Masterclass is raising new funding at a $2.5B valuation.
The platform's secret sauce: incredible SEO, which uses the power of "second order questions" to drive free traffic to its site.
Here's a breakdown 🧵
1/ The Masterclass website got ~10m visits in March w/ 61% of traffic coming via search (nearly all of it organic).
2/ The key to this organic search traffic?
Masterclass’ hundreds of high-quality articles including pieces on:
• Food
• Design
• Music
• Business
• Writing
3/ Masterclass appears at the top of Google searches for:
🥨“what are pretzels”
🖊 “types of poems”
🥄“how many teaspoons in a tablespoon”
🎶“song structure”
📙“how to write an autobiography”
These five key search terms combine for 500k+ monthly Google searches.
4/ Let’s dig into one example:
“how many teaspoons in a tablespoon”
This one has 130k+ monthly searches.
🔗 masterclass.com/articles/how-m…
5/ This “teaspoon” article definitely answers the search query.
BUT, it is also riddled with calls-to-action for Masterclass courses related to cooking (eg Gordon Ramsay, Madison Bottura).
6/ This is where "second-order questions" come into play.
Example:
Let’s say you sell washable rugs online.
A typical FIRST ORDER question you might rank for is “best pet friendly rug”.
A SECOND ORDER question you should target is “best rug shampooer for pets”.
7/ Why do SECOND ORDER questions work?
Because you’re targeting a similar audience who is one step away from wanting your product.
And @masterclass is brilliantly building a content library around these audience-related searches!
8/ This knowledge was shared to me by @ahogan, who DEF knows the search game.
Elsewhere, if you want to know the secret behind Amazon's writing culture...check this thread:
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