When they hired us for our SEO and content marketing services in the fall of 2021, they had limited brand recognition in the US, especially as compared to top competitors Hotjar and FullStory. One of Smartlook’s key marketing objectives was expanding their U.S. customer base by ranking for valuable keywords in the web and product analytics space.

In addition, Smartlook also wanted to bring more exposure to their product analytics features in order to attract more advanced users. While they were best known for their heatmap and session recording tools, their customer retention data indicated that customers who used their more advanced product analytics features — event tracking, funnel analysis, retention tables, crash reports, cross-platform analytics, etc. — got more value out of the tool and stuck around longer. So they wanted to build their authority as a product analytics tool, and not just a web analytics tool, to attract users who were more likely to need these additional features. 

Here’s how we used SEO, specifically our Pain Point SEO process, to help with these challenges.

SEO Is Ideally Suited to Attract Specific Customer Personas

Unlike paid display, paid social, or even most paid search campaigns, long form SEO content is an ideal channel for B2B SaaS companies looking to attract users looking for very specific features, because it allows you to target people who are searching for extremely specific things exactly when they’re interested. 

In contrast, while social and display ads offer some ability to target the right people, they have almost no ability to capture their interest at the right time — when they’re looking for a solution to the problem. Instead, they just show up when people are browsing the web or social media for any reason. High-quality content that targets long tail buying keywords, on the other hand, lets you show up for the exact search queries that indicate the user has pain points that map to your features and rank for those features. 

Paid search (or PPC) can also be difficult to apply to specific, long tail queries. In particular, we’ve noticed that many of these queries don’t have enough search volume for Google to decide to show ads for (we’ve tested this), but if you rank for these terms organically you can get enough search traffic and leads to make a real difference (as our results below show). 

Finally, long form content gives you the right medium — specifically, enough space — to explain advanced features and demonstrate how they help your target audience solve specific pain points. This space also lets you include the amount of copy necessary to adequately fulfill search intent and rank for competitive keywords.

For these reasons, we were excited to help Smartlook via our content process.

Applying Our SaaS SEO Strategy to Find and Rank for High Intent Keywords

When we started working with Smartlook, we immediately noticed a pattern in their existing content. Their blog had a lot of well-written educational articles about high-level topics related to website analytics and product analytics, but their only content aimed at high intent keywords were landing pages and feature pages. 

For example, they had several landing pages that targeted competitor-type keywords like “Hotjar Alternative” and “FullStory Alternative.” The landing pages were well designed from a conversion-rate optimization (CRO) standpoint and included compelling copy about Smartlook’s features. Similarly, their standard feature pages had a sharp design, strong visuals, and interactive features. 

But almost none of these landing pages and feature pages were ranking on the first page of Google. Most weren’t even ranking in the top 100 results. Why not? In both types of pages, the total word count per page was less than 500. It’s a common problem with landing pages: the content was too thin compared to the content existing on the search engine results page (SERP), and it lacked both key elements searchers were looking for and the crucial on-page SEO elements search engines look for.

The competitor alternative landing pages didn’t include a thorough analysis of how those features compared to the competitor, nor any insight into what the shortcomings of the competitor products might be. And the feature pages didn’t have enough space to really dig into the use cases of each feature with examples that would resonate with readers.

These two factors — too little content and not meeting search intent — were the key reasons these pages weren’t ranking (and are very common reasons most SEO agencies struggle to generate rankings and conversions). 

Content for High Buying-Intent Keywords

To address this, we applied our SaaS content marketing strategy and found dozens of long tail competitor and category keywords with high buying-intent that Smartlook didn’t rank for. 

When we analyzed the SERP for each keyword, we determined that searchers would be best served by an in-depth blog post, instead of a landing page, because it would give us the space to dig into the nuances of the differences between Smartlook’s features and their competitors, while showcasing Smartlook’s deep knowledge and expertise in the product analytics space. 

We combined our SEO strategy with our intelligent, thoughtful writing that demonstrates how a product or service solves the customer’s problem (we call it Pain Point Copywriting) to produce new content that offered the in-depth analysis searchers were looking for and presented a compelling pitch for Smartlook’s solutions.

Compare the user experience of their landing page, Hotjar Alternative, with our blog post, 12 Hotjar alternatives for website and mobile app analytics: 

The reader can immediately see that the blog post will help them make an informed decision — especially if they have a very specific use case in mind and want to make sure the tool they choose is appropriate. 

While the landing page includes social proof in the form of testimonials and G2 ratings as well as screenshots of their key features with the value proposition of each one in clear, compelling copy, there’s no analysis of how these features compare to Hotjar, which is likely to be a high priority for the person searching “Hotjar alternatives.” 

Content for Mid-Funnel Keywords

Our keyword research also turned up several jobs-to-be-done keywords (JTBD), which are descriptions of the use case for a feature that don’t include the name of the feature or the product category. This area of keyword research can often be a gold mine for SaaS companies.

Searchers who choose to describe the problem they’re trying to solve are often advanced users looking for validation that a product can solve that exact problem. In many cases, they’ve already tried a product in the category that didn’t meet their needs, so they’re refining their Google search to turn up new products that can meet their exact use case. In this way, even though JTBD keywords are higher up in the funnel than the keywords discussed above, they still have product buying-intent. But unlike some of the more obvious buying-related keywords, JTBD keywords often require very few backlinks to rank. 

For example, the phrase “tracking user activity on website” is a long tail keyword we targeted early on in the engagement. It’s a more precise search query than phrases like “session recording tool” or “website analytics.” After evaluating the SERP, we determined that searchers were looking for tools that could help them track specific user interactions like button clicks and text inputs and provide insights into why users behaved the way they did. This keyword was a great fit for Smartlook because it allowed us to highlight their advanced features for an audience that was clearly looking for those features.

Many SEO agencies won’t go after these keywords because they have low monthly traffic on Ahrefs. But we know that Ahrefs and other tools grossly underestimate the volume of long tail keywords, and this keyword was no exception. While Ahrefs estimated the traffic for the phrase “tracking user activity on website” at 40 searches per month, it accumulated nearly 7,000 organic sessions in the final nine months of our engagement (20 times more than Ahrefs’ volume estimate would have predicted). Across all of our content, that piece was one of our top 10 performers by conversion volume. 

Lastly, in keeping with our proven SEO tactic of creating separate blog posts for each target keyword, we also did a lot of “vs” pieces and “alternatives” pieces, offering head-to-head comparisons between Smartlook and a wide variety of competitors, including products that were more familiar to the advanced users Smartlook wanted to attract, such as Amplitude and Mixpanel.

These three types of keywords (category, competitors and alternatives, and jobs to be done) accounted for every piece within our top 15 converting pieces.

Results: 600+ Monthly Conversions, 37 Top 10 Rankings, and Traffic Growth

This engagement produced some of the most impressive results we’ve seen. 

As we do with all of our clients, we created a custom dashboard in Google Analytics to track conversion metrics from our content. In this case, we tracked free account sign-ups and demo requests. 

We grew conversions to our content to more than 600 per month in 16 months. 

By creating dedicated high-quality blog posts for each high intent keyword we identified, we helped Smartlook gain dozens of top three organic search rankings in Google in the U.S., growing their brand awareness and customer base. 

Of the 50 keywords we targeted during the engagement, we had the following wins: 

• 11 no. 1 rankings
• 20 top 3 rankings
• 37 top 10 rankings
• Average position of 7

We also helped them meet aggressive goals for organic traffic growth during the engagement. Organic traffic to our posts alone grew to 18,000+ per month. 

It was a pleasure to work with Smartlook’s marketing team as well as nearly a dozen subject matter experts generously lent their time to thoroughly explain the ins and outs of their product and the problems it solves for their customers. 

And, while we don’t take credit for Cisco noticing the good work the Smartlook team has been doing, we were pleased to see that one of the key reasons Cisco highlighted for the acquisition was how Smartlook helps users “troubleshoot hard-to-replicate digital behavior anomalies and analyze user interaction trends across web and mobile application platforms.” Those are some of the key benefits we focused on in our content, and it’s nice to see that message resonating with a worldwide technology leader. 

More Grow and Convert Case Studies

Here are five other case studies, each with unique insights, that you can read to see how we’ve executed our SEO strategy for other B2B and SaaS businesses:

• Applying Pain Point SEO to All-In-One SaaS Products: A Case Study

• Scaling Content: Expanding from Bottom of Funnel Content to Top of Funnel (Geekbot Case Study)

• Scaling SEO Traffic from 920 to 14,577 Sessions in 6 months: Circuit Case Study

• How to Do B2B Content Marketing without Domain Expertise (Rainforest QA Case Study)

• How to Create a Keyword Strategy for a New, Innovative Product (Case Study of a Video Editing Software Client)

How to Work with Us or Learn More

• Our Agency: If you want to hire us to execute a content-focused SEO strategy, complete with content creation, link building, and technical SEO, learn more about working with us here.

• Join Our Team: If you’re a content marketer or writer and would love to do content marketing in this way, we’d love to have you apply to join our team.

• Our Content Marketing Course: Individuals looking to learn our agency’s content strategy and become better marketers, consultants, or business owners can join our private course and community, taught via case studies, and presented in both written and video content formats. We include several details and examples not found on this blog. Our course is also built into a community, so people ask questions, start discussions, and share their work in the lesson pages themselves, and we, along with other members, give feedback. Learn more here.

• All-in-one SaaS Product Case Study – We share how we grew demo signups to 150+/month for a large SaaS platform that has numerous à la carte solutions inside of it.

• Geekbot Case Study – We share how we drove 1,700+ signups for the self-service SaaS company Geekbot by starting with bottom of the funnel keywords and working our way up the funnel to mid/top of funnel keywords. We also show how conversion rates differ. 

• Circuit Case Study – This article shares how we moved a blog from a subdomain to subfolder while following our SEO content strategy and grew trial signups to 250+/month.

With that said, in our experience working with dozens of SaaS businesses over the last 6+ years and hearing about their experiences working with other SEO agencies, we have learned that SaaS SEO services often don’t drive meaningful increases in MQLs, SQLs, or MRR for their clients.

So, in this post, we’re going to share the main reasons why we think this is and walk through how we approach SaaS SEO differently to achieve the types of results cited in the case studies above. 

If you’d like us to apply our SEO content marketing strategy to your SaaS business, you can learn more about our service here. 

Common Weaknesses of SaaS SEO Agencies and Processes

Below are what we consider weaknesses in the strategies of SEO agencies that have been previously retained by our SaaS clients. Our conclusions are based on directly seeing the work produced by these agencies, seeing what results these agencies have (or have not) achieved for our clients, and hearing the frustrations our clients have voiced to us about these projects.

Weakness #1: Too Many SEO Agencies Emphasize Technical SEO Over Ranking for High-Intent Keywords

We’ve noticed that SaaS marketing agencies (as well as in-house SEO teams) often focus the majority of their SEO efforts on “on-site SEO” (e.g. technical SEO, site maps, site structure, internal linking, etc.) combined with link building outreach, while giving a lot less focus, priority, and effort to what we feel is the most important part of SaaS SEO strategy: Identifying high buying-intent keywords and creating pages designed to rank for those keywords. 

We think this is backwards. 

In our view, activities like technical SEO audits and domain-wide link building should only be done as a means of ranking for your highest value keywords. 

Because otherwise, what’s the point? If you (1) haven’t identified what your highest value keywords are and (2) don’t have pages on your site specifically created to fulfill the search intent of those keywords, then what are you possibly hoping to achieve with technical SEO or link building? 

What use is high domain authority (the goal of most efforts to acquire backlinks) if you don’t have pages on your site created specifically to rank for your highest value keywords? Do you know what your highest value keywords are?

These may sound like obvious mistakes that no one would make, but it’s shockingly common. We see this backwards approach to SEO all the time. A ton of effort is spent on technical SEO and “cleaning up the site,” while a lot less effort is spent on identifying highest value keywords and creating content aimed specifically at ranking for them. 

Inevitably, in these scenarios, SaaS companies become frustrated when all the budget and time spent on SEO fails to produce any measurable increase in qualified leads or product signups.

Weakness #2: Keyword Research by Itself Doesn’t Get Results. You Need to Actually Create Content That Will Rank.

When we have seen keyword lists from SEO consulting services or agencies, there are often several issues with them. 

First, they’re often just massive lists of hundreds of keywords that SaaS companies could get for themselves from any SEO tool. Some agencies do the hard work of categorizing or prioritizing these keywords by buying intent, but from what we’ve seen, most do not. And these SEO tools (where most agencies are getting these lists) almost always suggest tons of low buying-intent, high search volume keywords. They don’t interview sales, product, or customer support to deeply understand pain points of the target audience and uncover non obvious but high converting, high buying-intent keyword ideas. You need humans to do this hard work. 

Second, these lists aren’t actionable. The vast majority of companies don’t have the resources to produce over 200 articles that are high-quality and crafted well enough to actually have a shot at ranking. So while this kind of keyword research may make the SaaS SEO company feel productive, it leaves the client overwhelmed and wondering how they can possibly rank for all of those keywords. 

Compounding this issue is that most of the time, the SEO agency that provided the list will only create “content briefs” for each keyword, but they won’t actually write and publish the pieces. (Or, if they do, they’ll charge an enormous amount to do so.) 

Unfortunately, content briefs don’t rank. Pages published on the site that match search intent rank. These take time and effort to produce. So, it’s no wonder many agencies don’t do this. Heck, many SaaS brands don’t even do this. It’s hard.  

Weakness #3: SEO Agencies Often Prioritize Traffic Over Conversions

Next, in addition to emailing their clients unreasonably large keyword lists produced by an SEO tool, most SEO agencies prioritize keywords by chasing traffic over conversions.  

We’ve talked a lot about why this is a problem, but in short, SEO agencies tend to spend a lot of their efforts trying to rank for top of funnel keywords that have high search volume but low buying intent.

By our measures, these keywords have very low conversion rates — a point that is neatly summarized in this Google analytics screenshot from our article on Pain Point SEO (our agency’s foundational SEO content strategy): 

The right-most column shows new user signups for each of the URLs listed. The three boxed posts follow the Pain Point SEO approach and rank for keywords with high buying-intent. The rest rank for something the target audience could search for, but not a high buying-intent keyword. 

The new user signups from the three Pain Point SEO posts are hundreds of percent higher. 

We also showed this at a larger scale in an analysis of 60+ posts for our client Geekbot:

The posts targeting high buying-intent keywords (which we’ve traditionally referred to as “bottom of funnel”) didn’t just convert a bit better than the higher-volume-lower-intent posts, they converted 2400% better. 

Within that case study, you can read about how the higher conversion rates more than made up for any differences in search volume or traffic between the two buckets. 

This is why, in our experience, prioritizing keywords by intent — not search volume and traffic potential — is far more effective for driving conversions. But most SEO agencies don’t use strategies that follow this logic.

Weakness #4: Most SEO Agencies Don’t Specialize in Product Copywriting

Next, in order to rank for high buying-intent keywords (e.g., “best accounting software,” “social media management software,”) and convert that traffic into leads, you need to be good at product copywriting. 

Pages ranking for high buying-intent keywords usually talk a lot about products. So, if you want to rank for these keywords, your pages need to talk about products in-depth, including, for example, an explanation of key features, the use cases for each feature, and what differentiates your product from others in your space. 

This requires a different writing skill set than traditional “blog writing.” First, most blog writing is self-researched, but product copywriting shouldn’t be. The traditional blog writing workflow involves handing a writer a keyword and asking them to come up with what to write on their own. Sometimes the writer is given a “content brief”, but even those are mostly dictating the subheaders based on what the existing ranked pages are already saying. 

That may be fine for introductory, top-of-funnel keywords like “accounting tips for startups,” where most of the articles ranking say the same thing, so a reasonably smart writer could digest the tips in a couple of hours and produce something similar but professional. But if you’re going after a buying-intent keyword like “accounting software for startups,” then you need to actually discuss the details of your software: 

• Outline your features and benefits
  • Why does your feature set look the way it does?
  • What are the most important benefits?
  • Are there any design details that are important? 

• Compare your software with others
  • What differentiates yours from others?
  • Where in the market do you sit? 
  • Are there certain use cases where a competitor might be better?

No freelance writer is going to be able to write this on their own. 

First, they’re going to need to interview product experts at your company to get this information. Most SEO agencies don’t have these interviews as part of their content creation process. 

Second, they need to be able to write this kind of content well. How do you sell the features without being too salesy? How do you contrast with competitors without being too aggressive or trashing them? These are hard skills to learn. Some writers on our team have told me that our writing is more like landing page copywriting than blog content writing. They’re not wrong. 

Weakness #5: The Sprinkle Method

As a result of all of these challenges with producing content that actually ranks for the researched keywords, we’ve seen many SEO agencies use an approach we’ve started calling “The Sprinkle Method.” 

Instead of producing a unique article or landing page for each target keyword, they simply give blog writers the keyword sheet and ask them to sprinkle the keywords in their articles, thinking this will be sufficient to acquire high search engine rankings for these keywords. 

This doesn’t work. 

As we explained in detail in this article, Google’s algorithm can tell the difference between content that’s tangential to the topic and content that specifically addresses the search query. So if you don’t dedicate a single page to fulfilling the search intent of your target keyword, you’re likely to get beat out by competing pages that do. 

Basically, if others are creating dedicated pages for specific keywords, and you’re just “sprinkling” keywords in here or there, you have a slim shot at ranking on the first page. And in our experience, lead generation from content doesn’t pick up until you’re ranking in the top half of page one, ideally in the top three positions. 

How Our SEO + Content Process Solves the Problems Above and (We Feel) Produces Better Results for SaaS Clients

Fundamentally, we feel our process is better aligned with clients’ desired outcomes (rankings for high buying-intent search terms) and is more likely to actually achieve those outcomes because of what we prioritize. 

Below is each step of our process, listed in order of priority. 

Note: By “priority,” we don’t mean chronology, i.e., when we do each step. In a client engagement, we may start each step at the same time. But the point is our B2B SaaS SEO strategy is guided by the higher priority items, and our argument is that this makes a huge difference.

Our SaaS SEO Priority #1: Finding the Most Valuable Keywords to Target

Unlike traditional search engine optimization firms that launch headfirst into technical SEO or link building without a keyword strategy in place, our focus starts with the keywords for which we want to rank. 

Ranking for your target keywords is literally the entire point of SEO. Nothing matters if you don’t know which keywords you’re targeting. Link building doesn’t matter. Technical SEO doesn’t matter. Yet, as we said above, we’ve had many clients who’ve spent months on all kinds of SEO activities without an agreed upon list of their most valuable keywords. Or, only slightly better, their target keyword list is only one or two keywords. 

Also, a crucial detail is that both the words “valuable” and “keywords” are equally important. Who cares about ranking for keywords loosely related to your product if they don’t bring you any business? Sure, your organic traffic will increase, and you can post that on Twitter and brag about it, but if the keywords aren’t ultimately leading to sales, then it doesn’t give clients what they want.

We’ve linked to these articles already, but to recap, you can read more about our high-value keyword strategy here and here. A case study quantifying the value of high buying-intent (bottom of funnel) keywords can be found here. 

To emphasize my point about priority, every other SEO activity we do (listed below) is in the service of ranking for these high-value keywords. This is our entire goal for clients. 

Our SaaS SEO Priority #2: Creating Product Content Aimed to Rank for These Keywords

Second, and equally as important as priority #1, we produce individual pages to rank for each high-value keyword we are targeting. We don’t use the sprinkle method, meaning we don’t produce a single “small business accounting guide” that’s aimed at ranking for 10 different accounting keywords. 

We analyze the existing search engine results page (SERP) for each keyword, determine search intent, and produce a unique piece of SaaS content that (a) has the necessary on-page optimization to rank and (b) better fulfills search intent than the existing results. 

And because most of our keywords are high buying-intent (“best accounting software,” for example), we sell the heck out of our client’s products and services in these articles. 

We get into the details of features, we explain the nuance of benefits, we weave in testimonials and case studies, and we differentiate our client’s products from those of their competitors (sometimes gently, sometimes aggressively). We base all of this on extensive interviews with product experts, product demos, and sometimes demo accounts (so we can use the product ourselves). We have been doing this for years and have an extensive writer training process that has helped us build a tight-knit team of product copywriters. 

Our SaaS SEO Priority #3: Site Cleanup and Technical SEO

You may be wondering, “How could this be third in the priority list? If the technical SEO isn’t in order, won’t you have trouble ranking for those high value keywords?!” Our answer is, “Yes, you would.” In fact, we start every client engagement with an SEO audit precisely to check for technical issues with the site that may hurt our ability to rank. Then, we either fix or suggest fixing the technical issues before we get started publishing.

So, like I said above, just because we list this as our third priority doesn’t mean it happens third chronologically. 

But, it’s third on our priority list by importance. Meaning, for us, site cleanup and technical SEO is only important insofar as it helps our content (Priority #2) rank for the most valuable keywords (Priority #1). Yes, if there are glaring technical issues, such as multiple H1s on a page, thousands of no-value, no traffic pages eating crawl budget, the entire site randomly no-indexed (you’d be surprised!), etc. — we’ll fix those problems immediately. 

But many times, there are no problems with the site! 

Contrary to what most SEO agencies will tell you, most SaaS websites of decently sized companies that can afford to hire these agencies aren’t a hot mess. Take, for example, the marketing sites of most B2B SaaS companies: they’re not even that big. They usually have something like 10–20 largely static pages (product, solution, pricing, etc.). So why are these companies being sold months of SEO audits and technical SEO “cleanup” by SEO agencies? It makes no sense to us. 

We do technical SEO and site cleanup fixes; we’ve done a lot of it for our clients. We do a site audit, and we prioritize issues by importance and severity. But for us, it’s just something to get out of the way so that our content (#2) can rank for our high value target keywords (#1), not something to extend for as long as possible to keep charging the client.  

Our SaaS SEO Priority #4: Link Building

This takes us to the final leg of our SEO process: link building. We view link building the same way we view technical SEO: We’ll do as much of it as necessary to get our content ranking for the high value keywords we’re targeting and nothing more. Now to be clear, that may be a lot. Link building, in our experience, works. But like technical SEO, it doesn’t pay the bills without high-quality content (#2) aimed at the right keywords (#1). It’s just a means to an end. The end is what’s important for meeting tangible business goals. 

In contrast, we’ve seen clients come to us after spending years paying untold sums on link building without even having a clear set of high value keywords for which they’re trying to rank, much less the content they need to actually achieve those rankings. When we ask, “Why are you building links?”, they tell us, “Our SEO agency said it was important to get rankings.” 

What rankings are these exactly? No one knows. 

Want to Work with Us or Learn More About How We Approach SaaS SEO and Content Marketing?

• Our SEO & Content Marketing Agency: If you want to hire us to execute content marketing in this way, you can learn more about our service and pricing here. We’re a full-service agency in that we do the research and produce the content to rank for your target keywords.

• Join Our Content Marketing Team: If you’re a content marketer or writer and would love to do content marketing in this way, we’d love to have you apply to join our team. 

• Our Content Marketing Course: Individuals looking to learn our agency’s content strategy and become better marketers, consultants, or business owners can join our private course, taught via case studies, and presented in both written and video content formats. We include several details and examples not found on this blog. Our course is also built into a community, so people ask questions, start discussions, and share their work in the lesson pages themselves, and we, along with other members, give feedback. Learn more here or watch our video walkthrough here.

They’re already bought into our whole approach to content marketing (ranking for bottom of the funnel pain point-related terms, getting the right customer-content fit, recognizing the value of mini-volume keywords, etc.), but they’re worried that we won’t be able to completely grasp the pain points their target audience faces or write about their solution with enough expertise to convince their highly knowledgeable audience to buy.

They assume the only way to produce content at the right knowledge level is to find an agency or hire someone in-house that already has deep domain expertise in their field. But in our experience this is not necessary to successfully generate a consistent stream of qualified leads from written content.

We’ve worked with clients in industries ranging from cancer treatment to ghostwriting services to seemingly every flavor of B2B software, and as we’ve shown in case study after case study, we’ve been able to successfully apply our Pain Point SEO process, rank for buying keywords, and generate leads.

In our experience, having deep industry expertise in a topic is far less important than having deep expertise in SEO strategy, interviewing skills, and knowing how to structure and write posts to rank.

Since we face this concern often, we decided to put together this case study showing exactly how we handle doing content marketing for industries we have no prior experience with.

Our client Rainforest QA was a prime example of a SaaS company in a niche industry with its own industry lingo, a complex competitor landscape, and a knowledgeable target audience.

Their product is a no-code software testing platform, which in itself is pretty easy to understand from the first sales demo (which is entirely the point, since it’s a tool meant for non-technical teams to use) — but to do content marketing for them, we needed to sound like experienced QA specialists and software developers, because that’s who we were talking to.

Here’s how we tackled the challenge and turned their blog into a growth engine in less than 12 months.

In this post we’ll share:

• How to do BOTF content marketing for unfamiliar topics
• Our pre-kickoff process for getting up to speed on industries we’re unfamiliar with
• The 5 interviewing tactics we use to get deep product knowledge fast
• A breakdown of our top-performing article for Rainforest showing how we used this process to write one of the best resources on the topic on the internet
• The results we’ve achieved in our first year working with Rainforest

Note: If you’d like to learn our content strategy and apply it to your business, you can learn our process via our content marketing course and community, work with our agency, or apply to work on our team.

How to Do BOTF Content Marketing for Unfamiliar Topics

First, for those that aren’t familiar, our whole process of content marketing is based on prioritizing high-buying intent, “bottom of the funnel” keywords and topics (see links at the top of this article for more info).

Now, when you’re writing bottom of the funnel content, you’re writing for customers who are actively looking for a product that will solve a pain point they already know they have. This means they aren’t looking for education about their industry, which is the number one reason why you don’t need industry expertise to write for them.

What they’re looking for is assurance that the product they purchase will solve the problem they’re experiencing.

So, your job is actually very simple: figure out what problems the target audience is experiencing without your client’s solution and then figure out exactly how the client’s solution resolves those problems. Before we go any further, note how different this is than typical top of funnel “educational” content most companies produce non-stop, which require the authors to pontificate on the industry, give general advice, and sound like a “thought leader” (although we’ve written about how that phrase is often misunderstood).

Most products — even highly specialized SaaS products — solve surprisingly mundane problems that are actually quite common across other industries.

• Getting some information from Point A to Point B without damaging the data or causing a security breach
• Consolidating data from many sources to analyze it without manually re-entering all the data into Excel
• Eliminating unnecessary emails for routine communications
• Etc.

So as you’re researching the client’s product and their industry and interviewing their subject matter experts, you don’t need to worry about learning the ins and outs of the industry when it’s flowing smoothly.

You just need to know about the moments when their complex processes break.

And the places where processes break are usually in times of transition. Communication errors. Transportation problems. Organization of data. Transfer of records. Misunderstandings between people, and so on.

The problems that B2B products solve are always human and simple, no matter how convoluted the industry is.

In the case of Rainforest, it was tempting to think we needed to learn everything there is to know about software testing, like every best practice related to creating tests, or what causes software bugs in the first place. We did learn a lot more about software testing eventually, but at the start, all we needed to understand was where the problems exist with the most common approach to software testing.

That narrowed the scope of our initial research phase to a much more manageable level.

Our Pre-kickoff Process for Getting Up to Speed on New, Unfamiliar Industries

To be clear, we’re not trying to say that you can do content marketing for any industry without doing background research. Of course if you’re new to a somewhat complex industry or topic, you still need to do background research. But what you don’t need to do is take a college-level 101 course in the subject.

Instead, you need to spend two or three extremely focused hours with subject matter experts.

And when we talk about subject matter experts, or SMEs, we mean people inside your client’s company who know everything about their own product, and the problem it solves.

This is a clear distinction from a very common content marketing process of interviewing external SMEs, who are experts in the industry in general, but who often don’t know anything about your client’s product specifically. That process can be helpful when writing top of the funnel content, but it’s almost completely useless for bottom of the funnel, where you need to explain nuances of features, benefits, and differentiators to competition.

For products in unfamiliar spaces, before you get onto a call with your internal SME, you need to do some basic background research. It’s far more efficient to ask the SMEs to clarify what you learned online than to ask them to explain everything about their industry to you starting from scratch.

Keeping in mind the high-level, pain-point focus we outlined above, here’s the process we use to prepare for our kick-off calls:

1. Read everything on the client’s website about their product.
2. Type in the client’s product name on YouTube, and see if there are any (1) video demos of the product, (2) short explainer videos, or (3) anything else that would help familiarize you with the product.
3. Do the same process for their top 3 competitors (you should have asked them who their competitors are before starting the engagement).
4. Read reviews of the client’s product/service online (especially if they’re software, but Google Reviews exist for most businesses) and look for mentions of specific benefits or frustrations.
5. Read reviews of their top competitors.

Anytime you encounter something you don’t understand in this process, add it to your question list. Note how focused this research is on products — the client’s, and their competitors — not general industry how to stuff. That’s intentional. Again, we’re looking for deep product knowledge to write BOTF content.

Then, for the kickoff interviews, spend at least one hour with one or two experienced members of the sales team, and another hour with one or two experienced members of the product team, asking them follow-up questions from your research. Your questions should typically fall into four categories:

1. Who is the target audience(s)?
2. What are the target audience(s) pain points?
3. How does the product solve each of those pain points? (specifically, which feature(s) solve it?)
4. What are the product’s differentiators?

This pre-kickoff and kickoff process will give you all the industry expertise you’ll need to build the client’s content strategy and decide which topics to write about first.

However, these two steps won’t give you all the details you need to write every article about the product. For that, you’re going to need an SME interview for every unique topic you write about.

And that’s when you’ll need excellent interviewing skills.

The 5 Interviewing Tactics We Use to Get Deep Product Knowledge Fast

Most advice about interviewing SMEs will cover the same basic tips, which to me are just the ground rules.

1. Do pre-interview research
2. Write down your questions in advance (but be prepared to deviate often)
3. Record the interview

In our case, the most important aspect of pre-interview research is to analyze the SERP and figure out what all the articles on page 1 are saying. We go into this process in detail in our article about SEO content writing so I won’t go into that here.

What I will share are five next-level interviewing techniques that will help you get precise, detailed, and technical information out of interviews that you can translate into plain English explanations for your article.

Establish Your Baseline Understanding of the Topic with the SME

Here’s a critical realization that’s not obvious at first: Most SMEs aren’t experts in communicating about their expertise. Unless they have a background in scientific communication or teaching high school or something, it’s unlikely that they’ll be a natural at explaining technical topics in a way that anyone can understand.

As a result, most SMEs actually go too basic in their explanations of technical concepts. Since they have no idea what your baseline understanding is, they oversimplify details that you really need to grasp precisely, and they’ll use language that they wouldn’t use when talking to their industry peers. If you simply repeat their explanations in your content, you’re likely to get it wrong and/or end up writing below the knowledge level of the audience you’re trying to reach.

So to avoid this problem, you first need to let the SME know exactly what your baseline understanding of the issue is — especially when you’ve already gotten a handle on their industry from your pre-kickoff research. And you can usually do this quickly and efficiently by the way you phrase your questions.

For example, here’s a paraphrase of a question I asked in one of the early interviews with Rainforest:

“What I understand about software testing is that most tools don’t actually test exactly what the user sees and instead test the code itself, and this is a problem because it means you can miss certain types of visual bugs, but what I don’t understand is, are those tools still considered to be testing the “user interface” even though the test doesn’t happen on the user interface?”

Note how detailed this question is: I told the SME what I already knew, and then asked a question about something I truly couldn’t find the answer for online. This is far more useful than walking into an interview and asking “So what differentiates your product?” and getting some high level cliches you could have read on their website beforehand.

Dig Deeper to Understand Claims

In our article about what good blog writing looks like, we distill the difference between a good post and a bad post simply:

Bad posts make claims. Good posts make claims and then back them up with details, examples, and explanations of impact.

However — and again this might be counterintuitive — most SMEs just make claims when they answer your questions, without providing any backup!

They’ll say things like, “Our product makes it easier to write tests.” Or, “Our product helps you see why your users abandoned their checkout cart.” Or, “Our product automates time-consuming, manual processes.”

When you’re interviewing, you have to ask a follow-up question whenever you hear a claim without any backup.

“How does your product do that? What problem is that solving? What happens if the person just ignores that problem or uses a workaround?”

You should even play devil’s advocate.

“Why is that easier than the status quo/competitor? Why can’t you just do that with a spreadsheet [or insert whatever the default or free alternative is]?”

These questions can help break the SME out of the habit of just repeating the standard elevator pitch for the product. They’ll often switch to describing a specific use case where the value of their product really shines, or where the consequences of ignoring the problem really become clear.

SMEs also tend to use a lot of terms that will be meaningless to you without a reference point (and which sound like empty business jargon if you use them in your writing). I’m talking about terms like:

• Faster
• Slower
• More often
• Easier to use
• More effective
• More efficient

Whenever you hear those phrases, you need to get a reference point:

SME: “Our process helps teams release new software updates really fast,”

Interviewer: “How fast is fast? Once every two weeks?”

SME: “No, like three times a day.”

Interviewer: “And what’s typical before they use you?”

SME: “Most are releasing a couple times a month”

Push for Your Own Aha Moment

In the SaaS world, the “aha moment” is the moment when the customer first grasps the real value of the product — usually because they’re able to see exactly how it will save them from a very specific pain they’re currently experiencing.

The goal of all the follow-up questions in the previous point is to make sure you get to an aha-moment for every important feature of the client’s product.

Typically, the best way to do this is to ask for an example of a use case for each feature of the product. Don’t let them dazzle you with shiny bells and whistles and nifty dashboards or vanity metrics unless they can show you the exact situation where each feature becomes useful.

Here’s a 50-second video clip from one of my earliest interviews with Maciej Gryka, an internal SME at Rainforest, where I show the follow-up questions that I needed to ask to get to that “aha” moment:

If I hadn’t been determined to get to my own personal aha moment, I might have left the interview with the following understanding:

Claim: Rainforest helps you expand your test coverage.

Explanation of that Claim: Rainforest lets you automate actions that leave the browser, which other testing tools can’t do.

That’s not bad, but the aha moment is what will take your writing from good to great:

Aha moment: This means you can test things like downloading a document from a web application, like you might do in Google Docs or Canva or any other web app that lets you download a file.

Always Get a Demo

One of the great things about doing interviews on Zoom is how easy it is for your SME to give you a demo of whatever they’re talking about, especially if their product is software. Usually, they just have to share their screen and then click around inside the product.

I can’t overstate how important it is for you to get a visual of what the product looks like. It will help you hold onto the information, and it will often make the whole thing seem much simpler than it sounded in words alone.

And when it comes to software products, the demo is often a great way to source images that you’ll use in the article. When you review the recording of the interview, you can grab screenshots of the product screens that demonstrate each feature. Those screenshots themselves may not be high enough resolution to use in the article, but you can send them back to the SME and ask them to recreate the screenshot on their screen. It’s often much easier than describing the image you want them to create.

But even if your client produces a tangible, non-software product or offers a service, getting a demo of some kind is invaluable, and usually not that hard. If they work in a factory, get a little Zoom/FaceTime tour of the factory. If they provide a service, have them walk you through all the stages of their relationship with their clients, and show you the end-results of those client engagements.

Paraphrase Everything the SME Says Back to Them

To make sure you’re actually understanding everything, it helps to repeat back to the SME what you thought they said. Ideally, you’ll simplify it into language that strikes a beautiful balance between being accessible to a wide audience, but still being technically precise. After all, you’re a writer — that’s what good writing is.

One of my favorite ways to check my understanding of the topic throughout the interview is to make up my own analogies for things. One of my favorites is a car. Everything is a type of car. A spoon is a car that carries cereal from my bowl to my mouth. An email is a car that carries words from my laptop to yours.

A Breakdown of One of Our Top-Performing Articles for Rainforest Showing How We Used This Process to Write One of the Best Resources on the Topic on the Internet

The second article I wrote about Rainforest became their top converting piece over the next 12 months after it was published. While I learned a LOT more about software testing over the next year of writing about the product, our research and kickoff process gave me enough insight to be able to speak to their target audience effectively from day one.

20+ Automated Testing Tools for Web Applications in 2022 (Including Coding, Testing Management Tools, and No-code Options)

The article was published July 15, 2021. As of July 22, 2022, it ranked #1 for 17 keywords and ranked #2 or #3 for many more. It had a conversion rate of 1.8% (conversions/unique page views), which is significantly higher than most single blog posts. (Top of funnel content conversion rates typically hover more in the 0.10% range — and that’s only for the top performing articles.)

Here’s a breakdown of some of the ways the interview process helped me write a top-ranking article on a topic I knew very little about beforehand.

Finding the Holes in the SERP

Our writing process starts with a SERP analysis, mostly looking for the holes in the existing articles that are ranking on page one. What questions would a searcher still have after reading the top two or three articles?

In this case, I quickly realized that the existing articles didn’t help readers understand the ecosystem of software testing tools as a whole, or where each tool fit into that ecosystem. This is because many of the listicles took the “longer is always better” approach to SEO, and dumped as many tools as they could into their articles, without bothering to categorize them or make any recommendations.

Most of these articles left the reader more confused than when they started.

In contrast, the first thing I did was define the categories for the reader in plain English, tell them which category Rainforest’s product belonged to, and accurately classify the other tools I included in my list.

Backing Up My Claims

A feature we include in many of our articles is the “What to look for” section. A lot of software product review articles include a section like this, but they often list really basic things like whether the software is compatible with your operating system/devices, how many user seats you can get, or pricing info.

But we use the What to Look For section to cut to the heart of the thing(s) that will drive you nuts when using any competitor’s solution. A.k.a.: the pain point that drove our readers to put this question into Google in the first place.

Selling the Product

Every article we write, no matter where exactly it falls in the funnel, has to make a compelling pitch for our client’s product because the purpose of our articles is to drive product sign-ups (or demo requests or qualified leads for service businesses).

Rainforest has a truly differentiated product, but you often have to do a bit of education and give the reader a specific example to make the differentiation clear. To do that, I had to establish what the “normal” approach to software testing is, explain the downsides of that approach, and then explain how Rainforest does it differently.

The Results We’ve Achieved in Our First Year Working with Rainforest

I’m proud of the results we achieved in our first year working with Rainforest QA. Within just seven months, we hit what we consider to be the breakeven point for them, meaning the value of the product sign-ups our content was bringing in was worth more than our monthly retainer. We’ve written a lot about how we measure ROI from content marketing, and that article includes an ROI calculator that you can use for yourself if you want to explore that more.

After one year, we had at least 26 top 3 rankings for keywords with extremely high buying intent, and 12 more rankings somewhere on page one.

Of the 34 articles we created during our engagement, 16 rank in the top 3 positions for the keyword we optimized them for (and many of them rank in the top 3 for many other related keywords).

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