SaaS SEO with Alexander Rehnborg from Get Response

MICHAEL:
Hi guys, Michael here. Do you want a second opinion on your SEO? Head to theseoshow.co and hit the link in the header. We'll take a look under the hood at your SEO, your competitors and your market and tell you how you can improve. All right, let's get into the show.

INTRO: It's time for The SEO Show, where a couple of nerds talk search engine optimization so you can learn to compete in Google and grow your business online. Now here's your hosts, Michael and Arthur.

MICHAEL: Hello, I'm Michael Costin and I am back for another episode of the SEO show, Sans, my partner in crime, Arthur Fabik. Partner in crime, I wouldn't know, I don't know if he's that exactly. I'm going to call him my trusty co-host, potentially my assistant or junior assistant. Whatever the case may be, he's not here, but the good news is we have a guest this week. We are joined by Alexander Rehnborg from GetResponse. GetResponse is a SaaS tool. They operate in the email marketing and marketing automation space. So it was only fitting that when Alex came on the show, we had him to talk about SaaS SEO. So for those of you that don't know what SaaS is, it stands for software as a service. Basically, when you're doing SEO in this space, you're looking to generate free signups for the software or maybe leads for a sales team to close. We had a chat on the show about, I guess, the overall SaaS picture in SEO, along with some tactical stuff around content creation and links that might be a little bit different in the SaaS world. So I'm going to stop talking about it now, and I'm going to cut over to our chat with Alexander Rehnborg, the head of SEO at GetResponse. Hi, Alex. Welcome to the show. For people who may not have heard of you, if you could please give us a quick intro to yourself and what you do, that'd be great.

ALEX: Absolutely. Hi, Michael. Pleasure to be with you. My name is Alexander. I'm head of SEO at GetResponse. We're a SaaS company selling marketing automation software, headquartered in Gdansk, Poland. Short my background, started off as a journalist, very shortly, I should say, very briefly. And then I discovered content marketing in the SaaS industry. And yeah, once you stumble upon content marketing, the road to SEO is inevitable. And I did that for a number of years as a specialist, and then had a chance to lead a team within affiliate marketing. where SEO was the main driver there of traffic. And right now I'm also leading an international team in GetResponse.

MICHAEL: Awesome. Well, you've touched on a few things there that we love talking about on the show, you know, content marketing, SEO, affiliate marketing. But one thing you mentioned that we haven't really covered much on the show is SaaS, software as a service. And I wanted to keep the chat today about that, you know, within the world of SEO, A lot of the tactics and stuff are the same no matter what you're trying to do. But then within any sort of industry or market, there are nuances or things that might work in that space that don't work in others. So when it comes to SaaS, you work at quite a well-known SaaS tool. You've got experience running SEO campaigns for it. So it's going to be great to pick your mind on all things SaaS SEO. Maybe we can start with where things are at in 2022 from a SaaS SEO point of view. What are you sort of seeing out there in terms of what works, but also maybe what the challenges are?

ALEX: Yeah, I think SEO has been important for a number of years in the SaaS industry, but I think especially this year, it's going to continue to be a big investment area. We're seeing, I should say, hyperinflation right now, not just in Europe, but in the US and other parts of the world, which means that the cost of paid marketing, such as paid search, is going to continue to go up. A lot of people are going to spend their money on campaigns. For a lot of companies, I think that then they will continue to see SEO as a place for long term investments. You invest resources in time and hiring people rather than just spending on campaigns when it comes to the organic channel. So I think considering the current climate in 2022, SEO is going to be even more important. And also for companies to position themselves, customer retention is typically important because the cost of sales is going up. And SEO is a really good channel for also, I think, retaining customers. So I think we can touch upon later, especially for SaaS.

MICHAEL: Awesome. Okay. And are you seeing any challenges with SEO from a SaaS point of view at the moment to sort of offset those opportunities?

ALEX: Yeah, for sure. I mean, rising costs is one thing. I think also post-pandemic, if we dare to use that word at all, but people talk about the great resignation and it is a reality and has been for some time. And it means right now that we have global workforce, truly. Companies have become accustomed to hiring globally. And it is good in one sense, because you can find the right person regardless of where he or she lives. But there's also a challenge, because who is going to get access to the top talent? Most likely the companies that have great work culture. For sure, the compensation and the benefits will be important, but also flexibility, good management, a good company governance culture, basically. And that means that a lot of companies will be left in the backwater when it comes to hiring. I think you can see that already that a lot of HR people are struggling to find the right people. I mean, SEO is no exception. So I think that top talent will continue to go to the top companies, and then there will be a big chunk of companies that will struggle to find the right people. They may even have to hire people below the roles they're looking for and try to train them. But that assumes that you have somebody already at the company who's seen you. So I think it's going to be a struggle with resources, honestly. And if you don't have the right people, you can't get the right SEO done, especially in SaaS. So that is one huge challenge, I think.

MICHAEL: Yeah, absolutely. I've seen that across a lot of our clients and even in our own world trying to recruit, it is very tough at the moment. But let's say you're a SaaS tool and you either do have a good person on staff, SEO person, or maybe you're working with an agency and you're trying to drive traffic, you're trying to drive free trial signups, that sort of stuff. At the moment, what would you recommend as a starting point for a SaaS tool in terms of trying to put together an SEO strategy? Hmm.

ALEX: I mean, in SaaS, it's extremely important. I mean, this is always true for SEO, but especially in SaaS that you need to anchor your SEO strategy with the company strategy. So you need to figure out what is the company, what is the company's direction and vision right now. And that needs to tailor the SEO strategy. But I think typically in SaaS, you need to have a versatile strategy. Typically, if we go from the affiliate marketing world, we usually talk about worst money. And then for SaaS, it's going to be usually at the bottom of the funnel content. So transactional content that drives sales. A lot of such companies need to invest money here and time in order to be present. The challenge there is that the type of transactional queries you have in the SaaS industry, in the SaaS search market, they don't always lead to product content. So that is one area that SaaS companies need to tackle. How do we get visibility for queries that don't necessarily lead to transactional or product content? What are the alternatives? Well, blog guides help content, actually, a lot of times. Areas that typically don't go off into other teams so customer success will be managing the help content and they may not even realize that that content is converting. So the sas industry really needs to cut through multiple teams and again that's always true always talk about that. No siloing, but it's especially true in SaaS. You have to work with the marketing teams, with customer success, in order to be able to be successful. Because you need different types of content in order to be present for, let's say, money content that we use in the affiliate marketing world. So I think that's one strong key.

MICHAEL: Okay. And so you mentioned, you know, it can't all be bottom of funnel. You've got to go higher up the funnel. Help content's a big one there. You touched on earlier about SEO being good at driving retention in the SaaS world. So I guess that's where that comes in, right? Like if you're creating good help content, then your customers are getting what they need, perhaps without having to talk to people, then they might refer people. And that leads to more sales that you would never have even tracked or attributed to SEO, but it is driving that, right? Yes. In addition to that, yeah, what would you say, like, let's say, let's go with that help topic. How do you come up with your strategy for that? Is it a matter of looking at live chats, talking to your team, or do you sort of do research, try and decide what topics to write about?

ALEX: That's a good one. I think talking to the customer success colleagues is definitely one source of information, like chat. But you can do traditional keyword research and you'll find that a lot of the help content actually qualifies to rank for things like how-to, which is a really important type of content in the SaaS industry. For instance, we're selling, among other features, web push notifications. How to do web push notifications. Typically, we would think that that's a blog guide. may there will be, can also be a health content. So conducting keyword research and matching that and seeing also making sure that you have content resources within the customer success to actually write effective health content, bringing out the data, showing them the numbers. A lot of people who produce health content believe that they're only writing for customers, which ties into customer retention. But many of them forget that it's also about customer acquisition. I mean, you can do that right now for anybody who's listening or watching. Jump into analytics or whatever tool you have, check the help content, see the proportion of new users from organic, for instance. And you'll be surprised that a lot of people coming into help content have never visited the website before, and they land typically for the first time on the help content. How come that is? Are all of those customers? Definitely not, right? You can actually acquire customers through help content. But on the retention part, I like to use the internal search also, if that's present on the website. If you're tracking the internal searches, which you should do if you have internal search engine, check the keywords. Check what people are searching for. And at least in Google Analytics, you can check the balances. So what is called search refinement in analytics. How many times are people refining their searches? before they find what they need and check those topics why are they not satisfied that can be one source of frustration that can definitely affect customer attention and what are the queries are people looking for pricing do they understand the pricing unfortunately one common search query many companies will be how to cancel my account Well, actually, that is an important one, because even if you have a person who wants to leave, they might be able to come back if you serve them the right information, and you're helpful. If you're not, you're going to strengthen their bias of you being a company that they don't want to have a relationship to anymore. So there's so many facets, really, to health content. And retention there is just giving people the information that they need. Hold their hand while they're working. That's really important.

MICHAEL: Yeah, absolutely. And with SaaS, you know, something that comes to my mind when I think of SaaS SEO is comparison pages in particular. So it might be, you know, your tool versus someone else and the types of features and benefits that it has. In your world, I haven't done much SaaS SEO myself, is that an area that you see a lot of traffic or opportunity on? And SaaS tools, should they be investing the time in that, even if it's maybe not saying that there's a lot of traffic volume there, perhaps the intent, the conversion potential is really strong with them? What are you seeing on that side of things?

ALEX: Oh, yeah. I mean, that's been true for many years. And the shift maybe happened seven, 10 years ago. Google decided that when people search for product queries, especially the big tail queries within a specific software topic, they want to compare before they convert, which makes total sense because that's how it works in many other industries. And the affiliate world began to take it seriously and therefore have flooded the search market for most SaaS businesses with that type of content. And they do that successfully, to be honest. So yeah, it is a fundamental part of the bottom of the funnel content strategy for a SaaS company if you're doing SEO. And the challenge is, of course, how to rival affiliate contents, how to write something that actually is better, deeper. Customers understand and know that if you're a brand, you're going to show the best side of yourself. But that is also the point. And I think some companies will still struggle, I think today, by getting the allowance or the clearance to write that content in the first place. It is still controversial, actually. When I speak to some colleagues, the top management will say, Ah, we don't want to have versus content. Ah, that's a bit too shady, and we don't want to look terrible. So I think one way to counter that is to say, we need to tell our story. And if we're not out there telling our story of why somebody should choose us over our competitor, the competitor is going to tell the story, even about us, and also affiliates. And that usually gets a lot of people taken, because they realize that, ah, we don't want the competitors to describe our pricing plan, because is that going to be truthfully, honestly, impartially? Of course not. So I think approaching this content nowadays is going to be a lot about the angle, finding something that's unique. There's so many websites and companies that do exactly the same approach to this type of content, like top 10 2022 soft software for what have you market. How can you break into that space and differentiate yourself? How can you bring something new to the top 10 results? That's going to require some creativity on the part of SEOs, but yeah, it's fundamental.

MICHAEL: And you've mentioned affiliate a couple of times there. I would imagine in the SaaS world, if you're running an affiliate program, the competition is fierce with your own affiliates trying to go for that traffic and in a SaaS tools point of view, ideally not be paying your affiliate because they've come through your own SEO content or strategy. What are some maybe, I guess, things to be aware of or areas that a SaaS SEO can focus on or little implementations they can do to try and compete with those affiliates who quite often, you know, can have really sophisticated SEO behind them, big budgets on link building, that sort of stuff. Is there stuff you're seeing out in the wild that works at the moment?

ALEX: Yes, you mentioned compete, and I would say that one strategy is the old saying that if you can't fight them, then join them. There will be some queries that will be super tough, and you need to decide budget-wise, resource-wise, are we going after this term, seriously? Do we want to be top 10 here? Or will we try actually to make sure that some of these sites are our affiliates in the first place? That's one thing, doing outreach, communicating with people, building relations. I think that actually that's really important also for the SEO team to support the affiliate team. And secondly, looking at the content that is ranking today among affiliate sites, are you mentioned there? And if you are, what's the accuracy of the content? If you release a new plan or you have new pricing of new feature, are all those things being mentioned? And if not, you will need to nudge some of these sites, building relations with webmasters and helping them, supporting them to make sure that they publish up-to-date contents because people are going to read it every day. And that's something that sometimes is overlooked by the SEO team because they believe that we're just going to put out our own in-house content and the rest is on the table for the affiliate team. But I think that's a mistake. You need to collaborate with the affiliate team on this one. When it comes to producing content that can rival the affiliate content, I think one thing is that typically affiliate websites sometimes are spread thin. They have a lot of different markets that they want to target. I think the quality is usually pretty good, but the depth of it, Not so sure. Have they really covered all the angles? And when you are working in a SaaS company, you become an expert of what you're selling. So a lot of times I think that there are very knowledgeable people inside the SaaS company, maybe outside of the SEO team, that would do a good job running a quality piece type of content that could rival the affiliate team. I'm thinking about people in customer success, for instance. I'm thinking about the product marketing team. who typically produces product content, however we define that, but they may not always be into versus content or comparison content. Well, why not? If they're experts at the tool, they will also know exactly how to test the competitor's tool in an interesting way and also giving that personal edge to it. So I think, yeah, using resources outside of the marketing team can sometimes produce interesting results here.

MICHAEL: And I would imagine, you know, you're talking with dealing with the affiliate team, the customer success team there, those people have stuff on their plate, you know, their own sort of day job, so to speak. What do you do to try and get buy-in? Is there sort of little approaches you'll use to get people to understand the importance of that and commit their time to it, whether it's using data or, I guess, making your case internally to get that support?

ALEX: Yeah, that's one of the, let's say, hidden tasks of an SEO team in a SaaS company, I believe, organizational communication. But I find a lot of times, and that's just my personal opinion, but data can probably persuade people who are already leading towards your angle. But it may not be the key point to communicate. So I think data can prove a lot of things, but you need the emotional level also. And I think one way to do it is to approach people on their ground, like people who write help content, they care about what they're doing. Confirm that by telling them not only are you writing for your existing customers which you care about, but you're also writing about for new customers, new potential customers who are coming in. If you show them that, through data for instance, you will open up their eyes and they will realize that they have a larger mission to play and people are usually responsive to that. Same within product marketing. They love being in charge of product content, but if you can show them that, hey, this type of content here, that's versus content, It's also a form of product content. And actually here, you have a real chance to tell your story of why we, in some parts, are better or outperform our competitors. You can tell that story. And that's something that they wouldn't be able to do in a pure feature page or a pure homepage or pure solution page. So you're offering them something new, but it anchors into what they care about. And it's always about seeing the other person's interest and what truly drives them. And in that sense, then you can build those relations and maybe get some help.

MICHAEL: Yeah. Love it. Love it. All right. Well, we've touched on versus pages. We've touched on our comparison pages with the competition. When it comes to SaaS SEO, are there any must have other features or sort of content types that you're creating or that you think SaaS tools that might be listening to this out there or SEOs that work at a SaaS company should be implementing in their strategies?

ALEX: We need to mention the more top of the funnel content as well, because branding is really, really important to SaaS. And this is, I think, where a lot of times being an SEO in a SaaS company, it's quite different from, let's say, affiliate marketing, because you spend heavily resources and time into branded content. And building the brand is super important because it has to do with conversion rates. It connects into your PR strategy. If you want to do some type of link building or outreach, typically you do that through non-branded content if you want to be truly successful. So discovering top-of-the-funnel queries and new angles on that. A lot of SaaS companies, for instance, sit on a ton of customer data. So using that data to produce top of the funnel content. In our case, we have a lot about email marketing, for instance, we have an email annual email marketing benchmark report. So what are the conversion rates of people in Singapore, Malaysia, United States and so forth? How do they differ when do people wake up in the morning and read their emails and this is the type of stuff that generates a lot of attention and you can get a lot of traffic for it and also it makes it much easier to build editorial relations to newspapers magazines blogs and thereby get links so well a lot of marketing websites for instance they will spend a lot of money on maybe paid links, and going all in on what we call the money content. Inside you need to cover all of the funnel, and at the top of the funnel you need to figure out what are the topics that can help us to build brand awareness and build engagement with the brand. Because at the end of the day, even if you rank number 3, 2, 1, feature snippet with the bottom of the fall content, such as a comparison page, people will also click not just depending on position, but also what brand they recognize. And that recognition, that is something that you as an SEO need to be part of the process and build that. So finding out the topics and also taking the company's strategy to how do we build brand engagement. How do we want to stand out? That also has to do with tone of voice, the approach to the content, how to write it, how to present it. Sometimes that will be a differentiator between you and a competitor that does slightly the same things. So I think that's really important.

MICHAEL: Cool. And I guess there's, again, there's so many different moving paths to that and people internally involved. You talk about tone of voice, for example. As an SEO, I guess you've got to work with what you've got in terms of the people in the business and how their marketing manager might say, tone of voice, we've got to keep it really corporate and above the line. You want to go with a more fun angle. So I guess that can make things difficult, right? From a pure SEO point of view, if you're just trying to drive traffic and conversions How do you find internally talking about SEO and your strategy to people that may not necessarily understand the channel or the technical side of things or what you're trying to achieve? Is there any sort of learnings you can give on that side of things?

ALEX: That's a tough one. It's the internal struggle, but I guess for all SEOs, but yeah, definitely. Sometimes I think that SEO teams, we're so focused on the core KPIs, we see ourselves almost as a sales team, that we forget that we have another mission, which is an internal one. And that is, since you're an inbound channel type of team, you see information directly from competitors in the SERPs. So communicating information from what you see among competitors and in the organic search results back into the organization. You mentioned the tone of voice, so you should be part of the process. You should be part of the discussions. And who's better actually equipped to do that than the SEO person who's actually spending their days being obsessed by competitors? What is the tone of voice? What's the vision of the fiercest competitors that you have? Yeah, sure, UX team will also do that type of comparison, but I think SEO team has a role to play there. So, one advice is to simply gather a lot of the information that you have in your templates, in your research documents, and share that with the rest of the team. Translate that into information and some people would call that a competitor research competitive intelligence. Why should that remain within the SEO team or even the marketing team for that matter when there's a shift in a big competitor in the market, the SEO team will be one of the first ones to do it because they're monitoring the websites. So being able to drive change in an organization internally, I think the SEO team has a big role to play. But you practically need to take that part and prove to them that SEO is not just wizard magic. It's something that everybody can understand. We spend a lot of time in our team also to educate others. We have different standing processes for that. One Friday every month, we hold a 30-minute talk. On an SEO topic, such as, what are canonical links? How do they work? Generating some interest among technical SEO. Core vitals, how does that work? Core vitals, when you look at it, it's a very practical topic. How fast does a page render when you enter it on a mobile phone? That's something that everybody can relate to. But if you're only discussing core metrics, then people, you will, they will get lost. Right. So, um, the SEO team needs to use a simplified jargon, uh, speaking of the SEO team to make them understand why it's practically important and, uh, also driving change within the organization, I think by gathering resources and sharing those resources on a, on a regular basis.

MICHAEL: Yeah. Yeah, love it, love it. Well, earlier you touched very briefly on the topic of links, everyone's favorite topic in the SEO world. I like what you're saying about, you know, at GetResponse, you know, when emails are being opened in different countries and putting that data out is going to be clickbait. You know, you can put it out to the journalists who might want to do an article on something related to that, which is awesome. When it comes to links, are you sort of going purely for that PR angle or are you doing, you know, paid guest post outreach? Are you avoiding paid links and doing everything free? What's your, what's your take when it comes to link building?

ALEX: Yeah, well, coming from the affiliate world, it's usually the book is open. Everything is on the table, let's say. That's usually my approach. I'm agnostic. It's really more about where you see the best success. And of course, what risks are you willing to take? And here, there's a clear difference that within the SaaS world, you typically have one domain. Or a few domains, and they are super important. And if something would happen to those domains, you're going to end up doing something else the next day, I think, for work. So you really need to think about what you're doing the long term. And I think that when it comes to link building, we like to look at that more in terms of relation building. We tried different methods in the past. There are platforms where you can buy links. Usually not a good idea, sorry to say. And also, a lot of guest posting today. Probably, Michael, you, as I receive tons of guest posting requests every day. And there's such an inflation on this market. And just like with much else, when you see that big demand, you're going to know that a lot of it will be crap, essentially. The quality is terrible. A lot of sites are being put up. They're bolstered by so-called PBNs, Networks sites that the buildings and then they send us links over to the main sites with the cell guest posting they discuss cryptic metrics i would say still such as the main authority which we still don't know when google is not using it could they be using a version of it. Maybe. Nobody knows. But the companies that sell sales software to us, they make us, of course, like to believe that these metrics are very important. But you've got to do your own math and see the correlation there. So I think looking at link building, we try to focus a lot on building relations to people and being visible, being present on websites that we believe that our customers are reading. And we want to put up content that people like to read. So if you would take a guest post, for instance, yeah, we tried that also. But it needs to be something that adds value. And usually the simple question is, would I like to read this piece of content? And if not, we shouldn't publish it in the first place. It's just not something we should be doing. And it's just not good value for money. And we can also see that sometimes links move the needle. Depends on the query and the competitiveness, but sometimes it doesn't. So I think just for starters, a lot of SEOs automatically go to, I need a link building strategy. Probably yes, but to what degree? For which content do we actually need links coming in, or relations if you prefer to use that word? When should we bolster the content, or when is content going to be the decisive factor to rank? A lot of times, for a lot of SaaS companies, they are competing among queries where content will be the main differentiator. Sometimes links can move the needle within the top 10, but you will see that a lot of sites ranking within top 3, top 5, some of them have pretty poor domain profiles, and yet they're there. And that begs the question, why? So it's the SERP research and competitive research, it's extremely important before you even begin. to collect budget for link building. But typically, we try to build relations to websites that we think have authority, that operate within the same space. And it can also be that we appear on their blog, they appear on our blog, for instance. And then we also make sure that if you want to do branded content, then we keep any links clean, branded anchors. I think that also is a good long-term strategy. Google went from penalizing sites that pushed an unbranded part of link billing too much to now more or less ignoring it. And that's why a lot of companies today, they have big link billing budgets. But I wonder what the performance is actually in return. So I think long term, especially SaaS companies, you really need to think about, we need to be staying in touch with people, stay in touch with websites over a longer period of time. And then actually, we'll see also that the the budget that you will spend. Also for links, it will go down because relations, they matter more in the end.

MICHAEL: Okay, and you've mentioned Google updates or penalties, or sort of mentioned it then. How do you sort of find it these days with these core updates that happen, they don't really give much away about what's changed and why, and are you guys coming through that unscathed, or have you seen dips here and there? And if so, what are you doing to sort of come out the other side of it, hopefully better off than where you were before?

ALEX: Yeah, everybody's worried about that. But we haven't really been affected by any of the latest core algorithm updates. And in general, I have the perspective that I think at some point we're going to get tired of listening to these updates, because we simply don't know what they mean anymore. If you go a few years back, a core update or an update at all from Google was a big thing. And they would usually name what it would be about, such as targeting local affiliate sites or something like that. Today, it's highly cryptic. It's usually tied to the search rates or quality guidelines. That's a 100-plus page document. At the end of it, it's become more of a philosophical question. Are we doing the right things overall? Are we putting out content that's good? Technical SEO, are we making sure that we block the content that shouldn't be crawled and indexed by Google? That's also something that's a struggle for a lot of SaaS companies. If you do the right things overall on the direction and strategy, I think I'm really not following these updates. I see them popping up in newsletters and LinkedIn and other places, but am I going to draw big conclusions from it? Sure if i was website where i saw the big fluctuations in traffic and some of them will do and i guess many of the sites will be in the your money your life area that absolutely like medic for instance. Cryptocurrency in other areas is very sensitive areas. Gambling would be another. Probably they're seeing much bigger fluctuations because Google is kind of homing in on those, because it wants to see authority, truthfulness in very sensitive areas. But if you're selling some type of SaaS software, I myself haven't seen that big correlation, actually, with core updates. And I just don't get much out of reading these updates. It's become almost a farce, to be honest. And everyone starts in the newsletters with, here's a core update. And nobody knows what it's about. Well, okay, thanks for the information.

MICHAEL: It seems like that's a deliberate case by Google, you know, they did used to give it all away, like we're targeting links, Penguin, Panda, like content, whereas now it's just, we've changed some stuff, could be this, could be that, but just keep doing what you're doing and you should be okay. Very helpful, of course. Yeah, of course, of course. Well, look, this has been a great chat. I always like to wrap things up by asking the same three questions of everyone, just to see what I guess the different takes are. So they're very simple. The first one is, what do you think is the biggest myth in SEO?

ALEX: For me right now, I think the biggest myth is if you invest in SEO software, I'm not going to name any names because we all know them, but if you purchase a SEO software and you see the visibility there, you will get to know exactly the visibility of your website. That's a big myth. If you actually dig into how a lot of the software are tracking rankings, what type of keywords actually follow, you're going to see a lot of garbage data that you don't need. A lot of the CRs are looking at these corporate metrics that we don't really know how they work. They estimate the disability links, but they're never transparent. And still, we use them in reports up to top management. And if the top management would ask us, what does domain rating mean? What does it mean that you have increased domain authority by five percentage points? We don't have an answer. That's a problem in our industry. So let's get back to the basics. Let's talk about the data that we do understand. That's a big problem, I think.

MICHAEL: Yep, yep, makes a lot of sense. Okay, well, on the other side of that coin, what do you think the most underrated tactic in SEO is? Tactic, thing, sort of, focus area even.

ALEX: I think doing the research really thoroughly, competitive research, and the creative part of figuring out how are you going to be any different. Still, a lot of people have the approach that whatever I see in the top 10 results, I just need to do the same thing. And that's my job at SNL. That's how we define search intent. What are the top 10 people doing? I'm going to do the same. Hopefully, I'm going to be there. That's the question. If you're not doing anything different, why would you be there in the first place? So how do we figure out how to be different? That's the creative part of this year. That's what makes it really, really difficult, I think. And it's so easy to skip it. But I think it's fundamental today as Google gets really smart about showing different types of content. So creative, competitive research, do it thoroughly and be informed before you write the piece of content.

MICHAEL: Okay, cool. And the last question, I sort of get the feeling or I get a sense for your take on SEO tools from this chat so far, but when it comes to getting the job done, what would be the top three tools that you use or that you think are indispensable in your day-to-day life as an SEO?

ALEX: Right. I would pick Ahrefs there, I think, because they have a great UI and that's why a lot of people are using it. But for competitive research, indispensable. And there are lots of good competitors such as SEMrush, but I think looking at, honestly, budget versus what you get out of it. So the value for money, I think Ahrefs still is a pretty good place to be. Very versatile. I would say Oncrawl or any of their competitors, but I think Oncrawl do a great job in modernizing technical SEO, automatic crawls, being able to export it to BigQuery. And there are lots of creative things that you can do, even on a small budget, to create automatic notifications to email, to Slack, to inform yourselves, to practically fix issues. I'm really impressed by Oncrawl and their customer support there. I think the third tool, for me actually, I would say advanced web ranking cloud there. I'm just looking at keyword rankings, honestly. Getting accurate data on where we stand visibility-wise. Visibility numbers in all their glory, but I want to see the core data. And I want to be able to create customized reports based on that. And that's typically what somebody in the upper management would like to care about. They have picked out five, 10 keywords or topics that they believe is important to the business. And you need to report on that. And I think that that tool does a really good job helping us do that and cater our reports. So we have three tools that work for us.

MICHAEL: Great. All right. Alex, it's been great chatting to you and learning a little bit more about your approach to SaaS SEO today. If people want to go check you out after the show, where can they head to find out a bit more about you?

ALEX: Easiest thing would be to hit me up on LinkedIn, for sure. I'd be happy to connect.

MICHAEL: Awesome. Okay. Well, it's been great chatting. Have a great day.

ALEX: Have a great day, Michael. Thank you.

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