SEO

Search engine optimization: earning organic traffic by ranking in search results. In the saved threads filed here it is treated as a growth engine for software and media companies, usually built on a large set of pages that match what people search for.

• Zapier. A thread credits the company’s early organic growth to three tiers of landing pages for every integrated app (the app, each app-to-app integration, and each workflow), which produced about 25K pages ranking in Google’s top 100 and, per the thread, half of search traffic to its main site today.
• Airtable. A breakdown points to its templates pages: 16.4K ranking keywords and about 9,500 monthly visitors, valued at $42,000 a month of organic traffic (the author puts the pay-per-click equivalent at $504,000 a year).
• Masterclass. A thread credits “second order questions” such as “how many teaspoons in a tablespoon” for roughly 10M monthly visits, 61% of them from search.
• James Clear. A newsletter of more than 1.5M subscribers grown without paid ads, on SEO and conversion-rate optimization, with a decade of writing online as the underlying moat. See Building a Newsletter.

The same practice at scale is Programmatic SEO. Its successor, as ranked links give way to generated answers, is Answer Engine Optimization, documented in Companies Are Using Reddit to Manipulate ChatGPT and Google AI Search.

Where this appears

Saved tweets:

• How Zapier Growth Hacked SEO… (tweet)
• If You’re a SaaS Marketer… (tweet)
• James Clear Built One of… (tweet)
• Masterclass is Raising New Funding… (tweet)

Concepts and long reads: Answer Engine Optimization, Companies Are Using Reddit to Manipulate ChatGPT and Google AI Search