier—like lawyers, if they win a lawsuit, they would get, you know, that much more, versus a CPG (consumer packaged goods) brand selling toothpaste, where, you know, the average selling price of a toothpaste is only so much.

Nik Ranger:
That makes total sense. Yeah, thank you.

Victor Pan:
So you have all those keywords, you’re thinking about prioritizing things on a common side of things, but what if we took this prioritization technique and moved it to technical SEO fixes, like what should you fix next? A lot of times you hear about HTTPS as a ranking factor, page speed as a ranking factor, user experience as a ranking factor, mobile friendliness as a ranking factor—the list goes on. So what do you do? Well, you can run a technical SEO audit, like the ones that are just built into Semrush. You can look at what happens when you fix some of those things, and then you can see what happens, right? Again, it’s a very quick thing to do, a very quick thing to see the results for. Once you figure out what the rough impact is on those experiments, you can think about how many of the same issues you can roll across your site. The larger your website, the easier it is to scale using templates, and the bigger the impact it would be. So if you just had a page speed issue on one blog post, you’re only going to get the benefit of fixing that one blog post, right? But if you have that across multiple pages on your site, then you’re going to see a lot more. So that’s again something you can weigh with the ICE framework.

A lot of times we’re thinking about, “Well, what do I do next?” and we forget about the things we already have on your website. I like to quote my colleague here, Braden Becker: whenever there’s organic traffic falling, the way he looks at it is, algorithm updates aren’t the cause of underperformed content, they’re a symptom of it. So you used to rank number one for something and you no longer do—why is that? Well, a lot of times you’re looking at all your content and it’s actually not holistic or part of a larger group. A lot of times, when you’re looking at your content and you’re trying to prioritize, you have a lot of traffic but they’re actually not being driven for good lists that you have from solving for your total addressable market. It’s really important to then subgroup them into themes and to figure out whether or not within this theme they’re interlinking with each other. Within these interlinks of content with each other, do you have a conversion mechanism where you can turn that traffic into actual business customers or leads or whatever it is that you track as your goal? Because ultimately, at the end of the day, traffic is nice but money is better, right? It’s what keeps you employed, it’s what keeps your company running.

ICE really is a very relative framework because the impact depends on what your business cares about, and that’s how you’re going to beat your competitors in terms of how much more focus you put on something versus something that would put a lot less focus, because their business would care about something totally different.

So you’ve organized all these pages with the keywords that you’ve put out in your TAM analysis. You’re going to find some pages that simply don’t rank for anything. Maybe they have some backlinks to them, but they’re really not adding value to the whole. It’s time for you to say goodbye to those pages and redirect to the next best page. Or if you don’t have that, the next most traffic page within the group, or a page that you do have that is a pillar page, because again, you want to optimize for conversions. You don’t want to have a lot of cruft lying around your website that isn’t contributing to the whole.

I have a quick case study. It’s a story about library.hubspot.com. It was a JavaScript experience that had all the offers that HubSpot has. So imagine you’re reading a HubSpot blog post, you click on a CTA, you capture your email—well, this was one way where you could also capture that offer but without reading a blog post. It was just a library of all the offers we had. A lot of people would just create agencies off of this resource because they’re like, “Oh, I know how to do this because HubSpot has a guide for that.” Well, we got a lot of backlinks for that, but search engines couldn’t tell who was on that page. So you can see, we have about 2,000 backlinks there, close to 3,000, and all you have to do is, again, find the stuff that was left out and old and repurpose it so that there are actual URLs and that any sort of extraneous offers that we had.

To give you some sense of how bad this was at HubSpot, we had an offer for “SEO Myths That You Need to Forget About” in, I don’t know, 2013, and it went from 2013 to 2014, to 15, 16, 17—all different offers, right? They were fighting against each other on ranking for SEO myths. What did we do? We just consolidated, said, “Hey, we’re going to stick to one URL from now on. For every new year, we’re just going to update the existing URL.” You can see the effects of pruning right around February-ish on that—sorry, no actual real numbers there. Before, that was trustworthy, right? So it’s crazy, and it’s not a lot of work. I’m just simply repurposing stuff that I already have and putting it into a new format.

This concept of taking something old and then making more out of it isn’t new. HubSpot’s been doing that for a very long time. It’s only been, I don’t know, two, three years ago that we started to really break down the process of that and streamline what that looks like. One quick method that we use internally is to look at what posts are actually losing organic traffic, and then before it stays there for too long, we make some quick edits to it to adapt what the SERPs look like so that we can go back up to where we used to be.

A lot of times when you’re doing forecasting or you’re doing rank tracking, you’re not super sure—like, is this just rank checking being a little off for a short time, or is it something that’s sticking around? What we did was we compare the first week of the first month, the second week to the second month, the third week of the third… so yeah, month one and month two—sorry, let me do that again. You have month two, week one compared to month one, week one, and likewise, it’s the same weeks to two different months. You look at the difference between that, because it’s hard to see seasonality if you’re looking at week by week. It’s easier if you’re comparing the weeks broken down into different months.

So we took that process, we automated it, and as long as you have a Google Analytics account with the right permissions, you can simply automate it with a quick tool called Google Analytics for Sheets. Just by seeing URLs that have multiple weeks that are seeing falling traffic, you can get a sense of, “Hey, this is a blog post or a website page that I should go in and update so that I rank well again.” Again, kudos to Braden for owning this process and all that. All I did was tweak it a little bit and add a sensitivity metric to it. So if you think 20% is too much work for you to do, you might want to change it to 30% so that you have less pages that need to be re-optimized. Some websites, you might say, “Hey, we have the bandwidth to tackle more posts to be updated,” you could change that to 10%. That’s a free tool, and again, it’s more about the process, less about, “Oh, what’s the perfect percentage?”

What do you do now that you’ve identified these posts? Well, again, going back to SERP features: do you rank for them? Can you rank for them? Have you tried to? Have you ranked for them but lost them? If you’re not sure what it is, my rule of thumb is: don’t delete anything if you’re not winning the featured snippet and it’s there. Try to win it, because the difference, the delta, in having that featured snippet versus not is significant—it’s basically ranking number one. If there is “People Also Ask,” which is a SERP feature of questions people have asked for that search term, you can try to add that into your content so that you answer those queries roughly with an answer. That’s what I would do with historic optimizations if I had really limited resources.

Peter Mead:
Awesome. We have a question from the audience, if that’s all right, Victor. You said earlier in your talk about keywords that are local. So, Jean Mayer—I’m really sorry if I’m saying that incorrectly—asked, you said, “Don’t try for keywords that are local.” How do we figure this out? Can you give us some more insight as to what you meant by that?

Victor Pan:
Yeah, so certain businesses have an immediacy to it. Imagine you’re searching for “restaurants near me.” Google’s going to narrow down the amount of search results to restaurants near that person, right? A lot of times, if you’re looking for a legal firm, for example—could be another vertical, or a dental practice—you’re not going to fly to a different country, you’re not going to go to a different county to get… Most of the times, you will not be doing that to do those things, right? So if you are a business that is not able to cater to that local need and you’re seeing in search results that there are maps, Google Maps results that are showing up, then you know that that is something that’s hard for you to get in. But on the flip side, if you’re a local business, then you’re like, “Oh, this is something I can win,” because that’s what people need and I need to make sure that I can optimize my content to win that Google Map Pack, or that I’m the first business listed of all the other businesses that are listed there.

Peter Mead:
Yeah, awesome, thank you. All right, and I’ll keep going. So CPC is nice, but again, real business dollars—again, just so much better. In SaaS, the way we look at it is customer lifetime value. It might be a little bit overkill if you’re running a mom-and-pop shop, but given COVID and given that a lot of orders are now happening online, I highly recommend going through the exercise of figuring out what is the average purchase value of a visitor on your site buying something. How often does that same person, if you have a CRM, do they repurchase? Given their frequency rate and how much they purchase, you can figure out what their customer value is. Then, by summing up all the customers that you have—like, how many months have they been a customer to the number of customers you have—and then doing the math, you can figure out what your customer lifetime value is. That’s how you’ll figure out, “Okay, I drove organic traffic, the typical organic traffic lead has… the typical conversion rate for organic traffic is X percent, and that person from that X percent is worth this much for me.” If you can get it down to this number, you will find that it’s a lot easier to justify a lot of the organic search-driven initiatives that you have planned for or plan to do. I’ve found through my analysis with customer lifetime value that, generally speaking, organic visitors are more valuable in customer lifetime value than paid ad visits. That’s just something that I’ve noticed a lot. So if you’re ever in an SEO versus PPC situation, I highly recommend trying to figure out what that customer lifetime value is, if you can—if you have access—because it’s going to make your case that much more compelling to get the resources that you need and to prove the results that you can deliver.

So that’s all nice if you control content, you control some budget and sometimes the developer and all these other things. But sometimes you just don’t have anything—like you’re in an agency, you’re just consulting and you’re telling your client and your client expects things to happen just because you’re their consultant. That’s not how it works. But then you’re left with link building, right? Like, how do you get your stuff ranking through links? A lot of times, link building has a bad rep because people are going about it in an unnatural way, which is the way you get punished. Full disclaimer: I’ve been punished before. I know now a better way to do it, and that’s, you know, just actually do what businesses do. So real businesses will reach out to non-competing businesses and refer them—a roofer might refer someone to a plumber or an electrician or something like that. There are networks of people, like industries, where maybe you’re in the remodeling industry for houses, or maybe you’re in—back to Crest, you’re in oral care—and there are non-profit organizations, like in America there’s the ADA for the American Dental Association, where they care about that topic, but they’re not trying to sell toothpaste. These partnerships are the best kinds of partnerships because it’s natural for them to link to you and it’s relevant to the total addressable space you care about, and you do want people to know that you’re an active participant in that field for brand and martinez and what have you. So grab on those opportunities, do co-marketing. Sometimes it’s different marketplaces where you can list your website or your services—so for digital agencies, there’s clutch.co, I think, is a big one. HubSpot actually has its own directory of agencies. There are these micro marketplaces where you can promote yourself that can still drive meaningful business to your website or whatever business you’re selling. In some cases, some of these partnerships, like third-party review sites, it might be a little hard to rank well, and you might find that sometimes they have paid advertising schemes where they’ll bump you up to the top of that list if you do spend money with them. Once you work out that relationship, you can maybe not stop paying them because it doesn’t make sense anymore, but they’ll just forget about the organic part because that’s not their job—their job is to sell more paid placements. So there’s sometimes a little bit of that—again, rounds on emails.

The last point here that I just want to touch real quick, because I used to work with Larry Kim from WordStream—he’s a really big PPC expert—is if you’re very notable in your industry, you can get backlinks by simply providing quotes to news organizations and they’re happy to link back to you. I’m really surprised that there’s no words of unicorns in here—having WordPress, that was free unicorn, blur candy core, mobile monkey—so there you go, fair enough.

Again, we see that at HubSpot. We used to have a page that tried to rank for “best CRM software,” and we did on the first page, but at some point search results changed, and that’s because for B2B business purchases, it’s a huge group of people that have to make a decision. So it’s not enough to just list yourself and say, “I’m the best CRM software.” The user expects a comparison of software, and I am not in the right to rank for that anymore because review sites are much more unbiased in covering that. So the best thing I can do to, again, address that total addressable market is to rank on those review sites so that after they’ve made that X versus Y comparison, they’ll come back and say, “Oh, now we’re ready to buy HubSpot something,” right? Like HubSpot CRM, marketing, HubSpot sales, what have you. The way you think about total addressable market doesn’t have to be set on just keywords, it doesn’t have to be set on just, you know, you have to beat your competitor or these content sites. Sometimes you can join these content sites, sometimes you can work with your competitor and say, “You know what, the market is big enough for both of us,” and you just work together and you’ll be surprised.

Hi again, Victor here. I’m a lazy SEO strat—at lazy SEO, but I’m also an SEO strategist. Again, I’ve covered how you really should use tools—it’ll just make your life easier. The tools may not be perfect in data accuracy, but it is a starting point for you to prioritize, and you can only start prioritizing once you have the total addressable market marked out. This is kind of the space you’re going to do all your work. Once you know the workspace, you can prioritize with the ICE framework. Once you have the ICE framework and you have money values tied to everything, you know which ones will give you the most bang for the buck. A lot of times, again, the 20/80 rule or the 80/20 rule—either or—applies, and you’ll find that historic optimization is going to be a huge lever you can pull. Last but not least, if you can’t touch content for whatever reason, you at least know the terms you really care about. Work with internal or external teams, whether it’s your PR team, your engineers, what have you. You can create non-traditional content—like right now, I’m doing a hosted webinar with y’all. So again, it’s not a zero-sum game; there are creative ways out of it.

Now I just want to conclude in saying, SEO is more of a flywheel in that when you have these processes down and you can iterate so quickly with experimentation and know what works, it’s no longer about who he said, she said. It’s more about, “Okay, we learned this, that this is true for our organization, this worked for us, and now we can carry those learnings on.” You’ll definitely excel in SEO if you just keep learning. Thank you.

Peter Mead:
Wow, thank you, Victor, that’s terrific. Yeah, such a—I love your approach and your logical explanations of some of these ways of going about things. Yeah, so thank you very much for that. I wanted to jump straight on the back of your presentation with perhaps just a quick question straight off the bat. So you talked about, you know, you were trying to rank HubSpot for the CMS type of keywords, and you figured out that it’s better to get ranked or placed on these other third-party websites that aren’t Google, which is great. I mean, we used to think about that as piggyback SEO, all kinds of things, you know—figuring out who’s already ranking for that and getting on there. But I’m just wondering, what tools do you use or what approach do you take for figuring out which of those third-party sites you would want to get onto?

Victor Pan:
Yeah, that’s a great question. So, the person that actually executed this was Alex Purkett within HubSpot. The concept, though, wasn’t unfamiliar for me. In Procter & Gamble, there was this concept called “big and popular.” So if you, as a strategy, establish yourself as the number one something in a category, when in an age where there’s all this analysis paralysis—like you go down an aisle, there’s 300 options and you don’t know what to do—when you’re overwhelmed, the easiest way to make a decision is, “Oh, I heard they’re the number one, so that’s a pretty safe bet,” right? So you can take that same concept, you put it on a search term that you know converts and does a lot of business for you. Let’s say you’ve suddenly lost that because these review sites have come in. You already know how much that is worth for you, and you don’t have to limit yourself to just ranking for one position with your site. It could be ranking for one, two, and three. The way you need to think about it is, two and three are owned by other websites—can I buy that website? Can I partner with that website? Do they run ads on that website? I want to show up on that website so that at the very end of that search journey—again, you have really broad keywords where you’re just looking for exploratory information, and then you have, you know, really long-tail keywords that really show that purchase intent, right? A lot of times what you need to do is actually just monopolize the search terms that are really close to purchase intent. If you show up in any sort of comparison and reviews and all that and you’re on every single site, then, you know, if it’s a complex buying decision, then it’s like, “Well, why don’t we consider HubSpot?” That question is going to come up, and that’s kind of the strategy behind all that.

The way we find these sites, again, going back, is: well, you know what the keyword is—just find all the websites and find out who owns them or who runs them, whether it’s LinkedIn, whether it’s a WHOIS lookup, who owns the domain. There’s going to be ways to find out who on the other end of that company can work out a deal with you, provided that you have, again, those resources, and HubSpot fortunately does. Again, the way we think about it is, well, what is a good business relationship that is a win-win for them and us as well, so that we can have this happen.

Peter Mead:
Awesome. That’s logical, yeah. What do you think, Nik?

Nik Ranger:
Yeah, well, I loved your presentation. You know, and it really speaks to a lot of the work that we do here with Studio Hawk. I mean, we focus on technical SEO. We have a manual backlink outreach team that really helps to leverage relationships with other business owners and things like that. Content is a massive thing, especially in an EAT space, where you really need to go back and refine and do content pruning to really make sure that the relevance is there for not just the topic but for also the business at large. Like, if you’ve got, say, a legal firm and they’ve got some really, really weird kind of blogs on there that’s kind of being used there as this clickbaity thing for social media, you really need to bring it back to, “Well, what’s the legal perspective of this thing?” We can be creative, absolutely, but we really need to really anchor it through there, otherwise we’ll get a topical dilution. So you really, really spoke to me with your presentation.

My question goes back to the content. So a lot of what you were looking at doing was looking at some of the content that was already there and then revamping it, kind of like in that kind of evergreen thing where you have that piece of content, it’s doing well, you go back, you make a couple of tweaks, and let it out into the ether and see how that goes. What are the kind of key things that you see that make those kinds of opportunities just so clear in your mind? Like, if we were to upgrade these blogs, that’s going to have a lot more impact than, you know, having to write a blog from scratch?

Victor Pan:
Yeah, that’s an excellent question, and the master of all this really goes back to Braden Becker and our team. But personally, when I look at these ops, you know, backlinks is one thing. In general, if something has that history of already having done that before but somehow has lost that over time, that’s another thing to look into. Another thing would be, given that, you know, how many other related pages you have on that topic on average, whether they kind of fall—that’s a good barometer for you to say, “Okay, is it likely that I’m going to rank for this, or is it unlikely because I’ve never done that before?” So those are some criteria to look at and prioritizing, “Well, how confident am I that I can do that?”

A good example for that would be, when I was working at WordStream, we used to build links with infographics when infographics weren’t spammy.

Nik Ranger:
Yeah, same here.

Victor Pan:
I know, right? Well, the graphics aren’t spammy on Pinterest now, but whatever, that’s another story. Yeah, COVID Pinterest, that’s another—oh, sorry, I’m totally going off track here.

Nik Ranger:
Yeah, we’ve been in the game too long, Vic.

Victor Pan:
There’s a whole other part about, or the parasite SEO, barnacle SEO on Pinterest—that’s another story altogether. And again, getting traffic on a different platform, that’s another story altogether. But a lot of things to do on Pinterest for sure. Medium.com, man, list goes on. But again, sorry, going off track. But to go back to your question, like, you get a sense of what that batting average is, and sometimes you do something totally in left field. So in our case for WordStream, it was, we knew that Gangnam Style was going to surpass Justin Bieber in YouTube video views, and we were just waiting for that counter to go out. Then we had an infographic on that, and our thinking was, well, we’ll target like viral video marketing or something internet related, because we figured if they were in the inner market marketing space, then they could think about, you know, PPC solutions back at WordStream. All the links we got were from Hollywood, because, you know, it’s Justin Bieber versus Korean pop star, Psy, right? All the links were in the wrong place, all the anchor text was all totally different, we’d never rank for viral marketing whatsoever, we don’t have anything related to that. We had a lot of backlinks, but they’re all in the wrong terms—you won’t rank for that. So again, it’s like, you kind of have to think about the history, the context, and if you have that background—and again, if you’re really serious about SEO, having SEO on your team to figure this out—they’re going to cut down all these trial and error things that you run into, like, “Hey, getting a lot of links from these really, you know, irrelevant places isn’t really going to cut it,” versus, “Oh, this is a non-competing competitor, we got a link from them, that’s really awesome,” or, “Hey, here’s a link from a competitor in a different space, but they’re okay with doing that because they don’t care about these keywords,” right? So again, it really matters for you to figure out, you know, what does that landscape look like, what are the sites in that landscape, because they’re the sites that matter for that topic.

Nik Ranger:
So I think, sorry if I can just jump in there, just because I have a lot of thoughts about this one. Like, for anyone watching, if you’re having a look at your blogs at large and you’re thinking, “What do I do here? Like, I’m kind of burned out with writing new blogs all the time,” have a look at the blogs that you’ve already done. If there’s a really great opportunity for something that could be like a year-on-year analysis, have a look at the SERP—what are the kinds of results that populate in this SERP? If there’s really great wrap-up lists that say, like, “Here are the top however many in 2020, 2021,” and it’s kind of going like that cyclical, that’s a really great organic way of knowing that Google is always looking for some refreshed, updated content, because that’s what the search intent is telling you—that that’s what they’re looking for. So a really great one with, say, the furniture industry—designs, trends, and things like that, that’s cyclical kind of content, that’s a really great one to go through and be like, “You know what, I will be an author, I will be quite authoritative in this space, I do have a lot of opinions about this, I’m in the industry, I’m talking to everyone at large, it’s a great opportunity for you guys to go through and put some opinions out there.” It’s a really great conversation within your networks, in your industry, to say, “You know what, we anticipate this is what’s going to be coming up, because you’ve got these lights that are going to be launching, you’ve got this range of sofa that’s going to be launching.” So as a whole, I think this is what here in Australia, this is what the market looks like right now and we want users to know that, so here’s a really great piece—create some really great backlink opportunities, potentially.

Peter Mead:
Yep, sorry, Nik.

Nik Ranger:
No, that’s fine.

Peter Mead:
I mean, it makes a lot of sense. I mean, we’re talking about content here, and perhaps I can segue your question over to Victor as well, because lots of what you talked about was perhaps—I mean, I love the idea that you’re coming from the lazy point of view. Well, let’s say, when I say lazy, I mean we really don’t have the time and the resources to optimize all the things, you know, it’s just kind of crazy, right? So you have to be a bit lazy. So a lot of what you talked about was pruning old content, and I’m sort of wondering about, you know, how does that work, especially when you’ve got things like your topical clusters and maybe you’ve got an internal link structure happening already, or maybe you just haven’t got any of that stuff. Is it, do you gravitate towards the side of pruning rather than optimizing?

Victor Pan:
So that’s a great question, and you would ask that question if you hadn’t done a TAM analysis. The reason why you would ask that question without having analysis would be: you should only have a piece of content if it covers a search term, right? If it doesn’t cover a search term, it’s gone. If it doesn’t have traffic and it doesn’t have backlinks and it doesn’t cover that search term, it’s gone. If it covers a search term, doesn’t have backlinks—it can’t be gone, or you could rewrite it, right? Maybe you just wrote a really bad, you added the year in the URL, which is a rookie’s mistake because it’s going to be outdated the next year, right? So that’s a good reason for you to get rid of that. But again, the reason why you would map out the market is so that you can then map it to the pages that you want to create, and then what are your plans for how to address that topic that makes sense for your business, that you feel like you have a fighting chance to win. So if you don’t have that, I mean, again, you’re just prioritizing things, right, and you’re shifting things around, and you’re going to learn more about your business going through this exercise of mapping things out and what you feel like you can rank for, because you’re going to have experience going like, “I tried that, it didn’t work. Oh, I need to put that down lower on that list.”

Peter Mead:
That makes so much sense. That’s, what a great framework for doing that. So we’re actually out of time, and so I just want to say thank you so much. But perhaps I’ll start with Nik. What’s your best channel just for people to follow you, to connect with you? What is it, Twitter? What’s your best channel, Nik?

Nik Ranger:
Yeah, so you can find me on Twitter at Nik Ranger SEO. I’m there most of the time if I’m not knee-deep in site migrations, or I’m on LinkedIn, on Nik Ranger as well. Or you can find me at Studio Hawk forward slash team for staff or team—I can’t remember—but I’m there on Studio Hawk and you can reach out to me directly there as well.

Peter Mead:
Terrific, thanks so much for co-hosting. So Victor, we really appreciate all your insights and your knowledge and your experience. That framework, I think, is really a great way for people to start considering how they can change up their approach. Thank you so much. What’s your best channel for people to follow you on?

Victor Pan:
Yeah, I would say don’t follow me. Follow—I have really talented co-workers like Asia Frost, Deja Vu—Twitter, you can probably find her on LinkedIn as well. There’s also Braden Becker, I’ve given a shout-out for him a few times, I think it’s @BradenBecker. And then also Alex Burkett, I think it’s just @iamalexburkett. Again, all Twitter handles, because apparently that’s where all the search-oriented folks hang out on, is on Twitter.

Peter Mead:
Yeah, it’s so generous of you to mention all those, all your co-workers as well. So again, thank you so much, enjoy the rest of your day, your evening, and we’ll see you next time.

Nik Ranger:
Bye, see you next time.

Victor Pan:
Thanks so much, guys.