Swipe Files - 📂 Zapier's legendary SEO playbook

Today's newsletter is proudly supported by 42/Agency 🙌

When you're in scale-up mode and you have KPIs to hit... the pressure is on to deliver demos and signups. And it's a lot to handle: multi-channel strategy, remarketing, landing pages, email sequences, revenue ops, conversion rate optimization.

42/Agency, founded by my friend Kamil Rextin, has worked with companies like Sprout Social, Klue, Qwilr, Uptick, Onfleet, and many more to help them with all things demand generation. They're always my top agency recommendation for specializing in SaaS demand gen. Go read some spicy takes on freemium, "inbound marketing", and category creation and then schedule a free consultation.


Today's newsletter is by my friend and SaaS content marketer Emil Shour.

Emil does content marketing for SaaS companies with his company Catalyst Content. He's previously worked for companies like Chili Piper and Roofstock.

And for the Swipe Files audience only, he's dropping some knowledge on programmatic SEO.


Zapier’s SEO playbook is the stuff of legends.

If you're not familiar, they brilliantly came up with a strategy to launch thousands of pages targeting searches for "connect [x tool] with [y tool]" - which is exactly what they do. On each of these pages, they show you how their product can help you easily connect your tools. They also include CTA’s to sign up and automatically create that integration, with recommendations on popular Zaps that people use between those specific tools.

As you can imagine, the number of variations of people searching for how to connect various tools is endless, making this strategy a huge growth driver for their business.

I was praying I’d one day get to use a similar strategy for a client, but nothing really presented itself… until recently.

I took on a new client at the beginning of 2021 and we decided to take a page right out of Zapier’s playbook to drive traffic and leads from their blog. These posts now bring in about 25% of all the leads they get from their blog (and they’re leads that actually convert to customers).

Here's what we did:

Their customers use their product along with other editing tools as part of their workflows. These editing tools are powerful and need a platform designed to handle working with them, but most people don't know my client's product even exists.

What they are aware of is another tool that you very likely know and have used, but is not made to work with powerful editing tools at all.

So we piggybacked off their brand. We found a bunch of keywords along the lines of:

"how to [desired action] with [powerful editing tool] using [well-known tool]"

And we showed people some workarounds to make it kind of work, but we also showed them a much better solution (i.e. my client's product).

Even though most of these keywords don't have any search volume according to the keyword research tools, we had a gut feeling that there was traffic there to win. So we started with a handful of these posts, saw they were working, and kept going through our list.

I just wish this campaign was as scalable as Zapier's! We exhausted everything possible for this client after ~20 posts. However, we’re testing something similar with a new keyword variation and are seeing some good early results.

My takeaways:

1) Grab inspiration from other successful SEO campaigns. This is one of my favorite things about connecting with other smart SEO's (or being on private newsletters like this 😁 ). Some of the best strategies/campaigns aren't written about in blogs or talked about on podcasts.

2) If you have an idea for a scalable campaign ,even a smaller one like this, test it on a smaller scale to get the data you need before putting resources behind blowing it out.

3) If people don't know about your category yet or the niche you serve, see if you can piggyback off the search traffic for the bigger players in your space. This same principle works well for versus and alternatives posts too, which are typically high converters.

—Emil


Thanks again to Emil for sharing his knowledge on SEO.

What did you think?

—Corey

p.s. did you see that I launched my new course, Marketing Like A Media Company? Would love for you to check it out →

Thanks again to our featured sponsors:

  1. Agorapulse: “The Zappos of social media management platforms” helps you plan, schedule, and report on your social presence.
  2. Ahrefs: Ahrefs Webmaster Tools is a free SEO toolset to help you build backlinks, improve your site, and rank for keywords.
  3. The Juice: “Spotify for marketing & sales content” to discover blogs, podcasts, and videos to help you grow your business.
  4. 42/Agency: My #1 recommended demand generation agency for SaaS to help you drive demos and signups.
  5. Supermetrics: Get all your marketing data into your reporting tool of choice. Push data from 70+ integrations into Google Data Studio, Sheets, and more.

0 of 5
You're just 5 referrals away from unlocking 50% Off
Next Reward
50% Off
Share with 5 friends and become a Swipe Files member for just $150 (normally $299) or get 50% off your next year if you're already a member.
Unlocked Rewards
50% Off
Free Year
Free for Life

Older messages

📂 How this company went from $0 to $54k MRR on launch week

Tuesday, July 12, 2022

​ ​ ​ Today's newsletter is proudly supported by The Juice 🙌 ​ You're gonna love this... The Juice is essentially Spotify for marketing & sales content. If you're anything like me and

📂 The big & scary behavior-based email

Saturday, July 9, 2022

​ ​ ​ Today's newsletter is proudly supported by Agorapulse 🙌 ​ You can tell a lot about a company based on its customer support practices. Zappos is famous for going to extremes for its customers,

📂 How Teachable generated $10M ARR from online events

Wednesday, July 6, 2022

​ ​ ​ Today's newsletter is proudly supported by Ahrefs 🙌 ​ Ever since going through Blogging For Business, I've been a massive fan. In fact, they're one of the companies I feature in

📂 Cabal NYC digital billboard ads

Sunday, July 3, 2022

​ ​ ​ Today's newsletter is proudly supported by Supermetrics 🙌 ​ What if I told you there was a way to get back days of work every month? Robust reporting requires an insane amount of integrations

📂 3x ARPU without decreasing conversions

Thursday, June 30, 2022

​ ​ ​ Today's newsletter is proudly supported by 42/Agency 🙌 ​ ​ When you're in scale-up mode and you have KPIs to hit... the pressure is on to deliver demos and signups. And it's a lot to

You Might Also Like

Inside Grindr's plan to squeeze its users

Friday, March 29, 2024

The company's bet on AI boyfriends and other paywalled features is making some employees nervous Platformer Platformer Inside Grindr's plan to squeeze its users By Zoë Schiffer • 28 Mar 2024

Inside Grindr's plan to squeeze its users

Friday, March 29, 2024

The company's bet on AI boyfriends and other paywalled features is making some employees nervous Platformer Platformer Inside Grindr's plan to squeeze its users By Zoë Schiffer • 28 Mar 2024

SaaSHub Weekly - Mar 28

Thursday, March 28, 2024

SaaSHub Weekly - Mar 28 Featured and useful products Loach logo Loach Say goodbye to unachieved OKRs with Loach, an OKR management solution that empowers your team to seamlessly align their daily work

84 new Shopify apps for you 🌟

Thursday, March 28, 2024

New Shopify apps hand-picked for you 🙌 Week 12 Mar 18, 2024 - Mar 25, 2024 New Shopify apps hand-picked for you 🙌 What's New at Shopify? 🌱 New login requirements for the Order Status Page Changed ⸱

We've Been Tinkering

Thursday, March 28, 2024

Join Our Beta! ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏

AMA with Chiedo John, Director of Growth @ GitHub

Thursday, March 28, 2024

Live on Wednesday, April 3rd, starting at 9 AM PST͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌

red hot startup intel

Thursday, March 28, 2024

FULL SWOT analysis on Ramp, Databricks, Cohere, Devoted Health, and Coalition inside Scouting Reports on 🔥 Startups Download Now Hi there, Psst. Want competitive intel on the top 5 industry leading

The Ultimate Amazon Guide: Strategies For Sellers In 2024

Thursday, March 28, 2024

Learn from Melisa Vong for FREE in the Start Your Ecommerce Business Summit ! Another day, another exciting opportunity to introduce you to one of our 20+ ecomm trailblazers in the Start Your Ecommerce

[SaaS Club] Overcoming Early Struggles to Bootstrap to $22M ARR

Thursday, March 28, 2024

Hey Reader Let's connect on LinkedIn! Follow me to stay in touch! Here's a quick round up of what's been going on at SaaS Club: 🎧 Podcast Hubstaff: Overcoming Early Struggles to Bootstrap

The ultimate 9-5 escape plan

Thursday, March 28, 2024

This is from THIS episode - Spotify - iTunes Reid Hoffman (founder of LinkedIn) once said “Entrepreneurship is like jumping off a cliff and building a parachute as you go down.” 😅🪂 I don't know