1. Building a blog: How to 10x
organic search traffic while
scaling publishing
sustainably.

2. @Pechnet
Link to slides
seowi.se/semrush-meetup-18

3. How to Start a Blog That Generates $xxxx a Month

4. SEO basic: Content & Links
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l8VnZCcl9J4

5. A practical guide to winning big links***

6. *** We do already have plenty links
People talk about our
product
Our PR team promotes our
company
Our content team creates
content that helps our
customers who end up
linking to it.

7. More content is often the most effective answer
0 links Wikipedia
Produce
more
content
Produce
content
hardcore
Build links
first (audit
existing
content)
Produce
content
first
0 content
Ton of
content

8. SEO Basic v2: Produce, Optimise and build links
Search
Volume
CustomersCTR Conversion
Rate
WhatSEOsDO?
Produce
more
content
Optimise
existing
content
Build
links
Optimise
existing
content
Easy to
measure
and scale
Harder to
measure and
scale
Optimise
Existing
content

9. Life of article
Month 1 Month 2 Month 3 Month 4
Production Crawl & Index Traffic Customers

10. Have a long term vision to justify short term expenses
** MNUs is our definition of new TransferWise users

11. Understand return on investment and CPA over time
** MNUs is our definition of new TransferWise users

12. 2 years later…..
1 2 8 58k+2K+ 600K+
Custom CMS
and suite of
research &
monitoring
tools
SEOs Content
specialists
Search intents
covered that
account for 13M
impressions per
month
Indexed articles Unique users a
month visiting
our blog
through search
alone

13. Full stack organic growth team
SEO Specialists Full Stack Devs Frontend Devs Designers Copywriters
Editors
Translators
Publishers
Analysts

14. Start with an empowered autonomous content team…
1. Analyse customers intents & search data

15. Don’t overcomplicate content strategies
Users Problem
? Search Answer to users
problem via
content

16. Craft a bespoke toolset for your team

17. Talk to customers and colleagues who regularly do

18. Old dear keyword research: clustering topics is key!
Search Data
Scrappy old way
Fancy scalable future possibly
too ambitious for a blog!

19. Strong methodology to convert tons of keywords
into well structured briefs, don’t let writers freestyle!

20. Bonus: extra but not essential tools to help writers

21. Start with an empowered autonomous content team…
1. Analyse customers intents & search data
2. Nail publishing operations

22. Start from a simple process
Copywriters
Editors
Translators
Publishers
Keyword Data Article

23. Publishing via CMS doesn’t scale: optimise operations!
Time

24. Constantly refine your publishing process based team size
Research &
Validation
Brief Write Proofread, edit,
brand & legal
review
Publish

25. It was taking us 2 - 3 months to publish an article from the moment the
brief was created to go live on the site. We now reduced it to 1 month.
Understand your overall production metrics
Publishing
Analyst

26. The Average Handling time (AHT) is normalizing and going down. In
average it takes around 15-18 days for each of the production stages.
Go deeper in the process to build operational
efficiencies
Publishing
Analyst

27. Don’t scale further until you
master tracking of publishing
metrics.

28. Start with an empowered autonomous content team…
1. Analyse customers intents & search data
2. Nail publishing operations
3. Have tangible north star KPIs to measure
sustainability

29. Indexed Pages
Traffic
Customers????

30. Don’t track
emotions.
Work our tangible metrics
relevant to your business.
You can’t improve and scale
what you can’t measure.
New customers
Revenue
Lead generating events
Page scroll %
Time on site & articles per visit
Returning visitors
Quality of content
Brand metrics

31. Define future investment in
content based on past
performance at topic level.

32. Topic clustering to inform scaling
We define “series” as a cluster of articles of the
same topic and analyse performance of the cluster
rather than individual articles in order to have
significant data.
White cell when
articles doesn’t
exist in that given
month
Grey cell when
articles drives
traffic that given
month
Green cell when
articles drives
new users in that
given month
** MNUs is our definition of new TransferWise users
Each row represents an different URL within a given series

33. Series 1 - Strong base line, good expansion

34. Series 2 - Started well but broader content doesn’t convert

35. Series 3 - Didn’t work, we got better but still poor

36. Series 4 - Works from the very beginning

37. Articles Series ladderboard, let the most successful
cluster of articles wins and receives more budget!
** MNUs is our definition of new TransferWise users

38. Solid data on production metrics
and business KPIs allowed us to
confidently scale the investment
in the team.

39. x Current content specialists Q2 2018
x Articles per month with current team members Q2 2018
x Incremental new users we want to add by end of 2020
x Articles we need to publish by mid 2020 in order to reach our new users target
x Years that would take us to publish target articles with current team
x Content specialists we need to hire to publish target articles by mid 2020
x Articles we can publish per month with x additional team members
x Additional content specialists we need to hire by end of Q1 2019
x Additional SEOs we need to hire in order to coordinate x content admins
Front load content investment to maximise growth

40. Start with an empowered autonomous content team…
1. Analyse customers intents & search data
2. Nail publishing operations
3. Have tangible north star KPIs to measure
sustainability
Leave emotions behind, relax & get obsessed about scaling :)

41. @Pechnet
Link to slides >>
seowi.se/semrush-meetup-18
Money without borders
TransferWise.com/borderless
Join us >>
TransferWise.com/jobs
Thank you