In this talk, we will uncover the 6 secrets of how Typeform grew through SEO from 0 -> 30,000 signups per month.
Although we cannot reveal the exact secrets before the talk, you'll learn how Typeform was able to reach page #1 in just 1 hour, how to focus on increasing conversion rates, and how they handled off-page SEO.
Jake no longer works for Typeform (since February 2019). Views discussed in this presentation are his own and do not represent those of Typeform S.L.
Jake Stainer:
Good afternoon, everyone, or good morning, depending on where you are in the world. My name is Jake. And in this workshop, in this training, I'm going to go through some secrets, SEO secrets from my time at Typeform. And before we get started just a small bit about me. I've always been interested in building websites. I was basically building websites since I was 11. And when I was 14, I taught myself to program. I was on forums, such as PHP Freaks. I was buying PHP books. I was trying to build stuff in PHP and I was building online websites.
Jake Stainer:
And then I got into online marketing because I wanted to drive traffic to my creations, right. I came across things like SEO for Dummies, a book on SEO and I was supposed to teach myself SEO. And the story about how I got into PPC was, I was on eBay and I came across these 75 pound Google Ads vouchers, AdWords vouchers, right? And I took part in an auction and I managed to get 75 pound Google AdWords voucher for one pounds, which enabled me to spend money on PPC. Because at that time I was 16 and was pretty poor, right? That's how I got into PPC.
Jake Stainer:
I went to SEO, have a technical background because I've been building websites, teaching myself to program in JavaScript, PHP, HTML, et cetera. Which I think has given me an edge on SEO, right. Because SEO has such a large spectrum. You have to really know so much so the content side, as well as the dev side as well, right. And in 2015 I moved to Spain to sunny Barcelona, getting away from the cold and the rain in the UK, right. And I joined a startup that was called Typeform, second person in the marketing team. And there we were optimizing the viral loop, right. Typeform grew from zero to 10 million through the viral loop. We're optimizing this through virality, through product growth. And then I found opportunities to really scale through [inaudible 00:02:21] ads and an SEO, building a team of 10 people, which in the end was contributing more than one third of a new MRR every single month.
Jake Stainer:
And one of those major channels was through SEO. And then basically one year ago I joined TravelPerk, which I'm not going to explain and go into too much, but it's a B2B SaaS company as well. And it's much more sales driven. Anyway, enough about me, let's go into this workshop all about how SEO at Typeform and the six secrets that I would like to share with you today. First of all, disclaim I don't work for Typeform. So all of these things I'm going to mention now they're not endorsed, they don't represent Typeform any way because I've left now. However, I'd like to share this knowledge with you guys anyway.
Jake Stainer:
These are the secrets, right? Secret number one, okay, is use the force, use internal links. Typeform is a super design focused company, right? And this was basically the bottom of their website. And as you can see here, there wasn't a photo, there was no links, right? When we're doing SEO, basically all of the landing pages, all the pages that we were building, we're floating around in space, but in link from anywhere. What did we do? We added a footer, right? And you probably thinking, Jake, this is super basic stuff, everyone has a footer, why are you explaining these things to me, right?
Jake Stainer:
And really internal linking played a major role in SEO Typeform, not just through the footer, but also building links into all of the content we had to get all of our pages ranking. For example, we really worked hard on building internal links to this page, so we make a page. And you can see the increase in traffic that we had by having this focus. And when we were building content, and we were launching content on a daily, weekly basis, in the beginning we didn't have a process for internal links. So what we did is once per week, every Wednesday morning, we had a two hour slot in our calendar that we called internal linking party. We called it a party, try to make it fun, where we'd spend time as a team, adding internal links, the page that we wanted to rank.
Jake Stainer:
But we soon found out that actually you had to build a process for internal links. You can't underestimate internal links, they're super important. I don't know what process you use for SEO right now. However, if you have a Kanban board or a checklist, it doesn't stop upload content to WordPress and then play on social media. In the middle of that as soon as your content writer or whether you have a brand in the context of WordPress, there needs to be a checklist or a column in your Kanban board which is internal linking, where that person, they need to get five internal links to this new piece of content from around your website, right?
Jake Stainer:
Internal linking needs to be part of your SEO process. It's really important, really do not underestimate internal linking at all because some of the biggest wins we got at Typeform was really focusing on adding these internal links to a different piece of content. And this actually allowed us to get above SurveyMonkey and a lot of cases about Wikipedia for keywords such as free survey make. And I really never thought that we would ever, ever get above SurveyMonkey, but we actually managed to do this. And I was surprised, but it was a combination of many things, the content, the back linking, but also the internal linking. We really went deep. We had our own internal linking parties before we actually put internal linking into the official SEO process. You need to operationalize and systemize SEO, have internal linking in the process.
Jake Stainer:
I suggest starting with a process where after you've uploaded that content to WordPress, there's a task which is at five internal links, to this piece of content with a mix of different anchors, because internal linking is really going to get your content ranking faster, is great UX. People are going to find it. Google's going to find it. And you're going to see a lot more results faster in your SEO.
Jake Stainer:
Other things we started to do was to add links in header. This was one of the Spanish website of Typeform, where we added [foreign language 00:06:57] as an experiment. And we found that these pages also ranked faster when you add the links into the header as well. Think about how you can build like bigger menus like Canva does in your header because Google prioritizes the links they find in the header, right. Think how you can build these menus to get the internal linking working hard for you in the header and also throughout the content of your website. But try and plan the architecture of your website around these pages that you want to rank. That was internal linking.
Jake Stainer:
Secret number two is build upon existing topic authority. What does this mean building upon existing topic authority? Let me give you an example. Typeform has a lot of different use cases from quizzes, forms, surveys. People in HR can use Typeform on there for a job application form, employee feedback survey, 360 feedback survey, onboarding processes. You can use Typeform for many things. We're thinking of different ways in which we can attract personas and we're thinking of content that we can make. For example, we were thinking about the topic of customer satisfaction, because you can run customer satisfaction surveys. You can create NPS, net promoter score surveys, we've Typeform as well.
Jake Stainer:
Let's create content around this because this is really strong, whereas we found that we had a really good conversion rate for NPS because it's specific and people after NPS are serious. There's a difference between a generic survey time and net promoter score time in terms of intent and buying power, et cetera. We thought this was a really good bet. We launched all of this content and we actually did all of our internal linking, add it in our process, backlinking et cetera. However, this actually didn't move the needle at all. We waited three months, so we said, okay, we'll give it three months. Google just needs time to rank, to evaluate the engagement metrics, et cetera, of this content. However it didn't do anything, we went back to the drawing board. We looked at what was actually already ranking on our website.
Jake Stainer:
Previously I mentioned the survey maker page, this was ranking really well. And we thought, let's look at what is already ranking, the different topics that we have, and then branch out upon what's already working, double down on what works, right? We start to create content, for example, how to write a survey intro, survey versus questionnaire, and post-event survey questions, really close to what was working. And this really works. We start to produce the content. We saw an uplift. We had backlinks, internal linking and it really took off as you can see here from almost nothing to 40K per month. By focusing on what is already working and brainstorming based off that, you're going to have results a lot faster than creating brand new topics, because you've already created and validated that topic authority to Google.
Jake Stainer:
So we went from, like I said, 1,700 visits per month to 34,000 new visits per month. And this was a big win. And then every time they started bringing new customers, because obviously there's a [inaudible 00:10:32] Typeform, on average it takes three months from sign-up to new subscription. There's a lag in terms of seeing actual new MRR generated from this initiative. Double lag from SEO then the lag from signup to subscription. However, we started to see the fruits of our labor. And then we started to do more. For example, how to structure a survey, how to distribute your survey, product feedback survey, et cetera. We started brainstorming even more things to build upon the existing topic authority that we had to get really big wins.
Jake Stainer:
This is really important. When you think about creating new content and brainstorming new content in your website, look at what is already ranking and think, how can I branch off this? What other opportunities do I have to double down on that's really working? Because this doesn't allow you to scale SEO like 10X faster than you could sell SEO. And if you just try and tackle brand new topics that Google really hasn't validated that you're a thought leader, you're a topic leader in the end.
Jake Stainer:
Secret number three, meet user demand now. This is one of my favorite secrets from my time doing SEO at Typeform. We produced this article, how to write certain questions that get results. Okay. It was close to our topic, close to what was already working. We did our keyword research. We did our on page SEO, we did our off page SEO. However, nothing happened, right? I should see a flat growth. I mean, we thought we did everything right. We did everything by the book, but nothing happened. We could not move the needle, even though we were creating content close to what was already working, the focusing on our topic authority, the internal linking we were doing and all of our on-page as well, but nothing moved for needle.
Jake Stainer:
We had to look at the top 10 in Google. And we started to see different patterns emerging from other people's content. Google was ranking on the first page of Google. And we saw this was the pattern. The pattern was for the articles on survey questions, it started with a definition of the type of question. It gave a description and it gave an example. I thought there's a pattern here. And we reject, we re-edited our survey questions article that we'd written. And we wrote it in the same format, as we found by analyzing the patterns of the top 10 in Google, just in the same way, definition, description, and example.
Jake Stainer:
And literally my SEO content writer, she did this because she found out she went to lunch, because they have catered lunches in Typeform, right. Literally 30 minutes later after one Google fetch and render, right? So we submitted it in such console. You see this vertical line here. This was literally jumped to the first page of Google by just asking Google to reevaluate the content, jumped to the first page. And this wasn't the only one, right? We also did this again for survey versus questionnaire. Again, you can see we had a huge increase in search traffic. And again, for survey intros, as you can see, nothing was happening, nothing was happening. We had to do the content and we had this huge increase in traffic as well.
Jake Stainer:
What we did is in hindsight we should've been doing already. In your process, the SEO, before you create the content, you need to really look at the top 10 in Google, doing an analysis of the top 10, because Google was using it's natural language processing, it's analyzing structure, look for the patterns in the top 10. Don't just go and create the content and think, hmm, how can I be the top 10 at meta-description searches et cetera. Really analyze the patterns that you're finding in the top 10 and then apply it to your content. Because chances are it's going to work super well as what we did at Typeform by analyzing those patterns.
Jake Stainer:
Secret number four is simple conversion rate optimization is powerful. When we were looking at the SEO Typeform, it didn't just stop at traffic. We were looking at the full funnel all the way until new MRR from SEO, because we were analyzing ROI and the contribution of the SEO team on the way the business run. Naturally we wanted to create content that wasn't to bring an MRR, signups, et cetera. Our tool of choice was Google Optimize. We used to run AB tests on the landing pages. And this is one test we ran on our form builder page to the H one and the H two. We added a much more benefit driven H one. This one was the online form builder created for humans. And it says a fast form maker that gets you 3X more completions, right. We've tried to focus on the benefits a lot more.
Jake Stainer:
And what do you think it got? Do you think it increased our sign-up conversion rate by 15% or 8%? Any idea? So we got an increase 15% in signups by doing this simple change, the H one, H two. I think it ran for around three weeks and we immediately had increase in sign ups to our form builder page, really simple. However, that said, we know that sign-ups is a vanity metric, right? Even though you might increase sign-ups, then you might not increase new customers because it's not deep enough in the funnel to predict new customers.
Jake Stainer:
And as I said, previously Typeform, the average it takes is three months from sign-ups to new customer. And what we did is we actually focused on our activation metrics. The activation metric is people who sign up, they create a Typeform, and then they preview that Typeform. And this we found correlated to retention and revenue. What we did is we didn't look as sign-ups when doing AB testing and creating our leading metrics for the SEO team. We focused on activations, how many people actually activated when they use Typeform. And as you can see here in this pretty blurry screenshot is even though we had a 15% increase in signups in the number of sign up completions, we actually had a 20% increase in activations. And this is a lot more powerful. We were actually impacting the bottom line a lot more than we first realized if we'd only be focusing on signups. And the fact is is that we were doing AB tests where we moved the needle on the number of signups.
Jake Stainer:
We wouldn't move the needle on a number of activations at all, have in this instance, we actually got more people using the product. More people were creating Typeforms and more people were actually proving the Typeform and then going on to paying for Typeform, and creating responses and then being retained, by adding more benefits. Let me go back here. So this was it, it was the fast form maker. We were talking about the product, the benefits that is fast used, you get 3X more completions. We're talking about the end result, the actual value that you get from Typeform. And this had an impact further down in the funnel. You're doing AB tests. Don't just look at your super leading metric such as sign ups, really have your activation metric in mind, send it to Google Analytics using Google Optimize or whatever AB testing tool you'll use, and really see how you can impact your activation metric. Don't try and impact sign-ups. And this is really going to lead to really bigger impact on MRR.
Jake Stainer:
Secret number five is double down on your sweet spot, so do more of your sweet spot. Here's a couple of examples of ... so the sweet spot of Typeform, the Typeform templates. For example, job application form, registration form, employee satisfaction survey, there's hundreds and hundreds of them. And we actually researched them and we found that if we were to create one of these templates and rank for it in Google, then on average it would bring four new customers per year. By understanding this, we were able to attach an ROI to our efforts. We knew how much we could pay to create the template, to create the content, to pay for the balance, et cetera, because we knew on average how much new MRR these templates would bring, right?
Jake Stainer:
We decided to redouble down on what was working, what was scalable, what was going to bring in new MRR and refocus and go deep on it. And for Typeform, that was templates. And other successful SaaS companies have really doubled down on this as well, so one example is Canva. They have more than 50,000 templates in their template gallery, and these are all made bespoke, right? This isn't user generated content. They actually started to use a design agency in Manila, in the Philippines, and then it worked out so well they actually bought the agency and now they have a full board office and a team of, I don't know how many people produce these templates every day, because they know the templates isn't just an acquisition plan, but templates are also an activation play, right? They don't just attract new people to a product, they also allow your people to learn how to use the product and activate in the product a lot faster with a higher velocity and bring in revenue and retain users. Templates are super powerful.
Jake Stainer:
And Wix here on the right do this as well with website templates. They know that they can rank for these different keywords. They know people are going to activate when they use this template. They know they're going to upgrade. Templates are super powerful for Canva and Wix, and they were super powerful for Typeform as well. And one of Typeform's competitors was SurveyMonkey. And we found that if you were to go on their site map in the footer, actually they would tell you all of the templates they had and we would just copy them. So thank you SurveyMonkey for that. If you're looking at competitor, double check their site maps, and maybe they have one in the footer or maybe they have an XML sitemap they submitted, so the competitive domain forward slash sitemap, the XML, see if you can find it. Because chances are you can really find that content a lot easier and you can just double down on this and not reinvent the wheel and do it this way.
Jake Stainer:
We doubled down on lead generation templates. So we were analyzing templates in terms of activation. What were the templates which people ... where there was a high potential, people who signed up and then activated, and we will double down on these templates. Why would we double down templates where [inaudible 00:22:32] activation rates, this wasn't going to favor our growth at Typeform, right? So we focused on templates, got high activation rates and high conversion rates from, to paying that bring in more MRR faster. Because as an SEO team we weren't just focusing on traffic, we're actually focused on MRR, brought through the SEO channel. Because we knew that we could defend, we could build business cases, we could get resources by focusing and attaching this to a hard business metric, which is MRR, so this is how we focus the team.
Jake Stainer:
We decided to double down and we built our own template galleries as you can see here, to really facilitate ranking for new keywords, with different templates, different use cases, different categories. So here for example we have surveys, questionnaires, forms, quizzes, polls, invitations, we will bring some [inaudible 00:23:23] different use cases for Typeform and there's hundreds of them. And we also did this, so we added a text which said not finding what you're looking for, let us know. And this led to this Typeform where people could submit ideas or things they couldn't find in our template gallery. We didn't just base off keyword research for new templates. We'd also ask our community so that they could submit templates that they wanted. And in some cases would make these templates and email them back and say, "Hey, we've made this template that you requested a few weeks ago," because this is going to help them activate and help other people out today.
Jake Stainer:
And in some cases we even found there was such volume for the template that they were suggesting as well. So this was really useful by having a way in which the community can really interact with you and the community can submit requests for things that they need to help them do their job a lot better, right? Because all of the users in your product, they're trying to get a job done. They've hired you, right? For jobs to be done framework, they've hired your product to do a job. If you're going to help them do that job better then it's going to actually lead to more MRR, more word of mouth, et cetera.
Jake Stainer:
And we really systemized the creation of templates at Typeform. I'm not going to go through this too much in detail. You can try and understand this flow. However the simple explanation is that we're doing competitor analysis, keyword research. We had a customer request going in, and we basically used a Trello Bot where we would hook up Typeform to Trello. We would start adding the cost of Trello. And this allowed us to prioritize the templates that we would make. We would drag into a column where the design team would pick up these templates, which would be in a format of a template brief for the design team. And at the same time we would be researching questions, building it with the copy, creating the Typeform, so we'd have both copywriters involved, designers involved, creative approval processes, and then we'd upload it to our CMS. And then we'll do an SEO check and then we'll make it live, back links, et cetera.
Jake Stainer:
We really systemized this process. We were really inspired by Ford, by how it systemized the manufacturing processes. And we built a process as well to really scale this further by getting really deep on that thing that was really working for us. And we systemized the whole thing like systems. They really make a huge difference.
Jake Stainer:
This is the last secret, the last secret for Typeforms SEO success is built a link building machine. How do we do this? This was link building back in 2011 on the website, I built back events. So almost 10 years ago, right. And before you would have your links page and you would basically just exchange links with different websites and say, "Hey, if you add a link to your links page, I'll add your link to my links page." And it would work, right. You would exchange links. Google would see the links like the referral links and you go up in the rankings. But as we know that no longer works, right.
Jake Stainer:
I built content, but no one came. Links are super important. You can't just build content as we know, you also have to build the links. We built a link building machine. This is a Typeform, a contact form that people would make on Typeform. And then they would embed it in their website, right? And maybe you can't see it because it's pretty small, but when people would embed this in their website, they wouldn't just embed a Typeform, they'd also embed a link back to the very landing page of contact forms here. Hopefully you can see this as well. It said contact form powered by Typeform. And the phrase contact form is the anchor which we linked back to our online contact us form template page.
Jake Stainer:
What would happen is we basically built a loop, right? The loop went like this. Someone would find us in Google, they would Google for example create an online form. They want to sign up and create a Typeform. They would then, let's imagine they made a contact form. They would embed a contact form on their website and at the same time they would automatically create a bank link back to Google, which in turn would increase the position of our contact form page or whatever use case they made in Google, which would in time allow more people to find Typeform. And even more people would then create a Typeform and then embed it in their website, right?
Jake Stainer:
We had a content loop going on, that was self-fulfilling and was driving [inaudible 00:28:26] Typeform. And this allowed us to rank for times like free content form. Here we were in position five for free contact form, and we built a machine that was building links. That said, we didn't just build these links because these are considered widget links, they're quite weak links. It was more of a growth hack to get us ranking a lot faster. We're also doing proactive outreach guest posting and et cetera, to build more stronger links that we were sure that would last a lot longer than these links in case Google changes algorithm, et cetera. So we were doing lots of different types of link-building. This was just one which was more of a growth hack, which allowed us to accelerate our SEO in the short term once we built, did the hard work of building links to ensure that we would continue ranking in the mid to long-term.
Jake Stainer:
These are six secrets and these six secrets have six takeaways. So takeaway number one is never underestimate internal linking. Don't just think it's all about external links, it's all about the interlink. If you don't have an SEO process, now there's a chat list or come on board, do it now and make sure internal links is on there. Upload content to WordPress [inaudible 00:29:49] then it's fine to five internal links, that will save you having to have these SEO internal linking parties every week where you're trying to play catch up on the content unit we did internal links for it.
Jake Stainer:
Number two, build upon existing topic authority. Focus on what's already working. What are you already ranking for? What other topics can I create around this? Because you're really going to accelerate your SEO growth a lot faster because you've already validated to Google that you're a leader in this topic. Number three, always test, one word can do a lot. So always be testing. Don't treat SEO as just a traffic generating funnel and look at the whole funnel, focusing activation metric, and increase the number of activations for doing smart AB testing on your landing pages. Always have AB test running.
Jake Stainer:
Number four is give users the information they want. Really analyze for top 10 in Google, see what patterns they have and really give people ... they've mentioned they want fast, don't make them work for the answer they're looking for, give them the answer fast, because if not, you're going to frustrate them and they're going to jump back to their Google search results pages, and you're going to lose rankings because you also I think that your content does not answer the query that they're asking for, right.
Jake Stainer:
Five, replicate good content. Find that sweet spot. Find what's really working for you and double down, build a process around that, involve your community as well to co-create content with them. And lastly, think about how you could build link-building machine. As I said, this is more of a growth hack, building links, let's call it the old fashioned way or the more resource intense way is always the best way to do it. If you can find other ways to building do so, because it could help you in the short term while you also build links for the mid to long-term.
Jake Stainer:
These are the six secrets of Typeforms SEO growth. If you have any questions, feel free to tap them in and I'll be happy to respond to them. If you want these slides, you can download them here. And I hope you really enjoyed this talk, this workshop on the six secrets from Typeforms SEO. I hope you're inspired to do things on your SEO and thank you very much for listening.
