Marketing Examined - 🔍 My SEO Starter Strategy

Hey friend -- Alex here.

This email is going to be a little different.

Unlike the past two emails, where I break down how other companies approach marketing — in today’s edition, I’m going to break down my biggest focus in 2022.

SEO.

And give you an in-depth view of how I plan on utilizing SEO as an acquisition channel for Marketing Examined.

By the way, if you haven’t checked out the new site, then please do me a quick favor, check it out, and let me know what you think.

Now for the fun.

And make sure to click "View Entire Message" at the bottom :)

Before launching Growth Marketing Examined, I felt like Harry Potter searching for a horcrux every time I searched for tactical growth marketing content.

And not only tactical content, but content specific to my problems, plateaus, and questions. Because what I wanted was a library of all-action case studies that helped me maneuver, tackle objectives, and scale.

Because I couldn't find it, I built it.

And if you're searching for that too, then I'm here to tell you that you can unclinch your fists, stop searching, let out a sigh of relief, because I built it for you too.

So, if you'd like to join 200+ founders and marketers who receive clear paths to growth, you can join us here.

Sure, unlike a paid ad, SEO won’t drive results overnight.

It requires time, effort, and patience.

And if that’s the downside, then I’m all for it.

Because the upside of SEO heavily outweighs the downfall.

This quote by Brian Chesky, the founder of Airbnb inspired me to make this a vital aspect of Marketing Examined.

“What the pandemic showed us is that we can take marketing down to zero and still have 95% of the same traffic as the year before.” -Brian Chesky

I. Want. That.

So, if you’re considering ramping up SEO this year, then hopefully these 5 reasons will help steer your decision:

1. You Can Cut The Light Switch
2. Creates A Moat
3. It Compounds
4. Lowers Your CAC
5. Increases CLV

My goal is to drive organic search traffic and convert a percentage of that traffic into email subscribers.

That means quality content.

And a site optimized to convert cold traffic into email subs.

Pretty straightforward, right?

But, here are some examples to illustrate this further.

Neil Patel drives 3.0M visits in organic monthly traffic from search.

Again, let’s say he converts 1.95% of that traffic into email subs every month.

That’s a mind-boggling 58,500 new subscribers every month.

And over the course of a year, that’s 702,000 email subs.

Again, on autopilot.

Search Engine Journal drives 930k visits in organic monthly traffic from search.

Again, converting 1.95% of that traffic into email subs is 18,135 new subs a month.

And over 217,620 subscribers a year.

Starter Story drives 353,000 visits in organic monthly traffic from search.

Now, let’s say they convert 1.95% (this is the average opt-in rate) of that traffic into email subs every month.

That’s 6,8883 new subscribers every month.

Over the course of a year, that’s over 82,000 email subscribers.

On autopilot.

So here’s the thing...it’s 2022.

New year. New site. New me.

Meaning I’m starting from scratch.

I just launched Marketing Examined’s blog roughly 10-12 days ago.

So, I’ve been studying almost every resource possible and talking to just about everyone I can to learn how to approach this.

So, I’m going to break down how I plan on approaching SEO...

To start, I'm using Ahref's Webmaster Tools.

With this, it shows and monitors:

• Marketing Examined's SEO health
• Marketing Examined's Backlinks
• Which keywords bring in traffic

All vital aspects to set me up for success.

To be straightforward, Ahrefs is my best friend right now.

As it’s making my quest into SEO much easier.

And helping me narrow down my decision-making.

So, here are the two ways I’m establishing which content to create:

I’ve been “social blogging” for a little bit now.

For me, that means treating my Twitter account as if it was my blog.

So, I’ve written 60+ Twitter threads centered around growth marketing.

And I did this knowing that eventually, when I launched my blog, I would use these threads as the base for several SEO-optimized articles.

So, how am I doing this?

1. I’m looking at highly-engaged threads I’ve written in the past
2. Researching the keywords
3. Finding the keywords, I could rank for ( <10)
4. Scale the thread into an article
5. Repeat

If you stay up to date with my blog over the next few weeks, you'll see me do this in real-time.

Here’s an example:

This is one of my favorite tricks within Ahrefs to find content worth creating.

And content that you can rank quickly for.

Here’s how to do it:

1. List competing sites
2. Search them within Ahrefs
3. Tap top pages
4. Find the top pages with a <10 RD

Take these articles, establish how to develop a better article, and execute.

These competing articles with <10 RD are low-hanging fruits.

And you don’t have to re-invent the wheel here.

You just need to juice it up.

After determining the content type that I’m going to go after — it’s time to create.

But something that I learned from Pat Walls, is to not spend endless time and effort trying to craft the perfect article.

Instead, create the minimum viable content.

Meaning, just like you’d ship an MVP (minimum viable product) to see if it gains traction, do the same with your content.

And for me, this takes roughly an hour to do.

Here are a few minimum viable pieces of content I’ve shipped in the last 10 days:

This brings me to the test phase.

I’m shipping the piece of content and examining it over the course of 30 days.

If the blog post starts to generate results after 30 days, then I will scale and optimize it.

Meaning I’ll follow this checklist to scale each blog post for long term success:

• Make it longer (more context, more tips)
• Make it richer (more data, more research, more user-cases)
• Make it stickier (more examples, imagery, gifs, videos)

Then I’ll run through this checklist from Ahrefs and make sure I’ve checked all the boxes:

• Include your keyword in the title
• Keep your title tag short
• Use an evergreen URL
• Craft a compelling meta description
• Optimizing images
• Add a table of contents
• Include 'linkable snippets'
• Add schema markup
• Add internal links

And will continue this process for whichever article gains traction.

Now, for the fun...

But getting traffic isn't my only goal.

I want to drive traffic so that I can convert that traffic into email subscribers.

So, how do I plan on doing that?

By taking a page straight from AppSumo’s playbook.

Currently, AppSumo generates 10,000 leads a month organically through SEO and content upgrades.

A content upgrade takes a blog post or article and extends the content with “bonus content”  sent via email.

Example:

And so, after a piece of content goes through the test phase, passes it, and continues into the scale phase it will also now receive a content upgrade.

This creates a growth loop.

AppSumo’s Growth Loop:

And here is how AppSump scales it.

They take their top-performing articles and case studies and add content upgrades to convert their traffic into leads.

Another example:

Lastly, one of the hardest parts.

Generating backlinks to your content.

Again, here’s what I’m doing.

It’s called the Skyscraper Technique.

And here’s how it works:

1. Find a similar piece of content with an ample amount of backlinks
2. Create a better piece of content
3. Reach out to the individuals linking to the OG piece and ask to link to your content instead

For example, here’s how I’d do it in Ahrefs:

1. Search Keywords

2. Scroll to list of SERPs overview and tap on an article with a good amount of backlinks

3. Filter for quality

And then start reaching out 🙂

I hope this helps.

And if you like this type of content, where I pull back the curtain and share what I'm doing, then shoot a response and let me know.

If enough people respond, I'll start sharing some of the strategies I've used and am using to scale a few startups I'm advising.