The Secret Behind the #1 SEO Newsletter With Andrew Charlton @ Silverbean

If you want to learn about SEO, you’ll be hard-pressed to find a better teacher than Andrew Charlton. 

Andrew is a Managing Director of Crawl and an Independent SEO Consultant, with over 10 years of experience. You might know him from Search Engine Journal’s list of top SEO experts to follow. His Weekly SEO newsletter is #4 on Ahrefs’ top marketing newsletters list!

In this AMA, Andrew Chartlon shares his thoughts on the SEO community, reveals the “secret sauce” behind one of the best SEO newsletters, and talks about his greatest marketing power. 

The Secret Behind the #1 SEO Newsletter

Q: How do you promote your newsletter? What worked best?

A: A curated newsletter is all about reciprocation. When I feature people, they inherently want to share it. That helps a ton!

Most of that is shared on Twitter.

I’ve never ran any ads! I proactively reached out to a few industry leaders like Cyrus, who shared my newsletter a ton in the early days and I picked up hundreds of subscribers from that.

Q: How do you approach these industry leaders and get them to promote your newsletter?

A: I either DM them on Twitter, or in Cyrus’ case, I reached out by email and asked whether he’d sign up for my newsletter and provide some feedback.

At that point, I just wanted to see how I could improve the newsletter. But instead, he shared it on Twitter and has done so ever since!

Q: What ESP (Email Service Provider) do you use for your newsletter? 

A: From my experience, https://curated.co/ is awesome. I’ve used that from the beginning. My inspiration was a newsletter from an entirely different vertical altogether: https://iosdevweekly.com/ – you’ll see a lot of similarities!

Q: How has the growth of your mailing list accelerated or slowed since the initial boom?

A: It’s definitely been more linear growth, than exponential. I’ve seen a large consistent spike in subscribers since my feature on Ahrefs.

From when I first launched, there’s also been others in the SEO industry that have started curated newsletters. That doesn’t help my list, but actually it’s quite nice that there’s room for us all!

This sounds counterintuitive but my goal with my newsletter has never been to grow my subscribers. It’s done a lot more for me than that. It’s opened to me up to a network of other SEOs and marketeers that have helped me get freelance work, or launch my course.

Most of all, it helps me create good habits and be consistent. I’ve had to write my newsletter every Sunday for over 2.5 years. I’ve had to create a process that keeps me consistent (and sane!)

How an SEO Expert Thinks About SEO

Q: What would you say are the top 5 most important ranking factors (outside the usual suspects listed in every blog)?

A: I think ranking factors depend a lot on context. Is it a news based search? Well, freshness is going to be more important.

Broad informational search query, like ‘what is a CMS’? The most comprehensive content is going to win, alongside links.

That seems like I’m dodging your question, so I’ll bite:

• Topical authority

Building a niche around a particular subject will make you more competitive. Google rewards niche sites because they know when a user lands on them, there’s going to a multitude of other relevant pieces of content that will interest them on the site.

• Intent (kinda a usual suspect)

Not a ranking factor per se, but having a good knowledge of the intent behind a search query is so important. Intent impacts everything. Knowing that if you rank for one keyword, that you can potentially rank for 100s of other keywords that are all aligned to the same intent, is huge! (I know you guys know this with Cluster AI)

• Relevant links

You can absolutely rank without links. But when you’re a new website, starting with a few links that are relevant to your niche can go a long way. Similarly, in some competitive niches, you absolutely do need relevant links.

• UX

Not Core Web Vitals…but old school user experience. I’ve seen small changes like adding sub-category menus across parent categories improve the flow of users through the site + increase rankings across that category.

• Take your pick

Q: How do you do keyword research on bigger projects (50,000+ keyword opportunity size)?

A: I don’t usually work with new websites, so if I’m starting on a website with data, I first:

1. Import all of their Google Search Console data into Sheets.
2. I combine that data with third party tools such as Semrush & Ahrefs.
3. I then cluster those keywords based on the similarity of their search results (I know this is something you’re keen on too).
4. Following that I’ll have a comprehensive database of internal keywords & groups. But a database like that is useless without structure. I’ve built an internal Google Sheets tool that segments this data further:

Segments keywords by position 1-5, 6-10,11-20,21+

Segments keywords that rank on the first page by whether their CTR is best performing, good performing, poor performance, or worst performing relative to the average CTR for the position.

5. I then use that as a data source to add to an interactive Data Studio report, so that I can manipulate and play with the data.

For example, I can ask questions like:

• Is one page trying to rank for multiple clusters of keywords. Can we create more pages?
• For pages ranking on page 2 for keywords, are there small changes we can make to get to page 1 and see huge improvements in CTR?

Building an Affiliate Site From the Ground Up

Q: If you had $2,000 to invest in a software review affiliate site, how would you do it?

A: Good question! This is a super competitive space, you’d need to niche way down. I haven’t played in the affiliate space personally (though I’ve worked with affiliates at my old agency).

While I’d recommend niching down; you’d need to understand whether the search demand was enough for the commission to be worthwhile.

I’d niche right down, and then go one step above that. So let’s say I niche down to ‘Dell laptop reviews’, you could start a review site based on ‘laptop reviews’ – it gives you more freedom and opportunity.

Aside from say $200 – $500 into SEO tools (let’s say I don’t already have them), I’d invest the remainder into a content writer ($1,500 is enough to get you out of the blocks fast).

The vast majority of content would be centred on various different laptop reviews and I’d invest a minor of budget into other laptop related content to build topical authority; ‘what laptop is most reliable’ etc.

Setting Up For Success

Q: If you were starting a b2c product and wanted to sell it before building it, how would you do it? (Assuming you have no list or followings)

A: For a b2c product (depending on the product of course), I’d create a landing page in WordPress with some features & benefits of the B2C product with a sign up form.

You’d need an asset to sell. Your list in this case would be your asset.

I’d then use Facebook Ads; a super inexpensive way to get clicks fast to send to my landing page. Once I had signups, I’d use that to create more sophisticated lookalike audiences.

Kinda off topic for SEO. So..from an SEO perspective, I wouldn’t just have a single landing page site, you don’t want it to be closed. I’d create a ton of articles around the B2C topic that were low volume, commercial and non-competitive and scale that up.

That way your asset becomes both your list and the fact that you’ve got a sustainable traffic source.

A Sneak Peak at the Mind of One of the Greatest Seo Experts

Q: What would you like to change in the SEO industry/community?

A: There’s a ton of positive stuff that happens in our community but if you head over to Twitter; it can get quite negative over there; calling out other SEOs etc. I’d like to change that.

We should share more of each other’s case studies and encourage not discourage new SEOs. I’ve tried to do this recently by sharing a positive case study from another SEO team.

Q:  What got you into SEO?

A: I got into SEO through starting my own record label; Gold Shore Records (Progressive House). I couldn’t afford a website, so I had to learn how to build on WordPress quickly and then promote it. With no budget, the easiest route seemed to be to learn SEO.

I became familiar with YouTube SEO, as it was simple at the time. You could literally include keywords in the title tag and video tags, and it would be enough! It wasn’t as competitive back then.

We managed to achieve over 100k views on our YouTube page by optimising for organic views.

Q: What is your greatest marketing power?

A: Oh this is a tough question and not something I’ve thought about before. I’d say my ability to juggle multiple projects at once. 

In the last two years I’ve:

• Started as a freelance SEO consultant full-time
• Launched a platform to create forecasts: futurethough.io
• Created a newsletter; The Weekly SEO
• Built my first course; Forecasting for SEO

Q: What are your goals for 2022? 

A: I started this year with 0 commercial goals and that’s how I mean to go on.

I’ve got a minimum amount of revenue I need to achieve every month, and anything else is a bonus (or a holiday).

I do want to launch more projects like my Forecasting Course though. I’m busy creating something new (which I can’t share yet) but it will be released as a Google Sheets extension

Get More Content Like This

Join the Fat Graph Content Ops community to ask questions from SEOs and content marketers from Shopify, Intercom, Quora, and Coinbase, and other leading brands in our weekly AMAs, and get our latest content as soon as it’s live.

Want to crush SEO without building backlinks or technical BS? Keep reading.

How a 45-person content team hires writers: Learn how to grow your content teams and scale content velocity

DoNotPay Case Study: 0 to 1,000,000 Organics Per Month and a $210,000,000 valuation.

Love YouTube? We do too. Watch the DoNotPay Case Study in super granular detail (70 minutes long), then subscribe to catch more in-depth guides.

Scaling Content Velocity: Why the #1 lever to get the fastest SEO results is publishing content faster.

Automating Keyword Research: AI perfect keyword research, without any SEO skills.