← SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
These are the AI SEO Secrets that Clickup, Airbase, and Freshworks are using to win
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You are listening to Conversations with Nathan Latka where I sit down and interview the top SaaS founders like Eric Wan from Zoom. If you'd like to subscribe, go to getlatka.com We've published thousands of these interviews and if you want to sort through them quickly by revenue or churn CAC valuation or other metrics, the easiest way to do that is to go to getlatka.com and use our filtering tool. It's like a big Excel sheet for all these podcast interviews. Check it out right now@getladka.com.
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So yeah, I mean we're going to talk about one of the very important topics for the last two years about like, you know, SEO and AI. Like you know, how this deadly combination is going to work. So we're going to talk about priority challenges and opportunities for the next 20 minutes. So I'm Shyam, I'm founder of Triple Dot. Triple d is a B2B SaaS growth agency. We work with over 100 plus brands. Previous to Triple Dart, I used to run marketing@remote.com, freshworks, Zoho and hey Digital. And I also advise and invest in startups. So if you want to connect, here's my QR code. Right. So for the next 25 minutes we are going to basically talk about AI and SEO. Right? 2023 versus 2024 impact of AI and SEO. What is SEO 2.0? And we're going to cover some of the most important and productive tools that we use in our day to day practices at Triple Dart and how the new SEO is gonna work and how to basically do backlink in 2024 and ahead. And also one other important topic that I'm gonna cover is like how you can scale programmatic SEO without scaling content without heavier budgets. So that's also we are going to basically talk about today, right? It's a quick, quick facts about Triple Dat. We founded in 2021, we had about like 80 people. We only work with SaaS companies. These are all the companies that we work with. We have three stages basically like for Matcha, we work with companies like freshworks and Sprinkler Growth stage, we work with companies like Privo, Fast Growing, we work with companies like Factors, AI Multiplayer and stuff like that. Cool, let's quickly dive in. So now we're going to talk about the role of AI in SEO in 2024 and what challenges, priorities and opportunities that we have. So this is a very important and interesting start that I took from Search Engine Write, Search Engine Land Survey. So you can, you can basically compare what is the difficulty and most important task in 2024 compared to 2023. In 2023, most of the marketing leaders and founders reported content production is the very difficult or challenging task to do. But in 2024, algorithm changes and link building and technical SEO are the three important or difficulties things to basically do, right? Why? Because in the last 18 months there are about 16 core algorithm update and in which there are three very important update, right? So if your website is 5 year old or 6 year old or 7 year old, you just need to basically get equip yourself with the new changes that has been there. So that's why technical SEO is becoming important, right? And also link building and algorithm changes. And if you look at this, this is again from the same survey, 71% of the respondents, they said like, you know this, you know AI in SEO is disruptive, right? And you can see like you know, 32 percentage is somewhat disruptive, 26 percentage is slightly disruptive. Like only 18 percentage is not disruptive. But like let's move on to the priorities, right? For example, people are saying after this sg, SG is nothing. It's called search generative experience. So Google use another traditional like you know, concept called SERP Search engine results page which is a very traditional way of pulling data from on the backend. Now it is using sge. SG is nothing but search generative experience which uses AI to basically pull in the data and then, and then showing it up front, right? So now you just need to be aware of three things. One, now whatever your website is, you need to update it for mobile first because almost all your website would be mobile first indexing than desktop first indexing. That's one. And second one is earlier like three years or four years back people used to follow this top of funnel keywords go up behind like lot of search volume keywords and stuff like that. Now you don't need to do that. You can focus on very long tail, very less search volume keywords. We call it as long tail semantic keywords. That is again like, you know, works really well for companies and you should also give importance to more rich text elements like images, visuals and, and other factors. So that is also an important factor when it comes to SEO, right? And if you look at this, this is a very important factor. 83 percentage of the respondents said it is positively impacted. There is no negative impact about this SEO. I mean like about this AI algorithm update within SEO. So you know, we can still be confident about whatever the changes that we are making that will impact us in a good way, right? And these are all the priorities for a, from an SEO department like you know, I have, I've categorized this into practitioners, managers and leaders. If you look at for practitioners, right? And you know, adapting to the impact of AI is the second priority. And if you look at for managers and leader, this is their main or important priority, right? So let's quickly talk about that, right? Like you know, and long story short, so your bottom funnel and high converting pages may still reap traffic and conversions. Your top of funnel pages is called as informational intent pages and those pages, the impressions are declining month on month right now the second point is you need to give more important to your brand and your brand reputation. So don't spam your brand with lot of like, you know, multiple domains for sending emails and stuff like that. Now your brand reputation is very important and focusing on improving a brand reputation is the core impact. And the third part which is called a content qualification methodology. So Google comes up with something called EEAT which is experience, expertise, authority and trust. So if you are, let's say if you're a fintech brand like you know, hire a couple of journalists who used to write for fintech brands and then ask them to write your pillar pages, right? If you are a cybersecurity brand like you know, work with someone who actually written a lot of cyber security content, right? So that is how you can basically generate unique content which stands out compared to your competition right now. Like what is SEO 2.0, right? It's very simple. You can use AI, you can use workflows, you can use automations to do like a 10 checklist. So first you can leverage AI to create high quality content ideas, not the content. You shouldn't use AI to create content that will penalize or that will impact in a wrong way. So you can use AI to find ideas. Second, there are a lot of experimentation tools right now so that will guide you whether a particular SEO experiment is going on the right track or not. Third programmatic that we are going to cover and fourth, right now you don't need to basically like, you know, spend time on building calculators tools and stuff like that. So there are lot of linkable asset creation tool like Replit Copilot where you can use to build mini tools for your website, right? And finally you can use an AI agent to track what is happening within your website. It's more like a virtual assistant that sits within your website that will notify if there is some Problem, it's more like a system monitoring, but it will update you if there is any problem that's happened within your website. So I'll talk about that as well. Right. And the other part would be like, you know, it's not just AI. So it's also there are a lot of workflows you can use in the SEO world. You can use MakeApp, Zapier and you can use ChatGPT4 to basically create all those different variations, right? So in Short, with this SEO 2.0, you can 10x your results with half of the investment and 2x more productive, right? Now let's talk about how you can be more productive and how you can basically generate this 10x results and stuff like that, right? So yeah, this is an important part, right? Like you know, these are all very, I would say, rare tools in the SEO world that not many leaders in marketing, I mean founders or know of. So first this tool, it's called completely AI, right? So I mean like you know, if you're a founder, some marketing leader, there is something called battle cards. You have to compare your product or your solution with another company. So it will take about roughly two days to create this battle cards, right? So now with competely AI, you just need to add who's your competitor. And this particular competely AI will give you a 10 pager battle card comparing almost all possible what information available on the Internet. So it will completely save like you know, one day minimum. Right. Now let's go to the second tool which is lot of founders here. You know, you want to know how is your Personas have been searching but you're not good at SEO, right? But you know, what is your product is doing and stuff like that. You can write in this tool called like you know, SEO AI saying that like you know, okay, like you know, my product is a fintech solution selling for SMB and what kind of keywords that, that probably, you know, fit into my top funnel. If you ask this question, this tool will give you the set of keywords. Then use this tool called seed keywords to further expand that. Again, this is a very, very useful tool. And once this is again, right, like you know, let's say you don't have a big web development team, right? Or you got the keywords but you wanted to structure this in a proper way. So that's when this keyword insights AI will come in. Let's say you get 100 keywords and you're going to basically publish those hundred keywords into keyword clustering tool it will cluster. What is your top of funnel, what is the middle of funnel, what is your bottom funnel and how many pages you need and which pages are top priority, which pages are like, you know, less priority and stuff like that. Every single thing. So for example, this will take about like minimum four hours to plan one month calendar just for clustering. So within this tool you can do it within 10 minutes. Not even 10 minutes, just five minutes. Right. And again, let's say through dot com. So this is this tool called, let's say you have a content writing team, but you don't know. I mean you're not confident about the brief that you're sharing with your team, right. So through.com you can basically give the exact Persona, what kind of messaging that you wanted to share with this Personas, what kind of tonality and what is the context behind this particular content. Right. And this through.com will basically give you a very detailed brief and that can be shared with your writers. So again, like, you know, very useful tool. And this one, right? So AI inner linking. So which is a very, very time consuming task. Let's say your website has thousand pages. Each page will probably have around like, you know, 15 to 20 links, right? 15 to 20 links into thousand. So I mean like, you know, you calculate, right? So it's a very, very manual, repetitive task. So there is this tool called Junia in which there is an AI inner linking capability. You just need to add the URL of your website and then that will scrape almost all possible inner link for your page. Again, like, you know, one of my favorite, hopefully this tool most of you know, which is called Surfer SEO, right? What this tool will do is this will grade your content, right? Let's say you're writing a new content and you don't know exactly what others have written and why their content is ranking better than your content. Right? So what this will do is it will guide the writer. So you can see on the right side there is a 90 out of 100 score score, which means and below that you will see an average of 83 and top 88. What it means is the number one link that is ranking for this keyword, they have 88 score and the average of the first 10 rank, so that is having 83. So the goal for our content writers to basically cross that 88 mark. Right? So that's why Surfer is like inevitable tool for triple dart. Internally we use for all our clients. So there is other tools like Clear Scope, Fraser and stuff like that. But Surfer is one of the Best tool. And here it's a one stop like SEO extension, right? You don't need to basically have like, you know, a bunch of extension within your Chrome web store. You just need to download this detail.com, it has eight tabs, actually seven tabs, sorry, which gives you a complete picture about your website and you can look at it, look this whenever you want to basically identify what kind of changes that you wanted to make. Right. And finally SEO is also moving towards audience led, right? So we use pactoro and we use audience.com to find the demographic, technographic signals about different companies. And this will help you identify, okay, like you know a company a visits like you know, freshworks.com and after that like in about two minutes they're visiting zendesk.com, right? So that kind of an information you can easily get from sparktero from audience. You can basically find the like where your Personas have been hanging out. Let's say a CFO for 100 million company versus a CFO for a 50 million company. There is a bigger difference in terms of like, you know, where they hang out, what content they read and stuff like that. So you can use audience for that to basically, basically identify like you know what they're doing and stuff like that. And finally, let's say you don't want it to go with an agency. You don't have a big budget, but you want to run an SEO. This is called this auto SEO. It's an AI agent. You just need to add the JavaScript on the website, right. And it will do almost all the work. Right. So but I mean like, you know, I don't prefer using this, but if you are an early stage founders, marketing leaders, you can use that. But I advise to go with a consultant or an in house team. But this is for like, you know, much cheaper and much better. Okay, now let's talk about new SEO versus old SEO which is very interesting, at least for me. You can see here. So there are 23 types of SEO content. Towards the left you will see these are all content that just drives traffic. Towards the right you see content that drives conversions. So whenever you look at SEO, you should basically classify your SEO strategy into two types. One, there are about 100 to 150 keywords which we call internally as money keywords or money pages, that drives business. And for any company that you take, the ceiling would be around 200 keywords. And each keyword will basically have around 500 to 1,000 search volume. So 20,000 volume would be more than Enough to drive close to like you know, thousand signups or thousand five hundred signups. A very good signups a month or demos a month, right? But on the right, left side, these are all very traffic generating keywords which is very good for all your visibility content, right? So I have, I have classified this into traffic focused conversion focused difficulty versus easy. So you can, you can, I mean like for example your list, your FAQs, your step by step guides, your interviews, that creates more traffic. And towards your right, like how to guides landing pages, product pages, that creates more conversions. All right? Now outdated SEOs, people will start doing keyword research, then they do topic research, then they write content. Now you should do the other way around. You should first identify like what's the pain points of the Personas that you deal with. Then create topics that you think of which is very, you know, like relevant to your audience. Then do keyword research. So that's what we call it, right? Like for example, then do a funnel saying that which are all your unaware content, which are all your problem aware content, which are all your solution aware content and start with product aware, then go to solution aware, then go to problem aware, then finally go to unaware. So this is like you know, three step easy process, right? Learn pain points, think of topic ideas and find keywords. So we use internally at TripledArt we use this framework called job to be done framework which is we pick a Persona and we pick the core job of that Persona and we also pick the related job of that Persona. And what we do is we look what they are searching on Internet day in, day out and then we map that funnel and then we start towards the right, we write content for more closer to the evaluation then basically pick up the middle of funnel and top the of funnel later. So yeah, this is a very popular framework that we use internally. And finally new SEO is not just within your website, it's also outside your website, right? So for example, let's say I'm writing a blog today, right? And my domain authority is 40, right? And Google will take about two days to index my own URL instead. If you write the same content within Medium or Reddit or Quora or just answer to some of the questions that is already there. So your chances of indexing your website or that URL would be much faster than your own content. Why? Because Reddit or Quora's domain Authority would be 1999, 95. Our domain authority would be lesser than 50 60. So you know like some of the social signals will be much faster to index compared to our own domain, right? And which is, I mean like now we are going to talk about a very, very important topic when it comes to SEO. Lot of people are struggling in it. They don't know how to basically get backlink in 2024. Again if you wanted to get backlinks, it's for two purpose. One to increase domain authority and two, to increase your topical authority. To increase domain authority don't do reach outs, don't do like you know, guest blogging and stuff like that. A better way to do is, right, like you know, you can just do a digital pr, you spend thousand dollars and you'll get listed in Forbes, Entrepreneur and whatever the best website that you can list it on. These are all like 90/ domain authority site and your domain authority will also get boosted. But to get topical authority, that's when for example you need to basically get ranked for. So what I mean by domain authority and topical authority is topical authority is a specific topic that you wanted to acquire links for. What I'm going to talk about is to get topical authority. Again like, you know there is a way in which you can get it. So the best way is to basically build free tools, right? So these are all some of the examples. You can build a freelance rate calculator, you can build a project timeline estimator, you can build a project budget estimator and stuff like that. I'll show you a couple of examples. So this is one of our client, we built this ESOP pool size calculator and this got indexed two and a half months back and we got 30 free backlinks, right? There are a lot of newsletters have been reported this and also there are a couple of other websites have been given this. These are all very big and towards the right. So we work with this company who is a social media management portal. We have created 10 free tools like that and you can look at, we got around 160 free backlinks in about two and a half, three months. So again that's an easy way to drive backlinks. And finally we are going to end the session with the programmatic SEO and B2B SaaS. So programmatic SEO is nothing but publishing more than hundred pages in a very short time. How you can do this? So it's very simple, right? You need like an optimized page template, you need a database of all the information, you need super like long tail keywords. So it's one into two into three. That's it, right? How we are going to do that right. So there are three myths in the programmatic world. One is programmatic SEO spam because you're going to repeat the content, right? So the search engine will might look okay, this is a duplicate content. It's not right. You can see the difference, right? Towards the left you can see a very generic answer for a topic. And towards the right you can see like you know, for every like you know, delta what is the miles worth, right? So the right will have more context according to Google compared to the left. Second, programmatic SEO only works with AI. Completely wrong, right? AI will only give flexibility, right? I'll talk about even before this AI thing comes. Like you know we work with manage engineers. We basically created thousands of pages back in 2012, right. So I'll talk about that later. But yeah, third thing, programmatic content does not convert which is partially true if you, if you create programmatic SEO without having that relevancy or context. But for few companies it works really well. That, that also we are going to talk about. Cool. So these are all some examples but you, but yeah, if you, if you want to understand whether PSEO is right for you, there are three things. First you need to put little bit upfront like you know, investment and time is needed but not always just one time, right. And second, your current SEO strategy, your brand should be little bit matured brand. And third, you should be selling some very big time. That's it. These are all the three prerequisites for pseo. And the first thing, programmatic SEO works really well for localization. For example, let's say we wanted to build like 100 pages for different states, thousand pages for different cities for zip codes and stuff like that. For example you can see an example, right? Minimum wage in Los Angeles for best restaurants. And it works for job to be done. JTBD is job to be done. Use a particular tool for a particular task. Third, it works for different industries and also comparisons. I don't know if you've attended this demo led SEO session. So storyline used to basically build all comparison using their programmatic way of doing SEO only. And for niche it's based on metrics and brands. So once you get the keywords then you're going to semrush and find all the existing keywords. Then what are you going to do is you need to identify let's say if you hit a particular traffic, how much like revenue or pipeline that you get. So for that let me quickly show that later. But just for pseo you just need these three things page Content, content database and AI prompts. This is how a page template would look like. So if you look at the blue color content blocks, all these are dynamic. If you look at like, you know, welcome to what industry and for what job title. And if you look at the second content block, top three, percentage of job title and third content block, different keyword and stuff like that, Once this is done, then again, like, you know, this is little bit tricky. I would give you an automated way so you can use that for building better this thing, right? So this is an automated way so you can use either one of this two tools. One is called Bioware AI, another one is called Withdrawdeem. So if you are not a programmatic ninja, so what you can do is instead of using Excel or Google Sheets and stuff like that, you can either use Byword or with tadream to basically build this like backend infrastructure for doing programmatic. That's it, right? So as I told you, like, you know, you just need to find keyword patterns. You just need to basically build page template, set up database, build AI prompts and publish. So this is a tool that we have built, right? So you can, you know, like if you can just, you know, scan this, it will take you to a Google sheet. And in that whatever I've discussed so far would be explained in a like, you know, step by step manner, right? And this is how it works. So for like after completing a programmatic SEO, it will take one to three months for indexing, one to six months for impression, one to nine months for ranking, one to 12 months for traffic conversions, pipeline revenue. So let's quickly talk about the results. So this is one company called Multiplier. So they are a global payroll company, one of our customers. So for them what we have done was we have created a country encyclopedia. So you can see there is very low results for their brand SEO. So what we have done was we have created programmatic templates for work permit and for employment guides, right? We have a database in the backend. We use that database and created content and publish this. And if you look at the second, which is for this company called bydance Lark. And if you look at, we have basically built close to 500 plus templates because ByteDance, I mean Lark is more like a ClickUp competitor. So they are a project management software. So we used to create a lot of templates and then use that as for our own Project Programmatic SEO and for Sentinel 1, right? So Sentinel 1 has this ransomware anthology. So there are about like you know, thousand plus ransomwares. For each ransomware we've created a like, you know, a page and there are about thousand plus page this not hundred. So there it results about ten thousand plus traffic. And this company is a freight forwarding company. So for that we basically build a like a to and fro freight forwarding calculator again at 400 pages. Like you know, we got around 5,000 plus traffic and stuff like that. The final one is R1 case study. All right, so you can, you can look at like, you know, if you search for B2B SaaS SEO agency in New York, B2B SEO agency in California, like you know, even after Semrush, we are the number one or number two position for almost all the keywords. All keywords. I mean all pages have the same content. We just change the state and country names and then it automatically started ranking. Yeah, that's pretty much about it. If you have any questions, connect with me offline. Happy to answer whatever questions, whatever you have.