I help clients build growth loops driven by organic search traffic. At the heart of your growth loop is the 20% of your collective company knowledge that drives 80% of your SEO and content marketing results.
Why 80/20?
After working with dozens of clients and studying the strategies of hundreds of companies, I realized there was a consistent pattern of 20% of efforts driving 80% of results – i.e. Pareto’s 80/20 principle in action.
In SEO this shows up as a small subset of topics, keywords, and content driving the lion’s share of traffic. You can see this dynamic in action in all the case studies on my blog.
- Relatively small topic clusters driving the bulk of traffic. Like how Headspace built a meditation resource center that drives 5X the traffic of their entire blog.
- Key programmatic pages of a web app driving the bulk of new users. Like how Zapier’s app integration pages helped them grow to $140M ARR.
- Even SEO strategies built on user generated content have a subset of users or topics that drive the majority of traffic and virality. Like GitHub’s open source SEO strategy that drives 1.3 billion visitors a year, or how StackOverflow gets 245 million visitors a month.
In your content funnel the 80/20 principle shows up as key pieces of content, pages, or conversion elements being responsible for whether or not visitors convert into leads and customers. I’ve run hundreds of A/B tests and conversion experiments for clients, and seen first hand how the majority of the changes you test make a very small difference in results. But a small percentage of changes can multiply your results.
And likewise in customer enablement it’s very common for a small subset of product features to drive metrics like activation, retention, and referrals. Effective product-led growth is all about pinpointing those elements. Then building systems that reduce friction and support users on their path to getting successful outcomes from those features. A big part of this is educating users with key knowledge on your product.
Your Company’s Collective Knowledge Flows Into and Drives All Three Important Elements of Your Growth Loop
Knowledge sits at the foundation of everything your company does. But in the context of growth marketing, it’s especially crucial.
- In SEO and content marketing, knowledge is what your potential customers are seeking to help solve their problems. It’s the magnet that pulls traffic to your site.
- In your content funnel, knowledge is the key ingredient that will sway people to choose your company instead of a competitor. Or to justify paying a premium price for your product. And knowledge is what advocates of your product will use to get buy-in from the rest of the stakeholders on their team.
- And in customer success, knowledge is what will empower your customers to unlock the full potential of your product, and drive metrics like retention and referrals.
This applies to the knowledge possessed by not only your company’s leadership, but to the knowledge of your entire team.
It could also be user generated knowledge if your product has a user generated content model. Or it could be indirect knowledge, like big data generated from the use of your product. Or even UX data that provides insight about user behavior.
Knowledge also extends to things like:
- Knowledge of your product
- Knowledge of your industry
- Knowledge of your market’s problems
- Knowledge of how to solve those problems
- Domain specific expertise
And in many cases, there is significant overlap in the areas your knowledge impacts:
This Overlap Is Why It’s Critical That:
- If you’re working on SEO, you need to be mindful of conversion and customer success.
- If you’re working on conversion you need to be mindful of SEO and customer success.
- If you’re working on customer success, you need to be mindful of the type of traffic flowing into your product, how they’re being educated in your funnel, and how these things affect the mindset of your users when they start to experience your product.
25 Years of Digital Marketing Experience
When I was 13 I started a web design “agency” with a junior high friend and started advertising it on newsgroups. The following year I started selling web hosting with dedicated T1 lines as an affiliate, and got into affiliate marketing from there.
Since my humble beginnings in the early years of the internet, I’ve had the opportunity to collaborate with hundreds of amazing entrepreneurs, marketers, designers, and developers across dozens of industries. And I’ve also had the unique opportunity to spend a lot of time working on the SEO and traffic side, as well as the conversion side of businesses.
Over the last 10 years (I’m 38 now), my work has focused primarily on venture funded, high growth SaaS companies. This has given me a unique lens on how SEO, conversion, and customer success intertwine and the synergy that exists between them.
SaaS companies tend to focus much more on product-led growth, where optimizing the long term user experience and customer journey is the main focal point vs. other markets such as e-commerce that are much more transactional in nature and don’t typically think beyond the initial sale.
This more holistic point of view helped me develop the 80/20 Knowledge Growth Loop, and see more clearly how things typically bucketed as “marketing” like SEO can have a huge impact on the entire customer journey.
I’ve seen first hand how SEO content can not only drive traffic, but also play a primary role in convincing visitors whether or not they should purchase a product. And I’ve also seen how SEO content can educate users at different points in the customer journey on how to get the most out of the product – directly improving product metrics like retention and referrals.
Some of The Companies I’ve Worked With
Summing It All Up: How Can I Help You?
To sum it up, I help team’s uncover their unique knowledge – the 20% that drives 80% of results – and turn it into a high value content resource.
This search optimized content resource could be:
- A digital resource center of topical content that helps new visitors learn more about your product, and helps existing users learn how to get the most benefit from your product.
- A set of programmatic resource pages that connects visitors with the most relevant information for their niche needs, tied to key product use cases.
- A directory of templates, tools, or integrations that helps existing users maximize the value from your product, and also acts as a gateway for new visitors to discover your product.
- An open and indexable online course teaching visitors how to solve key problems your audience is searching for, with your product showcased throughout the course as the best tool for supporting their success.
- Or one of many other possible SEO models, or combinations of models.
Every content resource I help team’s build is not only designed to drive large amounts of organic traffic through SEO. It’s also specifically engineered to generate conversions and enable customer success.
All three of these elements – traffic, conversion, and customer enablement – come together to create a growth flywheel for your business. And at the center of it is a content resource showcasing your company’s unique knowledge. Knowledge that will work in tandem with your product to actually make the lives of your customers better. Not just give them generic answers and try to empty their wallets.
How I’ll Work With Your Team to Create the Best Outcome
Unlike agencies that serve up cookie cutter, one-size-fits-all solutions – I’ll guide your team through the necessary deep work to create a high value content resource that perfectly fits the unique aspects of your organization, product, and market.
I’ll walk your team step-by-step through all the critical elements for building a content resource that drives traffic and conversions, while also supporting product goals like retention and referrals.
Together, we’ll work through things like:
- Building an inventory of your organization’s 80/20 unique knowledge for use in content assets as well as strategic decision making.
- Identifying the best SEO model for packaging and delivering your unique knowledge.
- Identifying the highest value 80/20 keywords your content should target.
- Mapping the unique stages of your user journey and determining the best content for each stage.
- Mapping your optimal site architecture for SEO and conversion funnel goals.
- Developing custom tailored on page SEO guidelines to follow for your unique SEO model, and the different types of pages on your site.
- Pinpointing the best off page SEO strategy (i.e. how to get backlinks) that leverages the unique strengths of your SEO model, and how sites naturally link to each other in your market.
I’ll help your team cut through the noise, and isolate the SEO, conversion, and customer success factors that are actually worth focusing on. And then act as your team’s trusted sherpa as they execute on those factors.
Turning Your In-House or Remote Team Into an Elite SEO Squad
Many agencies and consultants will aim to embed with client teams for as long as possible. In some cases, agencies will even keep their methods a secret to ensure clients are always reliant on them.
Maybe it’s because I come from a family of teachers, but this approach seems backwards to me. My aim with every client team I work with is to transfer the necessary skills and knowledge along the way, so they can eventually operate without my guidance. My most proud moment as a consultant is when I see former clients using strategies I taught them to build innovative, new projects.
With this aim in mind, all the key steps we’ll work through together in building your high value content resource will be accompanied by team training. This might include things like…
- Walkthroughs of SEO tools, including which features to focus on, and how to leverage them with the unique approach we’re taking.
- Worksheets, assessments, and custom tailored guideline documents to help team members think through each stage of execution.
- Using specific tactical steps as teaching moments for deeper principles so team member’s understand not only the how, but also the why behind the approach we’re taking.
At the end of our engagement, your team will not only be able to continue the ongoing process of SEO for the content resource we build together. They’ll also be equipped with the skills and mindset to develop new high value content resources. This newfound team ability is the biggest value I will deliver to your organization – because it will continue creating new value long after the end of our engagement.
Let’s Chat About Working Together
Fill out the form below and let’s chat about how I can help your team: