SEO for Technical and Non-Marketing Founders

By the time you’re done reading this, I hope you’ll be able to walk away with practical action items you can implement with your team to set yourself up for SEO success.

The way I see it, there are 2 scenarios where SEO makes the most sense as an acquisition channel for SaaS founders:

1. Launch: Designing your website with SEO in mind
2. Growth: You’re able to set aside $1,000+ per month for SEO

Why SEO is Important for SaaS Companies

Passive Lead Generation

Rather than chasing signups through PPC or social media, SEO brings signups straight to your door. By producing content for every stage of the customer acquisition funnel, your SaaS will be positioned to bring in organic signups.

Even if SEO isn’t going to be your primary acquisition channel, ranking highly on Google will allow you to earn new leads every month without active efforts. 

Stronger Brand Positioning

Ranking highly on Google means your company is in the same ballpark as even your largest competitors—no matter how long they’ve been established and no matter how impressive their client base is.

Consider the impact of ranking next to tech giants and how it shapes your growth.

If the first page of Google looks something like this, you’re sitting in excellent shape:

• HubSpot
• ActiveCampaign
• Your SaaS Here

One great thing about SEO that I love is that it’s a channel where you can win without investing obscene resources (other than your time investment). Depending on how competitive your software category is, this may take anywhere from 6 months to 2 years to see desired results.

However, if you work with an SEO with a track record in SaaS, this time can be cut down significantly. For example, here at SpacebarCollective, we’ve built up relationships with software and marketing blogs to make link-building a much shorter, more affordable process. Think of it like a friend letting you cut in line; we’re here to help.

Brand Reputation

SEO principles work side by side with building a good reputation.

In 2019, Google made a core algorithm update that factors in what they call E-AT. No, it has nothing to do with food, although that was the first thing that came to my mind too.

E-A-T stands for Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness. It’s a set of guidelines that Google uses to determine how high to rank a piece of content in its search results. To have strong E-A-T, your content must be written by an expert on the topic, be authoritative (backed up by other sources), and be trustworthy (free of errors and biases). 

The most straightforward way to improve EAT is to make sure your website has the most basic pages that every reputable company has:

Pages Every SaaS Should Have (for SEO)

• About
• Pricing
• Integrations
• Case Studies
• [competitor] vs. [your SaaS]
• [competitor] alternatives
• [category] software
• 404 → Content Hub + Contact

I’ll get into the above pages more in-depth with best practices you can leverage to earn signups in an upcoming article, so make sure to follow me on Twitter.

How to Do SEO for Your SaaS

On-Page SEO

When it comes to SEO, there are a lot of different moving parts to consider. But one thing that remains constant is the importance of following on-page best practices.

On-page SEO is the process of optimizing individual web pages in order to rank higher and earn more relevant traffic in search engines. It’s a crucial part of any good SEO strategy.

And while the algorithms used by search engines are constantly changing and evolving, there are still some tried-and-true on-page optimization techniques that can help your content rank higher and perform better.

Here are 5 on-page SEO principles to keep in mind when publishing new content:

1. Use keyword-rich titles and meta descriptions.

When it comes to on-page SEO, one of the first things you need to do is make sure your titles and meta descriptions are keyword-rich.

Your title should accurately reflect the content of your article and include the target keyword. And your meta description should be a short summary of your article that also includes the target keyword.

2. Optimise your images.

In addition to optimizing your text, you should also optimize your images for SEO. This means including relevant keywords in your image file names and alt text.

3. Use internal links.

Internal linking is an important part of on-page SEO. By linking to other related articles or pages on your website, you can help search engines better understand the context of your content and improve its relevance.

4. Use external links.

In addition to internal links, you should also include contextually-relevant external links in your content. External links help show search engines that your content is authoritative and trustworthy. Just be sure you aren’t linking out to content that’s in direct competition with your page’s focus keyword!

5. Format your content for easy readability.

Make sure your content is easy to read and free of any errors or typos. Use short paragraphs, subheadings, and bulleted lists to break up your text and make it more scannable. You can use tools like Hemingway and Grammarly to improve readability.

By following these on-page SEO tips, you can help ensure that your content is optimised for maximum visibility and effectiveness. So don’t forget to keep them in mind the next time you hit “publish”.

Off-Page SEO

Citation Building

Citation building is the process of creating profiles and listings for your company in business directories and review sites.

While this isn’t actually a very effective tactic in modern SEO, it does have immense benefits in the SaaS world specifically. In fact, I would say SaaS is the big exception where citation building is an essential, must-do, can’t go without tactic.

While the backlinks from business directories aren’t nearly as strong as they used to be, the directories that you can list your SaaS definitely hold their weight. Software review sites in general, have very high authority and trustworthiness in Google’s eyes and in potential users’ eyes.

Some of these platforms allow you to have links specifically to your pricing page and product demo, which can be quite valuable for bringing in new users. I’ve included links directly to their vendor signup pages below to make things easier for you.

Software Review Sites You Should Definitely Consider

• Capterra
• SaaSGenius
• HubSpot App Marketplace
• SalesForce App Exchange
• AlternativeTo
• TrustRadius
• CrozDesk

In terms of organization and keeping your workflow tidy, I would recommend starting with Capterra and recording all the information they request in a Google Doc or Airtable for future use on other platforms. It’s also important to keep a spreadsheet of which platforms you sign up for and which ones list your pricing. When you inevitably increase your pricing or change up your pricing tiers, you’ll be able to tackle updating all your listings in one fell swoop.

Creating citations can be a time-consuming process, but it’s well worth the effort. Not only will it help improve your SEO, but it will also help drive qualified traffic to your website.

Backlink Building

There’s a lot of debate in the SEO community about the value of backlinks. Some believe that they’re essential for ranking well in search engines, while others believe that they’re relatively unimportant.

Personally, I believe that backlinks are still incredibly valuable, but that their importance has diminished somewhat in recent years. As time passes, Google search engines place more and more emphasis on factors such as content quality and user experience. Maybe one day we’ll see ranking algorithms that don’t take backlinks seriously, but we just aren’t there yet.

Backlinks matter.

That said, backlinks can still be valuable for SEO purposes. They can help to improve your website’s visibility and organic traffic levels. Additionally, high-quality backlinks can also help to increase your website’s authority and trustworthiness.

If you’re looking to build backlinks to your website, there are a few things you should keep in mind. First, it’s important to focus on quality over quantity. It’s better to have a few high-quality backlinks than a large number of low-quality ones.

Second, try to get links from websites that are relevant to your niche or industry. Getting links from irrelevant websites won’t do you much good.

And finally, avoid using techniques that could get you penalized by Google or other search engines. This includes things like link buying, link farms, and other black hat SEO tactics.

Technical SEO

Technical SEO includes any activity that makes sure your website is easy to use and understand, from both Google’s scrapers’ eyes and from a UX perspective. Page load speed is one of the primary focuses of technical SEO, but it might also involve other things that may impact Google’s ability to ‘read’ and index your website. 

Technical SEO includes activities like: 

• Optimizing your website’s code so it can be read more easily by Google
• Improving your website’s speed and performance
• Making sure your site is accessible to both Google and humans
• Setting up structured data so Google can better understand your content
• Creating an XML sitemap and submitting it to Google Search Console

Add Schema Markup

Schema markup is code that you can add to your website to help search engines understand your content better. It’s a way of giving structure to your data so that search engines can interpret it more accurately.

Adding schema markup to your website can be beneficial for two main reasons: 

1. It can help improve your website’s click-through rate (CTR) by making your listings more rich and informative in the search results.
2. It can help search engines better understand the content on your website, which can lead to improved rankings over time.

If you’re running a SaaS business, then schema markup can be particularly beneficial. That’s because SaaS businesses often have complex pricing structures and subscription plans. This type of information can be difficult for search engines to understand without schema markup. 

Adding schema markup to your website is relatively simple. You can use tools like Schemantra or Google’s own Structured Data Markup Helper to generate the code for you. Once you have the code, you just need to add it to your website.

Optimise for Speed

The faster your pages load, the better equipped your website is for SEO. Page speed is a ranking factor for both desktop and mobile searches, so it’s important to make sure your website is as fast as possible.

Using tools like GTmetrix or WebPageTest.org is the easiest method of pinpointing the improvements you can make for speed optimization.

If you want to be more efficient, you could refer to EXPERTE.com’s Bulk Page Speed Test, which makes it possible to automatically determine Core Web Vitals and speed for your entire website. The great thing about it, besides its cost (free – no signup required) is that it automatically crawls up to 500 URLs or 60 seconds worth of subpages, whichever comes first. This means you can check your entire website without having to input each URL one by one. It also has a URL list feature, so you manually input which URLs you’d like it to crawl.

There are a few key methods to improve your website’s page speed. One is to optimise your images. Make sure your images are the correct size and format, and that they’re compressed so they don’t take up too much space.

Another way to improve your website’s page speed is to minify your HTML, CSS, and JavaScript files. This means removing all unnecessary code from your files, which will make them smaller and faster to load.

You can also use a content delivery network (CDN) like CloudFlare to improve your website’s page speed. A CDN is a group of servers that deliver content to users based on their geographic location. Using a CDN will help ensure that your website’s content is delivered quickly, no matter where in the world someone is trying to access it.

Finally, you can use a caching plugin like W3 Total Cache (WordPress) to improve your website’s page speed. Caching plugins store a copy of your website’s pages and files on a user’s computer, so they don’t have to be downloaded each time someone visits your site. This can help reduce the amount of time it takes for your pages to load.

Tips for Succeeding in SaaS SEO

Keyword Research and Content Planning

Keyword research is the process of finding and analyzing the words and phrases that people use to search for information on Google.

Keyword research is an important part of SEO because it allows you to find and target the right keywords for your website. By understanding what people are searching for, you can optimize your site to attract more visitors and improve your chances of ranking higher in search engine results pages (SERPs).

There are a number of different tools you can use to do keyword research, but these are the industry staples:

• ahrefs
• SEMrush

If you’re scared off by their monthly price tags, that’s a sign you aren’t ready to tackle SEO as a growth channel. Sorry, but that’s the truth.

Build a Library of Linkable Content

Think of building a base library of content as a method of ‘priming’ your website for link-building efforts. Most webmasters aren’t willing to link to homepages of new companies, but they’re definitely keen on linking to valuable blog content their readers will find useful.

To make your content linkable, you need to give people a reason to link to it. This could be by providing useful information, or by offering something unique that people can’t find elsewhere. For example, if you’re a CRM, you could write an in-depth guide to how using a CRM increases sales or improves internal communications. Or if you’re a Chrome extension, you could write content about why your customers love using it.

Follow On-Page SEO Principles in New Content

SEO is a fundamental part of online publishing, but it’s often overlooked.

When it comes to SEO, there are a lot of different moving parts. But one thing that remains constant is the importance of following on-page best practices.

You don’t want to have to go back and re-optimize your new content, right? 

Content Velocity

Content velocity is the rate at which you’re creating new content. 

The more new content you create, the more keywords you’re able to capture search real estate for. You can only rank for keywords you produce content for, after all.

Of course, simply churning out new content isn’t enough. That content also needs to be high-quality and relevant to your target audience. But if you can strike the right balance between quantity and quality, you’ll be well on your way to driving more traffic and sales through your website.

So how do you go about increasing your content velocity? Here are a few tips:

1. Plan ahead. The best way to ensure that you’re creating new content on a regular basis is to plan ahead. By mapping out a content calendar based on your keyword research, you’ll always know what needs to be created and in what order it should be produced. This will help you stay on track and avoid last-minute scrambling to get something new up on your blog.
2. Batch your content creation. If writing isn’t your thing, then consider batching your content creation. This means setting aside a specific day (or even just an afternoon) each week to create all of your new content. This will help you be more efficient and productive, and it will ensure that you always have fresh content to publish.
3. Automate and recycle where possible. There are certain aspects of content creation that can be automated, such as posting to social media or sending out email newsletters. Free up some time in your schedule by taking advantage of these automation tools. Thinking vice versa, if there are other pieces of content you’re already producing, like podcasts or YouTube videos, you can think about how to recycle them for your blog.
4. Delegate and outsource. If you’re finding it difficult to keep up with the demands of creating new content, then consider delegating some of the work to others. You can hire a freelance writer or virtual assistant to help you with the heavy lifting. Or, if you have the budget, you can outsource the entire process to a content marketing agency.

Link Velocity

Link velocity is the speed at which a website acquires new links.

A high link velocity indicates that a website is growing quickly and gaining authority, while a low link velocity indicates that a website is not growing as quickly or gaining as much authority.

Most SEOs believe that link velocity is a major ranking factor, and many studies have shown that websites with high link velocities tend to rank higher than those with low link velocities.

In general, it is best to focus on quality over quantity when it comes to links. A few high-quality links are almost always going to be worth more than many low-quality links.

If you’re putting resources into scaling up your backlink-building efforts, it’s also important to consider the publishing velocity of others in your niche. If you’re building links at a lightspeed rate while competitors are at a snail’s pace, Google might think your website is gaming the system and penalize you. The main strategy to get around this is to slowly build up to your competition’s link velocity and to continue scaling at the same rate past them.

Earning Page 1 Rankings

As your SaaS grows, so too can your SEO efforts. The sky’s the limit when it comes to building organic search traffic, making it a highly scalable growth channel.

Unlike paid advertising, which can be turned off at any time, traffic from SEO is long-term and sustainable. Once you rank for a certain keyword, you’ll continue to get traffic from it as long as you maintain your ranking.

SEO is such a powerful growth channel for SaaS companies, and if this article didn’t convince you, I don’t know what will.

15% of all Google searches have never been searched for before

It’s NEVER too late to start SEO

Your most profitable keywords might not even exist yet

— Chris Tweten (@ctwtn) April 10, 2022

Thin Content And SEO: A Brief History

Two major components of excellent SEO-driven content are relevance and authority. Your site will earn considerable traffic from providing relevant content that is genuinely helpful to your target audience.

It wasn’t until 2011 with Google’s Panda algorithm update that high-quality, high-relevant content became a major ranking factor. This update directly challenged the spammy, low-quality and untrustworthy content in an effort to better match search results with search intent. Prior to Panda, it was somewhat easy to rank with low-quality content, even with blogs as short as 200 words! Panda’s purpose was to keep pages without valuable information from ranking (or at least, not as easily). Not only did it become harder to rank short-form content, but having lots of thin content on your site could actually hurt your rankings as well. To avoid potential ranking losses, it’s become standard practice to either cull thin pages from your site or to implement content updates.

To better understand the decision between deleting or updating pages, it’s best you start with learning what thin content is. This is the first step in addressing thin content issues on your site.

What Is Thin Content Exactly?

Thin content is short-form content that doesn’t go in-depth or cover a topic enough to satisfy search intent. Thin content does not provide value to the reader and is therefore ranked poorly by search engines.

What Makes Content “Thin”?

Google sees thin content as the lowest form of content with the most negligible value. From content stuffed with irrelevant keywords to possibly being stolen from a source, thin content portrays attributes that transgress Google’s Webmaster guidelines. Some of the qualities that Google tags are thin content include:

• AI Misadventures: Automatically generated content typically turns up as incoherent strings of sentences that make little to no sense. As this content is made up of sentences or text that an AI mashes up from other sources without being reviewed by a human, it lacks the proper context and meaning. Such content includes automated captions, transcriptions, translations, and other forms of automatically generated content. 
• Misleading Affiliates: When affiliate sites fail to clearly state their affiliate nature by deliberating hiding their relationship with the product’s supplier, Google tags such content as thin. The situation is made worse in cases where there is no originality in the affiliate site when content such as the product description is copied and pasted verbatim. Such content is deceptive and not valuable for the reader, attracting Google’s thin content penalty.
• Redundant Content: The primary defining factor for search engines to label content as “thin” is its uselessness to readers. Content such as fluff that fills word count, irrelevant or outdated statistics, and information that is not related to the central theme of the topic is unrelated to the user as it does not help address the issue they are trying to resolve. Search engines can also tag your content as thin if your pages fail to provide useful in-depth information on topics, or you do not update it regularly and let it become stale.
• Doorway Pages: According to Google, doorway pages are sites or pages created to rank for specific, similar search queries. These pages are identical and have little helpful content as their purpose is to direct traffic to another page which may also not be relevant to the reader. This attempt to rank high by using similar pages to refer people to a page can get marked as thin content since they do not have value to the people.
• Your Ad Game Is Overkill: Trying to generate as much revenue from your pages is not a bad idea, but it can be damaging when it comes at the expense of your content’s relevance to your audience. When you stuff your pages with many ads that overwhelm your helpful content, you risk triggering search engines to mark your pages as thin content. Avoid making ads the primary theme of your pages and keep your content’s value as the main subject to your audience.
• Busted Backlinks: Such backlinks are incoming links to pages on your website that return “Error 404” pages. Even when you have relevant content on these pages, people who try to access them via broken backlinks cannot access the valuable information and see error pages. Ensure that you check these pages to restore the broken links or replace them with links that redirect people to relevant pages.
• Keyword Delusion *ahem* I Mean Dilution: Overloading your pages with content targeted at one keyword unfavourably impacts your rankings. When you keep repeating the same content geared at one keyword, you dilute the keyword, confusing search engines’ web crawlers with identical content. With such duplicate content and no added value, your content becomes superfluous.

Identifying Thin Content

Before solving it, knowing the problem and how much it affects your website comes first. 

Take advantage of web crawler tools like ahrefs and Deepcrawl to carry out a thorough analysis of your pages and view your content from a possible search engine point of view. 

Take note of key metrics such as conversions, impressions, and bounce rate.

You can export these metrics into a spreadsheet and add columns marking the target keywords and the verdict. The target keyword column is essential to gauge the possibility of thin content.

From the data you have extracted and collated, watch out for thin content flags line the following:

• Posts with abnormally little word count.
• Several posts targeting one keyword.
• Posts with little to no impressions.
• Content targeting irrelevant keywords.

Once you notice any of these flags, take time to look more thoroughly at the posts before you take actions to fix them.

How Google Identifies Thin Content

Google uses two methods to identify thin content on pages. Its Panda algorithm first identifies pages with high expertise, authoritativeness, and trust and drops pages with none of these qualities from search rankings. The other method is by taking manual actions, which involves a webspam team that spots and takes down spammy websites from result pages. Manual actions are quite rare, especially if you’re doing white hat SEO.

How To Recover From A Google Thin Content Penalty

Although it may feel like you’re entering the abyss, facing a manual penalty is not the end of the world. Because a thin content penalty from Google means that it sees your content as having no value to users, it removes your website from search result pages. That is, your prospective audience cannot see your website when searching for related content, and you have next to no visibility.

The first step in recovering from a thin content penalty is reviewing the content listed in the “Manual Actions” report in your Google Search Console account. You can also keep track of this report page to know whenever you are hit with a thin content penalty.

Fixing the penalty varies in the case of thin content; however, general methods include:

• Removing the thin content.
• Writing website content that expands on thin content while delivering real value

After you’ve implemented these fixes, make sure you file a reconsideration request with Google. Then, Google’s reviewing team can go through your website and if everything looks good, remove the penalty.

SpaceCase File #1: Travel SEO

BodegaHostels.com earned ~$38,500 (about 1.2 million Thai baht) in direct website revenue.

From over 700 page 1 keywords.

In 17 months.

With savvy keyword research and a small team of copywriters.

Before we hop into things, I have a few important points to keep in mind.

1. As Bodega Hostels’ Marketing Director, SEO was only one channel I was responsible for. This case study will not be covering any increases in bookings on other platforms like HostelWorld and Agoda—just direct website bookings.
2. Although organic search traffic accounted for 77% of our website visitors in 2018 and 2019, this case study will also cover key Facebook tactics that go hand-in-hand with publishing mountains of content.

This travel SEO case study is a 2,300 word behemoth that you’ll want to give your full attention to.

If you’re reading this on mobile, I highly suggest that you save this one for later.

Bodega Hostels

After backpacking for several months, 3 brothers from the Midwest launched a youth backpacker hostel in Thailand.

When I first visited Thailand in 2016, Bodega had 2 locations: Bangkok and Phuket.

Since then, Bodega has had over 100,000 backpackers stay at their hostels.

At 10 properties in 2 different countries.

Bodega Thailand:

• Bangkok x2
• Chiang Mai x2
• Ao Nang, Krabi
• Pai
• Koh Samui
• Phuket

Bodega Cambodia:

• Koh Rong Samloem
• Siem Reap

In 2017, Bodega acquired its largest competitor, Slumber Party Hostels and I joined the newly formed company, Slumber Party by Bodega Hostels.

On paper, this acquisition looked incredible. Neither hostel had properties in any overlapping regions, instantly making the company the largest in the country—both in total properties and in total bookings. 

My primary role was to improve direct website bookings on SlumberPartyHostels.com.

I increased traffic 10x in under a year and we were starting to map out national expansion along with all the content that came along with it.

However, there was an unfortunate culture clash between Bodega and Slumber that gradually increased tension internally. The merger falling apart seemed all but inevitable and since I was all-in with Bodega, I was in an awkward position to watch events unfold.

June 2018. Bodega and Slumber went their separate ways as fiery competitors and I was hired by Bodega as their Marketing Director.

BodegaHostels.com became my new baby, but I was starting from scratch—and competing against all my old work on SlumberPartyHostels.com!

The Opportunity

BodegaHostels.com was redirecting to SlumberPartyHostels.com during the time they were together, so my first priority after the split was launching a new Bodega website.

Without our own website, Bodega would be unable to take direct bookings online.

This is a big deal for a company in hospitality because…

Every OTA (Online Travel Agency) platform (ie. HostelWorld, booking.com, Agoda) takes a % of every booking made on the platform.

And since hostels are already at a low price point, this sometimes means giving up your entire profit margin on the bed to an OTA (usually HostelWorld).

That’s part of the reason why Bodega staked itself as a party hostel; food and beverage sales were powerful drivers in company growth. Tour sales as well, to a lesser extent.

Advantages of Direct Bookings Over OTA Bookings

• You control and own your customer data.
• You save money on every booking made by not paying OTA fees.
• Improved retention.
• Increased average transaction value.
• Increased tour and event sales.

Some OTAs don’t allow you to access customers’ email addresses.

Most OTAs don’t let you upsell tour tickets at checkout or promote events at all.

Investing into blogging should be a no-brainer for this industry, but the majority of hostels don’t even have a website to begin with.

That’s a massive opportunity for us.

And for Slumber Party too.

With the 2 companies now split up, animosity between Bodega and Slumber was growing.

The urgency to build a new website and start publishing new content was growing.

The Strategy

Be the best resource for a search term.

It may sound idealistic and overly simple but that was the basis of our content strategy.

Without going full out skyscraper technique, the aim here was to produce a piece of content that satisfies search intent better than the page 1 SERP. We also had to keep our Ideal Customer Profile (ICP)  in mind here: backpackers and travelers aged 20-35 from the Western world. We didn’t have to make the most thorough and complete blog for a keyword, just the best resource for our target audience. In many cases, this meant being able to rank blogs that were only 500-800 words long.

• Focus on long tail keywords
• KD0 keywords that larger sites have bad on page SEO for
• Topics that are popular among backpackers and tourists that have not yet been covered by reputable sites (extremely low keyword competition, but strong monthly search volume)
• Listicle resources aimed at expats that are still useful for tourists (e.g. best pizza in [city], best cafes, etc)
• Top keywords of pages published by direct competitors to Bodega, like Slumber and Mad Monkey

Pseudo skyscraper, adding unique value from customer data and staff recommendations

Content Velocity is King

For every opportunity found in keyword research, we need to produce 1 piece of content.

From 2018 to 2019, we produced 381 blogs to tackle 381 keyword opportunities.

There is no secret formula to get output like this.

You simply can’t rank for keywords you don’t produce content for.

More content means more opportunities to rank.

And when you’re tackling low difficulty keywords, that’s all it boils down to.

Always Be Copywriting

Content Production is a Bottleneck

When a (potential) client asks me how quickly I can get results, I respond back with a question of my own, “How aggressively can we publish content on your budget?”

How much content can we possibly produce?

Without taking a dip in quality?

Without burning out?

These 3 questions have stuck with me for many years, as I’m sure other SEOs have as well. Scaling up content production can be daunting, especially for solopreneurs and small teams.

Let’s explore this bottleneck problem and what it actually entails.

SEO Content Production Pipeline

1. Complete keyword research.
2. Write blog outlines.
3. First drafts are written and completed on a weekly basis.
4. Edit first drafts after receiving them from writers.
5. Publish in WordPress.

Every step in this process is a bottleneck. Every. Step.

Keyword research takes time.

Writing blog outlines takes time.

Writing blogs takes time.

Editing blogs takes time.

Publishing in WordPress takes time.

Luckily, there is a savvy solution to this bottleneck issue: Process.

The Importance Of Developing Internal Processes

Recording and fine tuning processes is key to long-term success.

Processes make your business run smoother, allow you to optimize your pipeline and save you boatloads of your time.

It’s important that you record your process in full, step-by-step, for as many areas of your operations as possible. For starters, it would be a good idea to record your process for each bottleneck in the content production process.

Outlining your exact methodology is essential in improving productivity, consistency and scalability. 

If you are able to break down what you do, exactly how you do it, you will be able to make your expertise a transferable knowledge. This means when the time comes to scale up your operations, your documentation will serve both as training material and reference for further refinement.

Leveraging UGC to Maintain Content Velocity

One initiative at Bodega that I spearheaded was their Creatives Program.

The concept is simple: If you’ve got creative talent, you can stay at Bodega for free while working on collaborative content.

Most commonly, this would be travel photographers we sent on our tours and pub crawls to capture moments we could use in promotional material.

Other times, we would work with travel bloggers on content for our site (and for theirs).

The key to running a successful guest blogging program is to hold your guest contributors to the same editorial and technical writing standards that your in-house copywriters follow. The more thorough your editorial guidelines, the higher quality and more consistent the submissions will be.

Producing content more consistently cuts down on the time it takes to edit and publish content, making it an important component in scaling up content operations.

Keyword Research for Travel Content

Stealing Traffic from Competitors

First and foremost, I still had access to Google Analytics data for Slumber Party’s website during the keyword research phase of planning out Bodega’s new website.

Being able to look directly at traffic data for your biggest competitor is like an SEO cheat code.

I was grateful to have this opportunity, but I also recognize that this is extremely irregular and not an approach to rely on. Still, it was a strong initial approach that I wasn’t going to pass up.

I exported a list of their highest traffic pages, popped them into ahrefs and found some easy, low-hanging fruit to tackle. I was lucky (or merely opportunistic) to find low competition, long-tail keywords that Bodega’s new website could rank for quickly.

The lesson I took from this is that although I brought results to the table working for Slumber, I was building a glass house that could be taken down with the proper strategy and some persistence.

Using ahrefs to Find Weak Points of Competitor Websites

Next I went right back into ahrefs and took a good, hard look at other competitors’ websites. Other than Slumber Party, only 1 competing hostel chain in Thailand even had a blog at all.

This was a bittersweet discovery.

On one hand, this meant there was a lot of ground to cover, undisturbed by active competition.

On the other hand, this meant we had to display leadership and authority in a market without guidelines for what type of content will rank.

There were 2 types of keywords we would target to compete directly with competitors:

1. Top Pages in ahrefs (already validated by competitor efforts)
2. 0 keyword difficulty with a minimum monthly traffic filter

On-Page SEO is Underrated

Backlinks are not the alpha and omega for SEO.

Google places importance on satisfying search intent.

On-Page SEO Checklist

Whenever I start a new SEO project, I rely on The SEO Checklist to make sure I’ve got all my ducks in a row.

URL Structure

It’s important to use an easy to read, logical URL structure.

I kept it quite simple for Bodega’s blog:

bodegahostels.com/blog/blog-title-like-this/

Each hostel property has its own mini-site, consisting of 5 pages:

/country/city

/country/city/accommodation

/country/city/contact

/country/city/tours-events

/country/city/blog

I didn’t give it much thought past this, but Moz has a great reference guide on when to change URLs for SEO you can check out if you want to deep dive the topic.

Internal Linking Strategy

Internal links are an effective way to indicate to Google which pages are important to your business.

The most important pages of a site are commonly referred to as money pages, which means exactly what you think.

Unlike other projects I’ve worked on, Bodega’s money pages are obvious at first glance.

• Hostel Property Pages
• Pub Crawl Ticket Pages

These pages cover our most important keywords and convert to sales the best, so it only makes sense to guide users browsing the site towards them with internal links.

When building internal links on your website, there are 3 principles to keep in mind:

1. Pages with more internal links are easier to rank.
2. Pages that are far away from the homepage (clicks) are harder to rank.
3. Google cares about relevancy, so internal links from more topically relevant pages will have a stronger effect than less topically relevant pages.

Keeping those 3 principles in mind, we took a simple 2-step approach to internal links:

1. Build relevant internal links from topically relevant blog content to money pages.
2. Add navigation menu links to money pages so they’re easy for people to find.

Giving people easy access to your money pages from a navigation bar is a great way to make sure they’re a close distance from your homepage.

Sending dozens of internal links to your money pages can move the needle more than you’d think.

If you haven’t been adamant about internal linking in your blog content yet, you’ve got a low-effort SEO opportunity right in front of you.

Image Optimization

Websites that load in under 5 seconds rank higher and see 70% longer average session lengths. If your website is fast, people are more likely to read, engage and stick around.

Optimizing the file size of your images is an easy way to improve page load speeds.

Here’s how I optimize images for SEO:

1. Resize images in bulk with Adobe Lightroom
2. Reduce image file sizes with FileOptimizer
3. ShortPixel automatically optimizes file sizes again at upload, serves in WEBP format

I usually aim for images to be under 250kb as a rule of thumb. You really don’t need to complicate things further than this, so long as your pages are loading in under 5 seconds.

If you’ve optimized your image file sizes but still don’t meet the 5 second mark, consider improving Core Web Vitals or trying your hand at some technical SEO.

If you can hit the 5 second mark without reducing image file sizes, you can work to further improve page speed or just skip this step altogether. Just remember that it’s a minor ranking factor in the Google algorithm, so it isn’t going to impact your rankings as heavily as producing new content or building links.

Closing

Thanks for reading to the end

If you have any questions, drop them in the comments below.

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