SEO and content strategy for the SaaS that wants to conquer the world

We are still trying to find SEO and content approach we’d still be completely happy with. One of the biggest issues for me personally, since I’ve never had to deal with this before, is that Bitrix24 got real big real fast. When I joined Bitrix24 marketing team in 2012, I remember envying Basecamp. Back then they had weekly registration statistics on their front page and usually they’d get anywhere between 6000 and 7000 new accounts a week (remember, back then Basecamp didn’t have a free plan). Those numbers seemed huge. I was really proud of myself when I got Bitrix24 to those numbers (account registrations, not sales), but we are now at the point when we have to grow our registrations by 6000–7000/wk every six months, and that’s really, really tough. Beating Basecamp turned out to be easy, especially in the mobile niche. Becoming the next ‘Dropbox’ seems completely overwhelming. So here’s what worked for us up to this point and some reasoning behind our/my SEO and content marketing decisions when promoting Bitrix24.

1. Two is a company, three is a crowd.

If you Google “free CRM” or “Slack alternative” or “free SharePoint alternative” or many other competitive key phrases that we are after, you should get two or three hits for Bitrix24. Only one will be for our website. The rest are posts/lists/articles that in many instances were placed on our behalf or were directly influenced by us (this is typically done by contacting authors or leaving comments, suggesting inclusion of your software in future reviews).

Here’s why we don’t limit SEO efforts (broadly defined as making sure that the person who searches for certain keywords is very likely to learn about Bitrix24) to our website only. First, it increases our chances of getting in top 10 (more websites = higher likelihood). Second, it is sometimes easier to promote an existing post that mentions your product and is already close to/in top 10 SERP, then create a SEO page on your site and start from scratch. Third, when people see your name in multiple places, they are much more likely to at least give your product a try. Forth, people are skeptical, so information about your product on your site won’t same the same effect and other websites mentioning or recommending it. Finally (and more on this later), this is increasingly happening on its own — we didn’t pay for any placements for over a year now (By the way, I can highly recommend Maricel Rivera if you are looking for a person who can both write AND place articles for you in blogs that get read).

So the takeaway is this — when doing SEO, leaving comments, pitching someone over Twitter, don’t do it one time. Ask your colleagues to leave a comment as well, don’t limit SEO to your website only (BaseCRM uses interesting SEO strategy with a sidekick site) because two is a magic number here and three is even better.

2. Become so good/big/impressive that you can no longer be ignored.

I remember watching once George Carlin giving advice to an aspiring comic who complained that he couldn’t get TV coverage, book gigs and so on. I remember the exact words — “You have to become so good, you can no longer be ignored”. That’s a big part of our content strategy now, when it became painfully clear that there’s simply no way doing all content in house or hiring content agency will give us as many new registration as we need to keep up with the pace. Essentially, what it means is that new content that mentions Bitrix24 has to appear on it’s own and in big quantities, preferably every single day.

There are several ways to do this. One way is momentum — and Slack is a great example of that. Essentially you grow fast (or your evaluation does) that it bedazzles everyone. Other way is to become category leader. Asana and Trello are great examples here. If a post is about project management tools, there’s probably 80% chance that Trello or Asana will be on the list. Of course, these two strategies overlap to a point.

I can give you an example how we do it with Bitrix24 in the CRM niche (of course, CRM is only one of 35+ tools available in Bitrix24). CRM is an extremely crowded niche, with several hundred vendors and several established leaders — Salesforce, Microsoft, Zoho. Bitrix24 was originally Bitrix Intranet CMS. It didn’t have CRM. So we decided to become dominant free CRM player. Zoho and other CRM vendors with fremium model wanted to attract people who search for ‘free crm’ to convert them to paying clients, which is logical enough. We didn’t want to compete with either Salesforce or Zoho, so we chose a radically different approach. We created the most powerful free CRM that essentially gave away everything. Free unlimited leads, contacts, companies, deals, quotes and invoices. Free call center. Free email marketing. Free sales reports. Free sales automation. For the first two and a half features EVERTYHING in our CRM was free (even now we only charge for history access, excess to recorded calls over 300/mo limit and if you want to have a list view for over 5000 CRM records). The way our math worked, we’d be profitable even if our conversion rate is below half a percent. We wanted companies to use our CRM and never convert. The free plan should fit 95% of all businesses in our approach.

After these features were added to our CRM, we had to create a bunch of landing pages (we call them ‘uses’) targeting specific requests, like free CRM for insurance agents or free CRM with email marketing or free lead tracking software, since CRM isn’t the only term used for sales management software. As you can see, these landing pages are really quite basiс, but they worked. ‘Free CRM’ is searched over 40,000 times a month and being in the top 10 SERP gives us a good chunk of that traffic. However, just three best performing ‘uses’ page for CRM give us more registrations than ‘free CRM’ phrase. You really should go after the long tail. It pays of big.

So the third step after adding all those tools to our free CRM and using SEO to make sure these features could be found was to track all new articles about free CRM or posts about different CRM solutions. If you wrote a post about free CRM and didn’t include the most powerful option (Bitrix24, that is), I would definitely let you know that you’ve made a big omission. And I still do this.

Sure, this approach takes a lot of time in the beginning. But after a while it starts to work in your favor. The more reviews you get, the more your solution gets included in various lists and top 10s, the more likely it is that the next person who’s going to write about “best free CRM” will simply copy a few names from one of the lists you are already on. That’s certainly case with Bitrix24, when I sometimes can accurately identify which older post what used as an ‘inspiration’ for the new piece that was just published. Oh, and very importantly, journalists, when doing research, use Google too.

Many software vendors do ‘cyberstalking’ and SEO the wrong way. They make just another task manager, then track posts that mention Basecamp or Asana and say something like ‘hey, since you wrote about Asana, why don’t you write about our project management tool, too?’

Sorry, folks, it doesn’t work this way. You really have to think hard about your product or service and what’s going to make it impossible to ignore. You don’t have to be bug free — our ‘mantis’ has over 1800 bug reports for Bitrix24. And your support doesn’t have to be perfect either — our tech support is only 14 people (out of 180) and only four of those cover cloud based Bitrix24 accounts. Since we have millions of users worldwide, keeping all of them happy is next to impossible. Still we got to the point where neither competitors nor analysts can ignore us and this is a good position to be in.

3. Think content distribution, not content creation. Be your own media outlet.

The #1 mistake content marketers make is thinking about ‘quality content’. What you really should be thinking is content distribution. Lemme xplain’. Let’s take my Medium blog, which I started three weeks ago.

The reason why I chose Medium over Bitrix24 blog for these posts is pretty obvious, and it’s not just because I wanted to cuss. It’s because Medium comes with a built-in content distribution system that makes ‘quality content’ easy to discover, even if it has as many typos, mistakes and missing articles as mine. Medium also has the right audience. It’s easy to pick up 500–1000 new readers in just a month time.

So when creating content, you have to immediately think about readership and viewership. Should I become Inc or Forbes columnist? Is this Reddit material? Who’s the best expert to interview with a sizable Twitter audience? Wouldn’t videoblogging work better than written reviews? Some vendors, like Hubspot, build huge email lists so that they can sell their services to marketers. Webinars work for others. Wrike has pretty good content marketing ideas. There are very few examples (Basecamp and Buffer come to mind) of successful content marketing via corporate blogging alone.

Stay away from content marketing agencies who come with $5K+ retainers, want to develop content strategy for you, but all they really do is writing blog posts or white papers without any solid ideas how those will find their audience. It has to start with the audience that you can tap into (be that people searching for something, reading, watching or listening), NOT the other way around.

Cultivating your own audience is not just a good idea, it’s a necessity in the age when pitching Techcrunch no longer makes much sense. Your users are a natural starting point, but don’t stop there. It’s essential to build a sizable audience that’s your own — I am talking tens to hundreds of thousands of people, some of which are bound to be ‘influencers’, but that’s a topic for another post.