SEO Basics for Startups with Bojan Maric

Hi everyone, hopefully everyone can hear me. We had a little bit of technical glitches. My name is Ehan Isaacs, I'm the head of global growth for the Founder Institute. Thank you so much for taking the time on this Monday to join us. Let us know in the chat where you're coming in from. I see Colombia, US, I see from all sorts of this, from all over the world. Awesome, awesome, awesome. I hope you're excited. Today we have an amazing session planned with Mr. Boyan Maric. For those who don't know, Boyan is very, very important individual in the SEO and the website space. Let's bring up Boyan onto the stage whenever we can. But super excited, he's prepared an amazing session for everyone today. We have about 186 people online right now. I know we had about 500 plus register. So let's get Bojan. Hey guys, how's it going? We have 190 people that have logged in just to see you. So your name does have some, does have some reputation.

20 or 30 more and it's going to be a record for me of an audience size.

So okay, well hopefully we break that record. Honestly everyone, Bojan's a legend. If you don't follow him on LinkedIn, follow him on social Twitter, Facebook. He's got a lot of great nuggets he wants to share. You know, I'm going to shut up now. I mean, I'm really going to put it to Bojan to introduce himself so he can take it from there. So Bojan, please take it away. I will jump back on to ask more questions. Just some housekeeping items, I guess, two housekeeping items. One, you will see a Q&A button. If you have questions for Bojan, please use that. We'll try to address it in this talk. And when we wrap up this talk, you will see these virtual tables. Bojan will have one. Hopefully you can get some chance to ask him some one-on-one question, but there'll be other tables there for networking purposes. You can do it on— we create different categories, so, and there's also general networking tables for you to utilize. So I'm gonna put myself on mute. Bojan, please take it away. And really, really looking forward to having this talk with you all.

Thank you so much, guys. I want to jump in right away. Thank you for joining. Today I'm going to be talking about how to grow your SEO channel to be a number one acquisition channel for your startup. For your company, maybe for your client if you're working in the service industry. I'll have this talk kind of separated in 3 distinct, in 3 parts, let's say. I'll be talking about a little bit of introduction onto how do we approach Google and how do we approach acquiring audiences through organic search. Then I'll move to talking about kind of the state of content publishing. And finally, I'll dive into the playbook that you guys can start using right away. Okay, let's jump into it by going a step back. My name is Buan, I'm the co-founder of Workello. We are a pre-hire assessment platform that enables companies to build and scale their content and marketing teams by using smart automations, We're used by startups, publishers, affiliate marketers, agencies, and some big companies that we're going to reveal later in the year. And the most important thing is everything we talk about and do is accessible widely to be used by founders who didn't have any experience in growing their team or growing SEO as their acquisition channel, which is exactly what we're gonna talk about today. A little bit about my team. Back in 2019, we scaled our content team from 1 to 45 writers. Oh yes.

Sorry, sorry, Bojan, we can't see your screen, so please make sure you just share your screen.

Sorry about that, guys. Give me 1 second. I did not do the most important thing. Are we there?

On that note, Yes, we can see it. But on that note, we are at 241 people, 243 people.

So I think we broke the record.

Awesome, awesome, awesome, awesome.

Thanks. Oh, thank you so much, guys. Thank you for this. Sorry, guys. So yeah, a little bit of background about my team and why we are competent on talking about all of this is because we did it for ourselves and then for multiple agency clients or customers of, and customers of Workello. In 18 months, we scaled our content team from 1 to 45 writers and editors. In 2021, we published 8,000 pages of content, which drove 200,000 keywords to page 1 of Google, which resulted in 15 million organic visitors without building any new backlinks or doing anything technical, highly complex technical SEO. Here's some numbers if we go back a little bit more. This is us on the day today. That number of organic visitors grow to over 30 million. There's 4,500 SEOs and marketers using our tools, and we've now published over 13,000 pages of content across, I believe, 9 projects. We're kicking off some more in Q1, and our internal projects, which is Workello, I'll be using the content of Workello to give you examples. So what are we going to talk about today? We're gonna talk about what content quality means because there's a lot of discrepancies out there. I'll share my approach and I would be happy to hear different opinions and contrary and why not. I'm going to talk about content velocity and approach that my team uses to facilitate these results that we'll be talking about today. And finally, I'll share the entire content ops playbook. So everything that you need to grow your team and then grow your traffic and consequentially conversions for your company. This playbook is loaded. I'll try to fly through all of this as fast as I can so I can go through your questions, but rest assured that every aspect of this playbook has some content behind it that's free and accessible for everyone who wants to learn more. All right, content quality. So what the hell is going on right now? Maybe some of you are aware of this, maybe some of you are not. I'm happy to hear that later in the Q&A. There's a running joke in the SEO community that there's been more Google updates in this year than has been in total. And that has resulted in a lot of website properties and webmasters getting headaches on losing their traffic or some of them gaining. I wanna draw your attention to December 5th of now, this last year when Google rolled out the helpful content update. One of the things they said there in the documentation is that helpful content is that, that provides additional value and is created for users and not machines. That's not really anything new to come from Google, but ever since this algo update rolled out, and to kind of give you a sense of how that works, it usually takes 2 weeks for an algo update to roll out, but we see tremors on traffic graphs for weeks to come. And another tremor is happening as we speak at the moment. We've seen across a lot of our projects and our friends and peers that we talk to, some movement in the search engine result pages. I'm happy to say that for us, that meant going up in traffic, fortunately or unfortunately, SEO is a zero-sum game. Someone needs to lose a position for someone else to gain it. I'm talking about the helpful content update and about another thing that's very, very relevant today, such as the use of AI tools or programmatic SEO to publish a lot of pages, just to juxtapose what scaling content and producing a lot of pages means in our view. But before that, let me talk briefly about how Google works. Again, there is according to some hundreds of ranking factors that go into ranking a page. I will absolutely not be discussing that today or maybe even ever in my career. I'll show you how myself and my team approach, how we view a relationship with Google, so to speak. So Google's goal is to show the highest quality, most relevant search results for any given keyword. And it's because Google generates $100 billion per year from AdWords. That means that 1% loss in market share represents over $1 billion in high-margin revenue and potentially further erosion of the market share and revenue for Google. So there is a fiduciary duty to maintain its reputation as the best search engine and show the best possible results. What is important here is what, you know, I've been asking myself my entire career, and you're probably asking yourself right now, how do I win to win from this? Well, there is a simple answer. You probably hear it a lot everywhere. I will back it today with actionable data and tips, and that is providing high-quality piece of content for any given search intent. Mind you, I will sometimes say for any given keyword, search intent is more precise in this case because ideally we want to target multiple keywords with one single page I'll talk about that later on as well. And second thing that you need to do to win is to do this at scale, produce high-quality content and do it at scale. So let me define content quality. It needs to meet the search intent of someone who's trying to find you on search engines, namely Google. It means providing additional value. So This is answering a question of how can I serve content quality that has everything that page 1 results have, but I can actually add some new knowledge. And finally, quality content in our eyes is the content that converts. I use a lot of metrics during this presentation that revolve solely on traffic. Every project we did either for ourselves or someone else, has always converted an audience into a customer, into a very significant percentage. And for us, traffic without conversion does not equal quality content. How do I know this? Well, in my career prior to this last 3 years, and also together in the last 3 years with my team, we never saw traffic drop after a Google update. Coming back to that helpful content update, or what quality means, this means that we may have lost traffic or positions for certain pages out of those 12,000 that we created, but on a project level, we've never seen a drop in traffic and that for me is a significant kind of indicator of growth and the quality of the content we produce. This is one of our most successful case studies. We grew this startup from 0 to 1.5 million organic visitors per month. Virtually, this is even more visitors because this is an approximation from Ahrefs within a span of 2 years. And here's that third aspect of quality content. This was not vanity traffic. This traffic converts into into users, it converts into signups, and Do Not Pay ended up raising at a valuation of $210 million with a backing from Andreessen Horowitz. So this is why we strongly believe that the best SEO campaigns are content-driven primarily. And here are some other case studies. I'll be releasing 4 more this year, but here are some of from last couple of years. This is logicinbound.com, grew from 0 to 100,000 visitors per month. DoggyPedia, our internal project, we sold it to a competitor in space. Campusreal.org, 166,000, and AnyLeads, which is a B2B SaaS that grew to 50,000. Those who are in the B2B space know that these are always conservative search numbers because they are approximations from third-party tools. And in virtuality, this meant, this means much more traffic. All of these campaigns were successful not because of these numbers alone, but because of the conversion rates they provided for their respective owners. And yes, you see here, all of this happened within a span of a year, and I'm going to be detailing that year for you guys on this presentation and the playbook. But before that, Let's talk about our approach. It's called content velocity. And it's actually entered the mainstream of SEO industry in 2019 when our agency Content Distribution released the case studies that I've mentioned. You can read all of them separately on our websites. I will share that with you guys through the FI team. But it basically refers to high volume of, page publishing on your website. And the content includes but is not limited to non-programmatic pages. So I'm talking here about long-form content, not something that you can publish in 2 clicks. So evergreen informational articles, various types of landing pages, blog posts, and guides that drive organic traffic acquisition, which is crucial. And here I'm not talking about branded search. So Yes, the mission of SEO is to be a brand campaign as well and to have your brand appear in the search more, but here we're talking about acquiring audiences through non-branded search for people searching for a job to be done or a problem where your product or service becomes the solution. It's quite simple really, there's behind that name of Content Velocity, more content simply means more traffic. So if you look at the left side of this table, you'll see some of the most successful SEO campaigns in the last couple of years. You'll see our campaign donutpay.com on the second row here, not updated here as you can see is 1 million. So basically all of the leaders in their respective spaces have published a lot of pages to achieve to achieve that traffic growth. You'll see some famous brands at the bottom, NerdWallet and Wirecutter, going over 5 or 10 or 14 million organic visitors per month. Now, on the right side of this table, you can see what is the amount of time that needs to pass for you to surpass your competitor. Let's look at FreshBooks. They have, again, this is a little bit of older data. They've grown since, but for 900,000 organic visitors per month projected in Ahrefs, they needed to publish 2,400 pages, which goes, if you break that down to traffic per page per month, it's going to be around 400. That means that if you're competing with FreshBooks, you need to publish 200 pages per month in order to catch up with them. So to catch up with pages, not traffic, that comes a bit later, but it comes significantly faster if you publish faster. To do it in a year, you need to publish 200 pages per month. You'll need 2 years to catch up with them if you publish 100 pages per month, which is kind of exactly what I'm going to talk about here, how you can achieve this type of content production velocity. To compete with these big guys such as NerdWallet, you know, it might be easier for NerdWallet. They have 130 writers on their staff and various type of engagement with them. And of course, that results in this huge number of pages, which is 17K. All right, let's now narrow this down into just one single niche. I'll use the pet space because this was the first kind of successful case study, super sentimental for us. On position 11 on this table, you'll see dogipedia.org. You'll see that our domain rating, I won't go into what does that mean and whether I find it really relevant, is the lowest compared to all of the leaders in this space. One other thing that you'll see in column A is the traffic per page per month. Something we call page efficiency is traffic, it's just traffic divided, total traffic divided by the number of pages. Something that we found interesting, and I'm showing you just the pet niche here, but we find that this holds true in nearly all niches is that, and if you kind of remember our different projects here, you'll see this band of, except for Wirecutter, which is a huge brand, there's this band of traffic per page per month that always kind of falls into somewhere around 300, to 800 visitors per page per month. So look at the number of pages that Dogipedia has published. With 200 pages, which we did in 6 months, so it's roughly 35 to 40 pages per month. After we did that in 6 months, on month 13, we reached 115,000 visitors per month. If you look at our page efficiency, it's right up there with dogtime.com, who's the leader in the space. They needed to publish 5,000 pages to achieve 3.3 million. So we are on the right track there, right? We did an exit with Dogipedia, sold to a competitor in the space. But what we're doing for other internal projects such as Workello is absolutely growing to those, those huge numbers which go into millions. And when you think about it, it really makes sense. It's 2023, everyone can create a website with 20 articles. And it's really hard to call a website authoritative if it only has 30 pages of content. In order to win, you need to be everywhere where your audience that, and your potential customers as a smaller kind of group within that audience are searching. And you need to do that by covering all of the ways people search for problems that your product or service has an answer to. Here's some good news. You really don't need a million pages of content to win. You don't need to be NerdWallet to meet your financial goals. Here I go, change from millions to thousands. Note to self, do not change presentation 10 minutes before. 10 minutes before start, but it's a really important point. You don't need thousands or millions of pages. You can turn SEO into your number one acquisition channel like we did for all of our clients and doing for our customers within Workello by publishing a couple of hundred, hundred of pages of content. And that's something that you can do by following this playbook. Just checking the time, I think I'm good. All right, here's our entire playbook. I have a lot of written content and video content to share with you guys that goes deeper into each one of these segments, but it's important for me to show you this entire playbook as its whole here. I'm going to talk about what the hell are you getting yourself into if you decide to go down the route of making SEO your number one acquisition channel, which can be the most successful one, especially in the times that are coming, talking about the economic climate and recession. And I'm going to talk about how— after that, I'm going to tell you what is the software stack we use, a list of tools that you can have tomorrow I'm going to talk about a really important aspect of getting into content velocity and publishing a lot of content so that you keep that level of quality high, and that's knowledge transfer as we do it. I'm going to talk about hiring writers, but more importantly, growing your team. We, every single project manager, editor today, our head of operations today, our head of growth, and editor-in-chief. These managers in our company have all been writers within our team and then grew together with us to those positions. So I'm going to be talking about how it's important to hire those first, to get those first hires, to get this production started. I'm going to talk about the importance of delegating editing and QA of content ASAP. That's something that founders myself guilty included, cling on for a very long time, but without delegating, there's no growth. And then finally, I'm gonna tell you how you can remove SEOs from the process. I'm going to use, I'm probably going to cover this in the next 15 minutes, these 5 points, but then I'm gonna spend 15 minutes on actionable stuff when we talk about SEO processes here at the end. Let's go. What are you getting yourself into? All right, you are going to need to build a team to hit your goals. There's no way to do that even if that team is 3 people, which we're going to talk about. I would love to hear your questions. I'll share everything that we have. You know, what's the best kind of ratio of editor to writer? You know, what can I do with 2, 3 writers and 1 editor? Is it worth it to start? Spoiler alert, totally yes, but you need that team. People are harder to manage than 301 redirects, and that's something we've learned along the way as well. So if you nail having a team producing your content, it's gonna be much easier to handle those technical issues later on. You are going to need to spend at least $2,000 per month on content if you want to initiate content velocity. And you can expect that 5 to 10% of that content cost will go on software. I'm going to talk about it in a minute. And you absolutely have to, I know I'm going to bore you to death, but you absolutely have to create quality content. There's no cutting corners, but that's what this playbook is all about. So we'll jump right into it. Number 2, optimizing your content ops software stack. It's actually super simple. And I want to show you our own content stack. It's been this stack even when our company was just my two co-founders starting the agency and the roots of Workello. It was just the two of them and one of them was writing. So this is the stack that they use. I've put in the cost here on the right side, so you kind of get a sense of, uh, sense of what you're going to need to use. But an important thing here is that this, uh, all these tools are available for free, uh, with their limited capabilities that are very much enough for you in the first 3 months to kind of R&D everything. I won't go deep into details unless someone has questions later, but we use Zoom, Geekbot, and Slack for all of our communication. A lot of async standups, a lot of chitchat between teams. It's really important when a founder is managing only alone all of these team members. We use Airtable to basically manage everything from the content calendar itself to payroll. And then we glue everything together with Zapier. And we've, a couple of years ago, we transferred our knowledge base from Google Docs into Slite. It just moves faster. It's super nice, super easy to share documents with your team in live. Finally, I wanna say that this is the stack that we have used. Even at our highest production rates, which were happening in late 2021, and that is publishing 600 pages per month. I believe we're now down to 200, 250 per month, but everything runs smoothly. Finally, position number 1 is Workello that helps you grow your team. Can always ping me to know more about that. Let's talk about knowledge transfer, number 3. None of this will work if you don't have a unified place with enablement documentation. And it sounds like fancy, complicated words, documentation, this or that, everything is documentation. Everything that I've told you today is something that I've done as a task and then written down as a very non-solid draft of a stream of consciousness, which then either me or my team later on converted into a document that can be used again. But when you're starting an SEO project, there's no way that you can progress if you don't have everything written down. What I'm here to tell you is that you can set up the basis of your documentation for your SEO campaign, let's envision together those 200 pages. Let's say that a total of 200 pages is something that all of us will strive for with this playbook in as low as 7 days with this method. Let me make it simple. You basically need to write down all of the questions you can think of organized by type or topic. And then you need to send those questions to project stakeholders and schedule a knowledge transfer meeting. We've gone through this with, I think, 15 of our big brand clients. This is where we learned all of this. But what I can tell you is that there's so much value in doing this in-house if you're doing a campaign for yourself. So gather your co-founders, gather your team members. If you're doing this alone, you need to do it as well still. Write down a questionnaire and then write down everything that you know. If this is a dialogue, record that meeting and then create written documentation that covers everything that was discussed. Let's make it simple. I'll show you examples, but before that, I want you to remember two things. Unless you document everything that needs to happen in this campaign, you cannot hold your team accountable to it. Only with documentation can there be clear expectations and clear outcomes for everyone who participates in the production process because creating content is creating a lot of liability and there's no way without documenting this. And it starts with a couple of simple documents, maybe 30 pages of internal processes. You also need to update this documentation as new requirements are added and as your campaign grows, but that becomes so much easier later on. All right. I swear this is what we used for our small internal projects, what we used to grow Rokelo, and what we use to drive great outcomes for VC-backed startups who have been our clients in the past years. This is the boilerplate of a template that we use to create documentation. You start by jotting down everything about the industry that you're in. Where does your product or service fit? Why do your customers choose? Why would they choose you over your competitors? Which means you have to have a competitor's list and kind of research them as well. What is your strong opinion in that industry? How do customers purchase this kind of product that you're offering? What are their evaluation criteria? How do they search for things? This is something you know best. You know what's the tone of voice for your potential customer. You need to write all of that down. Then finally, you need to find the best communities of your industry and join them. Facebook groups, there's, there's, people to follow on LinkedIn. There's Reddit, there's subreddits that you need to be a part of and follow everything. And then you need to find the best and most authoritative resources where you can learn more. There are leaders in the space who have written extensively about your industry. You need to gather all of that. And then finally, you have to have a basic set of content articles that are written ideally by you or someone else that everyone in your team needs to read. That's called a top leadership article. I am actually going to share my TL with you guys at the end of this, which is about the playbook of how to publish 100 pages per month. That's absolutely essential. If you take time to do this at the beginning of your of your SEO journey, there's nothing, there's no way you won't succeed. All right, hiring writers. I'm always open to a lot of questions here. We have so much, so much, so much to say. We've gone through, our customers have gone through 30,000 candidates now and are hiring for all of the roles for their content team. I'll just kind of let you know about, the things that are the biggest hardships and some of the things that we've solved already so you don't have to deal with them and maybe things that you haven't thought about. 4 distinct segments here. Why content cost is a competitive advantage. Why is it so hard to find a really good content writer to produce all of those pages? How you can automate this entire process And then I'll talk about what our writers and editors look like. I have a couple of slides about what our team looks like. I won't go over that during this presentation, but I will absolutely answer all of your questions about that just for us to save time. Okay, content cost is a competitive advantage. So we've worked with writers from every continent, and I cannot even count the number of countries that we hired from. Here is a table that I've approximated from sources in 2021, I believe, maybe a part of 2022, from Indeed and Glassdoor, and kind of rounded up the numbers, um, of, uh, how much would it cost, uh, to hire a writer in different places across the globe, uh, and then if we, uh, kind of, um, Say that this writer who is full-time can produce 200 articles during a year in your, which is an approximation of what our writers produce within a year. They're quite lower a bit. They produce, I think, 15 to 18 articles per month at the moment. We have a very aggressive PTO plan for them. They rest during the month, but this is the number of pages that you can expect from a writer, let's say, during the course of a year. If you divide this average yearly compensation by the number of pages, you'll get a cost per page and you'll get a sense of how much it will cost you to produce to produce that piece of content. And if you wanna go 200 pages, having $450 per page is quite different than paying $120 or $90. Some thoughts from me as someone who started as a writer as well back in the day when Upwork didn't exist and then moved into SEO and then a founder who has been hiring writers for years now. Native English speaker does not equal good writer. Our non-native team are better content writers than most of American writers we worked with. And we had both people from US and Canada on our team. And if your budget is limited, paying someone in a lower cost of living country a great wage is a much better situation than underpaying someone living in the United States, for example, and not having outcomes that both parties are satisfied with. Here are all of the problems that you're gonna— that you're going to encounter, that we encountered. So before we went through 30,000 writing and marketing candidates within Workello with our customers as an agency, we've gone through 3,500 candidates and hired— had 100 people go through our team. Some good ones became department heads, some not so good ones didn't spend more than a week or two in our agency, and that's where we got all of our learnings. And unfortunately, this is what it looks like. 90%, 95% of all of the people are not really qualified to write. You're gonna have poor candidates which are going to submit good portfolios because someone edited that work to make it publishable. And every step of this process is manual and tedious. There's actually 14 discrete steps to bring one person from applying for your job to write a couple of pages of content or 20, not to mention 50, to actually hiring. And then you don't get to evaluate everyone. So these people underperform and you spend too much time editing your content and resources before you terminate and then you rinse and repeat. This is something that Workello solves with our automations. Ping me about that anytime you'd like, but let's move on to our next segment. That's why delegating is so important. If you're watching this presentation, you're responsible for generating revenue for your business. You need to delegate content production and QA as soon as possible so you can focus on high revenue systems. We have found that the best way to do that is to promote within. Here's why. You know, with working with these hundreds of people, we figured out, we've realized the hard way that you cannot fake caring about what you do for 2 to 4 months. And to have a really good editor or content QA or project manager, you need to be able to work for them, with them, with a couple of months. That's why our strong stance to win is that your best writer is going to be your number one candidate for editor and then project manager, etc., etc. And in the beginning, you want to spread your workload to create that editor pipeline. You want to hire more writers to see who is going to be that first editor of yours. Like I mentioned, I'm going to tell you the structure of our team and please ask me questions, but I can tell you right away that a really good setup is having one editor managing two writers in the beginning. And as they get better, which is called a senior writer in our organization, one editor can manage three writers. And now you are at a place where you are producing 40 pages of content per month that are ready to go live. So that's, that's, why this is so important. And yeah, the more writers you work with, the more surface area you'll find a great editor. This is the story of our company. This is the story of our startup. My co-founder Nick met my other co-founder Gordana back when he was a one-person founder. She was his best writer. She then became an editor running a team of 3 people, then a director of operations running a team of 40 people. And then developed a tool to grow teams for other startups, which ended up being Workello. So who you hire next is probably going to be the hardest thing that you do, but the most important one to set you up for success in the next year or two. And now I am gonna show you how, I think we started 30, 3 minutes ago, nice. I wanna show you some actionable stuff and some examples about how you can run this process without having an SEO in-house. This is what our structure looked like, well, last year. Now we have heads of departments and the team has grown a lot. Executive editor is the editor-in-chief. We have, I don't do, director of SEO anymore that much. That's our head of growth. But actually, aside from myself and my co-founder, Nick, no one ever had any SEO knowledge before joining our team. They had access to documentation, which is the playbook that I'm showing you today. There's 3 things that you can do basically once within 1Q and be set forever, or at least in those next year or two to produce a high volume of pages. Number 1, you need to automate your keyword research. And that is something that's quite difficult to do because even today experienced SEOs, myself included, I'm guilty of that, are not ready to delegate. And then you get inconsistent deliverables across keyword research to find the topics that you need to write about. This is time-consuming. Consuming, and it consumes your budget as well. So we found that automating this process is key to doing it. We do that with our tool Cluster AI. It is also free to try, but it's also completely free with Workello. I also have a lot of resources that can show you how to do this process. With as low as spending $30 for probably just 2 or 3 months and have all of the topics that you need, that you need to automate your keyword research. Because guess what? It's going to be your competitive advantage. If I told you that you can have all of the topics that you need for your startup in, 8 hours of work, wouldn't you rather do it that way than having it as an ongoing situation? And that's also content that's free on our YouTube that you can check out how to do that. I actually have a video called 100 Topics in 1 Day. Okay, here's why you shouldn't do it manually. It's gonna be time-consuming. It's gonna be heavy on qualitative analysis. Let's, I don't know which niche to use. Let's use CBD. That's one of our projects. You know, what is the best CBD oil for anxiety issues? How many keywords do I need for something like to write a topic like that? Do I write 3 or 4 pages, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. This is a weeks-long process if you do it manually. So the number 1 thing you need to do is automate your keyword research to set yourself up for success and have a content calendar for an entire year. The entire year. Finally, you won't get trapped into what's a big problem, and that's decision-making driven by intuition. If you just process a lot of data manually with your pair of eyes and your pair of hands under, above a keyboard, you'll find yourself at the end of the process where you need to, you know, take a gut call And I know this because I've done this. I've had success and I was lucky enough to do it successfully, you know, 5 or 6 or 7 years ago when I started. But it would take me and a team of 2 or 3 people to create a content calendar somewhere between 4 or 8 weeks. And we would go on with that process while publishing. So a lot of not data-driven, guesswork was in place for us to be able to produce fast. So instead, you just make an intake sheet. Again, I'll leave you a resource and I won't go deep into that today, but I'll leave content for you guys to read and watch. You make an intake sheet about everything that you want to talk about and everywhere your audience searches. And guess what? You don't have to look far because presumably you made that documentation that we talked about. So you'll know exactly what kind of terms you need to search for. Again, I'll have a step-by-step that's completely free for you guys to do that. Then you can import that into any of the tools that you use for keyword research and export your CSV through Cluster AI to receive a keyword opportunity analysis, which is effectively a list of topics you can start writing about right away. Boom, that's keyword research done. Number 2, to be able to achieve this process in-house is to document everything. We talked about building a knowledge base of everything that you need to kickstart a project. But once you start writing about topics, you'll start to have things that you need to communicate to your writers multiple times and you will put that into documents that they can always reference. And the best thing is your best thing, sorry, the best thing about that is at one point your writers and editors start documenting the process itself. I'll give you a simple example of a knowledge-based article that every production team has. That's, for example, a glossary of terms that's being used. I've personally saved, I don't know, 100, 150 hours of standups and meetings and messages and emails by creating a glossary for a project for personal finance that we were running because everyone could just reference that single document. So that's something that's gonna be specific to your project. Happy to talk about that more if you guys like. But the second thing is writer briefs, and I'm sure you've heard about this. The writers need instructions to write about those topics that you got from keyword research. We've actually realized that it takes a lot of time to write 200 writer briefs in order to create 200 articles. So we thought, what if we just not do that? And what if we just create 1 or 5 briefs for all of those 200 topics because those topics belong in certain clusters and you can actually write 1 brief for 20 or 30 pages of content. We call that a content series template. And I wanna talk to you about that briefly here. I have more info again on our website. So basically it's actually simple. You gather all of the essentials that you need. So the existing documentation, the example that I provide here on the screen that you can see is about, is working with clients, which is actually a bit harder than when you work for yourself and for your own startup. So all of the onboarding documents, details from meeting recaps where you talk about you know, customer personas, where you talk about the product itself, where you talk about features, where your company is going, everything from enablement documentation that I mentioned a few slides ago. And then the approved opportunity analysis that I mentioned when you do keyword research, I can show you an example of that, but basically the opportunity analysis is a list of topics where you have keyword variations grouped under one topic. And any other knowledge transfer documentation that you may have. You then put that into that brief and then you study the project some more, the client, the industry, the competitors, and start browsing their website, but also the competitor content for a given search term. So I said, you know, how to use CBD oil for anxiety, or, you know, how to post a job ad on LinkedIn, I'll look at what the competitors are doing on page 1 and I'll get a broad sense of what kind of instructions that I need to give to my writers. And guess what? I can actually give similar instructions for 20 pieces of content. I don't have to do it for one single topic. And we've done that for over 10,000 pages and it's worked quite well. So gather the essentials, do deep research, and then create evergreen instructions. So what is the minimum number of words? How many images does this article need to have? Give your writers some research tips. If we're talking about LinkedIn, give them some research tips on how to use LinkedIn documentation to find information. Then give instructions on plagiarism and spinning content and all of the metadata instructions and examples. I'll show you a template soon. And then finally, revise. Ask someone in your team to have a look at this brief and to have a look at the 20 topics that this brief covers. Maybe it's your co-founder. In our case, it's usually the client. And then write, have your writer write one article and give you feedback on it. You will learn so much and you can add back to that content series template to the brief because any feedback you get on one article, you can actually apply it on all of the other ones within one category of writing that you do. I know it's super abstract. Examples are coming and I'm going to show you examples through the third, aspect of SEO that will bring you this success, and that's on-page optimization. You need to know the basics of content structure. You need to know how to optimize for keywords using those keyword variations. I'm gonna show you that in an example now. That's all I mentioned before with automating research. And then thirdly, You need to internally link all of your articles. Think about your project all the time that I'm speaking about this and what are the aspects and topics that you could be talking about. Here are the basics. I swear it's this simple. We still use this as a base for any article and then the editor will see if there's something that needs to be changed. Do not reinvent the wheel, be simple, straightforward with the most important on-page elements. So you can see it here, I'm not gonna read through all of them, I'll show you an example of an article. Here's a snippet from the content series template that I mentioned. These are the on-page basics. Give your writer requirements when it comes to number of words, structured data. Yes, I call it structured data. You don't need schema to have basic structured data. Structured data existed in text much prior to computers and internet. It was called a bulleted list or a numbered list, a spreadsheet, and have paragraphs with headings that will actually show the reader what they're expecting and what they can read about. So this is an example of writing requirements. You might ask, how do I know if it's 2,000 words? Well, remember, you have your topic, how to post a job ad on LinkedIn. Go and look at what the competitors on page 1 that Google is serving have done. Don't just count their words, see what's the knowledge that they conveyed. then see what's your additional, what's the additional knowledge that you can provide and then figure out, oh, okay, I think this is doable in 2,000 words. And if it's doable in less, do it in less. Humans and search engines alike do not like fluff. Content that's about job to be done is not about having It's about writing nicely, but it's not about having excessive storytelling. All right, I wanna show you what this looks like on a real example. So here's how our writers do this. I promise there's gonna be an example. This is still abstract, but I wanted to show you our instrument. So the writer receives a content series template that has all of the instructions from you. but then they also receive a Google document that has this tracker of number of tables, lists, internal and external links, and how many words they need to include. This is something that they will fill out after they write the article itself. So, hey, they added 3 tables, they added 6 lists, even though the minimum was 3, they added internal 33 internal links, even though the minimum was 10. I'll show you how internal links are instructed to be done also in the template in a moment. And then the assignment here was 1,600 words. This writer submitted a bit more. This is a list of keyword variations that they need to use. So we provide our writers with a list of keywords that need to be used for one single article. This is blurred out because we have NDAs with our clients. but you can see that there's 60, the 60 keyword variations here. We will never stuff, we will never put in all of the keywords. That's a thing of 2010, please don't do that. You'll see that the writer will use 10 keyword variations, they're highlighted here, but we will still rank for all of these guys. And the reason that they are all grouped together is Well, if I know that I'm targeting all of these keywords with one single article, then I know that I don't need to create a page of content for this random keyword here, right? And that gives you an idea of your content plan and makes you become a person who can actually control your budget instead of willy-nilly publishing 4 pages of content when you actually need one to rank. So that means that in this article, which has close to 800 words, our writer was able to use the keyword 10 times and the rest were not used. Super abstract. Let's have a look at a specific example. Again, guys, I can only show you my own project, which is workello.com. Here's an example of a written article and how our writers do it and how I encourage you guys to do it. Their keyword is how to write a job posting on LinkedIn, right? Super clear intent. This one doesn't have that many variations, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10. So your editor who created a brief only had a look at this topic and then 10 more similar ones. And I am inviting all of you to have a look in this entire category on Riquello that I'm gonna show you, you'll find there's gonna be 6 posts about LinkedIn, not just one, because that's how much we need to cover this topic. And here's how they'll, this writer put in some other LinkedIn articles that they want to link to so they don't forget. That's a bit different. We also have some image optimization. I won't talk about that today. Here's where the article starts. And here's how they implemented keywords. How to write a job post on LinkedIn. That's a great keyword for H1. It's repeated here in the intro seamlessly and without using robot text. Here's another keyword, how to write a job post on LinkedIn. Again, similar to the main one, but a bit different and steps on how to do it, right? Makes sense, answering intent. Great. And then LinkedIn job posting language. What are the standards that are expected? Boom, that's done. Here's another keyword, how to format a job post on LinkedIn. So this is now a big guide on how to write a job posting on LinkedIn, having all of the keyword variations. Here's what the end product looks like on Rokhelo. Look how many internal links you'll see, and external as well. You see niche, best niche job boards. I'm just setting you up for us talking about internal links. One last thing, we're providing everything that our competition is doing. I think I can later on open up, I don't have it prepared, I can open up our Google Search Console. I can show you that this post, even though it was published 30 days ago, is already getting, I think, 200 or 300 visitors in the last 30 days, even though it's super fresh. And we already had 2 signups on our app here. Why? Because remember the additional value? For those of you who have a software product, the additional value is always going to be your product. So search intent, How to write a job posting. If this person is searching for this, that means that they're creating an open role. And that for me, as someone who's driving an SEO campaign, means that they're going to need some sort of a tool to track hiring for any kind of role, which is Workello. So guess what? My additional value content is going to be, hey, here's how you can automate all of this process that I gave you for free. For free with my tool. A lot, a lot of times when you have a software, this is how you choose your topics. The additional value is your product feature, which offers a solution. We've done this for 3 SaaS now, always successfully and always with conversions. All right, let's jump back to The presentation almost done, I'm giving the floor to you guys. The third aspect is internal linking. I wanna run through this really fast because I have separate articles on this. This is the kind of third most integral step of on-page. We've done this quite differently and now share with everyone else to use. We actually plan out all of the linking between pages prior to publishing. That's why you saw that writer write down what are the links that they're going to publish. If you know your content calendar of 200 pages for the next 6 to 12 months and you know the next 20 pages I'm going to write about LinkedIn, why wouldn't I share that with my writers and have them internally link everything during production? We do that. By calling these links mandatory links that they need to put in. And those are the links to the pillar pages and money pages. And we include that into the brief or the content series template. And I'm gonna show you what that looks like on an example of a project that we did for some time ago in the CBD space. So we had a, a series of 50 articles that are about using CBD for anxiety and depression. And we selected 50 articles that we're going to target in that vertical because our client was selling these types of oil and we wanted to grab the attention of that audience who's searching for that solution. And here is the mandatory links that we gave to our writers. And if you look at the topics here, Every page will have a link to a pillar page, which is usually a definition or a pillar informational page in that series. So this is the broadest topic within the series of articles about anxiety or depression. Here's another one. Probably don't have time. I usually do a quiz if someone can tell me what's a money page. I'll do it for you guys this time. It's how to choose CBD oil. So remember what I said when I was showing you the article, you will provide free value with your content, optimizing for keywords for this topic, but your additional value will be your own advice, your own strong opinion on how to choose CBD oil. And guess what? Oh, luckily so, you're actually selling it. This is how you convert your audience into a customer. All right, just to summarize, these are the 3 things that you need before you reach 100 or 200 pages of content. Technical SEO does not become a huge leverage. You don't need to over-optimize your blog. You don't need to have a design that's going to slow everything down. The thing that is going to slow you down the most is starting the content production fast. By month 6, you can have 50 pages of content live at least, and then you can focus on making your blog better. Get the simplest, the simple most, sorry, it's a bit late here. The most simple WordPress theme that's fast and start publishing. All you need to do is get the topics that you want to target, document everything for your writers, and then teach them to optimize on page while writing the way that I've shown you just now through internal links and those basics. All right, quick summary. Really think about what you're getting yourself into. And if you want to go for this crazy ride in the next year, prepare a software stack super fast. Sit down and do knowledge transfer within a week or two. Hire those first people. It's as fast as 3 or 4 weeks with Workello to get your writers in place. Get them, get those, get those people a team leader so you can delegate this process by month 2. And just gather all of the documentation from my playbook on how to optimize Everything for SEO and Start Winning with Content Velocity. These are some of the articles that I've mentioned and tools. I also invite all of you guys to join our Facebook group. There's weekly interviews with leaders in the space. Don't listen just to me, listen to everyone who's someone in SEO. We value all of the opinions and you guys can actually access that knowledge in our Facebook group for free. Also on our YouTube channel. Thank you so much. This is where you can find me. I'm all yours for any kinds of questions. Thanks for bearing with me. This is a bit longer than I expected, but I'll, uh, if we don't get to talk today here, I'll see you on LinkedIn, uh, or, uh, on, on my email. Thank you so much.

Awesome. Thank you so much, Bojan. I just wanted to let you know we went, we got up to like 300+ people.

Oh my God.

Yeah, some folks are just trying to drop off because we're just over the hour. But as promised, you know, we've got a lot of Q&A in the chat. So I don't know how much we'll get through. Let's try to do 5, 6. Tables will be there. Bojan will be there. He said he's promised to be there for a little bit, but Let's try to get through at least 5 of these because I think it's great. Folks, jump into the Q&A, post a question, vote. There's already a bunch already in there, so I'm going to go by the most voted. So the first one is the one that I posed in the start, which is about AI content writing. And there's been other follow-up questions around ChatGPT and a bunch of other things. So like, what are your thoughts on that? You know, everyone's seeing this space blow up? Like, how is this all going to come together?

Okay, so I want to pre— everything I'm going to say after this, I want to preface with this one sentence. I don't think there's anything intrinsically wrong with creating AI content. I think it's an amazing writer enablement tool. It goes for Jasper, it goes for ChatGPT. It goes for CopyAI. I'm mentioning now the ones that I've tried, tried and tested. The tools themselves are not a problem. It's the content that you produce with these tools. There is a correlation between number of pages that people produce and their quality. So I'm not saying everyone is doing this, but I'm just seeing a lot of people doing that. The most important step that's allowed my team to be successful is a really meticulous QA and editing process. So if you use AI to scale and you skip this process and there's no real way for you to understand whether you're just regurgitating everything that anybody else is saying I cannot tell you with my personal professional integrity that this is going to work or not. However, if you use AI to help you be more efficient, help you do research faster, help you do organizational parts of everything that I've been talking about. So I use a content series template because it's more efficient than writing 100 briefs, perhaps you have a way to write 100 briefs with AI and then delegate that to being written. That's a great way of using it. So those are my thoughts. I can also be completely transparent. Our team has not produced one single page of content with AI, not even just segments. What we do have is, a couple of writers and myself testing stuff out on test websites. We haven't published anything and I don't have a clear data set to give you. I know only what I hear from my peers and friends who ask me to review their own website with hundreds and hundreds of pages produced by AI that has not been edited by a human or really not, thought through. One last thing, just to give you a little bit of background when it comes to what I do and my team does. So I've been in SEO for a very long time. I've been successful in a lot of programmatic SEO campaigns where we publish tens of thousands of pages of content through, using some older tools or just to say good old Python, it's been successful. There are pieces of content where you can have an inventory website, where you can have a glossary-like content that you can automate with this type of work. I don't think that that's new. What I can tell you is that even back then when I published 10, I think it was 100,000 pages of content on one website at the most. It had to go through some QA process where we added some additional value, which was original imagery or original datasets. So to kind of summarize, here's what I think AI cannot do as well as your team, especially if you're an industry expert. So I'm talking to people who have software products and these types of startups. You know, I don't think AI can generate your strong opinions and can probably spin it later, but you still need to write them. I don't think AI will be able to produce conclusions out of datasets. Well, not at least creative conclusions. And I don't think that AI can spin out any type of experience that you have in the industry. So those are 3 things. If you use AI, make sure to see how you're going to have new datasets that are not already on the internet. So it means you crunching the data, strong opinions, and then finally some subject matter expertise from people who are experienced if that's not you.

That's a really great response. I think, sorry, just some housekeeping folks. Bojan's presentation will be emailed to everyone. All the links have already been shared in the chat, but we'll also mention it in the follow-up email, so just don't worry about that. The next question, which is by Fanny from Supracool, the founder there, is like, "Where do you put all this new content on the website? I'd like to assume not directly on the homepage, but should we start a blog section for our site? And if they already do have a blog section, What should they do?

Correct, correct. Keep it simple. It's probably a blog section. That's the easiest way to do it. It's great that you kind of organize in your mind a topical map of where certain things are going to belong. Again, I'm not able to show this to you guys for other websites, but let me show an example of kind of my own. I will share my screen for just a brief second. Showing is better than telling. All right, so Workello is an applicant tracking platform, and of course I put a lot of navigation up here, and also I have a lot of videos on how to set up your footers as well, but as you can see, I'll have landing pages and then I'll have also categories. So here's how you can organize it simply. You guys know what Workello is. I need to have job descriptions. So here's a quick organizational view. If I go to any article, by the way, we practice what we preach. We've published over 1,000 pages of content here on Workello. So if you look at my breadcrumbs, This article will be in the content team job description in all of the job description templates that I have on my website. Then I'll do the same for other teams. Then I'll have software reviews and virtual assistant and job boards. That's where you saw that LinkedIn article that I mentioned to you. And you see it's not, design is not even set up yet. Most important thing for me is to publish these 50 pages of content that are about job boards. Keep it simple, create a category page, dump everything there. Once you start receiving traffic, just like me, then you can make this page look nicer. I hope that answers your question.

No, I think that was great. All right, let's move on. So quite a lot of people, they were getting confused on two things. I'll ask them together. So what's a page in this context? Because you've been using that, is that just something specifically, and what's the difference between an editor and your writer? So if you can answer those.

Thank you so much. So I use the word page is because sometimes you're going to write an 800-word blog to answer a simple question, you know, how to, you know, how to change a bike tire on my bike, right? But sometimes you're going to write a really long evergreen article, just like that LinkedIn that I've shown you. But you're also going to create landing pages, which are pages where you want people to sign up for your product. And usually those pages are going to be for really straightforward search intent. So for example, a writer test is a simple intent for my project, like someone is looking to ways to test the writer, so I'll create a landing page for that. But for someone who's, you know, somewhere in the middle of the funnel, they want to hear about how to post a job ad, or they're in the top of the funnel, they need a job description because they're just thinking about hiring someone, you know, I'll create different type of page. So basically, just to keep it simple, I say page because it's not always going to be an article, but in our case and everything that I mentioned here in the presentation, 80% of all of these pages are articles. They're basically content pieces like the one that I've shown you. To answer your second question, an editor is someone who proofreads and contextually edits an article that a writer submits. And I promised you guys that I'll mention what, how is it set up in our team. A writer will get a topic, they will write the first draft, and they will send that draft to their editor. Their editor was the person who already reviewed the 20 or 30 topics that they assigned to their 2 writers. So they already know a lot about the series of content that their team is gonna write about. In the initial kind of situation for people who have their startups, usually founder is, the founder is that person. The founder will actually assign content to writers because the founder knows everything about the industry and the topics, et cetera, et cetera. And that's why I say it's important to delegate that to someone else. So that's an editor. An editor will receive 2 or 3 or 4 articles per day, depending how good they are, from their writers. They will give suggestions on how things can be better, and then the writer will correct everything according to those suggestions. Because of that process, after 20 or 30 pieces of content, that writer will do a much better job because an editor will teach them with each single edit of the new article, how to write this next one. You cannot expect from a writer to have control of the knowledge of everything. They do, after all, have to write that piece of content. So that's the main difference. And like I said, with people who are just learning a new industry, especially if something more complex, we found that we need one writer, sorry, one editor to kind of manage those two writers that are gonna produce, let's say, 30 to 40 pages of content in a month.

Yeah, that's a helpful metric to go by. 30 to 40, have one editor. I'm gonna do one last question just because I wanna make sure everyone gets up to the table, we can get into the tables and then also be cognizant of everyone's time. This is, This is pretty pertinent. So most of our audience here are early-stage founders. They have very scrappy, shoestring marketing budgets. So what's your advice for some people with low domain ratings who are just starting out or in super niche spaces? Like they don't have a full marketing team. They can't go and, you know, maybe follow your guidelines, which are amazing by the way, but they cannot like go and execute those because they don't maybe have the budget or the time or where, where's a good starting point for them to start evaluating and figuring out SEO for their startup, whether it's SaaS, e-commerce, DTC, or whichever? I'm sure there's a variety. Yeah, I would love to get your thoughts on that.

Absolutely. Start with the documentation right away. Imagine that you are, imagine that you don't have any budget constraints, okay? Imagine that, what would you do if, you could pay $1,000 for one page of content, for one article. What would you do if you didn't care? You would probably publish those 200 pages that I mentioned because you're gonna get 100,000 visitors in a year from now that are gonna start converting into users. So that's the most important part. That's where people get stuck. Even if you're alone, the sooner you do everything to prepare for content production and start the content production itself, scrappy as it is, the sooner that countdown to that year where you can hit those significant numbers of visitors on your website that can start generating money for you will happen. So if you leave this call, tomorrow's a Tuesday, you can actually have all of your documentation written by Monday. I've done this numerous times for our clients and customers, sit down, use this template, have everything prepared. The next thing that you need to do is kind of figure out what topics that you need to write about. You also don't need anyone for that. Go check out my videos, learn a little bit about keyword research. It's all free on our YouTube channel and there's a bunch of other people who know that. Create a content calendar. That's something you don't need anyone for. Now you're in a place It hasn't been a month from this talk. Now you're in a place where you have a content calendar of let's say 100 topics and you have the documentation for a writer to start writing. You know, there's, I usually don't talk about this a lot, but Workello customers pay their writers anywhere between $30 and $100 per page of content depending on how complex it is or how much work they can, give them, or maybe those writers are sourced from the communities that actually like writing about these things. We, you know, there's an incredible pool of writers in Eastern Europe, Southeast Asia, South America that are really good and that you can start working with just one and then calculate what is it that you can spend in the next year and then calculate what is the return of this potential that you can have. I think I have another article that I can share with everyone else via email later, but you can actually calculate the return of an investment on an SEO campaign. If you have 200 topics, you have all of the keywords for that topics, you have the volume and everything, you can actually project how many people will visit your website and project a conversion rate. Then you'll know if it makes sense. So yeah, you can start as, that's why I said, I think for this to start and you have a significant result in a year, you should expect to spend $2,000 per month for the next 9 to 12 months. You can have a really good outcome with something like that.

I think that's a great topic for maybe next time. Like, how do you measure the ROI? Yeah, the ROI on SEO. But like, no, Bojan, thank you so much. We have like a lot of questions. I wish I could go through it all. I want to make sure we're cognizant of time. Bojan's committed to 90 minutes. We're close to the 80-minute mark. We're going to end this session. You'll all see a bunch of tables with a bunch of different topics. You can do general networking. Those tables will be open for the next couple hours. Bojan will try to get into one of those if possible to say hi to everyone. But if not, Bojan, thank you so much. We'll share everyone your details. Hopefully they can kind of connect. And then, yeah, everyone, I hope you found this content valuable. Please follow Founder Institute on social. If you're interested in starting an accelerator or if you're an early-stage founder, do check us out. We have over 200 cities that are currently enrolling. More information will be on the follow-up email, but, you know, for right now, let's wrap things up. Bojan, thank you so much, um, and we'll go from there. All right, take care everyone, enjoy the rest of your Monday.

Thank you everyone.