AMA With Bojan and Gordana

Everybody wants to talk to the CEO, but the truth is that Bojan and Gordana have been running the company for a long, long time.

Gordana started working with the CEO, Nick Jordan, as a Writer before she joined the team as a full-time Content Editor. Over the next two years, she was promoted to Content Manager, Project Manager, and finally Director of Operations, now running a 45-person content team.

Gordana used to work with Bojan at an art publisher, which he took from 50,000 to 400,000+ organics/month in about a year, with his main strategy being content velocity. Seeing his results, it was clear that he was the perfect fit for the Content Distribution team, which he joined as the Director of SEO.

In this AMA, Bojan and Gordana answer questions about:

• Hiring Writers and Editors
• SEO
• Software stack, processes, systems, templates, and SOPs
• Dominating the American SERPs as non-native English speakers

SEO—Bojan

Q: How did you even do keyword research before ClusterAi?

A: I used to do initial KW research in SEMRush to get seed words and then use those to do KW research in Keyword Planner. After that, I’d merge all of that to search for duplicates. I had a team of people who would go through all of it before I’d a make decision on what to target with which pages. It was successful, but man was it expensive.

Q: You grew Wide Walls from 50k to 400k—how?

A: By publishing a lot of pages—like 200,000. Most of them were programmatic pages revealing historical data for one single piece of artwork. It was more of a product page than anything else. But still, it did wonders to connect the entire website. Most of the traffic came from evergreen content—around 1,000 long-form articles and 500 biography pages (we actually had closer to 5k artist biographies, but only 500 drove significant traffic).

Q: Why don’t more SEOs build their own content teams in-house?

A: It’s a tough thing to do. During a short period of time back in 2017 when I considered going the agency route, I created a consultancy with a development partner. We ended up doing a lot of work on the tech side. But with content… Ooof. We never had enough clients to hire in-house content people. When we did, we couldn’t find Writers. It just costs a lot of money. I’m interested in hearing what other SEOs would say…

Q: Now that you’ve taken a project from 0 to 1,000,000 organics/month, what’s your next big professional goal?

A: I want one more to 1 million. Then quit SEO.

Q: What are your thoughts on using apps like Jarvis to speed up content production?

A: Here’s what I have till now:

1. We found it working for programmatic and temptable content really well
2. Does not work so well on long-form informational content
3. Can be done only with really good research and instructions
4. A Writer needs extensive training AND needs to be talented to be an “Editor of self”
5. The content will rank but not if it wasn’t heavily edited and optimized for keywords and internal links
6. Would love to be able to test some more as we only tried it for a handful of pages for internal projects and never at scale
7. Bottom line—it is more often than not a lot of fluff and sometimes just factually wrong

All the tests were done using Article Forge and Shortly.ai (which was acquired by Jarvis some time ago if I’m not mistaken).

Q: You’re playing the SEO squid game. The challenge: you’re starting with a fresh domain that you just bought. Niche: B2B marketing + sales. The task: 60k traffic in 1 year or you die. What would you do?

A: Gordana and Nick already did it. 47k is third-party data, so count on it that it was 60k. Boom—game won. Check out this article on the fastest SEO results to see how they achieved that.

Q: How do you know when there’s an SEO opportunity by working with schema (beyond what plugins already do automatically)?

A: So, during my time in this team, I didn’t have much opportunity to implement a lot of it (and thank god). Long story short, it will move the needle for sure! Now, the question of whether it’s needed relates directly to what you want to do. Let me give you some (fairly unstructured) notes from my experience:

• I loved playing with FAQ and the How-to schema—it always increased impressions. However, when it comes to CTR and Clicks, well, that went in different directions
• I’ve managed to get a lot of PAA rankings/clicks without ever using the FAQ schema—just with good content structure. So it is definitely not necessary. However, it can definitely help, depending on which niche you’re in or how competitive the market you’re in is
• Another good illustration of when you need to target certain benefits such as FAQ and/or How-to—there was a time when I absolutely HATED when I landed in the Featured Snippet. The click-through rate was much lower than being one position below, and I really wanted peeps on my website. A similar thing happened when I implemented the How-to schema on some nice articles I published—people got everything on SERPs directly, and I did not get any visitors!! But that’s what you get when you just want to move the needle on traffic

To answer your question—make sure you know what you want to achieve. Don’t just think of traffic, think of your reader’s journey. Meeting search intent is just half of the job. What do you need for that search(er) to do next? What do you want?

Q: So what’s a good content structure to land in the PAA without schema? Is it question = H3, answer = paragraph?

A: Sure! But not only that. Google will serve the answer even if you have it in a different form. For example, if you are using a keyword in a statement, it can serve that entire sentence or part of the paragraph in a question that relates to that long-tail keyword. When I say good structure, I mean the flow of the entire piece of content.

Q: And how do you determine the different ways the flow could be modified to test if something could be done to land in PAA?

A: If you know the keyword you are targeting, you’ll know if there is a PAA on the SERPs. Then, you need to answer the question(s) in your content meaningfully, and that’s it. Where it makes sense, I guess one question could be one H2/H3.

Q: Your team loves to talk about huge organic traffic without many backlinks. What tasks are left for you if backlinks are not of huge emphasis?

A: Basically everything except backlinks:

• Competitive Analysis
• Keyword Research
• Topic Selection
• Briefs and Content Series Templates Production
• Content Optimization
• Technical SEO Issue Monitoring
• Content QA
• Data Analysis
• Reporting
• Post-Publish Optimization

Q: What’s the difference between content optimization and post-publish optimization?

A: Content optimization is planned out during keyword research and topic selection and rolled out to Writers and Editors during a session we call Content Series Intro. It’s a stand-up meeting where we talk about the niche, intent, product/service, reader and user journeys, etc. Post-publish optimization is reacting to the results of matured content.

Q: How do you plan your internal linking strategy? Do you draw it/use software to conceptualize it? How do you keep the internal linking straight and check it against your plan? Or does it not matter and just # of internal links is what you’re most concerned about?

A: We are actually working on visualizing the linking strategy during our SEO SOPs overhaul this quarter. We’re gonna test silo visualization on a couple of existing projects, then see what we can extrapolate into general rules. Right now, we document detailed instructions on how to implement what we call mandatory links (these are links all articles in a given content series should link to). Then we also provide instructions for editors on how to track the implementation of contextual links.

Q: How do you prioritize, plan, and execute content updates for underperforming pages/posts?

A: This is how we do it:

1. Analyze data and report regularly—this shows the underperforming pages
2. Use GDS to look at queries for a given page
3. Compare ranking queries to what the content piece’s goal was in the first place
4. Refresh content according to data found in 1, 2, and 3

HOWEVER, this is a super-simplified version of our process. There are certain forks in the flow. For example, our documented processes help us identify whether the content quality was not on point or whether there was another error in the flow rendering the content piece unsuccessful.

Technical SEO—Bojan

Q: How do you execute core web vitals? Which tools, (themes) and plugins have you found powerful for optimizing the core web vital for WP CMS and for custom-built CMS (G-page speed metrics)?

A: We’ve had the luck of working with really great dev teams on our clients’ side. I would coordinate with them to optimize for best practices, but we DO NOT execute. I think all of those teams had custom solutions to our suggestions.

RE WordPress—we’ve been using paid NitroPack but just as a temporary solution. I’m not sold on it being something we’ll be satisfied with indefinitely. So, for example, working on our current project, we are using Divi to build it but being extra careful not to deploy unnecessary bloated code. We have outside contractors helping with this.

Q: What are the top things that you pay attention to when auditing a website?

A: Page speed, mobile usability, internal link over-optimization, CTA overoptimization, ad overoptimization, thin content, indexability issues, duplicate content, broken links, and internal linking network (all of this can be done via Screaming Frog today).

Q: What are the common issues that you tackle with SaaS websites?

A: For some reason, I’ve faced this dumb trailing slash issue 2 times already. There is this dumb lambda setting on AWS that indexes 2 versions of a URL. Then, during production, Writers will sometimes link to the link with the / and sometimes to the version without. It wreaked havoc for the duration of our sessions.

Another hellish thing has to be broken links…

Hiring, Building a Team & Buying Content—Gordana & Bojan

Q: What made you accept the offer to join the team as a full-time Editor?

A (G): I was a Writer for way too long at that point and wanted a change. I was also always a better Editor than I was a Writer, so it seemed like the perfect opportunity. I also wanted to learn more about the scary scary SEO, and you made it sound super simple. And I really wanted to run a content team.

Q: Why do you think we’ve been able to do what we’ve done? What makes our team so unique?

A (G): I think the reason we are successful and managed to build such a big and passionate team is that we invested a lot of time into SOPs. I spent hundreds of hours documenting every little thing about writing and editing (and then the team built upon it) and was really strict with the guidelines in the beginning. Only people who are passionate about content can take that feedback and implement it, and we are so lucky that we found such people who are still with us almost 2 years later.

Q: We used to buy content from other agencies. Why did we stop and decide to get an in-house team?

A (G): I mean, they sucked. It was really hard to keep them accountable and make them use our guidelines and processes. For me, it’s really important that the quality of content stays consistent, and working with freelancers and fulfillment agencies did not do the trick. We were getting too much variety, the content needed to be edited multiple times, more often than not rewritten, so it didn’t make sense to continue. An in-house team takes longer to build and is definitely a huge time commitment, but it is worth it.

Q: What would it take for you to buy content if it didn’t suck?

A (G): Well, we’d have to do a pilot first to see if we’re the right fit. But what I’d like to see is adherence to our writing guidelines, 1st drafts that are easily edited, 0 fluff, articles that make sense and are factually correct, etc.

Most importantly, we would need to make sure that the articles they deliver have all the elements we ask for, and we’d need good communication with the Account Manager. Since we’re a content agency, we are super particular about our requirements and are responsible for the outcome of the campaign, so the fulfillment partner would need to make sure that all our feedback is relayed to the Writers, that the content is submitted and edited on time, and that the quality doesn’t suffer over time.

Just off the top of my head. There are a million more factors that I’d take into consideration if we were to actually do it.

Q: How do you hire a good Editor? What should you look for? How do you find Editors that actually care?

A (G): Here are the steps:

1. Hire a good Writer
2. Teach then everything you know about writing
3. Be ruthless with feedback (but always kind)
4. Hire more Writers
5. Promote the best one to Editor

I’ve never hired an Editor who wasn’t a Writer first in our company. So I wouldn’t know how or where to find a good one. The best solution is to train a Writer and then promote them because they already know all your processes and guidelines and know how much you care about content quality.

Q: What are the first few things you filter (out) when applicants come through in your Writer hiring funnel? Or does everyone who applies get a paid 1,000-word trial?

A (G): Oh we definitely don’t test everyone. We take a look at their portfolio, and if it’s not up to our standards, we don’t test them. We also don’t test Writers that don’t send a portfolio or submit a portfolio in another language.

Q: You have a new Writer that produces a post that’s heavy on fluff & descriptions but light on facts and info that will help the audience. Do you consider this Writer not suitable or teach them a better way? If teach, how do you teach this seemingly grey-area skill?

A (G): This is a tough one. We definitely give them a second chance, and we make sure their content is carefully edited and a lot of feedback is provided. If they still can’t improve after a couple of articles, we have to part ways. We try to explain why fluff is a big no-no and what the purpose of their article is. Sometimes it just doesn’t work out, but we had a few success cases and those people are fantastic Writers now!

Q: What causes you to send a first draft back to the Writer? What is considered OK that the Editor can fix?

A (G): We send even the best 1st drafts back after providing even minimal feedback. If the article is generally good with only a couple of comments, we send it back so the Writer can learn from them and improve over time. But we don’t ask them to rewrite those. We send an article back and ask for a rewrite if it:

1. Doesn’t make sense
2. Is factually incorrect
3. Has absolutely no elements we ask for
4. Has horrible grammar
5. Has questionable word choices

It’s unfortunate and sad to say, but many Writers fake their portfolios and have their wives and friends do the written test. And when that happens, the quality of the 1st draft we were led to believe we will get is usually so far from good that we have no option but to ask for another go. This does not happen that often thankfully, and most of the issues with 1st drafts can be fixed and improved on.

Q: How do you know when a Writer should actually be an Editor?

A (G): They excel at their writing job! Their content requires little to no editing, they understand our guidelines and requirements, they add interesting elements to their articles, and they generally show that they are passionate about content. Our Editors have a really good relationship with their Writers, so a Writer can come to an Editor (or anyone else for that matter) and say that they would like to help with editing.

And whenever we need a new Editor, we have an internal job ad that everyone can apply for. They then do a short editing test + grammar and general content comprehension test. Whoever does the best job becomes a new Editor!

Q: Are your Writers paid a monthly salary, per word, or how exactly?

A (G): We pay per article because we have a lot of Writers in training. While they’re in training, they don’t write as much as already trained Writers, so we’re trying to be fair to everyone with this system. But, we do payroll once a month, at the end of each month, for all the content they produced.

Q: How to structure the team so you can make sure all the deliverables are done in time?

A (G): Depends on the deliverables and the size of your team. But, ideally, you’d want to have 2–3 Writers max per Editor, an Executive Editor to manage all your Editors, a PM for client work, and a lot of documentation so you can delegate stuff to your team.

Q: Why do you think a team of non-native speakers has been so successful at dominating America’s SERPs?

A (G): They had great training! They are also educated and smart and had to learn English so they could work with foreign companies. It’s a common misconception that only native speakers can write great content. I can safely say that that is not true. There’s space at the table for everyone, and we don’t need to be non-inclusive and agoraphobic about this. Just because someone has a “weird-sounding” name for Western ear, doesn’t mean that they are less educated and passionate than a Mark or a Lisa.

Q: In managing a team of Writers and Editors, what was the biggest challenge?

A (B):  To give a bird’s eye overview, and this is something I felt in previously managing Writers and Editors (was one of my first real jobs after writing): having the team understand that I have their back. Like, literally, whatever happens, I got you.

Q: How do you manage 4 Writers vs. 40 Writers? The difference lies in what?

A (G):  Oh boy, just about everything. If you work with 4 Writers, you know all 4 of them and know all their strengths and weaknesses, personal problems, and what motivates them.

When you have 40 people, it’s impossible to know all these things about each one. Also impossible to manage 40 people to start with. So you need to delegate some of that to content Managers and Editors.

I’m a huge softie when it comes to this, and I’m very sad that I don’t know everyone personally and don’t talk to everyone on a daily basis. But, even if I don’t talk to them all the time, my job is to keep their jobs secure, to keep them happy, and to make decisions that they will appreciate.

It’s also a long process of teaching new Managers how to manage people, so part of our Editor training is just that—learning how to handle people and how to keep the team happy.

Q: What is the one thing all Content Agencies should know but seldom do?

A (B): You can break and fix issues. You can delete and edit pages. But you HAVE to nurture people and relationships. Nothing more important.

A (G): I agree with Bojan. Agency life is by nature unstable, and you never know what tomorrow brings, and so I feel that a lot of agencies don’t really take the time to build relationships and trust with their team. We try to be as transparent as possible with our team and share our decision-making framework so they can understand why we do what we do. Now, we are definitely not perfect and this is far from easy, but I wouldn’t have it any other way.

Q: How do you qualify Writers? What do you look at?

A (B): Candidates are required to send their portfolios of work when they apply. Our editorial team goes through the portfolios, and candidates are invited to take a test. Then our team of Editors grades the tests. According to the results, Writers get invited for a 30-minute video interview. If they pass the interview, they enter an 11-week-long onboarding cycle to become FT Writers.

Q: Where do you find Writers?

A (B): By posting on 200+ job boards across the world. Hell, maybe that base of boards became bigger.

Q: What does your testing process look like?

A (G): We have a set of requirements (500 words, some lists, certain H2s, etc.) that the Writers we test have to do. We then send them the test, and when they finish, our system changes their status so our Editors can know when to go in and review them.

Q: What is the cost range that you found good to go with?

A (G): This is a tough one because it varies. But let’s say that the sweet spot is anywhere from 5c/word and up.

Writing & Publishing—Gordana & Bojan

Q: Goals and quota—does each Writer have a quota of words/articles they need to meet every week?

A (G): Yes, and it depends on the project really. Working with freelancers is different, and we generally don’t assign more than one article every 2 weeks to freelancers.

Q: How many articles were published per site? How many thousands of words per site? 1 million?

A (B): By the time it reached 1M organic, there were almost 10k pages published. The average number of words per page is around 1,200–1,500, so I guess it’s close to 15,000,000 words. Which, now that I look at this number, is the first time I saw this “metric” on screen.

Q: Do Writers need to be well-versed with on-page SEO? Who publishes the post? The Editors?

A (G): That’s the most beautiful part—no. They don’t have to know anything about SEO. We teach them everything they need to know.

As for publishing, we worked with a VA, but just recently we automated the publishing process with Zapier. We change the status in Airtable, and a zap pushes the post to WordPress. It’s magical!

Q: Do you do any blogs other than SEO blogs?

A (G): Great Q! Client work is mostly SEO blogs. But we do have a blog section on our agency website (and our SaaS website soon) where Nick publishes his thoughts on hiring, SEO, etc. I’m very much looking forward to doing the same soon. We don’t optimize these, and we don’t do keyword research beforehand. They are more of a TL style of articles for our community.

Q: How can I improve my writing as a non-native English speaker?

A (B): Write. Write a lot. When I started out, I did 14 articles per week, 7 days a week. And I already lnew English very well (was an English tutor).

A (G): I also recommend reading fiction or autobiographies of people you are interested in.

Editing—Gordana

Q: What does an Editor do and look out for in editing for content? As in, is it SEO-optimized content for Google bots or good-quality, contextual content for readers?

A: Our Editors focus primarily on making the content they edit valuable for readers, not Google bots. I really believe that if you provide more value than anyone else, you will naturally optimize your content. Of course, they do pay attention to the main keyword and keyword variations we get for every piece of content and make sure they are nicely distributed throughout the article (and not stuffy, and, you know, SEOy).

Q: How do you have a proven fact-checking process, and what is it?

A: Fact-checking. Oh boy. So, one of our biggest projects was in the legal space, and, as you can imagine, you have to be really careful with this. So our Editors will initially check everything, but after the first dozen or so pieces they edit, they get a better idea of the niche and can fact-check much faster. No magic cure here I’m afraid. At least not that I know of.

Q: How many articles are given to an Editor each day? As in, how many articles can be edited on a daily basis and what kind of word count would that be?

A: This also depends on the project. For B2C stuff in, for example, pet space, I would expect that my Editors spend no more than 30 minutes on a 2.5k-word article. They are not editing directly but providing feedback to the Writer who then goes in and makes the corrections.

B2B projects will take longer to edit, but again, this also depends on the niche, the length of the article, whether they are writing/editing something simple like email marketing or something nobody knows, like cloud archiving.

Q: How many words do you prefer per article?

A: It depends! If your competitors are writing 1,000 words, definitely go with more than 1,000. if they only have 500, you can get away with 600–800. We check this during the process of writing CSTs, and we get to a median number of words that we use for the entire series. Again, it depends on the series and varies a lot, but there is no magic number here.

Q: How many Writers does one Editor handle? And do the Writers do their own research, or do the Editors help them?

A: Each Editor handles about 2–3 writers in their pod. And yes, the Writers need to do their own research too, but they get significant help from the content series template, which basically cuts the research time in half.

Q: How would you plan a team of 25 writers? How many Editors would be needed for 5 web content projects, and what would the SOPs look like?

A: Depends on the project definitely, but for 25 writers, you need approximately 8 editors. So, you can put 2 pods on one project, 2 on another, etc. Really depends on the size of the projects and, of course, the type of content you are writing.

As for the SOPs, we have general writing and editing guidelines + project-specific KBs + content series templates for each of the series in one project.

Q: What are the key skills that a Content Editor should possess?

A: They have to be very passionate about content, they have to be language nerds, and they will probably read a lot. If they have all 3, they are almost perfect. You will, of course, teach them how to edit your particular style of content, but they should already know how to recognize a good article, paragraph, and sentence and understand that each word means a lot and that each word needs to be meticulously placed in a piece of content.

Q: How would you structure an Editor’s payment when it’s performance-based?

A: I’m afraid I don’t really have good advice here because payroll is a nightmare. You would probably need a LOT of spreadsheets for this. I would also recommend a Geekbot Slack app where you can ask questions at the end of each day and then compile your team’s answers in a separate channel to track performance.

Q: What are the main responsibilities of an Editor?

A: Editing content and managing writers! Our Editors provide feedback to the Writers, and they also run editing pods, where they each get 2–3 Writers to manage for a month (or more). But we don’t do this with new Editors. They need to pass onboarding first and learn how to edit our way. Only then do we assign them Writers and start teaching them how to manage them.

Q: What is the expected time editing for an Editor?

A: Depends on the project, length of the article, topic, etc. A listicle about cat toys will take significantly less time to edit than a 3k-word article on cloud migration. This is something you have to figure out with your Editors, and I recommend apps like Clockify (non-intrusive and they don’t take screenshots) to track how much time they spend on each article (look out for things like project, content series, word count, Writer’s name, etc.).

Processes & Templates—Gordana & Bojan

Q: How did SEO templates make it simpler for Editors to focus on editing or fact-checking?

A (G): We actually worked with templates even before Bojan, but he definitely made them the powerful supporting docs they are today. The Editors actually make these, and while they do, they do a lot of research and create glossaries of terms for both Writers and Editors. Those glossaries are often at the end of the template so Editors can refer to them whenever they need to.

Q: Do you have any tips on mass content briefs/outlines?

A (G): This video explains it all step by step! I highly recommend it. We use this process for huge content series, and it has never failed us.

Q: “Each content series template will contain a list of articles that Writers are required to read before they start writing.” May I know how your Editor prepares the reference articles list?

A (B):  Great question. These can be:

1. Existing articles we previously produced on a project
2. Important articles already published, but before our time on a project
3. Articles we find good examples from competing websites

What you guys are mostly referring to in your question is no. 3. There is a process for that:

1. We look at a content series—let’s say it has 100 articles
2. We take the main keywords of the most important pages in the series—money pages—these are pages we want to drive the most traffic to for various reasons
3. We analyze the ranking pages closely
4. Depending on the quality of those pages, we select the good ones for the Writers to read. It can refer to:
   1. An article is a great example of how to structure content
   2. An article is a great example of what kind of voice to use
   3. An article is an example of having great CTAs

Projects—Gordana

Q: What has been your favorite project so far and why?

A: The super-secret one we are working on right now! And why? Because it’s ours! We finally started working on something for ourselves!

As for client projects, I really enjoyed the one in the pet space. Mostly because of sooooo many pictures of cute dogs! All jokes aside, I’m really proud of every project we worked on, not just because they were all successful, but because I got to try something new each time. Working on those projects helped us build this wonderful community and helped me connect with a lot of people who know things I don’t (and make some friends along the way).

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