Hey, I'm Uswan. I worked with modash 2x their deals from programmatic SEO coming from inbound search and improve their search traffic by 96%. All of this happened in eight months. We started working with them last year when they had already cracked the programmatic SEO play. They were generating some traffic about six figures already on a monthly basis and they wanted to uplift that two to three x their traffic and conversions. So we built up program optimized it in a linking structure to website architecture as a whole got revamped used first principle thinking and a lot of research talking to a lot of subject matter experts to revamp the data that we present on those programmatic pages, which was basically data points coming from their product and all of this resulted in doubling the growth for the company. We worked with the design team, the data engineering team, and the head of marketing to implement the program. And all of this went pretty smooth in a matter of months. Now who should implement this? You can implement this if you are in a B2B category or in fact any category I would say as long as you have some of the parameters checked you have decent search demand. You have repeatable keyword patterns in your industry that you can create templatized pages for it. You have true prior tree data. For example, in the case of Mordash, we had a lot of unique data for specific influences that you can hire. So you want to, you know, hire fitness influences. You can see their average likes average views, fake followers, etc. If you have group priority data that you can use to deploy and create dynamic pages, have decent search demand. And then most importantly, have product market fit. This strategy is going to unlock a new level of growth for your company. If that resonates with you, listen along. Otherwise, honestly, don't check out our other episodes instead. You are listening to T L B R. The B2B says growth podcast got to you by spare growth. Every episode is like a case study of a tactic, which means if you're listening to this on a Friday, by Monday, you can actually start implementing it. I'm your host, Ishan. And I run an ads and SEO agency for B2B SaaS companies like yourselves. Now let's get into the episode. So I'm Usman. I'm an organic growth strategist. I work with B2B SaaS companies. In simple words, we help turn a search on organic growth as a whole, which could also include other channels, not just search into your number one revenue driving channel. We help generate customers and revenue for software companies, mainly in the B2B space. Just make more money, right? Help them grow through acquisition. So that's one thing that we do. We're also trying to branch into when I say we, my current agency, which is Omnation Digital, when I'm working as an organic growth strategist, we're also trying to branch into the channels as of now. And on the side, I do a lot of consulting and advising for the B2B SaaS companies in whatever capacity I can. So that's me. Usman. Oh, my God. I am so excited for this one. And so if, you know, we've spoken so many times, right? When you know how my first metastie was, I've been following you from work. I think back when you were at Flying Cut, I've been following you from there. You are one of the few SEOs that I like following on LinkedIn for their SEO strategy. Everyone else is talking about some random stuff or just, I don't know, like, even their snapshots, I'm not very fond of. I am like, you know, there's maybe four or five SEOs on LinkedIn that I'm like, hey, these are these are freaking guys that I would love to learn from a work with. And you're one of them. So thank you so much for doing this. Thank you so much for inviting me, Sean. It's an actual pleasure. You really, really kind to be honest. I just try to do good work, have a higher bar of excellence. But I'm really, really glad the content is resonating and you feel like my mental models are somewhat sane. So yeah, and by the way, I've been following you for the same time period. I think spear grows, how you folks have grown. I've seen the kind of people have joined your team. So you folks are doing really good work for sure. Love that. Okay. So let's get directly into the topic at hand. Right. So this is a new one because we're not discussing. Hey, you kicked off a programmatic program. But you act. They've also in this correct me if I'm wrong. There was a programmatic program already. And you took that and still were able to scale it. Right. So that's correct. So can you just quickly just share once what you know, just like what did their existing programmatic program look like for anyone listening. And then we can discuss. Okay. And what did you do from there? Yeah, for sure. Mootash was definitely one of the most interesting projects I've worked on mainly because many factors. But one of them being the fact that the client, the head of marketing who hired me was also somewhat of a friend. I was thrilling then. So we had we've been chatting. We have like a catch up every three to four months. So it was definitely in some sort of an informal capacity. Right. He was very upfront. Like, hey, it's always fun when you have someone who you already know and you're trying to work together. And it's like a, you know, I would say partially casual sort of a setting. So that's one factor. But then additionally, the foundations that that company had built through that. Head of marketing, right, that friend of mine, whose name is Ryan, by the way. So shout out to Ryan. They had just done some amazing foundational work. So just working with Ryan, they scaled to I think a couple million dollars in a ride, totally mainly organically. And even before Ryan before they kicked off their marketing, they had a pretty solid product. There were pretty strong signals that this product is pretty solid. It's going to grow in the market on its own. And then if you can just fuel good growth and marketing. It will play out pretty, you know, even better, right. So just having those signals and then seeing what kind of work, Ryan had done on the project. So for context, Brian himself came from an SEO background. He was managed to get a strategist at scale at some point. And then he joined Mordash. I became the head of marketing. So he already knew the SEO game. He did most of the fundamental plays, created a blog, you know, targeted those part of the final commercial intent, kind of keywords, built some foundational pages, drove a lot of traffic. Also invested in programmatic SEO, created a lot of pages for those locations, specific kind of terms. So for context, Mordash is an influencer marketing platform. It helps you find influences and then also manage campaigns. So you can think about, let's say, if you're beauty brand and you're looking to grow in a pretty good region. And you want to work with influences for growth. You can search like, you know, what are the best beauty, beauty influences in Chennai or Delhi or California, right. So that platform had a lot of data, a lot of unique information that users could use. And that pro priority data was used to create a lot of programmatic pages, right. So I'm we're talking hundreds of pages with different categories, platforms, locations, segmented into different, you know, pages that that could drive such traffic. So we're talking about the same kind of keywords, right, like fitness influences in Colombia, you know, beauty influences in some other place or YouTube, YouTubers to follow or, you know, to hire in particular areas. Now these are not blog posts, these are not listicles, these are programmatically created pages based on the data that the platform has pro priority, right. Their own data, right, which shows them not just the YouTubers and the influences, but also, you know, a lot of additional information specific to the platform, what are their average views, average likes, right, what are how many of their fake, how many of their followers are fake, what is their average engagement. So all of this data is something that their platform offers as a product and they integrated that into this programmatic play. So that was pretty cool that itself scaled the company in terms of traffic to I think six figure, multi six figure, say traffic on a monthly basis. Now, of course, that was a little top of the funnel, but that was a pretty good discovery medium for people to learn about the brand. And then at some point using, you know, multi touch attribution model, they were measuring how those people would finally convert into a paying customer. So that became a pretty good discovery model, right, for the company, those programmatic pages alone. Meanwhile, they were also investing in blog and that has also been growing at that point. So we had a pretty strong foundation, then new hate this channel works, these initiatives are going to drive results, but so far, it was only trying, right, or maybe a bunch of freelancers. And then when you're only head of marketing and more of a marketing captain, rather than, you know, someone with a big team, like you're just doing most of the work on your own, you're waiting a lot of hearts. You spread 10, you don't have time to invest a lot into strategy and, you know, planning, fancily, right. So just like being very scrappy. So that was the model that they were working with, which showed an opportunity that, hey, we've received signal that these programs work. Now we want to take it to the next level and add strategic prioritization, right, strategically build infrastructure that can help us five X 10 X results from these programs, so that is where I was brought in. Interesting. So when I was, when I just think of programmatic, right, the biggest or how do you even go about it? Because of the way this context, when I try to do something like this, the first thing is trying to sort of create a encoder database, you can call it a spreadsheet, but sort of design one, like, what does the page look like to what are the pages you can create. So the first thing is, okay, water, although the permutation combination of all the pages. And two, then, okay, for every single page, you have to now then identify the kind of data points that will fit in in which different places, some of it is, yeah, so that that's our process. How do you structure that, right? And so like, if you were starting it from scratch, a program like this with students, but if you were, what would your like step one, two, three, because most people will probably not join in the middle of a programmatic program. Yeah, yeah, that's a really good question. So there are some foundational checks, right, some set of parameters that you have to check at the very base level. And then there are other factors that you have to think about when you're trying to basically estimate the overall increase in any particular metric that you can expect, as in traffic, conversions, etc. Right. So starting with the foundational ones that needs to be true, right, those are the conditions, pre-requisites. I would say a decent search term, as in, hey, is your search market pretty small or is it decent enough for you to create a bunch of pages. On, on particular repeatable patterns and then attain traffic. So if, if, for example, you're just highly specific and a small niche, most likely programmatic is not going to be a big growth level, right. Maybe you can just like, turn up 10, 15 pages of, you know, same looking templateized fashion, but it's not going to be a massive growth level. The second thing would be can you notice some repeatable keyword patterns that can be aligned directly with what you have to offer, right. In an ideal scenario and that comes in so many shapes and forms that you have to build a really deep understanding of your product offers and who you're trying to reach your customers, right. And only then you can layer that feasibility check of programmatic, right. So the way I think about this is, you know, the classic example of Zapier, for example, they have an integration product. Of course, the most obvious thing to do would be to create all of these thousands of integration pages, you know, talking about integration of one product to another, right. In the same sense for Zelo or Airbnb, right, just blending people discover those places that the platform already helps discover programmatically makes sense, right. So all of these are really good examples of alignment with what the product offers at the core. Same goes for can write if they have a lot of templates. If you really grill it down to the core, it's basically saying, hey, we are a design product. That is our offering. And our programmatic pages are directly aligned with that offering, right. Our templates will allow you to start designing. Airbnb says, hey, our programmatic pages will help you start discovering those Airbnb locations, right. Same goes for Zelo, same goes for any of their major indeed, for example, right again, a programmatic SEO strategy will help you find those jobs because we have that database. So I think alignment directly with what your product has to offer and who are you exactly offering is pretty important. And you only do that by building a deeper understanding of the audience that you're trying to reach. So those two to three would be foundational checks. And then I would think about on addition, in addition to that, if you're really just starting out, I would say, do we have product market fit. Do we have some signals. That's for SEO in general, though. Yeah, yeah, that is true. But the way I think about programmatic SEO is like it's you're trying to scale. And you're trying to do X 3 X 5 like you're just really trying to unlock the next level of growth. So of course, for sure, you know, program, you know, PMF should be a factor when you're thinking about SEO at large. But even within SEO, you can use some sort of some sort of a thought leadership led motion in your blog, right. Like, hey, we're going to publish four pieces a month. Like that's not going to hurt if you have decent budget, even if you know, you haven't totally unlocked product market fit, but I wouldn't really think about programmatic SEO in any capacity. Unless product market fit is achieved or you've seen some pretty strong signals. I have a pretty cool story actually. And this is why like I'm pretty cautious about programmatic SEO specifically without seeing product market fit. There was a company back at flying cat. And we started with programmatic SEO for them. The main problem was they had almost no paying customers hardly one or two. B to B company enterprise level. And we just thought for some reason. Now, to be honest, it was not my idea, but still either the strategist, I had to like, you know, take, I have to take ownership. I didn't really push back. This was years back, but again, you know, something that fell on my shoulders. But pretty big learning for me. So we did a bunch of programmatic pages created them, saw some impressions and clicks. In fact, traffic started coming in. None of the pages brought in anything like we couldn't see anything. And we're not talking about attribution problem. We're saying, even holistically on a domain level on a website level, we didn't really see an uplift. Although traffic was was growing in some capacity. So that was a pretty big lesson. Like programmatic SEO sure, you know, if you just have the money and you could just like, you know, you have days of funding or something in those rare instances, you want to be aggressive and you want to try things out. But generally speaking, programmatic SEO without product market fit, especially when you're just starting out is not a good idea. So I would say just summarizing those foundational checks at the start. Does it make sense? Is there search demand? Are there repeatable keyword patterns and can be aligned this directly with the product offering and is their product market fit. So in the case of more dash. This was pretty obvious right because they had already seen some signals. I think one thing that I will add, which is a slightly complex point is that do you have alignment with the product team and the head of marketing or the CEO. In this case, the CEO, honestly, like if you're doing programmatic because this is no longer a marketing decision. For example, if you're marketing an analytics company and you want to do programmatic, you need to build out a lot of templates. You took Zapier's example, Zapier's CEO was convinced that their growth model was add was adding more integrations because then that gives them SEO traffic. So there has to be alignment on the CEO level versus a lot of other SEO plays. You just need alignment on what like the marketing level. You don't really have to go to get to the CEO. Or for example, there's also like some interesting things. For example, if you have built out integrations that's your information. You can decide to do what you want with it. When you are using your or even like in the case of more dash, it is all public information at least not like how many followers someone has or what their post look like is still public information. So you can use it easily. There's some. It almost goes to the gray area and some place. For example, Gong would publish content around. Like, hey, what is the average time some good sales person spends on a call? Sure, that's on your platform. But you did use your user's data to analyze trust. You need to now get the legal team involved to sort of get so. So, and you know, you could take it. I don't know anyone that has, but you could take it a step further. For example, if you're a HR tech platform, you could do things like, you know, the top templates that work really well and features literally like anonymized, but share the best template out. That is literally your like your customers information. Yeah, yeah, you need to sort of figure out where do you draw the line? How much? How far can you go with it? 100% 100% I would also say what you said earlier, right, when you gave the Zappi example of the CEO being convinced that they need to add more integrations. I think that is such a solid point. I guess the ideal state for any programmatic play, if you're doing it on a such a large scale is if multiple teams that are involved. All see that as a win win, right? Like it just does not feel like a programmatic SEO play specifically at all, right? It just feels like, hey, we're doing a bunch of things. It's going to help in SEO, but we're also going to benefit other teams. I remember I was at a company called Unlayer. It was an email design platform. I was there for a while in house. And then I went in a consulting mode. But we tried to totally copy the, you know, can we think, right, because it was an email design platform. So email templates made a lot of sense. It's a newsletter template. It's basically the kind of templates that you would see HTML emails. And we did the entire thing, right, let's create a lot of categories, email templates for marketing, for invoices, for e-commerce, all of that stuff. And then we created a system where product team would be pretty interested in getting those templates ready. Same goes for customer success teams. And then, of course, from an SEO standpoint, we were getting the benefit. Simply because they just thought it's such a good value add for the user. Right. So if you can find that, I guess, nexus of different teams, where they all just see that program as a win win. And it just feels like a good strategy for everyone. That's ideal. That's like, you know, you're just like hitting on the right spot. Yeah, you can call it whatever you want. You can call it. Hey, how do you make it a win win? But it is sort of trying to convince other teams and sort of make other teams to your bidding for you. Yeah, for sure. Make yourself look less selfish, exactly. Right. So, who do you think? In this context, like, who owns the programmatic program in the case of Modash, who was the owner of the program? And it could be you. It could be your friend, wait, Ryan. It could be Ryan. It could be like who owned the program? Because, obviously, there was the productive and world problem. What were the teams involved? I would say it was owned definitely by Ryan on a program level. Right. Again, Brian was this marketing captain. Right. Who was pretty hands on. And that's like, you know, to be honest, one of his biggest weapons in his arsenal. That his just so hands on that he can get things done. His not afraid to jump in. And he had that, you know, hands on mindset. So that was pretty enabling, even if for me, jumping on this project. So he was owning that entire project for me jumping in and, you know, working with them as a consultant, leading the strategy. My scope was mainly focused on the programmatic part. So in some sense, we shared ownership for that program at a program. Apart from that, we also had some engineering team folks involved to help us create those pages. And especially when we were trying to redefine the logic, which we can talk about, right, because we had so many different data points that we were using to create those pages. And we wanted to create new. We wanted to make many changes to the existing ones in terms of the information that we display, the data that we show, the internal linking, all of those factors. So we had support from the engineering team. I think one engineer, in fact, was dedicated specifically for that project. At the start in part time and then Ryan was talking about getting in full time. So That and he was a data engineer. So he was like really hands on really in district assignment. So that was pretty helpful. I would say it was a nexus of me from an SEO standpoint. Ryan from a holistic marketing leadership standpoint, and then that did engineering person owning that engineering and you know, data block. Sort of wrote the content for the pages, because even if you decide, hey, this piece should go here. Someone has to still write it. And then someone has to make it look pretty. Yeah. Yeah. And sorry, one, just come another question to this is like, did the engineering team also do the front end bit or was there a web dev team? And the engineering team took part of the back and like, what did that look like? Yeah. So basically, we have, as I said, there were multiple teams. The hard designer, a freelancer designer who would work with them. Specifically, again, for that part of the website, they just knew that that part of the website, that segment, programmatic pages as a whole. It was just a important segment as in it just moves the needle for them, and they just had cracked that measurement model to figure out, hey, this is working. So we want to deploy resources specifically to focus on this segment, right? So they would get a designer in part time capacity or whatever capacity. Specifically work on those programmatic pages and just like help them, you know, in its prints, right? Like, hey, the next three months, we want to change these things. Same goes for the data engineer started part time and then, you know, in some capacity, it changed over time. So when it comes to the development, it was owned so the actual product, when I say product, I mean, programmatic pages as a product, right? So the information that they displayed was pretty dynamic, which was taken directly from their product. So it was created as a model by the data engineer and then the front end most likely was done by their team, right? And that was an infrastructure that already existed when I jumped in into the project. So like they had a good system like, hey, we have these pages. These are, you know, the cards that we're going to display content. Someone else like someone has to write the content still, not necessarily. So like the very high level as in, you know, we have these headings that we're going to show. And then all of the cards that we show, like, let's say, for example, if you take the example of, you know, fitness influences in California, we decide, hey, this is, you know, we're going to show, let's say, 15 influences on a page. And then each of those are going to be directly coming from our database. And this is a card that each of the influencer gets within this card will get average likes top performing posts or, you know, percentage of fake followers for each of the influences. And all of those are literally exact metrics that the product offers to the users, right, paying users. So like they can like Ryan could really literally just click a button and then, you know, decide, here, these are the ones that I want to plug into the cards, right, not at the start, but that is how he planned working with the engineer, like, hey, I see this card. I'm going to work with the designer, create a design for this. I'll tell you which data points include. And then I wanted to create 1500 pages out of it. Right. So, yeah, so like that when I jumped in, I think they already had 1400 pages. And they didn't really have a turn of support. And to be honest, didn't even needed on the textual content front, right, like actual writing. So I think one thing that I do when I'm taking up projects like these is that there are some sections on the website that have to be written. For example, if it was and you don't always have to do this, but for example, if you're saying, let's say there's a influences in California, there could be something like California is the hub of blah, blah, blah, blah. You know, there's like something like fashion influencers are more this and that is something written on top. Yeah, sometimes because without that small subtext or without some city years, you know, like it sometimes feels less complete. In this case, that wasn't needed, though, he was saying, this is, they already have enough more than enough information and fences already really descriptive. I didn't usually, I would say, I agree, usually speaking, as in, you know, some textual content helps. But in my experience, what I've seen is if there are some again, foundational factors true in your space, and then on top of it, you can just hit the session tend most likely would not need it. So, for example, if more dash was basically a pretty fresh brand, nobody knew them in the space, they had no traffic at all and authority. Yeah, and this space had a lot of competition. As in, you know, many other companies had thought about this programmatic play of, you know, finding influences already and they like everyone was doing this. Then most likely textual content could become a little bit right here, Google might give you an advantage on top of, you know, all of the competition in the serves. The advantage that more dash had was, you know, it was a decent brand already. They had raised some funding, you know, they were doing good. They had some digital PR giving them authority as a brand overall. And then more importantly, I don't think anyone had already done this kind of a play already in the service. So like they came in and they said, Hey, we're going to create hundreds of hundreds of pages. And no one in the service was really out there competing with them. In fact, when I did most of the analysis research, I found that most of the pages that they were competing with were blog posts, which are most likely at that point created manually. Right. So they were out there sharing our pages like hundreds of them, like systematically, and the companies they were competing with were creating those textually as a list, right, like, hey, these are the 10 influences to follow. So I think that was an advantage. I remember seeing this same pattern at only the same company that I talked about, right, which is that evil design platform. So we had similar sort of template focused pages. And at the start, I was convinced that we need to have these blocks of text on the page because it's going to help with the topical relevancy and rankings. And then at some point, actually, as an experiment, we removed those pieces, those blocks of text from many pages, which were already performing or growing up in rankings gradually. I didn't really see a difference. Again, earlier, again, was a VC packed company at that point. Yeah. Yeah, when you can avoid it, you avoid it, right, because I would slow down the progress. By the way, this was my favorite answer given to like by the perspective. Yeah, no, it's all good. I mean, any SEO nerd would say, you know, if we can add some, you know, text on the page, like that would just make them feel more secure. Yeah. Perfect. So just I have a couple of maybe deep questions. One, how would you deal with the indexation issues? You know that you understand the question, right, if you want to explain the audience first and then answer it. Yeah. No, for sure, for sure. So I think normally speaking, one of the biggest issues with any pragmatic campaign is the indexing, like that is one question that even some of the leaders ask. You know, and that's like the first concern, even if they don't understand SEO, the deepest level, they still think, hey, indexing is something that we really care about. But yeah, in the case of Mordash and also as a mental model for any campaign, my understanding is we want to give Google a good enough reason to index these pages. That's one. And then secondly, we want them to be easily crawlable and discoverable, right. Those are the main two broad categories, right, in order to get a patient text. They want the page to look important, right, to have, you know, information that is worth indexing and then give signals so that they can be crawled and indexed, etc. If those two things as broad categories can be nailed, then, you know, you don't, I don't see any chances of getting the page not indexed. How many pages, sorry, how many pages did you make live at a chance at once? Yeah, so when we started, I think Mordash roughly had about 1200 to 1300. So, as of now, I think we added about 3000 extra pages after that. And so the total time period, I think for the project was about six to eight months. So, I mean, those pages, I think only went live because for the first three months, most likely we were focused on the existing pages, how we want to upgrade those, you know, how we want to change the logic and the information displayed on the pages. And then we were also doing research for new pages that we want to publish, right, based on prioritization and attributed deals that we could see in the data. So, the time period for the new content to go live was pretty short, I would say, for 3000 pages, right, so I would say maybe like, like they all went live. Yeah, I'm pretty sure there were some pages, right, like struggling to get indexed, but again, when you're doing it on a such a large scale, and you're seeing at large pages getting indexed, crawled and ranking. It's like on a program level, it's fine, and then you can of course take tactical steps to go back and say, how can we fix the ones that didn't show up. So, in the case of Modash, one thing, like we knew we cracked the first part, which is the information that we're seeing on those pages, right, that is something like we publish a page. It tracks up pretty quickly if it's already indexed, right, which is a pretty strong signal that the information is pretty high quality. And again, we could like anecdotally see within the service that when someone searches for it, fitness inferences in California, if a Modash page exists, there's no way someone would not click that page, right, like there's no way someone would read a blog post. When we're showing them literally the percentage of fake followers, they have their average engagement and the kind of proprietary data that we have, it's just, you know, words apart from the rest of the service. So the first part, right, which is like, have a page that is worth indexing, that was cracked in our opinion in our thesis. Second part was just making it more discoverable and internally linked, and that is where we used internal linking logic. So we noticed when I jumped in and noticed, although they had a lot of pages, one big problem was that we didn't really have a solid architecture for links, internal links across all of those pages. Especially when you have 1400 pages and you publish them, you know, in a short amount of time, and you had so many of the things to do, it makes sense, right, you don't have to necessarily get everything which perfect in the first run. So Ryan, you're totally cool. But, you know, when I jumped in, I really saw that as an opportunity. In their case, we created three different segments. So if you think about discovery of influences, right, from first principles perspective, you can segment them based on category, location, and platform. Right. So you can say there are going to be categories of inferences, fitness, beauty, right, health, whatever, there are going to be inferences by location. So Pakistan, India, US, right, and then there would be based on platforms. So TikTok influences, Instagram influences, YouTubers, etc. When I jumped in, most of the pages, all 1400 pages were basically just to randomly living on the website with no clear internal linking. So the logic that we created was that we're going to create these three categories. We're going to have one pillar page for influencer marketing page, which already existed. We're going to use that as a page to, you know, use as a pillar and then these three categories will have their own pillar pages. And then finally, each of those categories will have their hundreds of pages in them, right. So when it comes to countries or regions or cities, there would be hundreds and each, etc. Same goes for platforms, same goes for categories. And then we need vertical, as well as horizontal link, internal linking, right. So basically just imagine you have these 3000 pages and you have these segmentation based on category location and platform. And now all of the pages need to link to each other, right, in some capacity. So imagine if there's a page that says fitness influences, sorry, fitness, Instagram influences in Pakistan, right. So that page need to somehow and we have to figure out how we were going to do that needs to link to all pages that reference Pakistan that reference Instagram and that reference fitness, right. Because those three were the variables, those three were the parameters mentioned on that page. So just creating that sort of a logic where we said, hey, if any two pages or mood shared any parameters, let it be region, let it be platform, let it be category, they have to link back to each other, right. So that was the logic that we defined. And then you said link back, did you just add like a big section at the bottom and just like, yeah, that's the second part of figuring out how can we do that right. So we came up with the model and we said, this is what we want to do. And then we said, you know, the best way to do this is to create a scrollable, some sort of a footer section. So it needs to be scrollable so that, you know, all of the links are in there. And Google can see all of those and we actually, they already had a section like that, but it was not scrollable. It was not searchable. It is basically just like some random links that they would add at the end of any page. So we jumped in and said, hey, based on this logic, the best way to do this is to create a scrollable footer section where you have three different boxes or two boxes or one box based on how many of those parameters, those three categories are seen on a page. So imagine if there's one page that says fitness influences, there would be one box at the end that would link to all of the pages that reference fitness. If it if the page says fitness influences in Pakistan, there would be two boxes at the footer scrollable again, one for fitness, one for Pakistan and linking back to all pages that reference Pakistan, right. And then if there are three different parameters used, fitness influences, fitness, Instagram influences, there are going to be three boxes, right. And now we're going to link to all of the pages that reference Instagram is a platform. So that created like a web holistically across the website. So there's two ways to do this, right. One is you try to do it purely for Google and then you try to not make it hinder the UX. Yeah, sort of saying that, hey, all the links are here and then I just want to somehow make sure that even if a user gets here, it doesn't hinder their experience. The other way to do it is somehow make it part of the UX where the user also appreciates having all the links. So what did you really pick? What did the links look like was the question. Yeah, yeah. So I think I just start I remember seeing that section and I can we can also I can also share the screenshot. You know what it looked like and what we didn't that into it was definitely moved on the I guess still it would be unfair to say it was totally for Google right at that point. It just felt like it was more for Google's optimization. But we when we did this entire play, we just knew there would be so many pages if we would have to create. We at least tried working with the UI UX designer to create a model that would be a blend of user experience as well as Google optimization. So for example, I would totally vouch for. Hey, let's just get all of the pages linked in that section so that all of the pages are getting internal links in some capacity and their UX designer actually came up with the idea. Hey, what if someone wants to search for a particular city, right? And you have like 500 pages in that little box scrolling through. How are they going to find it? So they suggested you're adding a search bar, right? So so that made sense. So that made sense. Yeah, I would have probably won't have, but I would have said, okay, you know, can we make the links look like profile links or something? Yeah, right that but the search bar was very smart. I would have done the same thing, maybe like a drop down with just scroll it and yeah, yeah, yeah. I was like, that's such a good idea. I don't know why I didn't. Yeah, no, that was not my idea to be honest. I would have to admit. I would just to focus on the optimization part and that was a pretty cool addition by the designer. So and then possibly by Ryan as well, right as an idea. But yeah, that was again, you know, going back to what we were talking earlier, just a good blend of different teams working together, just bringing different sort of mindset into the same program and just making it success. I'll ask you one just a fun question, honestly, right? So when you do this at the end of it, there are a few pages. You know, if I tweak this a little bit, you know, it's going to get. I can make it easily rank a lot more. I can probably get a few more internal links to this. I can probably add a section to this, but it would break the template. What do you do then? I feel the urge for sure. You know, just like any other SEO, especially when you can see the opportunity, like, hey, you know, if I could just like, you know, move out of this template and just like, you know, optimize this title tag a little differently because the subs look a little different and unique for this particular case. But to be honest, I tend not to do it. I just like look the look at the program holistically and say from a bird's eye view, we did this and then, you know, this is the total uplift that we're seeing. And then, you know, out of these 3000 or whatever number of pages we published, if 10% pages are just going to sit there in the graveyard, we can let them be. We can make any changes we want to really if we have resources like nothing is stopping you, of course, we should, you should do that. But if it's going to cost you anything, right, that is not worth doing, then you can just like let them sit there. I think, in fact, that was the framework that Ryan also used at the start, which is like, hey, before you joined in, he actually told me, he said, I just did a bunch of things, you know, for these programmatic pages, I just went in and said, you know, what are the pages that make sense to create. Under this programmatic play and then the ones that do not perform or don't show any impressions, we can just delete them right going back. So instead of planning very rigorously, we can just like run a hypothesis and say, let's create hundreds of these pages. And then if they don't perform a show up, we can just go back and delete them afterwards. So I think I was running with the same mindset. Yeah, that was going to be my next question, right. So I do something very similar. It's like when when you're doing keyboard to search normally, I am so careful, I probably spend when we were doing it manually, now we have internal tools at the show, I promise you, I'll show it to you someday. But we haven't really do this. Earlier, I would spend like arts finding a single keyword. And when I'm doing programmatic, I'm like, create how do you prioritize right because you still have to say, okay, shoot the engineers and all the teams focus on this one section before the next, how do you prioritize. So when you say sections, do you mean prioritize as in the pages that we want to create or yeah, for example, you could go after in this case, it was just influences in every group in different ways. Yes, by different number of parameters. Right. So very often when you are doing a program project, there are usually, okay, there's there could be, you know, like there could be sections of, hey, should I create influence of pages should I create. Yeah, there's like types of pages and then all of them would require almost it would feel like a separate programmatic program on its own. Yeah, in this case, you didn't have to but then still I think it's useful to discuss. Yeah, no, this is a good question. And even in this case, actually, I think this was some word in my mind and there's a pretty cool example of this and something to actually learn from. So my thesis is you should prioritize based on expected business value and you should have a hypothesis behind it, not necessarily based on your obsession with data. Because, you know, sometimes it's just really hard to actually filter for signal with all of the noise with the data, like you can just like create your own story, looking at numbers. So I would say if you have, if you can somehow connect the dots and say there is higher business expected value here. And this is my reasoning, then that is where you should attack now in the case of more dash, for example, we could look at volume, we could look at so many little things. But, you know, what's, you know, the biggest factor that we were taking into account, specifically for all of these regions was basically just population. Right, like saying, what are the biggest regions where we really think there's no way on earth, no one is searching for influences. We're going to prioritize those regions specifically, right. So, of course, you know, search volume can add in a little layer of information and then prioritize like you can totally use that as a data point. But then if you just like run with first principles and say, hey, you know, is there really a way someone is not searching is, you know, lost Angeles for, you know, beauty influences or models, you know, some sort. If that makes sense, then of course, let's just prioritize those regions first and then move on to the next ones afterwards. So, that's like, you always make a spreadsheet with the data and then you say, yeah, it's usually that. Yeah, 100% it's like, of course, you can look at all of the data, you can look at all of the numbers. But then something needs to click mentally, you have to use some sort of a sense checking filter mentally, right. And usually I would say when you said generally speaking, you have so many options, programmatically speaking, I tend to focus specifically on the ones that can be directly matched with the product offering. As in, if someone searches for this keyword pattern, they're exactly looking for this particular product. If that kind of an opportunity exists, then that is where I would typically start. In the case of Mordash, for example, I think it was somewhere in the middle, right. So, for example, we didn't necessarily went with keyword patterns such as influence and marketing platform for different categories, right. For different audiences, industries, that would have been a good example of something on the extreme end of product relevancy. So, I think we were somewhere in the middle, someone is looking for a certain influences. And most likely if they're trying to launch a campaign working with influences, they're going to use Mordash that they can't possibly use Mordash. So, it makes sense to capture that such demand. But usually if you were to ask me for a general product, I would try to look for opportunities that are on the extreme end of product relevancy. There's a really good case study. I think when we were talking about scheduling this interview, I talked to you about two different companies, right. Mordash was one of them, but then additionally there was another product that we worked with. The case study is still in progress. We still do it have, you know, approval for them for us to speak about the project publicly. But that was a pretty cool case study for a pretty big company, pretty mainstream product that we all use and then tech. And we did programmatic SEO for them created, I think only about 50 pages, templatized, pretty small campaign, but it drove pretty significant results for them. And I would love to talk about that whenever we have approval, but that was an example of extreme product relevancy. Like they were focused on, you know, commercial keyword, insert commercial keyword for different use cases because that was a horizontal product. So, I would say normally that is where I would start. If you can find those kind of category keywords and you see a horizontal need that you can create a bunch of pages for programmatically. Even if they're like 25 pages, that's still fine, right. That is where you should technically start. And then if you're looking for scale of traffic and, you know, discoverability, that is where middle of the final sort of opportunities, such as the one that we did for Mordash makes sense. This was good. I still have so many questions is because I'm so excited by this. You actually give good art. When I talk to someone about programmatic, it's usually just very surface level stuff like, hey, you know, like let's just make a bunch of pages. I used, they'll talk about, hey, I'll just connect in the spreadsheets and how they connect things and how many pages can be created. And those are all important stuff, but the moment we talk about, we went in depth about internal linking, how does it look like in customer experience? How do you predict that stuff? People usually don't have great answers for some super excited. I still have so many questions, but for time I will have to sort of end this, but so like was there one question? One piece of information that I didn't really ask that I probably should have. I think I would just mention that of course, programmatic was the biggest play for them. One thing that really helped, even in the programmatic project as a whole, but also when we started focusing on the blog was just old school talking to subject matter experts. And again, you know, Ryan is just so brilliant at this. He just knew that that is going to help. So usually speaking, I understand the struggle when people are trying to speak to customers or subject matter experts in the company is just not so. But I just had the privilege of, you know, asking Ryan, hey, who are some of the experts in the field that you can connect me with and I can talk to them. And I interviewed a bunch of folks. Some folks who are who I am still connected with on LinkedIn and that just added another layer of insights. So I really think for this programmatic project, we really drove amazing results, but also as a subset of that project as a whole working with modern should we start focusing on the blog. The I would say most of the of the success can be attributed to deeper understanding of the customer profile, the industry in the product, who we directly got the insights of working with the SMEs. Right subject matter experts and these are the consultants influence the marketing consultants who work with more dash for a bunch of things. So they had access to these people. And if you are your company have someone like this, right, let's say you're an evil marketing software and you know a bunch of folks who have done amazing work in evil marketing space and your company somehow does some marketing work with them or their consultants or you can just like get 30 minutes on their calendar. I promise you letter to programmatic stuff, let it be blog that you work on, let it be you know even video content, anything at all that comes into organic marketing. The overall output will be so much better like I promise you if you just find some time talking to those people and ask the right questions, it's going to make a world of a difference. So I would just encourage everyone listening, of course, look at the data, do amazing things scale traffic, you know, all of that plays amazing, but start at the basic level, start by building a deeper understanding of the product of the customer profile. And that will inform literally everything like I can literally connect the dots saying, you know, going back to Ryan, like, hey, you know, we want these cards to be created and we want to add, you know, 10 additional data points like an example would be if we have, you know, average likes displayed for each of the influencer within these cards. But what actually the audience is really interested in because I actually talked to this influencer marketing expert and they told me these are the metrics that they're looking at usually is average views right and we don't have that in the guard currently. So it feels like there's a disconnect, what we currently have is not in accordance with what are influencer marketing experts are really telling us right and these are the folks who are managing massive campaigns in influencer marketing, working with different e-commerce companies. So again, that sort of a connection just using those insights into collecting and then connecting them directly with how you translate them into pragmatic pages or block content or any form of content you publish that will make an amazing difference. Love that. Thank you so much for doing this. If someone had to find you, what's the best place to follow you? Is it LinkedIn or? Yeah, LinkedIn LinkedIn. LinkedIn is one place where I jam a lot. So I'm also trying to move active on YouTube, I guess in the next one month or so. But yeah, LinkedIn is the place. Feel free to drop me a DM. Awesome. Perfect. Appreciate it. Thank you for listening to the TLDR podcast. In case you're wondering, spear growth is a marketing agency. We do ads and SEO for B2B SaaS companies like yourselves. You can check us out at speargrow.com. That is S-P-E-A-R-G-R-O-W-T-H dot com. Every episode just like this one starts with a quick summary of what we're going to discuss. Pick the next episode to watch based on what you can implement right now. And once you start seeing results, we'd really appreciate it if you drop us a note at
[email protected].
PodcastTranscript AI