Trish Seidel: "My approach to SEO has completely changed!" Tales from Scaling Content Production at Springly & Moving to Djust

Hi Trish, welcome to the podcast. Hi, thanks. Yeah, how are you doing? I'm good.

I'm so good. It's the first sunny day in Paris in months, it feels like. So it's giving me energy. That's normally a good thing.

Like it starts in Paris and then we get a sunny day as well. I'm hoping. I'm hoping that it comes up to you. I'm sending it your way.

Thanks so much. Anyway, so the podcast has been on pause. I feel like I should address that. this would be the first one that comes out after like two months or something yeah been busy yeah oh yeah been like really getting trying to get back on the horse is that the right is that the right metaphor i think so yeah it sounds right to me yeah but anyway also something else we should address is that we've done this podcast before we sure have no one heard the first one because i didn't release it because i took so long to release it that it came a little bit outdated which is it is cool because we get another stab at it yeah totally yeah but so thanks so much for coming on and for doing this twice always one of the good things about that also is that you've changed companies and changed like environments and you're now head of content at just yep and and how to say it yeah it's spelled djust for anyone listening so this is a perfect opportunity actually to like look at the difference in ways of approaching SEO in different companies so like springly the company where we you know we did the first interview it was like product led right it was like absolutely you could sign up yourself and then pay like more like 45 a month or something whereas things are a little different just so we can kind of discuss the nuances and different SEO strategies and things like that which is absolutely such an important topic because there's you know one strategy doesn't work for everyone and there's a lot to learn it's been extremely educational so really happy to be able to like compare and contrast and have the opportunity to do all that learning for sure yeah yeah that's so cool and I also thought like we can look back now like when we first started talking about springly like you were in the weeds and also working there so you kind of you know it's easy to like smooth over like the bad learning so the things you wish you were doing differently and maybe yeah I'm hoping now looking back you're not in the weeds there might be like learnings that you would not do again if you did it.

Absolutely. 100%. Perfect. Exciting.

So why don't we start with Springly? Could you like tell us a story of what you did there and like, I guess the results and what you were trying to do and that kind of background? Yeah. So Springly is actually an American branch of a French startup called AssoConnect, and it's an ERP for nonprofit organization.

So it's basically to help people who help people. that's kind of the tagline and I was there for four years and when I started in 2019 we were right about to hit COVID like we were months away right or like the month or two before and so when I was brought on they had just opened the U.S. market and by just opened I mean had a landing page in English and the product had been translated into English and so I was responsible for helping the company expand to the United States in all ways so I started off with helping with the product started off with helping with sales.

And then I niched down into marketing. And we found that not just during the pandemic, but in general, opening a new market, we were basically mainly focusing on growth tactics, like growth marketing tactics, lots of ads, lots of cold mailing, kind of growth hacking and trying to get like quick wins. And it just wasn't working. It was impossible.

We were hemorrhaging cash. The pandemic was in full swing and we were just making mistake after mistake. And so we kind of sat down and we're just like, didn't know what to do. And what does everyone do when they don't know what to do in marketing is that you kind of go back to the foundational aspects of good quality marketing, which ends up being content and ends up being SEO and kind of realizing that maybe the quick wins, there are no quick wins, especially in tackling a market as big as the United States and to maybe just do it a little bit slower.

And so what we decided to do was based off of a French strategy that we had been successful in, but much slower, they had, you know, they were very well referenced. They had a really good website. Their articles are ranking well. So we basically were able to adapt the strategy and scale it.

And so we started off with producing, we were producing one or two articles a week in-house and then we scaled eventually within a year to producing 25 articles a week. And we ended up growing by 1800% in 18 months. Nice. Yeah, it was crazy.

Yeah, it was wild. 25 a week is a lot isn't it it was and thankfully we had an army of freelancers that were behind us helping us we had created a really really sophisticated yet simple content machine that was able to help us give us visibility on the entire process and then we were able to hire a full-time content manager who was there to manage the day-to-day so i could focus on other things but you know it's a full-time job and a half just creating that much content especially this is in the era before chat GPT and before AI.

So everything was completely human written, all the briefs were human written. And so as you can imagine, it was a huge time investment. I think it's probably a good thing you missed the AI thing. Probably also a lot of ways to streamline your processes when it's like that high volume as well.

So just to go back to the results, what was the traffic growth before? What was the before and after? before we were basically starting from zero right so we were like I even want to say like a thousand visits a month at one point and then we scaled to about a hundred thousand I can't remember the exact numbers now that's been a while since I've left but we were at a very quite stable growth of around a hundred thousand visits organic visits per month in the end so you know fluctuating around there yeah massive cool and so how did you get buy-in is a question I want to know for like scaling content like that like you said you're doing two a week like were you seeing results from that and thought let's scale that up not really so you weren't really seeing any results in the beginning because you weren't doing it strategically like we were just kind of you know it was a team of me and my french colleagues and at that point in my career i knew very little about seo knew what good content was but i didn't know really much about seo and so we were with the very limited time i had from my the help of my french colleagues um because they were focused on their market, which is completely normal.

I was pulling keywords from SEMrush and just kind of creating content willy-nilly, I guess you could call it. And we weren't doing it strategically There was not a lot of linking Even the way our website was structured wasn great because again we were dedicating stuff to little time to this new market et cetera And once we started taking it seriously and decided that we wanted to scale we put all of our time, money, and effort into doing that. So we built out the website. We got off a subdomain.

We were on a HubSpot subdomain for our blog. We migrated onto a single domain, which was one of the biggest elements of success. That's when we really started seeing results. So we had started creating the content massively before that.

But once we migrated off the subdomain, that's when we really started seeing great results. And then, yes, we, once we started taking it seriously, honestly, we were seeing results very, very, very quickly. Nice. But yeah.

And then that fuels your fire, I suppose. It's like you get the wins, create more buy-in and so on. Yeah. Exactly.

And so we were planning on doing it for like a quarter, right? So for an entire quarter, I mean, it basically took us a whole month to migrate off the subdomain because we wanted to do it well. We had experts come in. We had technical SEO experts come in and help us do this in a safe and secure way so that we weren't killing any success that we had already had.

And so once we started creating the content massively for the quarter after that, that was when we're like, we're just going to test it and see if it works. And if not, we'll scale back. And if not, and if it works, then we'll scale up. And that's how we got the internal buy-in to add more budget, add more time, et cetera.

Cool, I like that. I think one of the things like that you're getting at there is like one thing is a conversation I often have with clients around like before you scale content, like you want to make sure that you have these like strong foundations in place, like the website solid, like the blog solid, like the technical side is you're not building on something like shaky. Exactly. And this is the first conversation I had in my current position at Just is that there was no SEO person.

There was no content person before. And so again, same issue with subdomain on a blog on a subdomain. So the first thing that I did before even starting to create an SEO strategy or a content strategy was get ourselves audited technically, right? Because those technical SEO wizards, they're like magicians.

They see things that I don't see as like an on-page SEO person, right? And so we got ourselves migrated off. We did a huge audit, fixed everything so that we have a nice clean foundation to build on top of. Because like you said, otherwise it's just a waste of time and money.

Yeah. Yeah, it really is an uphill battle if you don't have like the basics in place. So what kind of content did you create? Did you prioritize like certain types of content first?

Did you, you know, in clusters? Did you choose only top of funnel, only bottom of funnel? Like, yeah, how did you approach like types of content? I'm a content cluster queen.

I love a content cluster. And so we actually, like most SaaS companies, we actually built our content clusters first before starting to produce content. and we built them based off of each feature of the software, right? So kind of a typical SaaS product-led SaaS strategies that your clusters can navigate around each major feature in your software.

So that is what we did. And we started off with our primary cluster, which was our major feature, our best-selling feature, the feature where we are most legitimate. And we did all the bottom of funnel content, then all the middle, then all the top. Oh, amazing.

Yeah, exactly. And so then we were able to link them all together in a really logical way. And the linking came as much as it could in the moment. But obviously, if you're producing content, regardless of how many good processes you have put in place, if the other content isn't created, you can't link it, right?

So the linking, we would kind of constantly go back in and do all of the relinking. And that, again, was a huge success factor for us. I mean, yeah, internal linking is so important. I think one thing would be good just to connect the dots even more for like people listening, because that's actually very, very similar to how I would create a software company's content strategy.

Well, you reassure me. Yeah. Okay. I'll maybe put it back to you.

Like, why is it that you would build a cluster around a feature? Like, what is the like growth mechanism that you're kind of playing into there? Well, the funnel, all the content trickles down into something that is highly convertible, right? So the idea is to generate not just traffic, but to generate conversion, to generate revenue, to generate something concrete, a concrete metric, not just a vanity metric that gives us business results.

That is the goal of good, at least in my opinion, good marketing, good content marketing sort of drives revenue, right? And so when all that top of funnel dribbles down to the minimum of funnel, which dribbles down to in theory, obviously this is a much more complex thing in theory. but it's very simplified versions that it all trickles down to that really bottom of funnel article blog article or landing page that's going to help push that conversion through yeah exactly and it's like if you target topics related to your feature you're bringing in traffic with people from people who are searching something relevant you know like the ability to kind of authentically teach them about your product or draw them into your funnel exactly and they're primed by that topic.

Absolutely. It's not just like pure product pushing is that you're giving them something that's relatable and you're able to put your products in front of an audience that's ready to hear about it, but not in a way that is not just like spammy, I guess. Exactly. And I think it works especially well with more like product led, especially if you have a free trial, because yeah, the barrier to someone signing up, even on top of funnel content, like they could go from like, what is keyword research to going like, oh, this company, Ahrefs, does keyword research.

I'm going to test that out. You know, there's actually a kind of shorter funnel, I think. So you built clusters around, you know, like the core functionality of the platform, then the features, and then you went from, so why did you choose to do the bottom of funnel content first and then move up? Longer time to rank, I guess, was like the first priority was being like, this is our most important content.

We want to give it the longest possible to do really well. It's also the content that was the hardest to produce. And it's really wanted to get, I feel like once we could nail down the positioning and because again, don't forget that we were going into a new market, right? So the US market is much more tech mature than European markets or even the French market.

So the way we positioned our product was a little bit different as well. And so nailing down that positioning and the way we talk about it and the features and like all of that really good concrete stuff made that top of funnel, those top of funnel topics that much easier to produce. First of all getting this difficult stuff out of the way first making sure that we had longer time to rank and that you know we were getting all that that good juice seo juice prepared yeah it makes so much sense like yeah absolutely right it like the highest conversion rate potential so you want to give it the most time to rank and like to start building some authority but like you're building everything else on top of it like you're driving traffic to those blogs and also every writer wants to know about the product and like it just has a a lot of benefits to yeah that layer first yeah okay let's talk a bit about the process people love scaling content such a hard thing to do especially with writers like it's a lot of process to it I would love to know how you dealt with quality of content what was your approach to making sure in your process there was quality did you have a very high buff quality were you more like a ship it and see what happens no yeah I'm a stickler I'm a big stickler and I think it maybe also could be one of my disadvantages as being a content creator.

So we can get kind of in our own way sometimes, but we were producing the 25 articles a week. Obviously quality was a big question, right? So again, this is before the AI era where now we think about quality very differently now than we did then, right? But for us, when we were, it was about relationship, a relationship with our agency and our freelancers.

So in the beginning, while we were scaling up to this 25 a week, we were writing all the briefs ourselves, right? So we had myself, we had a few interns, we had some of my French colleagues, we were all writing like two or three briefs a week to build up, you know, first of all, our own skills in brief writing, and making sure that we were controlling the narrative around the product, and as well as defining the tone and giving our business expertise, right? Because nonprofits are very particular, right?

And their problems are very special and unique. And we wanted to make sure that we give them the business context as well as the human context that they need, which obviously the writers don't have. They're not experts in nonprofits. That's okay.

That's not their job. Their job is to write. So that was the beginning. And then once we built that relationship out with our agency, they were able to, they had learned so much that they were able to produce a lot of the briefs themselves.

And we were just kind of glossing over in the end, especially when we were moving towards the middle on top of funnel content, we were more glossing over it, making sure that we add in a point here or a point there or whatever. But it was building that relationship was really essential to getting the briefs off our hands to making sure that the quality was still very, very high. But I would determine all the quality aspects to good quality brief writing for sure. So you mentioned that like about having to teach the writers about nonprofits and your products and stuff.

Like how did you approach that? Did you do it per brief? So in this content machine, we created incredibly detailed documentation. So we were able to give them all the business context.

We were able to have them read some of the really key articles about the nonprofit statuses in the United States. We were able to give them industry reports. And I summarized a lot of those in video so that it was a little bit easier to digest. They all had a very specific onboarding process, but it was essential to making sure that they got onboarded quickly and efficiently.

And now there was not a lot of back and forth again, because when we're doing 25 articles a week, you don't have the time to like face to face in depth onboarding, which is something that I'd like to do and not just it's something that we're doing is a much slower, much more in depth onboarding, right for our freelancers. Again, it's not like a week long, it's an hour or two, you know what I mean to face with the agency. But yeah, so does that make sense? Yeah, it does make sense.

I can reflect on that this because at the moment, I'm bringing in new writers to my content operation. And for a while, I've relied on like a few very good writers who know everything about the client. They've been onboarded for a while. And I recently have onboarded it.

Well, I gave a writer an article and they weren't properly onboarded because I'd sort of assumed they could pick up the documentation and run with it. And so I didn't properly invest in the onboarding. And the first couple of drafts were like, oh, this is way off what's happening. but I realized after a little while it's like not that they're a terrible writer it's actually they just don't know anything about the industry like they spent way too much time stuck in technical details they didn't know anything about like yeah that boarding process like so incredibly important so when you have one client like you're working in-house somewhere you can make like you know everything you have really detailed you could make one really detailed package but when you have like five, six, like 10, 20 clients, it's yeah, that onboarding documentation process becomes increasingly important as well.

And I imagine all of like your clients onboard people differently if they even think about doing it. Right. And so it's like, I can't imagine as someone who works with many clients at one time, like you coming up with your own onboarding process is essential. Yeah.

For me, my clients expect the content and everything from me. So they don't do the onboarding. I do the onboarding. Okay.

This particular one, like that was just like a little gap that went wrong in the process because it was a new writer. I haven't onboarded new writers in a while, but it's always great. You know, yeah, exactly. It's great when you have these issues come up when you're like, imagine if you're producing 25 articles a week, when an issue comes up, it's like, oh yeah, you need to patch it quick and then better forever.

Yeah. Like, and I even to this day ask our freelancers and our account managers and whatever for regular feedback on the process, what's working for them, what's not working for them, what they're struggling with, what's taking them too long, like by working with us so that we know what we need to improve. Because obviously, you know, they're thinking about our content all the time. Well, in theory, all the time, they have multiple clients, of course, but you know, we, I'm doing a thousand other things.

And so of course, having them push me to improve the process is really essential. And having people that you can do that with is great. Yeah, a hundred percent. So maybe to wrap up springy like stuff like so many avenues that we could go down but like looking back at like you know scaling so many articles in their short space of time and like building that up like what's your honest take like was it worth it why or why not and if you could do things differently to get kind of a better return on that investment what would you do so i think it's definitely worth I think it was a fantastic way to prove the efficiency and power of SEO.

And again, it's not just that, like, I know I spoke about the organic traffic metric behind it, of like the 1800% growth in 18 months, but the conversion followed, right? So we were generating free trials out the wazoo We were you know it really allowed us to put our sales time into other things right So absolutely worth it One mistake is like the biggest mistake that we made that I if I were to do the same thing again, is that we produce, produce and set, we set and forget, right?

There was one point where we had kind of gone through a majority of the keywords in our sector. We had like 700 articles at one point. And at one point you saturate your market. Like you can't, there's not much else you can be doing, right?

in terms of keywords and keyword research. So then we found ourselves going back and optimizing all of these 700 articles. And it was incredibly painful. You know what I mean?

Because you weren't just optimizing the content. We were realizing that like some of the formats were different. A lot of the alt tags were missing. The images were far too heavy because we weren't really focused on that at that point.

We didn't care. We're just like, we'll fix it later, right? We have to produce as much content as we can. We'll fix it later.

And the kind of fix it later mentality is not necessarily sustainable in the long run. Like it will be great for this really micro, like this really high hyperspeed growth, but you will plateau at one point, which is totally normal. It's how life works. It's how, you know, search works.

And so going back and optimizing them was a little bit, was a lot of it painful. I think I like to have really like strict standards on stuff like that. Cause you're right. Like if you make the same shortcut 700 times, you have to fix it 700 times at some point.

Oh yes. And there's no way to automate it. No way. None.

Yeah, that's crazy. Okay, cool. To kind of finish up our conversation overall, let's go to like Just. And what's different about how Just works for you and like as a company compared to Springlee?

And like, how is it forcing you to approach SEO differently? So Just is a very complex software. We are a B2B e-commerce. And so it's a SaaS product, but it's not like a product led free trial generated product, right?

So it's, we do enterprise sales. The sales cycle is extremely long between, you know, six to 12 months. We're working with high profile clients, Fortune 500 companies. And so as you can imagine, the approach to SEO is vastly different, wildly different.

And it's not big. And it's because we're not using SEO as like our primary growth tactic, right? And so when you're not using it as like the major channel acquisition, it takes a different lens. And so what we're doing is that I've built out an entire strategy.

We didn't have an inbound funnel up until recently, again, because enterprise sales, mostly outbound sales, mostly events, mostly like thought leadership in a lot of sense of the word. And so I'm focusing on being very intentional about the content that we create and we're creating content in a much slower, slower rate. So we're creating about eight articles a month. So as you can imagine going from 25 a week, which is like a hundred a month to eight a month, the scale looks very different and the content is much more complex and it's very research focused.

So we're taking information from McKinsey, from Gartner, from, you know, these really research specific organizations. And that's what a lot of our content, our bottom of funnel content is based off of. And the scale and amount of keywords that we have found that are really, really intentional for us is much lower. We're not talking about 700 keywords anymore.

We're talking about like 150, you know, so very different. I've had this experience for sure, like in the tech companies that I worked in, like the target audience is like more, maybe more senior, like the buying cycle is longer. The product is more of a hard sell at that point. Like those kinds of people tend to not be searching very top of funnel stuff, at least not stuff that you can do in a basic way.

Like they want you to bring the content that resonates as like much more needs, much more depth kind of thing. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. And so we're targeting a C-suite level executives, again, of these fortune 500 companies.

So the search and behavior is so different and exactly. Yeah. So the top of funnel content, top of funnel is like what I would consider bottom of funnel for things like Springlee, you know? And so it's been extremely educational and a great lesson for me as like an SEO person who is mainly focused on product-led SaaS and this like hyper growth through SEO.

This is like a really good step back for me and being like, okay, we can do things in a different way and it still be quite as effective. And we're using AI to help us. So it's not AI, like it's not all AI generated content, but we're testing and learning with AI to help obviously reduce costs and increase, you know, article time and whatever. and but it's been super super interesting learning so what are you doing with ai so we are using ai to help produce our top of funnel and middle of funnel keywords and we're doing it in a very specific way where that we're not just like inserting a keyword into chat tpt and having it built an article for us we're actually building out the brief a human brief and then we're using very specific prompts to generate like section by section so we're doing custom prompts per section per article and then we're having it edited by a human and so it doesn't look like chat tpt content or it doesn't look like ai content when it's done but it's fluid if it's fluidified is that a word in english it's streamlined streamlined yeah thank you let's streamline the process and we have a wonderful agency that is helping us do this so so yeah interesting so for me like to challenge you there maybe like c-suite level content that needs expert insight and research and data and all this stuff is it not just taking you a lot longer than writing it to get ai to write that quality like how no so it's taking me the same time to make a brief so like the human generated or human articles that's funny to say human articles versus the articles the human 100% human the bottom of funnel really important information is all human produced and it takes me the same time to write a brief for that or for an AI article.

Then I'm finding all the reports. I'm highlighting sections that our agency can then go in and chat to BT to, or AI, whatever AI, I think it's chat to BT for, to summarize it and just like, you know, clean it up. So it's taking them two hours. It's taking me, my brief.

It takes me the same time. Interesting. Cool. Well, we're coming to the end of our time.

I'd love to keep going, but I think, yeah, it's been brilliant. Thanks so much for coming on. Is there anything you want to shout out or like say to everyone before you go? Just follow me on LinkedIn.

Marketing Big Sister is my brand and I'd love to get to know you and be your big sister if you give me that opportunity. So yeah. Yeah, Trish is an excellent person to follow on LinkedIn.