S1E5 - How to leverage SEO as a B2B SaaS with Maeva Cifuentes

The most important and sustainable avenue for long-term growth is SEO. The big question is how to leverage SEO as a B2B SaaS? Long-term growth frequently depends on this investment. Maeva Cifuentes, CEO of Flying Cat Marketing, a startup that helps B2B SaaS companies with their SEO and content strategy, is our special guest today. Maeva has extensive knowledge to impart based on her three years of expertise and track record of working with over 40 B2B SaaS firms. Immediately, let's begin! Thank you for coming, Maeva.

• Defining SEO: Maeva defines SEO as transforming your website into a self-sustaining ecosystem that attracts users organically throughout their buyer's journey, from awareness to becoming a customer. Without SEO, your website relies solely on brand searches or paid ads for traffic.
• Preparation for SEO: Before diving into SEO, Maeva emphasizes the importance of having a solid product-market fit and ensuring that your website can convert visitors effectively. This way, your investment in SEO will yield better results.
• Understanding the Ideal Customer Profile (ICP): Maeva stresses the significance of having a well-defined ICP before creating SEO-focused content. Understanding your audience and addressing their specific needs is crucial for successful SEO.
• Common Mistakes: One common mistake businesses make is focusing on the wrong metrics for SEO success. Maeva advises aligning SEO KPIs with business goals, such as demo requests, free trial sign-ups, or revenue, rather than just rankings and traffic.
• SEO Strategy: Maeva introduces four website archetypes - Builder, Optimizer, Scalar, and Wild One - each with specific SEO objectives. For beginners (Builders), the focus is on ranking for easy keywords to build topical authority, while more established businesses (Scalers) create thought leadership content and attract external interest.
• Content Optimization: Maeva recommends optimizing existing content to increase click-through rates (CTR) and conversion rates, as it can yield quicker wins compared to focusing solely on new content creation.
• Fresh Content and Rankings: Refreshing and updating content periodically, especially for pages on the second page of search results, helps maintain relevance and appeal to both readers and search engines.
• Should You Include Last Updated Dates in Your Blog Posts? The podcast begins with a practical question on whether including the "last updated" date in a blog post is necessary. Maeva advises that having the date on the blog post is considered best practice. For industries where information changes rapidly, it benefits users to know when the content was last updated to assess its relevance and accuracy. Considering user experience is essential, and including the date ensures transparency and builds trust with your audience.

Key Timecodes

• (1:25) Why you should listen to Maeva
• (2:00) What is SEO?
• (2:55) What you need to have before starting SEO
• (4:50) Mistakes companies make while implementing SEO
• (7:29) What to do to get the most out of SEO
• (10:34) The best SEO practices
• (15:25) The bottom of the funnel example
• (16:50) The importance of refreshing content
• (19:17) Maeva’s success story
• (23:45) Does duplicate content hurt your SEO?
• (25:46) AI effect on SEO
• (28:37) How to grow to 10K MRR
• (30:01) How to grow to 10M ARR
• (31:05) What does Maeva wish she knew 10yrs ago?