A 5 step framework for SEO success
Content & SEO are very measurable (despite what you might think)
This post is guest-written by Padraig O’Connor, ex Wealthsimple, HubSpot and brightwheel.
It was a sunny morning in San Francisco a few years back. Padraig and I were in town for a marketing offsite and had met early to have a team breakfast before we all headed back home. Padraig and I lucked up and were sat across from one another at a small café table. We started off with the casualties, and recapped our learnings from the offsite. All the suspected talking points of a breakfast with a new colleague. Then Padraig started talking about his previous impact at Wealthsimple and I’ll never forget the moment my eyes lit up and I found myself physically leaning into the conversation nodding along. This is a play I’m excited to have him recap here for others to learn from. I’ll let Padraig take it from here!
When it comes to SEO and content marketing, few companies get it right or give it a meaningful shot. I think that’s because content marketing has a bad rep for being fluff. And SEO has a bad rep for being a kind of black box. There’s also a myth that it’s impossible to measure. But that’s not true.
SEO/Content marketing is a hugely valuable channel when done right (for a few reasons):
High LTV marketing channel—People discovering content from search queries are generally pretty valuable. Many of them are in-market and are actively searching or invested in what you have to offer. If someone is taking the time to learn or research through search engines, their purchase decision holds weight. For many, they’re doing research because they are willing to spend. In a lot of sectors I have worked in, folks gained from organic search have a much higher LTV than any other marketing channel.
Pretty low cost—That’s primarily because you have no paid media costs. Your only real cost line items are labor costs (an agency/in-house team of writers and SEOs). Marketing costs matter more to cash-strapped startups, so it’s a great advantage for them.
Super high ROI—As the points above illustrate, it’s a channel with strong returns. Done right, content marketing and SEO will attract high-quality customers at a low cost, thus generating a high return on investment.
Owned media (and a moat)—When it comes to content marketing, you own the content and can control the narrative. Warren Buffett famously said he invests in “castles” (meaning businesses) that have strong moats surrounding them, and that’s exactly what SEO is. Once you have built a library of content and assumed rankings on search results pages, you’re driving traffic and customers every month. This can’t be built by anyone else overnight.
Aligns with your mission—This is the part I really love. With content marketing, you’re helping a company transmit its values and vision to as many people as possible. Content marketing provides a free education to anyone with an internet connection. Not only is this a wonderful impact to make on the world, but it's a really motivating story to tell internally, as well.
Drive brand awareness–Content marketing is a great way to drive awareness amongst your target audience with little wastage. With many traditional marketing channels, you end up paying to reach a portion of people who are not even your target market.
I’m here to keep it real and provide a full picture. There are downsides too:
You have to be in a niche where consumers search for your product—Typically, you need to be in a sector where consumers search for information about your category, rather than discovering it on social media. If folks are not actively searching, you’re wasting your time with SEO.
Longer payback period—It can take more time to break even on the marketing costs you invest. When it comes to content marketing, the majority of the investment is upfront. You pay for the content to be created and then have to wait for it to rank before you bring in customers. It’s different to paid media, where you typically see immediate results in the same month you’ve invested money. If you're a seed-stage startup with limited capital, this is less ideal than if you’re a well-funded mid-sized company.
Hard to get talent—Compared to other marketing channels, I believe it’s much harder to get folks who are truly skilled at SEO.
Capacity limitations—The volume of people searching by sector varies a ton. This means you could have a lot of scale or a very limited scale. Generally, you can only assume one listing on search engine results pages for each search (rather than multiple).
At this point, you’re either sold or sick of hearing about the unit economics of SEO. I hope it’s the former and you’re now saying “yes SEO!!!” And you’re wondering what’s next!
I’m here to give you a very quick lesson in successful SEO/Content Marketing 101 and share my five-step process to nailing it.
1. Uncover if there’s an SEO opportunity at all
First, you have to uncover if an opportunity exists for SEO to be a viable marketing channel for your business. If you’re a large firm, that probably means hiring McKinsey, Bain, or a marketing agency to scope it out. If you’re a startup (or anyone that doesn’t want to drop a fortune on light scoping), then I’d suggest paying for a monthly subscription to Ahrefs/SEMRush or similar and punching in a few keywords to describe your business. For example, a finance company might input “stocks”, “debt”, or “credit card”. If you’re seeing hundreds of high search volume phases containing these keywords, you’re onto a winner. If you’re not, then you either don’t have the right keywords (keep going) or SEO is sadly not a channel for you and you should absolutely not waste your marketing dollars on it.
I can’t stress enough how important it is to understand if it’s even worth investing in this channel before you do anything else. An ethos of “build it and they will come” will do absolutely nothing for you. If your content is ranking in first position on search engines for queries nobody searches for, then that’s doing absolutely nothing for your business. You’re not going to get much traffic and less spending customers. You can get an agency to help with this step, but I’d advise businesses to do their due diligence and not make a full-time internal hire until they have done some opportunity sizing.
2. Write about the topics people search for
Next, it’s crucial to cover topics that have search volume. It’s not about what your brand team or your CEO wants to write about. You will need to cover what some might consider the boring and mundane things people search for. This sounds intuitive but you’d be very surprised how many businesses fail at this. In a world of finite resources, you’ll want to carefully consider where to start and choose topics that have decent search volume, aren’t too competitive, and are closely related to your business so you’re moving the needle in terms of customer acquisition and revenue.
3. Do it better than anyone else
Cover topics well—your content has to be better than the existing top ten results ranking on Google for a given query. For many categories, there’s going to be a high bar. You might need to hire exceptional researchers and writers who can interview experts on a topic to come up with something new, useful, and authentic rather than regurgitating what’s already on the internet. You’ll want to put yourself in the reader's shoes and cover exactly what they want to know. If you’re in a sector where information really affects people’s lives (think medical, health, or finance), it’s worth getting your content reviewed by a professional. The content should also mention this fact because it builds credibility and trust.
4. Ensure your site is technically sound
Doing technical SEO alone will get you nowhere (remember you need to have content people search for to begin with). That said, you do need to nail the basics of technical SEO to ensure search engines can find your content. Technical SEO is documented to death online, and agencies are generally stronger at technical SEO than other aspects, so it needs little explanation.
5. Content promotion
Finally, you’ll want to promote your content so it’s considered an authoritative source of information. Just ensure you don’t engage in unethical SEO techniques in the process.
Building a Content Marketing Powerhouse: How SEO Became Wealthsimple's Most Efficient Channel
I joined the growth marketing team at Wealthsimple in 2018. They are a Canadian fintech company offering a myriad of financial services, from stock trading to tax filing. When I started, the company was in its infancy. There were about a hundred employees. To begin with, I was tasked with growing the SEO & content marketing channel, which was virtually non-existent at the time. In the beginning it was a challenge to even get buy-in to fund long-form content. I remember putting together a graph with word count on one axis and traffic on the other to point out the correlation–it did the trick!
Over about three years, we went from ranking for a few non-brand keywords and getting virtually no non-brand organic traffic (or customers) to hitting a million monthly visits in certain months. SEO was also the most efficient marketing channel for the company: It brought in thousands of customers, at the highest ROI and shortest payback period. And it all happened by following the five-step process I described.
We built out a hub on the website exclusively for content aimed to gain traffic and customers from organic search. It was called “Personal Finance 101”. Having a dedicated section with this set goal really kept us focused. I hired a team of freelance finance writers, and over time we would publish hundreds of personal finance articles on this hub.
Our cardinal rule was only to write about content people search for. We used software like Ahrefs and SEMRush to uncover the finance topics people actually wanted to know more about. Initially, we prioritized largely based on search volume and queries that related closely to the products we offered. Later, we were able to combine that data with internal data like APRA and LTV and organize it by topic in order to determine what to cover. We created long-form content that covered various topics in detail. We secured top search engine rankings on high-value terms like “how to buy stocks”, “emergency fund”, “savings accounts”, “best ETFs” and the likes. We even gained page-one rankings for the brand names of some competitors.
We also created a bunch of free tools that people search for, from a retirement calculator, income tax calculator, RRSP calculator, and more. Again, our cardinal rule was to only build tools people searched for–we didn’t waste resources inventing tools people didn’t seek out.
Over time, we improved our data, tracking, and attribution. We were able to track how much revenue each article/tool generated, the average revenue per customer, and the payback period of each article. We were also able to classify our articles by the category or topic they related to, so that we could analyze what topic areas brought in the highest value customers, the highest volume of customers, and revenue. The classification was a manual process where we mapped URLs to topics in Google Sheets and fed it into our BI tool and dashboards.
We did further analysis to uncover what the revenue opportunity for each article would be if we could improve the rankings for that term. We engaged specialized SEO agencies to increase the rankings of our highest-value content. Over time we also invested in infrastructure. For example, we initially didn’t have a content management system (CMS), but we invested in one that made publishing content much quicker and easier. We were also able to realize some technical SEO efficiencies in doing so.
Getting the opportunity to spearhead the SEO and content marketing function from the ground up at Wealthsimple was a career highlight. I’m proud of all the business success we had, as well as the free personal finance education we provided in the process to millions of people through content marketing.
A huge thank you to Padraig for sharing his learnings! Something I’m excited to do here more often is to highlight the brilliant minds of those around me. If you’re like Padraig, and have something you’d like to share or collaborate on in a future article–hit reply and let’s chat!
See you all back here next week!
Kaylee
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