From 4 to 21 Million Organics/Month With Nigel Stevens @ Unsplash

Nigel Stevens took Unsplash from 4 million to 21 million monthly organic visits.

And as if that wasn’t big enough…

He also grew a few other sites you all know of:

Hotjar (tag): 20x non brand traffic, 3x organic MQLs

Profit Well (tag): 4x traffic in one year, +760% traffic in 2 years

ShipBob (tag): 17x traffic in less than 2 years

In this AMA, Nigel talks about:

• B2B vs B2C SaaS
• How to GSD at big companies, as an outsider
• How to structure an “agency” team for success
• How to set up engagements for success
• How to optimize your existing content

Q: Did you care about backlink building?

A: it’s very easy to have a binary view of this. As in,

– backlinks don’t matter

– all you need to do is build backlinks

This is a tough one. Because in some spaces, it is really difficult to rank without being insanely authoritative. E.g. anythign to do with health/wellness, and also finance. And what does “authority” mean? It’s a bunch of signals, but one is links.

But what a lot of companies get wrong is: they get it into their head that SEO = links, even though they have a strong brand and are already authoritative on a subject. So for them, they don’t necessarily need the links to move the needle that much. Sure they may help, or not hurt. But the main thing is: cover your topical areas with content, and make sure they get half decent engagement and fulfill intent.

When I talk to early stage startups who are in insanely competitive spaces, I basically tell them to not worry about SEO for a while. Wait till you build a brand, then SEO will become easier. (this isn’t a universally held opinion, but I find it’s generally accurate….with exceptions, of course).

Q: What was the #1 thing you did that had the biggest impact on traffic?

A: #1 impact on traffic = internal linking (if I have teo pick a short, hack-y answer)

Q: Which bits of work had the biggest revenue impact?

A: revenue impact = based on what parts of the site it impacts. For B2B SaaS, the biggest revenue impact – at least in the short term – is probably your “vs” pages.

Q: can you provide some example SaaS companies that you have worked with in the past?

A: Hotjar, ShipBob, ProfitWell, BigCommerce, Stilt, and others

Q: What does your team look like? Do you outsource content or..?

A: we don’t do in-house content. so when we work with a company, they either have content resources, or (usually) they have some and we set the expectation upfront that they need to commit extra resources to scaling that part.

Q: What was the strategy with HotJar?

A: I worked with the great Louis Grenier, who was the Content Lead at the time (or whatever his job title was). So a lot of it was easy. As in, the tough part with B2B SaaS is translating customer pain points, features, and jobs-to-be-done into SEO.

They gave us everything we needed to do research on that, and gave them a list of prioritized content opps based on:

– traffic potential

– business relevance

– difficulty (a modified version of Ahrefs’ KD where we account for their approximate topical authority…e.g. the kw “heatmaps” may have a high KD, but they are Hotjar, so it’s not hard.)

The toughest part was then translating SEO requirements into a writing process that would produce unique content. But again, it wasn’t that hard, because the great Fio Dosetto (who runs this great substack –> https://contentfolks.substack.com/) was the writer.

From there, we built in link incentives to the pages/topics where they weren’t strong. E.g. they are now in the top ~2 for “conversion rate optimization”, which is insanely tough. They didnt have much topical authority there. but we created a bunch of content, and built links, and then it finally started working.

Q: WTF did you do with Unsplash to crush so hard.

– How much content was produced?

– Did you create it? Did they?

– What was the content strategy?

– What else went into the insane outcome?

A: this is very much a product-led SEO effort.

with Unsplash, the “product” is the pages like this one –> https://unsplash.com/images/animals/dog

if you’re looking for dog photos, they have . . . photos of dogs. so it was in part a technical SEO effort to make sure that we established the relationships between pages. e.g. “dog” should link to “puppy”. to do that, we worked with them to build a tagging system, which is really a set of internal linking modules

Another big thing we did was title tag testing. We got millions more visits just by testing title tags en masse. We noticed at the time that the results were all very uniform – “Dog Pictures | [Brand]”. By adding “Best”, numbers, and other CTR elements, we got big wins. Plus, optimizing for different variations. “photos/pictures/images.”

Ironically, a lot of the things that work for a site like Unsplash are NOT good to think about for more content-led sites. E.g. I would not want a company thinking about a bunch of synonyms for (e.g. like “photo”) when thinking about how to tackle a market.

Also in the example above, we actually built static pages, and they’ve done well. in addition to those (/images/animals), we had to build a “product” around whether to index the /search/ pages or not.

Q: – How many clients do you have?

A: usually have around 10-12 clients pretty consistently and have grown revenue mostly via pricing. 

Q: What does your team structure look like?

A: Will probably cross that threshold soon, but trying to take it easy and not just hire a bunch of people and take on lots of clients.. . . not that there’s anything wrong with that – it’s mostly a lifestyle decision (and I’m pretty conservative…don’t wanna grow super quick and then have to worry about maintaining that level).

We have a few ‘Growth Advisors’ who work with clients directly. Then a few ‘Growth Managers’ who report to them and each support specific clients. This way, we build up deep knowledge with 2 people on each client, and we have repeatable processes that give us greater leverage.

Q: What’s next in 2021?

A: As far as what’s next in 2021 . . . we’re working on some videos that I think people will like (now that I’ve committed to it here, I can’t get lazy).

Also taking our internal tooling to the next level

Q: It looks like your last job was BigCommerce, how important was working at a name brand in starting your consulting / agency?

Did you do any social brand / audience building while at BigCommerce? Or was it all kind of offline networking?

A: In short: it was everything. But there’s two parts to that:

– working at a big name

– having success – AND A GOOD STORY – at a big name

Now, of course, any decent storyteller can be pretty useless at a cool company and _still_ leverage it for their own benefit. But I’d grown traffic significantly in the year before I left, which was very compelling for other companies to hear.

Plus, my network from BC was strong. A lot of those execs went to other places. And those people referred me to others.

So one great ‘win’ turned into a ton more opportunities.

Q: Most B2B SaaS marketing world seems ignorant to SEO. (to me)

Why do you think that is?

A: B2B SaaS it’s kind of its own universe (for better, and also definitely for worse). The buying cycle is different. The VC scene is different. a lot of companies get P/M fit based on whether they can sell to other companies in their VC’s portfolio.

It’s oftentimes complicated products that require a long sales cycle and interpersonal relationships.

So unless a company happened to stumble into SEO early, by the time they get around to it, they’ve had to develop a bunch of product marketing and (educational) content best practices. And that’s not necessarily a bad thing!

BUT – what then happens is there’s a strong culture of what content is supposed to be, and SEO is seen as infringing on that.

And part of that is for a very good reason. in B2B SaaS, just ranking for an informational query might not do much for you. If you have a complex product, and you throw up a very generic “what is ____” piece of content, then is that really going to help get someone into your funnel? Maybe, but also maybe not.

So when you add all that up, “SEO” is seen as a sketchy thing done to ruin content. And part of my job is selling a holistic vision of how to take what already works, and apply that to an SEO strategy – without spoiling the magic.

Q: Whats the difference between SEO for enterprise companies and non-enterprise companies?

A: enterprise companies is all about getting buy-in from the beginning, getting commitments, and getting them to understand the cross-functional needs if you wanna get anything done.

People want SEO in theory, but they often don’t want to do the upfront diplomacy to get people onboard. Since SEO touches so many disciplines – copywriting, content writing, design, engineering, brand – at a bigger company, everyone has opinions.

At a smaller company, people are too busy to block you. But at a bigger company, people may feel incentivized to block you. To be clear, we’ve worked with big companies who are able to GSD and it’s awesome. But i’m just being real here.

non-enterprise is more about committing the resources, e.g. to create content. one of my blunders early on was taking on projects, then surprising people with the content requirements. now i’m extremely upfront about that.

Q: How did your agency evolve? What was your initial offer/service, did you focus on a vertical and then expanded horizontally or..?

Give us a few tips on growing an agency from scratch (or however you started it)

A: so parts of my own story may or may not be applicable to others, but here goes.

I started out . . . not trying to “start an agency”. I was open to doing consulting. I left my job, moved to Thailand, and took one client with me (that was pretty low maintenance). Then, through my network, I got some other opportunities.

Since I didn’t ‘need’ the work, and I was living in Thailand with a bit of savings (in case anyone doesn’t know, Thailand is cheap AF), I thought “oh whoa, it would be cool to help *this* company).

I got one, then another, then another. Had success with all of them.

I basically took on whatever came my way before i knew any better. the “offering” was to help people clean up their site, get a strategy in place, and then hand off content briefs. I was doing all this stuff myself.

Then I brought on a buddy to help me part time. We brought on a couple other junior people to help with processes around link building and stuff. (because I would talk about the benefits of link building – before I was more strategic/thoughtful about it – but I didn’t really ever wanna do it myself).

Finally brought on a couple FT people in late 2018, and that’s when it became more of a real business.

It has always come from network referrals. I hardly do anything (like this, for example!) – which is NOT a good strategy for others. I just got lucky and got some early wins, which lead to a lot of work.

So my biggest rec would be: think of your immediate network. Who do you know who’s well-connected, and likes talking to people? Do they already know you’re a badass? if not, get on a call and show them (you don’t need to be aggressive). Then figure out how that aligns to a service offering through trial and error. Figure out what you do/don’t want to do, and which companies value your ideal work the most.

Q: Did you take on brands that aren’t household names or did you just work with the dopest logos in tech the whole time?

A: definitely a mix. I did some projects for smaller startups where we had mutual connections. But then obviously when cooler companies come around, that’s awesome.

Q: What does your client communication / reporting / PM stack look like?

A: pretty simple.

– try to keep as much as possible in project management tool. One KANBAN for content development (we throw topics and briefs in at first). Another board for ‘everything else’.

Monthly reports, quarterly reports.

Weekly slack updates.

Most ad-hoc stuff is done via Slack, but we try to keep everything structured in PM software where it makes sense.

Q: how did you get all these clients?

A: Like everything, there’s a virtuous cycle to it.

Do well with 1 or 2 upfront, and they tell other people. Those people tell others.

This gives you more cool opportunities. Success begets success.

But from a practical standpoint, I’m pretty selective about who we partner with. In calls, I often begin with why it isn’t a good fit. And if it turns out I’m wrong, great. But since I only have so many ‘shots’ to fire, I want to make sure they all count.

I’ve had opportunities to make solid $ for stuff that I either thought may not pan out, or didn’t fit our model for successful engagements. Being able to say “no” is the biggest blessing for a business.

And since our product is effectively our marketing, I have to be very careful about continuing to have success.

Q: What do you think about the irony in that the better SEO you are, the easier projects you get. UnSplash is like a DR97 lol

A: HA, I know right.

The double irony, though, is that sometimes sites with a high DR got it because they have a strong brand. And strong brands make SEO more complicated – due to real and self-imposed constraints.

So, easy on paper does not necessarily equal easy in execution.

There’s a reason so many strong brands have terrible SEO, after all!

I’d argue that Unsplash was easy less because of the DR, and moreso because of the basic things they hadn’t done. They were already doing aiight, and there was low-hanging fruit.

Q: If you’re looking at a website with 1,000+ high-quality blog posts, what sort of low-hanging fruit do you generally look for in regards to getting them some quick wins?

* Featured Snippets

* Pages with a lot of impressions in positions 5 – 15.

* Rich Snippets

Once you identify the opportunities, what are the key tweaks / changes you make on the site in terms of on-page optimization, internal links, etc…

A:  a combo of:

– consolidating pages where there’s cannibalization. E.g. 3 pages that fulfill the intent for “ecommerce design” – redirect 2, beef up the content in the 3rd, and optimize for title tags/featured snippets

Then basically everything you said. We’ve grown traffic by 50% in 1 or 2 months by optimizing sites like the one you described (except even less traffic, so you can def crush it).

When you show Google that more pages have value, and then you increase the relevance and CTR potential (by optimizing the body and title tag), you can see huge results.

Lastly, I’m a big fan of Clearscope. I know there are other tools but that’s the one I go with.

Q: I read somewhere that you found great value in optimizing content after publishing:

– What do you do most?

– What is your process regarding anlysis, (e.g. do you go through older content or low performing content first)?

– What are the easiest wins, what were some of the more creative things you did?

– Do you do any A/B testing once you change content?

A: to start with the last one – YES to A/B testing (although any real stats nerd will tell you, correctly, that it’s not _actual_ A/B testing…..but I digress).

For every client, we have a changelog where we record the date we optimized a page, and roughly what we did.

We used to do this all manually and it was a huge pain in the ass.

Now, we feed this data into a Cohort Dashboard in our analytics stack. and we get cool charts like this one:

As far as what we prioritize, we have an internal tool that shows us potential traffic by page. We use that as a big input.

Otherwise, the usual suspects:

– pages that have $ keywords in the ~7-15 spot

– pages that rank for queries with feautred snippets where we are in striking distance.

– pages that are poorly optimized for the ranking keywords, and we know we can crush it by just tweaking TT and body

– pages that rank OK, but don’t relaly fulfill the intent of the KW. so we provide some quick guidelines for the editorial team to add a couple paragraphs.

the cohort dashboard is such a game changer. Like everything, it’s not perfect. but it allows us to

– see what’s working

– demonstrate our value

Whether you’re in-house or external, it’s easy to get comfortable and assume people understand your value. That is usually not the case. Even if they know you’re legit and like the top-down results, people appreciate some bottoms-up insights.

On this dash, we can also show what % of growth was driven by optimizations. Pretty good way to show the imapct you’re having.

Q: what is something that you focus on to rank automatically generated pages (similar to your “search pages” example above

A: a principle is to segment pages by:

– what’s doing well/not well

– topical area

I don’t think there’s a universal answer. Sometimes, you can rank with really thin pages. Other times, you need more. so for each area of the dynamic pages that have somewhat unique SERPs, I try to look at a small sample size to make hypotheses, then roll them out to more pages.

But one easy ‘tactic’ is adding an FAQ. People hate on these, but it’s an easy way to add more relevant subtopics to a page, and also get that sweet sweet rich markup that gives you fatter SERPs.

Q: do you have any low hanging fruits / tips to get SEO started with new sites?

A: whenever you start ranking for something – anything – create more content on that topic. Since Google is so topic-centric, you want to take advantage of where you have momentum. then other things get easier.

Otherwise, target very niche terms even if they supposedly have no search volume (spoiler alert: “0 serach volume” is kind of a BS phrase…..there are 6B+ people on earth….people search for weird s—).

so for very long-tail topics, if you can create content that people engage with, it makes it easier for Google to trust you on other stuff.

Q: What is the most importang books that you have red that you think have helped you to come where you are today?? Both business and personal (since they often overlap each other) ?

A: Business: https://www.amazon.com/…/B002…/ref=dp-kindle-redirect…

Life: https://www.amazon.com/Black-Swan…/dp/081297381X

(Nassim Taleb in general…..he has many flaws, but packs some great principles)

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