BDTP. Product SEO with David Pasztor
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Hello everyone and welcome to Better Done Than Perfect, a podcast for SaaS marketers and product people. Our awesome guest today is David Pastor, founder of UX Studio and Ranking Raccoon. And we're going to talk about product SEO today.

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Hi, David. Hey, thank you for having me. Excited to talk to you. Seven years after we talked at another show about your UX roadmapping book that was like a gazillion years ago. Yeah, it's great to be back. Before we dive into the main topic of our conversation, you have a pretty fascinating story from a studio founder to product owner. Tell us a bit how it happened, how the story unfolded over the years.

Yes. So I started a product design agency 11 years ago and it started us most of these agencies. We served local small businesses and slowly we climbed the ladder. And some of our well-known clients now are Google, Netflix, Samsung and other big tech companies. And

And while we were designing great products for these tech companies, an obvious question came up. Our designers asked me if we can design such a great product for other companies, why don't we build our own products?

So around seven years ago, we started building our own products and we shifted the focus of the company to becoming this product house where we are building multiple software as a service products.

One of the first products was UXful.io, which is a portfolio website builder for product designers. Obviously, this was something that we struggled with ourselves to build our portfolios. So we built a better solution for others as well. Then when that became a success, we built similar products for copywriters, marketers, and architects. These were Copifolio and Archifolio.

And after we built these products and we are still building those, we started Ranking Raccoon, which is an SEO tool. The origin story of Ranking Raccoon is our own marketing team. We do SEO marketing in UX Studio and in our product teams as well.

rely heavily on SEO. Somehow we found that this is the best channel if you want to scale up a product. But there was one part that all of us hated, like really, and that's link building. So when I asked our marketers to do some link building, they were not happy at all. I saw it on their faces. Those were the worst day at work when they had to do link building.

And to be very honest, I understand why. Because the old fashioned way of doing link building includes sending out thousands of cold emails and a lot of tedious work of collecting website owners, filtering down the contact information. So that's really not a pleasant thing to do. On the other hand, we received a lot of requests ourselves.

So other founders and other marketers were writing us emails multiple times a day that, hey, can you give us a backlink here, there?

But we got a lot of low quality requests as well. So spammers or owners of scammy sites, you know, and these private blog networks full of AI generated low quality content, they were reaching out as well. And it was very difficult to figure out who are the trustworthy professional to work with. And that was actually the pain point that

made us to build a better solution because we saw that there's already a market out there. There are people emailing each other. It's just very inefficient. Like the response rate for these cold emails are, I just read it a few days ago that it's now under 5%. And if somebody responds to you, that doesn't mean that you can collaborate. So it's really low percentage.

So we thought that, okay, there might be a better solution for this. And to solve this issue, we created Ranking Raccoon, which is a platform that is heavily moderated. And we only let trustworthy SEOs join. And we manually check every website that is added to the platform to make sure that the members of the community and the websites they are collaborating with are all high quality.

and trustworthy. And this is how we started our latest product. I don't want to turn this interview into an advertisement for Ranking Raccoon, but we love it. And also we love your emails as an email platform.

You have them done according to all the best practices that we recommend. And we have your emails short, sweet, lovely, with a raccoon on top, sitting in most of our collections and articles. So thank you for doing great emails as well. Okay, you're welcome. We experimented a lot with our emails, actually. When we were building UX Folio, we tried many different email formats. Like we tried really long emails,

And there were not so much engagements there. We tried emails that were very graphic, like a lot of banners and the visual elements there. And we just learned that somehow

The messages that look like plain text messages work better with conversion. There are more people clicking through. Obviously, it's a question if you want to, what's your goal? Do you want people to read your content? Or if you are promoting a product feature, we want them to click through and try it out. So, and

And for that, the short messages with a little animation of the new features and the very clear communication and the big call to action. What I personally love about your emails is that they're clearly designed. So there's been obviously a design eye working on them. You have very tasteful animations. All the spacing is perfect, but it's not distracting from the content. So that's like the perfect balance. That aside...

I'd love to explore the evolution of your SEO thinking as you used SEO to promote all of your businesses. And now we have your brain to pick on this. And let's start with your original agency business when you used SEO to find your clients. I guess that worked as well. So that's how you learned SEO is great.

Yeah, I mean, we are continuously working on our marketing, but in the early days of the agency, the main idea was to do inbound marketing and become thought leaders. So we wrote a lot of high quality articles, in-depth articles about different topics, but these were mostly informational articles.

And a lot of people read those, but we got no new clients at all.

And it was super disappointing. Like when you have tens of thousands of people reading your articles, you get zero calls like, hey, I want to hire you or your design team. And yeah, it was really frustrating. And we started to analyze what's going on. And we learned that all our competitors are reading everything that we write or almost all of them.

And other designers were reading them. But these people were not the same people who were hiring design teams at other companies. So it was actually more useful as an employer branding channel.

And that's when we learned to make a distinction between informational and transactional articles. Transactional articles are targeting a transactional keyword. So somebody is searching for something that they want to solve. And actually, there is a very funny story because this is how we got Google as a client to our agency.

So when there was a big downturn around, I don't know, nine or eight years ago, I decided that, okay, I'm the CEO, but I want to help marketing to get new clients. So one day I went into the office, sat down next to our marketer and tell her that, okay, I'm going to write articles now as well.

And I wrote an article about UX agencies and compared the current landscape. And it started ranking a few months later. And after about a year, one day Google wrote us an email that, hey, they are searching for an agency. Can we maybe collaborate?

And it came from an at google.com email address. So our salespeople thought that it's spam. So we haven't applied to Google reaching out. And three days later, the guy called us on the phone and then, oh shit.

We should have answered that email. And that was the first project that we did with them. So we learned that it's not enough to create great content. We need to target transactional keywords. And later, that's what we did with our portfolio builder products as well. Let me interrupt you for a moment. If you don't mind sharing a few keyword examples that you can remember that worked

quite well for your agency. And then the same question would be for your portfolio builder products. Yeah, sure.

So this is not really a rocket science. So it will not be super surprising for anybody, I think. But it taught us some time to learn this. So if you imagine somebody who is searching for an agency that they would hire, what would you type in Google? So I think many people would type in like agencies in San Francisco or best product design agency or top UX agencies.

So these are the type of keywords that people type in. But many before this shift, we were producing content that was more informational. So we were covering topics like how to do personas, how to do wireframes, how to design a button.

That's content for designers. Yeah, how to design, how to think about user journeys. And these were really great content, but the audience of this content are totally different from the audience of the people who are actually ready to hire an agency. And it took us more than a year to learn this quite easy lesson. And then when we started creating transactional content, the

then more and more clients came to us and reached out to us who were ready to buy. And when we started building our own products, we did the same there as well.

So for example, my favorite example is actually Canva because they are dominating the template related keyword. So whatever you want to do and you write in Google, you want to have a wedding invitation template or a social media posts template or a video template, then the first thing you will see on Google is Canva.

And this choice is a really wise one because those who are looking for a template are usually ready to create something with that template and they are ready to try out a tool like Conva.

So that's why we call these keywords transactional keywords. And that's what we did with our portfolio website builders. So if you are searching for UX design portfolio template or UX portfolio examples, then there is a very high chance that you will find our articles.

And those people who are searching for examples or templates, they are the ones who are ready to do something with them and try a new tool, for example.

We do a super similar thing at UserList with email examples and email templates for different situations that SaaS companies may face, which by the way, really helps to differentiate us from other email templates, which there is a gazillion around. We try to find use cases that are only happening in the SaaS lifecycle, for example.

What's interesting is that this idea is so much on the surface, but it took us maybe a year or two of SEO practical work to arrive that this format works so well. Also, we use community to source those examples. So it's like a super wild, awesome game to put these together. I'm curious with your portfolio products. Did you just from day one know that examples would work or did you also have some sort of learning curve?

When we started building those products, we knew already from the agency experience that we need to work with transactional keywords. So that was the most important. But what are the best transactional keywords? That's a big open question. And for example, one thing that we thought about earlier is like how-to or tutorials. And they were not really working that well.

I think it's a process. You start, you have some initial ideas, you do your research and you start publishing some content. And when you talk with your users and you see how they react and you do more and more keyword research, you will find those transactional keywords that work well. So it needs some experimentation. And I think it's different in every niche area.

For Ranking Raccoon, yet another journey to start. And I know you're already regretting some decisions about it. How did you approach SEO? Ranking Raccoon is really young. It's like a year, somewhere around that old. So how did you approach SEO for that product? Yeah, so this is an SEO tool. And somehow our original idea was to not do SEO at all.

Because we thought that, okay, for an SEO tool, you need to have other channels. And it was probably a stupid idea. Now I regret it. And I think that's something a lot of founders regret, that they haven't started SEO early enough.

So, and it's super funny that I made that mistake as well. So we started six or eight months later on the blog for Ranking Raccoon. So it's a pretty new thing. So that was the thing that I regret, actually. What types of articles are you writing for Ranking Raccoon?

For Ranking Raccoon, we try to create a blog about link building. The difficulty of this thing that when you are writing an SEO blog, you are competing with all the other SEOs around the world. So it's not an easy thing. And how we solve this is that we try to create our own niche. So we go after link building and we try to...

to evangelize this new way of link building or quality focused way of link building that we really believe in. And that's how we approach this. There are some segments that we see ranking raccoon is really a good fit for. For example, software as a service companies and we target those.

We have a really awesome episode here with John Doherty about building marketplaces. Essentially, ranking Raccoon is a marketplace, so you need to hit the critical mass of people to get it off the ground, which is always hard. What's your approach to making sure you get those numbers in? Because that's critical to success.

Yeah, this is something that was not really easy at the beginning. So you have this cold start problem and how many marketplaces solved this?

They targeted a very small niche at the beginning because in that small niche, it's easier to reach the critical volume. And then you add other niches as well. So this is how we started. We didn't want to build a link building platform for everyone. We picked a few small niches.

And we actually reached out to people working in those niches with our pitch and almost like manually invited them to the platform. Then we started doing our SEO and paid advertisement later. So that's how we did. After a while, we gave up focusing on these very specific

small niches and we opened it up for everyone. So that was our approach, actually. What's your big ambition? I know you have some plans about ranking Raccoon. Yeah. So we want to be the go-to spam-free link building platform for all the trustworthy SEO professionals out there. I would be happy if this would be the number one tool that people use for link building. We are not there yet, but we will get there.

There is one story related to your product, and I was convinced until we met today that your idea is to replace ABC link exchanges with a marketplace where you give a link to someone and then you can ask someone entirely different for another link. And both will be fresh and exciting, not like you have to arrange an ABC swap. But apparently it's not the case. Tell us more how that happened.

Yeah. So when we started ranking Raccoon, we thought that our platform will be the tool that creates this balance. So you get as many links as you give to others. But when we try to communicate this approach to users, it was just too complex. They didn't understand how that would work.

So in this industry, trust is a very important thing. And if they don't understand how something works, that doesn't really build trust.

So after some experiments, we ditched this idea. Now we trust our users to talk with each other. The main focus of Ranking Raccoon is to find great marketers working, covering similar topics that you do. And we create a place where you can build relationships with these marketers and collaborate around link building.

And we let people to figure out how to collaborate and ask something in return.

And we learned that they actually do this. So when you sign up and you start a conversation with another marketer, you see what websites they are working on. And if they request a link from you, and if it's relevant and it's a high quality site, you can give that backlink to them. But you can also see what they have and you can ask them to return the favor. And that's what most of our users do, actually.

Did you hit any absolutely unexpected roadblocks in your journey with ranking a raccoon? There were a lot of different obstacles we hit. One thing for such a platform, I think activity, like an active community is very important. So one of the things we had to solve was ghosting at the beginning. Like people were not replying to each other.

And then we created a little visual indicator that tells you if you are a good community member who replies to others and it warns you when you should be more active. And surprisingly, this was actually our first idea. And we thought that we will need a lot of different things to solve this issue. But surprisingly, this solved this ghosting issue. And now we have really, really great numbers. So yeah.

Like more than 70% of the requests are replied within a week.

And this is something you can't do with cold emails, for example. Another thing that was surprising to me is there are two types of marketers out there, in-house marketers and agency marketers. And they have a very, very different working style, let's say. So they have very different communication style. They behave very differently.

And one of our great challenges now, and I think we'll solve it really soon because we have really good ideas, is to make sure that these two different segments can collaborate together. Tell us more. What are the issues exactly? Like what's the difference you're describing?

So agency people, and I think, so our main target is in-house marketers. So they are more picky and I think they do it well, by the way, that they just want to work and collaborate with really trustworthy professionals from other companies, um,

Agency people are less picky because they have a huge pressure to deliver things. And agency people start conversations with long lists of websites or companies they are working with.

And that's super annoying for in-house people who just want to know about one or two opportunities that are really highly relevant to them. So that's one specific example where their communication style doesn't really match. I think if we can teach how to communicate, teach these two parties how to communicate, there will be really great collaborations. We just have to make sure that they know how to communicate with each other properly.

If you were to start another product from scratch, would you keep SEO in mind? And I bet you would. And how exactly? Would you like, you know, hypothetically, what's the role of SEO in a good way? I think SEO is still the most important channel online. You can't beat SEO in scale and targeting. One advantage of SEO is you can target people who are ready to buy.

ready to try a new tool. If you target the right keywords, you can create content to those people who are searching for a solution right now. And in this sense, SEO can bring you much better quality traffic than other channels, I think. And the other advantage I think SEO has is that it's scalable. And if you create evergreen content, it will work for you for a long time.

So what I would do, and we will probably start new products because we really like to build software products. And that's what we do here. I would start creating content and building up SEO really from the first day, I think. And in some cases, probably even before we start coding the product.

So I think an ideal way of doing this would be to start building the content, see what works, have traffic. And when you already have the traffic for transactional keywords, then start building the product.

This is not necessarily something everybody can do because they don't have the luxuries to wait with building the product if they have, for example, investors. But for bootstrapped forks, for example, or those companies who have multiple products and they just want to start a new product, I think this is a really great approach because you will already have the traffic by the time you start building the product. So you will have testers and you will have an early audience.

I guess that kind of answers one of my next questions, but let's do another blitz round as we always ask our guests. One do and one don't for SEO on products.

Okay, so one do is to build backlinks. They still work. And the best way to build backlinks is to build lasting relationships in your industry and find partners in other companies, marketers and SEOs. So build these relationships. And one don't, don't sacrifice quality to quantity. So you don't need hundreds of backlinks. You just need a few really great quality ones.

That's very inspiring. Let us all go and build some links. Thank you so much once again for sharing your wisdom today on the show. Where can people go find yourself online and all your products and all your wisdom? I would suggest go to rankingraccoon.com. This is where you will find us. Me personally, you can find me on LinkedIn. Awesome. Thanks so much once again, David, and have a wonderful rest of your week. Thank you so much.

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