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cover of episode These are the AI SEO Secrets that Clickup, Airbase, and Freshworks are using to win

These are the AI SEO Secrets that Clickup, Airbase, and Freshworks are using to win

2025/1/28
logo of podcast SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders

SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders

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Shyam: 作为TripleDart的创始人,我认为在过去的两年里,AI和SEO的结合变得至关重要。在2024年,我们需要关注算法的更新、链接建设和技术SEO。AI对SEO的影响是巨大的,71%的受访者认为它具有颠覆性。因此,我们需要更新网站以适应移动优先索引,关注长尾关键词,并重视富文本元素。SEO 2.0是利用AI、工作流程和自动化来提高效率,可以用一半的投资获得10倍的效果。我推荐使用competely.ai、SEO.ai、keyword insights.ai、through.com、Junia、Surfer SEO、detail.com、Pactaro和audience.com等工具来优化SEO策略。新的SEO策略应该从用户痛点出发,而不是从关键词研究出发。同时,我们应该重视网站外部的SEO,例如在Medium、Reddit或Quora上发布内容。获取反向链接的目的是提高域名权重和主题权威性,可以通过数字公关和构建免费工具来实现。程序化SEO是一种在短时间内发布大量页面的方法,适用于本地化、Job-to-be-done、不同行业和比较。通过优化页面模板、建立信息数据库和使用AI提示,我们可以实现程序化SEO的目标。程序化SEO的结果需要一段时间才能显现,但它可以为企业带来可观的流量和转化。

Deep Dive

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This chapter discusses the shift in SEO challenges from content production in 2023 to algorithm changes, link building, and technical SEO in 2024. It highlights the impact of AI on SEO and the importance of adapting to Google's Search Generative Experience (SGE).
  • Algorithm changes, link building, and technical SEO are the most challenging tasks in 2024.
  • 71% of respondents find AI in SEO disruptive.
  • Priorities for SEO departments vary by role (practitioners, managers, leaders).
  • Top-of-funnel pages are declining in impressions, while bottom-funnel pages remain strong.

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You are listening to Conversations with Nathan Latka, where I sit down and interview the top SaaS founders, like Eric Wan from Zoom.

If you'd like to subscribe, go to getlatka.com. We've published thousands of these interviews, and if you want to sort through them quickly by revenue or churn, CAC, valuation, or other metrics, the easiest way to do that is to go to getlatka.com and use our filtering tool. It's like a big Excel sheet for all of these podcast interviews. Check it out right now at getlatka.com.

- So yeah, I mean, we're gonna talk about one of the very important topics for the last two years about SEO and AI, how this deadly combination is going to work. So we're going to talk about priority, challenges, and opportunities for the next 20 minutes. So I'm Shyam, I'm founder of TripleDart. TripleDart is a B2B SaaS growth agency. We work with over 100 plus brands. Previous to TripleDart, I used to run marketing at Remo.com, Freshworks, Zoho, and Hey Digital. And I also advise and invest in startups.

So if you want to connect, here's my QR code. So for the next 25 minutes, we are going to basically talk about AI and SEO, 2023 versus 2024, impact of AI and SEO, what is SEO 2.0, and we're going to cover some of the most important and productive tools that we use in our day-to-day practices at TripleDot and how the new SEO is going to work and how to basically do backlink

right in 2024 and ahead. And also, one other important topic that I'm going to cover is how you can scale programmatic SEO without scaling content, without heavier budgets. So that's also what we're going to basically talk about today. Right? It's a quick...

Quick facts about TripleDart, we founded in 2021. We are about 80 people. We only work with SaaS companies. These are all the companies that we work with. We have three stages, basically. For mature, we work with companies like Freshworks and Sprinklr. Growth stage, we work with companies like Plivo, fast-growing, we work with companies like Factors.ai, Multiplayer, and stuff like that.

Cool. Let's quickly dive in, right? So now we're going to talk about like, you know, the role of AI in SEO in 2024 and what challenges, priorities and opportunities that we have, right?

So this is a very important and interesting stat that I took from search engine, right? Search engine land survey. So you can basically compare what is the difficulty and most important task in 2024 compared to 2023. In 2023, most of the marketing leaders and founders reported content production is the very difficult or challenging task to do. But in 2024,

algorithm changes and link building and technical SEO are the three important or difficult things to basically do, right? Why? Because in the last 18 months, there are about 16 core algorithm update and in which there are three very important update, right? So,

if your website is 5 year old or 6 year old or 7 year old, you just need to basically get, equip yourself with the new changes that has been there. So that's why technical SEO is becoming important. Right? And also link building and algorithm changes. And if you look at this, this is again from the same survey, 71% of the respondents, they said like, you know, this, you know, AI in SEO is disruptive. Right?

And you can see 32% is somewhat disruptive, 26% is slightly disruptive. Only 18% is not disruptive. But let's move on to the priorities. For example, people are saying after this SG, SG is nothing, it's called search generative experience. So Google used another traditional approach

concept called SCRP, Search Engine Results Page, which is a very traditional way of pulling data from on the backend. Now it is using SGE. SGE is nothing but Search Generative Experience, which uses AI to basically pull in the data and then showing it up front, right? So now you just need to be aware of three things. One, now whatever your website is, you need to update it for mobile first because almost all your website will be mobile first indexing than desktop first indexing.

That's one. And second one is,

Earlier, like three years or four years back, people used to follow this top of funnel keywords, go up behind, like a lot of search volume keywords and stuff like that. Now you don't need to do that. You can focus on very long tail, very less search volume keywords. We call it as long tail semantic keywords. That is, again, like, you know, works really well for companies. And you should also give importance to more rich text elements like images, visuals, and other factors. So that is also an important factor when it comes to SEO.

And if you look at this, this is a very important factor. 83% of the respondents said it is positively impacted. There is no negative impact about this AI algorithm update within SEO. So we can still be confident about whatever the changes that we are making that will impact us in a good way.

And these are all the priorities from an SEO department. Like, you know, I've categorized this into practitioners, managers, and leaders. If you look at for practitioners, right, and, you know, adapting to the impact of AI is the second priority. And if you look at for managers and leader, this is their main or important priority, right? So let's quickly...

Talk about that, right? Like, you know, in long story short, so your bottom funnel and high converting pages may still reap traffic and conversions. Your top of funnel pages is called as informational intent pages. And those pages, the impressions are declining month on month.

right? Now, the second point is you need to give more importance to your brand and your brand reputation. So don't spam your brand with a lot of, like, you know, multiple domains for sending emails and stuff like that. Now your brand reputation is very important. And focusing on improving a brand reputation is the core important. And the third part, which is called a

content qualification methodology. So Google comes up with something called EEAT, which is experience, expertise, authority, and trust. So if you're, let's say if you're a fintech brand, like, you know, hire a couple of journalists

who used to write for fintech brands and then ask them to write your pillar pages, right? If you are a cybersecurity brand, like, you know, work with someone who actually written a lot of cybersecurity content, right? So that is how you can basically generate unique content which stands out compared to your competition, right? Now,

Now, like what is SEO 2.0, right? It's very simple. You can use AI, you can use workflows, you can use automations to do like a 10 checklist. So first, you can leverage AI to create high quality

quality content ideas, not the content. You shouldn't use AI to create content that will penalize or that will impact in a wrong way. So you can use AI to find ideas. Second, there are a lot of experimentation tools right now. So that will guide you whether a particular SEO experiment is going on the right track or not. Third, programmatic that we are going to cover. And fourth,

Right now, you don't need to basically spend time on building calculators, tools, and stuff like that. So there are a lot of linkable asset creation tools like Replit, Copilot, where you can use to build mini tools for your website. And finally, you can use an AI agent to track what is happening within your website. It's more like a virtual assistant that sits, you know, like a...

within your website that will notify if there is some problem. It's more like a system monitoring, but it will update you if there is any problem that's happened within your website. So I'll talk about that as well, right? And the other part would be, like, you know, it's not just AI. So it's also, there are a lot of workflows you can use in the SEO world. You can use MakeApp, Zapier, and you can use ChatGPT4 to basically create all those different variations. Right?

So in short, with this SEO 2.0, you can 10x your results with half of the investment and 2x more productive. Now let's talk about how you can be more productive and how you can basically generate this 10x results and stuff like that. So yeah, this is an important part. These are all very, I would say, rare tools in the SEO world that not many leaders in marketing, I mean founders, know of. So first, this tool.

It's called completely.ai, right? So, I mean, like, you know, if you're a founder, a marketing leader, there is something called battle cards. You have to compare your product or your solution with another company. So it will take about roughly two days to create these battle cards.

So now with competely.ai, you just need to add who's your competitor and this particular competely.ai will give you a 10-pager battle card comparing almost all possible information available on the internet. So it will completely save like one day minimum. Now let's go to the second tool.

Which is, a lot of founders here, you know, you want to know how is your personas have been searching, but you're not good at SEO, right? But you know what is your product is doing and stuff like that. You can write in this tool called, like, you know, SEO.ai, saying that, like, you know, okay, like, you know, my product is a fintech solution selling for SMB.

and what kind of keywords that probably fit into my top funnel. If you ask this question, this tool will give you the set of keywords, then use this tool called seed keywords to further expand that. Again, this is a very, very useful tool. And once you

This is again, right? Like, you know, let's say you don't have a big web development team, right? Or you got the keywords, but you wanted to structure this in a proper way. So that's when this keyword insights.ai will come in. Let's say you get 100 keywords and you're going to basically publish

those 100 keywords into keyword clustering tool, it will cluster what is your top of funnel, what is your middle of funnel, what is your bottom funnel, and how many pages you need, and which pages are top priority, which pages are less priority, and stuff like that. Every single thing. So for example, this will take about minimum four hours to plan one month calendar just for clustering. So within this tool, you can do it within 10 minutes. Not even 10 minutes, just five minutes.

And again, let's say through.com. So this is this tool called, let's say you have a content writing team, but you don't know, I mean, you're not confident about the brief that you're sharing with your team, right? So through.com, you can basically give the exact information

persona, what kind of messaging that you wanted to share with this personas, what kind of tonality, and what is the context behind this particular content, right? And this through.com will basically give you a very detailed brief, and that can be shared with your writers. So again, like, you know, very useful tool. And

This one, right? So AI inner linking. So which is a very, very time consuming task. Let's say your website has 1000 pages. Each page will probably have around like, you know, 15 to 20 links, right? 15 to 20 links into 1000. So I mean, like, you know, you calculate, right? So it's a very, very manual, repetitive task. So there is this tool called Junia, in which there is an AI inner linking capability, you just need to

add the URL of your website and then that will scrape almost all possible inner link for your page. Again, like you know, one of my favorite. Hopefully this tool most of you know, which is called Surfer SEO, right? What this tool will do is, this will grade your content, right? Let's say you're writing a new content and you don't know

exactly what others have written and why their content is ranking better than your content, right? So what this will do is it will guide the writer. So you can see on the right side, there is a 90 out of 100 score, which means and below that, you will see an average of 83 and top 88. What it means is the number one

that is ranking for this keyword, they have 88 score and the average of the first 10 rank, so that is having 83. So the goal for our content writers to basically cross that 88 mark, right? So that's why Surfer is like inevitable tool for triple that. Internally we use for all our clients, right? So there is other tools like ClearScope, Razor and stuff like that, but Surfer is one of the best tool. And here it's a one-stop like opportunity

SEO extension, right? You don't need to basically have like, you know, a bunch of extension within your Chrome web store. You just need to download this detail.com. It has eight tabs, actually seven tabs, sorry, which gives you a complete picture about your website. And you can look at it, look this whenever you want to basically identify what kind of changes that you wanted to make.

And finally, SEO is also moving towards audience-led, right? So we use Pactaro and we use audience.com to find the demographic, technographic signals about different companies. And this will help you identify, okay, like, you know, a company A visits, like, you know, freshworks.com. And after that, like in about two minutes, they're visiting zendesk.com.

So that kind of an information you can easily get from SparkTarot. From audience, you can basically find where your personas have been hanging out. Let's say a CFO for a 100 million company versus a CFO for a 50 million company.

There is a bigger difference in terms of where they hang out, what content they read and stuff like that. So you can use audience for that to basically identify what they're doing and stuff like that. And finally, let's say you don't want to go with an agency, you don't have a big budget, but you want to run an SEO. This is called this auto SEO. It's an AI agent. You just need to add the JavaScript on the website, right? And it will do almost all the work, right? So...

But I mean, like, you know, I don't prefer using this, but if you are an early stage founders, marketing leaders, you can use that. But I advise to go with a consultant or an in-house team, but this is for like, you know, a much cheaper and much better. Okay. Now let's talk about marketing.

New SEO versus old SEO, which is very interesting, at least for me. You can see here, so there are 23 types of SEO content. Towards the left, you will see these are all content that just drives traffic. Towards the right, you see content that drives conversions. So whenever you look at SEO, you should basically classify your SEO strategy into two types. One,

There are about 100 to 150 keywords which we call internally as money keywords or money pages that drives business. And for any company that you take, the ceiling would be around 200 keywords. And each keyword will basically have around 500 to 1,000 search volume, so 20,000 volume.

would be more than enough to drive close to like you know thousand signups or thousand five hundred signups a very good sign up someone thought or demo someone right but on the right left side

These are all very traffic generating keywords, which is very good for all your visibility content, right? So I have classified this into traffic focused, conversion focused, difficulty versus easy. So you can, I mean, like for example, your list, your FAQs, your step-by-step guides, your interviews, that creates more traffic and towards your right, right? Like, you know, how-to guides, landing pages, product pages, that creates more conversions. All right. Now,

Outdated SEOs, people will start doing keyword research, then they do topic research, then they write content, right? Now you should do the other way around. You should first identify like what's the pain points of the personas that you deal with, then create topics.

that you think of which is very, you know, like relevant to your audience, then do keyword research. So that's what we call it, right? Like for example, then do a funnel saying that which are all your unaware content, which are all your problem aware content, which are all your solution aware content and start with product aware, then go to solution aware, then go to problem aware, then finally go to unaware. So,

So this is a three-step easy process, right? Learn pain points, think of topic ideas and find keywords. So we use internally at TripleDart, we use this framework called Job-to-be-done framework, which is we pick a persona, right? And we pick the core job of that persona, and we also pick the related job of that persona. And what we do is we...

look what they are searching on internet day in, day out. And then we map that funnel. And then we start towards the right. We write content closer to the evaluation. Then basically pick up the middle of funnel and top of funnel later. So yeah, this is a very popular framework that we use internally. And finally, new SEO is not just within your website. It's also outside your website.

Right? So, for example, let's say I'm writing a blog today. Right? And my domain authority is 40. Right? And Google will take about two days to index my own URL. Instead, if you write...

the same content within Medium or Reddit or Quora or just answer to some of the questions that is already there. So your chances of indexing your website or that URL would be much faster than your own content. Why? Because Reddit or Quora's domain authority would be 90, 99, 95. Our domain authority would be lesser than 50, 60. So, you know, like some of the social signals will be much faster to index compared to our own domain, right?

And which is, I mean, like now we are going to talk about a very, very important topic when it comes to SEO. A lot of people are struggling in it. They don't know how to basically get backlink. In 2024, again, if you wanted to get backlinks, it's for two purposes. One, to increase domain authority and two, to increase your topical authority.

To increase domain authority, don't do reach outs, don't do guest blogging and stuff like that. A better way to do it, you can just do a digital PR. You spend $1,000 and you'll get listed in Forbes Entrepreneur and whatever the best website that you can list it on. These are all 90 plus domain authority site and your domain authority will also get boosted. But to get top

authority that's when you know like for example you need to basically get ranked for so what I mean by domain authority and topical authorities topical authority is a specific topic that you wanted to like you know acquire links for right to get what I'm going to talk about is to get topical authority again like you know there is a way in which you can get it so the best way is to basically build free tools right

Right? So I'll, you know, these are all some of the examples you can, you can build a freelance rate calculator, you can build a project timeline estimator, you can build a project budget estimator and stuff like that. I'll show you a couple of examples. So this is one of our client, we built this ESOP pool size calculator, and this got indexed two and a half months back, and we got 30 free backlinks.

There are a lot of newsletters have been reported this and also there are a couple of other websites have been given this. These are all very big. And towards the right, so we work with this company who is a social media management portal. We have created 10 free tools like that. And you can look at, we got around 160 free backlinks in about one of three months. So again, that's an easy way to...

drive backlinks. And finally, we are going to end the session with the programmatic SEO in B2B SaaS. So programmatic SEO is nothing but publishing more than 100 pages in a very short time. How you can do this? It's very simple. You need an optimized page template.

You need a database of all the information. You need super long-tail keywords. So it's one into two into three. That's it. How are we going to do that? So there are three myths in the programmatic world. One is programmatic SEO spam. Because you're going to repeat the content. So the search engine might look, okay, this is a duplicate content. It's not right. You can see the difference. Towards the left, you can see a very generic image.

answer for a topic and towards the right you can see like you know for every like you know delta what is the miles worth right so the right will have more context according to google compared to the left second programmatic seo only works with ai completely wrong right ai will only give flexibility right i'll talk about even before this ai thing comes like you know we work with manage engine we basically created thousands of pages back in 2012

So I'll talk about that later. But yeah, third thing, programmatic content does not convert, which is partially true if you create programmatic SEO without having that relevancy or context, but for few companies it works really well, that also we are going to talk about. Cool. So these are all some examples, but yeah, if you want to understand whether PSEO is right for you, there are three things. First, you need to put little bit upfront information

like, you know, investment and time is needed, but not always, just one time, right? And second, your current SEO strategy, your brand should be a little bit matured brand. And third, you should be selling some very big time. That's it. These are all the three prerequisites for PSEO. And the first thing,

Programmatic SEO works really well for localization. For example, let's say we wanted to build like 100 pages for different states, 1,000 pages for different cities for zip codes and stuff like that. For example, you can see an example, right? Minimum wage in Los Angeles for best restaurants.

And it works for a job to be done. JTBD is a job to be done. Use a particular tool for a particular task. Third, it works for different industries. And also comparisons. I don't know if you've attended this demo-led SEO session. So Storyline used to basically build all comparison using their programmatic way of doing SEO only. And for niche, it's based on metrics and brands.

So once you get to the keywords, then you're going to SEMrush and find all the existing keywords. Then what are you going to do is you need to identify, let's say, if you hit a particular traffic, how much traffic

like revenue or pipeline that you get. So for that, let me quickly show that later. But just for PSEO, you just need these three things. Page content, content database, and AI prompts. This is how a page template would look like. So if you look at the blue color content blocks, all this are dynamic. If you look at like, you know, welcome to...

what industry and for what job title, and if you look at the second content block, top three percentage of job title, and third content block, different keyword and stuff like that. Once this is done, then, again, like, you know, this is a little bit tricky. I would give you an automated way so you can use that for building better this thing, right? So,

So, this is an automated way. So, you can use either one of these two tools. One is called ByWord.ai, another one is called WithDream. So, if you are not a programmatic ninja, so what you can do is instead of using Excel or Google Sheets and stuff like that, you can either use ByWord or WithDream to basically build this like backend infrastructure for doing programmatic. That's it, right?

So, as I told you, like, you know, you just need to find keyword patterns. You just need to basically build page template, set up database, build AI prompts, and publish. So, this is a tool that we have built, right? So, you can, you know, like, if you can just, you know, scan this, it will take you to a Google Sheet. And in that, whatever I've discussed so far would be explained in a, like, you know, step-by-step manner, right? And...

This is how it works. So for like after completing a programmatic SEO, it will take one to three months for indexation, one to six months for impression, one to nine months for ranking, one to 12 months for traffic conversions, pipeline revenue. So let's quickly talk about the results. So this is one company called Multiplier. So they are a global payroll company, one of our customers. So for them, what we have done was we have created a country encyclopedia.

So you can see there is very low results for their brand SEO. So what we have done was we have created programmatic templates for work permit and for employment guides. We have a database in the backend. We use that database and created content and published this.

And if you look at the second, which is for this company called ByDance Lark, and if you look at, we have basically built close to 500 plus templates because, you know, ByDance, I mean, Lark is more like a click-up competitor. So they are a project management software. So we used to create a lot of templates and then use that for our own programmatic issue.

And for Sentinel-1, right? So Sentinel-1 has this ransomware anthology. So there are about like, you know, 1000 plus ransomwares. For each ransomware, we've created a like, you know, a page and there are about 1000 plus pages, this not 100. So then it results about 10,000 plus traffic.

and this company is a freight forwarding company so for that we basically build a like a two and pro freight forwarding calculator again at 400 pages like you know we got around 5000 plus traffic and stuff like that the final one is r1 case study all right so you can you can look at like you know if you search for b2b sas seo agency in new york b2b uh seo agency in california like you know even after sem rush we are the number one or number two uh

a position for almost all the keywords. All pages have the same content, we just change the state and country names and then it automatically started ranking. Yeah, that's pretty much about it. If you have any questions, connect with me offline, happy to answer whatever questions, whatever you have.