👋 Hi allemaal! It’s Barbara here. It’s been a while, but I hope you’re all good and somewhere warm right now.

This article was a long time in the oven. I’ve been writing it since I noticed all SEO conversations I had would revert to content marketing. I wanted to write this article to open minds to all the different ways one can win at the SEO game.

It’s absolutely packed with examples: of programmatic SEO, UCG, templates and more. So I hope you find this useful! 🙏

Introduction

We've reached a common consensus on the value of SEO. SEO is internet real estate. It's a moat that brings companies like Shopify $244 million ARR. Yet, when talking to leads and clients about SEO, I often see we are not talking about the same thing.

Client: How do we define which keywords to focus on for our content marketing strategy?
Me: How can we increase the volume and quality of organic search traffic?

Yes, we all know that when it comes to Search, original content is king. But there are multiple effective ways to generate quality and original SEO traffic. And some of those ways don't require writing a single article.

Templates, API-generated content and custom tools are how companies like Airtable, TripAdvisor and Veed generate quality search traffic.

In this article, I show how they do that by covering five types of successful SEO initiatives.

1. Problem-focused landing pages

Your product and its features solve problems. Users search for solutions for their problems on Google. A problem-focused landing page exists in that intersection. It's a web page focused on one single problem that’s solvable by your product.

These pages are built based on your target audience and the SEO opportunities:

Audience: What problem(s) do you solve for your audience and how do they word that problem?
Opportunity: What problem(s) that you solve for your audience have high volume (and, preferably, low competition)?

Veed has 50+ landing pages for each video editing problem they solve

Video Editing tool Veed is knocking SEO out of the park by doing just that. They have created 50+ problem-focused pages. Each page focuses on a different problem they solve. For example "Add Subtitles to Video":