If you’re a SaaS marketer, you need to study Airtable.
The SEO & growth strategies they used become a $5B startup and reach 1M users are so impressive.
Here's a few things you can learn from them 🧵
Every month, an estimated 10-15M visits hit their Airtable's website from various sources.
Organically (SEO) more than 245k people reach the site through search. That’s a lot of people.
One of the major attraction spots on Airtable’s website is the templates landing page:
Here's some key metrics:
The templates rank for 16.4K organic keywords
Attracts over 9500 visitors each month
The organic traffic value is $42,000
Meaning... You would have to pay Google $504,000 to capture that much traffic through PPC a year.
This is why SEO is important.
1) EMBRACE SEO DRIVEN TEMPLATES
Airtable recognized that templates are highly valued, especially in B2B, so they created a bunch of them.
I always say:
"People love templates. It’s a cheat code to adulting."
And Airtable's been able to leverage this to perfection.
Riches are in the niches and the sale is in the long tail.
Airtable has templates for long tail phrases like:
> Social Media Calendar
> Job Search Template
> Recipe Database
> Book Database
> Personal CRM
> Lease Tracker
> Trip Calendar
This drives a ton of long tail traffic.
2) SPEAK DIRECT TO YOUR AUDIENCE
Another thing Airtable does right is creating audience oriented landing pages.
Visitors can self-identify with the niche and industry that they’re working in.
Talking about someone’s industry is the B2B equivalent of saying someone’s name.
4) EMBRACE VIDEO FOR SEARCH
Google is the most popular search engine in the world. The second most popular is YouTube.
Some people learn by reading.
Some people learn by watching.
Airtable's YouTube is filled with product demos, API walkthroughs and product marketing assets.
Airtable's YouTube channel is estimated to generate about 44,000 views per month and is growing by +800 new subscribers per month.
Not all Airtable's videos are found via YouTube though. People are finding these videos directly from Google.
5) INJECT SOCIAL PROOF ON YOUR SITE
Got traction? Good.
Tell people about it. Scream and yell at the rooftops how your product helps Netflix, Expedia, Medium and more.
People want to be in good company so showcase the brands you work with to build trust.
6) CREATE CASE STUDIES THAT AREN'T BORING
One of the biggest mistakes SaaS companies make is creating case studies that aren't written with a story.
Whether it's a TV series on Netflix or a case study - People resonate with stories. Airtable does this well.
7) INVEST IN CREATING BACKLINK DRIVEN CONTENT
Backlinks are still important.
No, you're not going to rank for high value keywords after buying 500 links on Fiverr. But if you can create content worth linking & do content distribution.
Spoiler: Remote work doesn't mean working from home.
Remote work means: having the flexibility to work from a co-working space, a local cafe, that restaurant up the street, next to the beach, a cottage in the woods or your parents backyard before a BBQ.
Remote work means having the ability to take a midday shower after a run, a spontaneous catch up with a friend, a tea party with your kids and a moment to just relax and chill after a big deliverable.
Remote work means skipping that long commute in the morning, avoiding road construction, reducing your carbon footprint, reducing your budget for gas & not being forced to sit at a desk for multiple hours a day.
I've had social posts reach 100,000+. I've had blog posts reach millions. I've created strategies that have made millions. All because:
I've studied Content Marketing for YEARS 🧠
Grab a coffee and enjoy 👉 Here are 23 resources and techniques for fast tracking your skills 🧵
Use Wayback Time Machine to See The Golden Era Of Marketing Forums 🧠
You can learn a TON by browsing through old marketing AMAs in forums like GrowthHackers. You can literally find old AMA's between the community and the CEO of Zoom discussing their growth plans. So valuable.
Study & Research The YouTube Archives 📺
Go to Google and type in "Interview [Brilliant Mind]" and listen to a bunch of their interviews. For example, you can go to YouTube and find a TON of @aprildunford interviews that will arm you with a ton of value.
We took 100 SaaS sites and analyzed their marketing approach to design.
Grab a coffee, bookmark it and enjoy the thread 🧵
Here’s what we learned studying 100+ SaaS sites.
98% Of Brand Logos Are On The Left
The placement of the logo on the top left of a website is a common design best practice.
It’s an approach that most designers use inside of SaaS and outside of SaaS. But sometimes brands will switch things up and go in the middle like this:
Most SaaS Websites Are Mobile Responsive
The world runs on mobile. In April 2021, 56% percent of all web traffic came through mobile phones. 📲
Mobile responsive sites are a great way to ensure you don’t deliver broken experiences for people on a desktop or visiting on mobile.
It's when a brand has invested so strategically into content & SEO that they captured space in the SERP for the vast majority of search terms associated with their market & ideal customers.
How do you do it? 👇
A brand that has built an SEO moat is a brand that establishes itself as an authority in the eyes of Google and can extract value from the global search behaviours of people around the world.
To get value. You must give value.
That's where it starts.
Creating valuable content.
Salesforce has an SEO moat.
You search “CRM” – Salesforce shows up in the top 3 results. Type “marketing automation” – Salesforce shows up in the top 4. Type “CRM software” or “CRM system” and once again they're in the top 4. And so on, and so on.
But there’s more myths in marketing than almost any industry.
Myths about SEO, content, growth and email.
I’m going to bust them.
Grab a coffee, save this thread and dive in 🧵
Here’s the myths holding many marketers and brands back:
More Content = More Traffic
This isn’t true. You can publish 200 blog posts a year and still not come close to generating as much traffic as another blogger in your niche who publishes 20 posts a year but has unlocked amazing distribution.
You need to remember this.
Ranking # 1 Is All That Matters
The top search results for a phrase in New York is often different from the top search result in Stockholm.
Even when they’re not localized…
The SERP is always changing. You could be ranking at the top one day and ranking fourth the next.