1. Taking part in comments under relevant threads;

2. Publishing your own posts in other subreddits;

3. Running your own subreddit.

Your own subreddit is the place where you have the biggest leverage to influence. Some type of content you want to publish will never be accepted by moderators of other subreddits (if you don’t ask to pay them for it).

However, running your own subreddit is also the hardest thing. You have to invest months of work to see first traction. After running 4 subreddits, I see that:

1. Really, not every brand needs it. It’s a long-term game for brands that have something to say and want one more big channel to spread the message.

2. The number one step to success is the right expectations. You have to admit that it will take a long time.

Despite all of that, Reddit gives much more organic reach for subreddits than LinkedIn or X(Twitter) to company pages.

Get help with Reddit SEO services for B2B SaaS at my B2B Gaps agency

2 reasons to run your subreddit

1/ Rank your content in Google SERP and influence LLMs

This is the main long-term goal. You want to build an active community that allows you to win in SERPs & LLMs by highly competitive keywords.

We play by Google’s rules, and Google loves Reddit. I see more and more that content published on Reddit ranks better than the same content published on authoritative websites.

Below is an example of what we’ve achieved at /r/Sitechecker subreddit for 3 months. All of that without building backlinks.

2/ Attract new audience from Reddit itself

This is the most non-obvious thing for SEOs who think only about traffic from Google and LLMs. Reddit is both a huge social media and search engine. It has an advanced recommendation algorithm that helps you distribute your content to your ICP.

Don’t be afraid that creating your own community will be considered spam. The Reddit team promotes this option for brands. Check this video from Imogen Maric, and you’ll see how the Reddit team thinks about it.

How to send visitors from a sub to your website

Your own subreddit helps to influence people’s decisions, even if you don’t get conversions immediately.

People will learn about your brand from Reddit, Google, and LLMs when they read your content → all of that will lead to an increase in brand searches and sales later.

However, you also have 3 methods to send them directly to your site.

1/ Links in posts and comments

This is the most obvious. You can add links to your site without fear that somebody will delete your post because it’s a promotion.

However, I believe that you have to add links only when they’re really valuable for a user. I don’t publish posts to build links; I publish posts to share news, own the narrative, and share some details about what the brand can do, and add links only as a part of content.

2/ Welcome page for joined members

You can add a pop-up that each user who joins the community will see. This is one more place to paste the most important links and resources.

3/) Community bookmarks

This is a list of links that are built inside the right sidebar and are constantly visible to users when they read posts.

Remember, your power as a moderator is limited

Yes, running your own community is the biggest leverage on Reddit, but it’s still not the same power you have on other social media.

The most important thing → you don’t own a subreddit as you own a company page on LinkedIn, Facebook, X, or YouTube. Think of yourself as a tenant, not an owner.

• You can’t delete a subreddit.

• You can’t redirect it.

• You can’t change its name.

• It can be banned for unmoderation or a lot of self-promotion.

• It can even be transferred from you to others after a long period of inactivity.

The last one is the most unexpected thing, and that’s why it’s so important to invite your colleagues or friends as moderators too.

Launching a new subreddit is only 1 of 3 options

Because nobody owns subreddits, it also creates opportunities.

1/ You can buy a subreddit

Important! Buying a community is against the Moderator Code of Conduct. You won’t find an official marketplace or site to buy a Reddit community.

However, it’s almost impossible to track such deals for Reddit, because all operations (negotiations, sending money) are handled outside the platform. Most of the deals are made via the following model:

• You negotiate the conditions of the deal with a top moderator of the community

• The top moderator invites you to become a moderator

• The top moderator is exiting from a moderator position

• You automatically become the moderator of the community

The other way is that the top mod invites you as a mod and you manage the community, in fact, even without deleting old moderators.

2/ You can request to work on some old, unmoderated subreddit

It’s like a drop domains in SEO :) People die, forget about the subreddits they managed, lose motivation to continue working with them, etc.

That’s why Reddit created a separate sub where you can ask to become a moderator of an old, unmoderated community → https://www.reddit.com/r/redditrequest/

Here is the list of criteria for submitting a successful request on r/redditrequest.

How to name your community (brand vs category)

It’s a hard question for many, because you can’t change it later. The answer depends on 2 variables:

• How popular your brand is.

• What are your main goals with a community?

I recommend creating a brand community:

• If the brand already has a lot of fans, people look for specific products and questions related to the brand.

• The company plans not just to get traffic to a website from a sub but also to build one more direct channel of communication with customers (share product updates, run surveys, reply to product issues, etc).

In other cases, the niche community with a category name is better, because nobody cares about your brand yet, people just look for unbiased reviews, tips, and feedback.

2 types of content you need to grow a subreddit

1/Really interesting content people can't read in other subreddits.

It includes:

• strong opinions, thought leader posts;

• being the first to post news;

• describe real painful questions so accurately that your audience can't;

• real user experience with screenshots.

The goal of this content type is to get better CTRs in the home feed and attract real members who will take part in discussions.

The problem is that many SEOs can't do it. You have to think and act as a marketer or magazine owner.

2/ Long articles with images focused on targeting specific keywords.

It's much easier. You do what you've done years before publishing SEO content on your websites. However, think about these articles as real landing pages where you sell your product.

Because it's not enough to rank in SERP. Your goal is to influence people's minds about which use cases your product wins and why.

Having 2 types of content, you build a machine that constantly acquires new traffic from both Reddit and Google.

5 ways to speed up your subreddit growth

1. Send traffic to it from your website, email list, and other social media.

2. Repurpose content from other platforms and publish it in a subreddit.

3. Crosspost your best-performing posts to other communities.

4. Publish 2-4 hot topics in a subreddit each month (data studies, interviews/AMAs, unique how-to guides, etc).

5. Incentivize your team and customers to take part in discussions.

How to measure your subreddit growth?

With the rise of AI, Reddit is full of bots and people who leave AI-generated comments. Recently, their CEO published an announcement on how they plan to work with it.

These changes also affect how you measure how your community is growing. The number of posts and comments is no longer as important, because 100% of them can be from bots.

I believe that only those communities that can attract real people to join and participate in discussions will thrive. That’s why this is my hierarchy of the most important milestones you have to track:

1. The first organic comment from a human.

2. The first organic post from a human.

3. The first viral posts (1k, 5k, 10k impressions)

4. 100-500-1000 members joined.

5. The first traffic from Reddit.

6. The first posts ranked at the top of Google.

7. The first demos and sales mentioned Reddit as a source during signup.

Here are the stats of 4 B2B communities, where I’m a moderator. You can check how long it is active, how many views it has had, and the members it acquired.

As you see, it’s really hard. Even /r/favikon/, after 8 months of active work, hasn’t achieved it yet. However, I believe it is possible to achieve this milestone in 6-12 months for most B2B SaaS.

Remember that Ahrefs doesn’t see all the rankings of your subreddit. You’ll get much more traffic from search and AI chats than you can measure.

Also, good news, that after 6 months, Reddit finally gave up, deleted the noreferrer attribute for external links & gave us back the ability to measure traffic from Reddit in GA4.

That’s it. I didn’t cover a lot of small, important details about spam moderation, designing the sub, using flairs, and so on, but you can find a lot of these things on the separate resource → https://redditforcommunity.com/.

Also read:

• SEO product manager role is the future of SEO

• My Reddit SEO strategy for B2B brands

• 5 insights you can get by merging GSC & GA4 data

• SEO is not dead (5 reasons why)

• 12 lessons on how to grow on LinkedIn

• Top B2B influencers to follow

What has changed during this time?

1/ More and more people are posting

The cost of 1000 impressions of a post in LinkedIn advertising on tier 1 markets ranges from $40–$100, depending on how good your post is in terms of CTR.

2 years ago, getting 1000 impressions on a post was quite easy, and if someone wrote a post in under 30 minutes, it often had a good ROI for many people. So more and more people try to use this opportunity, and this increases the overall competition for attention.

2/ Platforms have shifted to promoting content based on interests and engagement

Platforms want people to spend more time in their newsfeed, and popular posts, even from strangers, are better at holding a user’s attention.

The same Facebook years ago promised that it would make friends read each other more, but it ended up the same.

The truth is that most people write uninteresting, low-value content. Plus, some of those who write something valuable and unique cannot design it in such a way that people stop in the feed and read it to the end.

As a result, each of your posts is either a hit or a miss. The distribution of winners is the same as in sports, music, and cinema.

3/ Using AI for commenting and posts

About 50% of the comments I receive under my posts are AI comments. The most unpleasant thing is that even CEOs, founders, and C-levels of normal companies often resort to this automation, not just freelancers who want to offer you links.

When I see a person doing this, I don’t want to communicate with them anymore. In my opinion, AI simplifies gaining visibility, but kills reputation.

The easiest way to detect people who leave AI comments is to visit their profiles and check the last 3 comments. Usually, there are 3 long comments left in the same minute under different posts, which is impossible for real discussions.

I understand its use for Reddit SEO or elsewhere, where anonymous accounts are used, but in a professional network, where each of your posts is evaluated to see if it makes sense to work with you, it looks short-sighted.

These three trends lead to an interesting effect. Posts from influencers with 30k-50k followers often get the same number of views as those with 3k-5k followers.

For me, if a post gets 1000 views now, that’s a good result. So, how do I adapt to these changes to continue growing on LinkedIn?

1/ Constantly asking why people add me to connections

A large part of the impact of your posts cannot be easily attributed to likes and comments. Most people who read your posts do not like or comment on them, but they do affect whether you are remembered and chosen.

I began to notice this when I started asking everyone who added me as a friend what interested them in my profile. And they write that they read my content, although I have never seen them among the participants in the discussions.

1000 people who meet your ICP and read you regularly, this is a potentially $50k-100k MRR business, for a product where the minimum ARPU is $100/m.

2/ I treat content on social media like work

For a long time, I treated it as some kind of side activity that could potentially help the business somehow. Now I see that this is my main lever for the business.

Every post is a potential candidate for thought leader ads, which can bring dozens of leads.

When I find a topic that triggers people, I try to write a few more posts, but from different angles.

For example, the first post about Semrush went down very well, after that posts about the Semrush subreddit, their sale to Adobe, pricing changes, and 4 reasons to move to Sitechecker were born.

All these posts went into advertising, and now they are leading among all our campaigns in the number of demos.

A certain change of mindset is needed here. It always seemed to me that writing about the same thing is bad; it shows intellectual laziness, but this is exactly what is needed for business.

3/ I use thought leader ads on LinkedIn as the main advertising channel

So organic reach is falling. But even before, for posts where you are selling your product, you could not get the organic reach that you would like and to the audience that you need.

Thought leader ads are a great lever. Yes, you have to pay for promotion, but how much you have to pay for each click depends again on your writing skills and understanding of what hurts your audience.

For now, these ads are our main channel for attracting customers. According to my statistics, the ideal thought leader post has a CTR of 8-10%. In this case, for the US market, a click costs about $0.7-$0.8.

4/ I am changing the perception of the impact of content

I am increasingly seeing that constant posting is not only about attracting new customers, but also about retaining old customers.

Sometimes, a good post is an educational product that provides additional value to your audience. And visionary posts, where you show where you are moving your product and why, give a sense of perspective and understanding why it is not worth canceling the subscription.

5/ I create lead magnets that I distribute via LinkedIn direct messages

We recently surveyed 73 SEO agencies on how they are adapting to AI search, what they are doing with pricing, margins, growth, etc. Based on this, we made a nice report.

And thanks to the activity in the past 2 years in building contacts, I can send this report directly to potential clients via direct messages.

What are your strategies to adapt to the trends I mentioned? Or do you just stop posting?

Read also:

• 5 insights you can get by merging GSC & GA4 data

• Insights about anonymised Google Search Console data

• SEO product manager role is the future of SEO

• Top SEO influencers to follow

• Top B2B influencers to follow

It helps quickly identify the most valuable pages and explain to customers (if you are a consultant or agency owner) why overall organic traffic growth is a bad SEO KPI, and why you chose to work on specific landing pages and topics.

But after many experiments and talks with SEO consultants, I found that there are more use cases. This is a list of insights I use in my work, but I’ll be happy to read if you have any additional use cases or questions for me, whether the specific chart or report is possible to build at all.

1/ Prioritise landing pages and keywords based on conversion data

Four years ago, I built a unique Looker template to merge GSC & GA4 data. It became a hit and one of my most popular templates ever.

The idea is that GSC metrics aren’t enough to understand which page should be prioritised for content refresh, design imrpovement or link building.

Connecting conversion data from GA4, you can calculate how many additional conversions you could get if the page ranks in the top 1 for all keywords it already ranks for, and the conversion rate will be the same as in a previous period.

This is not 100% accurate approach, because:

• I use the same CTR of the 1st position for all keywords and pages, which is not true.

• It doesn’t count the difference in conversion and CTR between brand and non-brand search queries.

• It doesn’t count that some pages rank by multiple related search queries, but they will never rank №1 by many of them.

• After the AI overview launch, this accuracy becomes even worse, because the 1st position CTR dropped almost 30% for such queries.

But anyway, this is valuable enough, because it answers the main question: Which pages are worth your attention more than others?

Working with this report, you’ll notice 3 facts:

1. Some pages generate a lot of traffic but no conversions at all.

Working to increase traffic on these pages rarely makes sense. It makes sense only if you know that such pages get organic backlinks and you can pass this link weight to money pages.

2. Some pages generate traffic and conversions, but they already win the 1st positions in theSERP, and there is no potential for traffic growth.

It generally makes sense to work only with conversion optimisation on such pages.

3. Some pages have only recently begun to generate their first traffic, and it is still unknown how much they actually convert into conversions.

Make sure that these pages have some proxy conversions, such as creating an account, going to the checkout, visiting book a demo page, etc. It will help you quickly identify their potential, because collecting enough data by purchases usually takes much longer.

Another important insight in this report is that we can calculate the approximate amount of potential conversions the specific keyword can generate if we assume that all keywords by which the landing page ranks have a similar conversion rate (which is close to the truth, because Google already done a job in identifying which user intent the page satisfies).

You can use this table with search queries and potential conversions for another reason too → understanding which queries are worth testing in Google Ads. It’s valuable if you’ve started with SEO, but haven’t run Google Ads campaigns yet.

If you’ve started with search paid ads and want to test SEO, I have another report that helps merge Google Ads and Search Console.

2/ Detect the impact of user behaviour changes on rankings

After many SEO experiments, I see that the Bounce Rate, Avg. Session Duration and overall amount of new Sessions to a landing page have a huge impact on the Average Position metric from GSC.

If we show such metrics on one chart for a landing page or page segment, you can easily detect the impact of a new design, user funnel or updated messaging on your rankings.

I’m building a separate template now that helps to display metrics from GA and GSC on a chart with a Date axis. It should be easy to work with data on a website, page segment and specific landing page level.

You can already get some insights using the on-page report at Sitechecker, because we already have GSC and GA4 metrics there, but they are in different tabs so far.

However, even with different tabs, it’s often easy to detect a time period when something happened with a page. In this case, checking GA4 metrics by landing page is a must-have task.

3/ Identify the real user paths by internal links

GA4 has a parameter Page referrer, and using it, you can build a map of how people navigate your website, link by link, and detect which (often unexpected) pages affect conversions.

It’s not the full path, only 2 steps, but anyway, it can help to understand whether your internal link structure works at all and how to improve it.

This report doesn’t have GSC data, but the decisions you have to make based on that are all around SEO and search metrics.

Questions you have to ask yourself:

• Is the most popular user path the one I want, or do I have to change something in design and internal links?

• Are pages visited as a 2nd step well optimised (if users visit them by internal links, it’s a huge ranking signal and you have a big opportunity to rank them by important keywords)?

Internal links are the old fundamentals that are often underestimated, in a new world where more and more people want to sell AEO as a completely innovative, unique service.

Internal links are also interesting because this is one of the topics where most of the contradictions between marketers, product managers, and SEOs arise.

The conflict is inevitable when you have to define:

• which internal links should the header and footer include;

• which anchor text internal links in the header and footer should have;

• which product landing pages should we link to from the blog.

When you have data, it will be easier to make a decision.

4/ Compare performance in organic search and AI chats

Gemini, as a huge part of Google’s R&D, doesn’t send as much traffic as ChatGPT (yet), but it can change this year fast (the fact that Apple chose Gemini is a huge signal). We see Gemini as a referrer in GA4, and can track it and compare it with metrics from GSC.

The most important thing I want to see here is how the success in search correlates with success in Gemini and vice versa.

If we want to compare only Sessions or Key events, we can do it using only GA4. But I believe we can get interesting insights by comparing Impressions from GSC and Sessions from Gemini.

For example, questions I ask myself:

• Does Google test a page in organic search before recommending it in Gemini?

• If my Average Position in GSC improves, can I expect that I get more visibility in Gemini too?

I plan to build a template to answer these questions, but later, because Gemini still doesn’t send much traffic even to big websites (but it definitely should change in 2026).

5/ Detect the gaps

There are still many interesting questions, I would like to get answers fast:

• Which pages that receive traffic from other channels, aren’t visible in organic search at all (sometimes brands send traffic from Google Ads to good but noindexed pages)?

• Which noindexed pages still receive traffic from organic search and AI chats?

• What Bounce Rate and Avg. Session Duration metrics have had pages, which Google removed from the index recently?

• Which pages have backlinks that send real traffic to them?

I also ran a user poll on my LinkedIn about which of the goals is the most important for people when they merge GSC and GA4, and the results are interesting.

For me, page prioritisation is the most important too. What about you?

Read also:

• Insights about anonymised Google Search Console data

• SEO product manager role is the future of SEO

• Top SEO influencers to follow

• Top B2B influencers to follow

She said that SEO & paid search don’t work anymore as acquisition channels.

Here is my response to it. You can send it to somebody who will use this statement as the 100% truth.

5 reasons why SEO has evolved, but has not died

1/ The impact of AI is very different for different SEO niches.

AI chats killed or almost killed some companies, but it doesn’t kill the entire industry.

It has the biggest impact on news/media and content/affiliate sites, but it’s not that big for B2B / SaaS, e-commerce, and local sites.

This shift highlighted how many websites wrote almost the same content with no additional value. LLMs just fixed the gap.

Here is a good study from Graphite on which websites and industries declined and which grew.

2/ Businesses can create a lot of AI-generated content now, but it’s not easy to index it, rank it, and keep in the top for a long time.

Usually, people who don’t know the history of Google updates and what scanning, indexing, and ranking are talking about the rise of AI-generated content.

Yes, many websites publish AI-generated content, but Google has been fighting with duplicate content and low-quality content for decades.

The only way to get at least some success with AI-generated content is to use an old, authoritative domain name with many backlinks. If you do it with a new website, your pages will stay in Discovered - currently not indexed, or Crawled - currently not indexed statuses in Search Console constantly.

Even if you index and rank your page in the top 10, it’s hard to stay at the top if users visit it and bounce. And they will bounce, because people quickly identify AI-slop.

3/ Search, as an important element of user behavior, has not gone anywhere.

People can change WHERE they search for something, but they search anyway.

Google made a statement that people even search more on Google.

Yes, we see a reduction in clicks for top rankings of almost 30%. But if people get better and faster answers to their search queries, they are motivated to use search more.

4/ People switch more to searching in LLMs, but how do LLMs decide which product or brand to recommend to them?

They look for information that somebody has published, updated, or linked. This is SEO. The fundamentals of getting visibility in AI chats are very similar to old SEO:

• you should know your audience to find the relevant search queries

• you have to write something, on your website and update it regularly

• you have to build your presence on other websites

• etc.

For most commercial queries, LLMs have to use Google or Bing indexes to find relevant, fresh, and unique information to write a better answer.

5/ SEO is one of the few scalable channels.

Communities, built-in-public posts on social, employee-led social: these are good examples of channels you have to use when you start and try to do things that don’t scale. But it’s hard to grow a business with them only.

If you need growth, anyway, you need to invest in:

• outbound (email, LinkedIn, phone calls)

• paid social (influencers, ads on LinkedIn, YouTube, Reddit, Meta)

• search (organic and paid, search engines and LLMs, Google and Reddit, etc)

Moreover, when you invest in the first 2 channels and don’t invest in the search, you lose a lot of the value that your demand generation campaigns created.

Do you have a lot of brand searches and only a homepage or a couple of product pages? It may look okay for OpenAI or Lovable, but it’s a bad decision for the majority of startups.

SEO has changed. These changes vary greatly by niche. But SEO as a channel is not dead and is only growing.

Am I wrong?

Try my templates, if you are tired of the non-friendly interfaces of GA, GSC & GAds:

• AI chats visibility tracking template;

• GA4 Looker Studio template;

• GSC Looker Studio template;

• Google Ads Looker Studio template.

1. At first, my focus was only on constantly publishing posts to grow followers and connections organically.

2. Then I’ve added direct messages by cold and warm prospects to convert people on the demo.

3. Then I’ve launched influencer marketing campaigns to check how I can scale my best-performing posts via non-English speaking influencers.

4. And finally, in Q4-2025, I’ve decided to test thought leadership ads.

The reason I’ve decided to test them is simple → the content that sells best gets little organic reach.

The most viral types of posts are: news, lead magnets, spicy opinions, and checklists. You still need to publish them to be known, build connections and trust, but it’s just not enough if you want to reach all your entire audience.

Even lead magnets. They can generate a huge list of prospects who will be happy to get your template, checklist, etc, but it doesn’t mean people need your software/services.

My approach and results

I chose the Engagement objective (I need people who are active on LI and ready for conversations) and manual bidding (to test ads with a smaller possible budget).

At first, I structured my campaigns like one campaign = multiple countries and one post, but then I switched to one campaign = one country and multiple posts.

The first approach helps you to get more attention for each post, but such campaigns compete with one another because you target the same audience with different content, and increase the final price for you.

The second approach helps you delegate to LinkedIn to decide which posts are worth promoting based on your goal and manage your manual bids for each country flexibly.

I also learned a lot from the how-to posts of paid ads experts Jonathan Dane and Patrick Cumming. They say that it’s better to use Brand Awareness, not Engagement, goal for thought leadership ads, and the target metric in such ads should be:

• Audience penetration > 60-70% → because you have always only 5% of people who are ready to buy among 100% target audience, and only focusing on full penetration helps to achieve all possible buyers.

• Average post frequency = at least 10 times.

I haven’t tried this approach yet, but I plan to do so this quarter and compare it with my old settings.

After the first test in October and disabling ads in low-performing countries, November became the best month. For $13,500, we’ve generated 30 scheduled demos, and additionally, 20 people requested a free trial to play with the app. So, the cost is around $270 per MQL and $450 per SQL, if we measure the impact of ads in the 30-day window.

The most interesting part is that I’ve detected clear winners among posts, why our audience is interested in our product → it’s looking for a Semrush alternative.

Here are my top posts sorted by generated leads:

• “We are looking for a Semrush alternative”

• Semrush’s subreddit has turned into a wall of frustration

• Adobe buys Semrush for $1.9 bln

• Semrush updated its pricing page (after being acquired)

• 10 things you wish Search Console had

• GA4 metrics by landing page, inside on-page SEO audit

• Content updates on your search metrics chart, automatically

I target agencies by:

• industry (the main filter: Marketing Services, Advertising Services)

• titles and years of experience (I need only decision makers)

• skills (it helps to exclude people who run agencies that don’t do SEO)

I also created a couple of audiences for targeting and retargeting:

• The list of emails that our cold email outreach agencies collected

• Users who engaged with ads

• Users who made important actions on the website

The main lessons

1/ You need more posts.

You have to post about your product/service under different angles with different hooks and images to understand what triggers your audience.

I have 15 posts in the campaign, and I add a new post each time we deploy a new important feature, or I get an interesting insight from the sales call.

2/ When you find a topic that performs well, create more posts around it.

When I found that first post about Semrush alternative works so well, I focused my attention on looking for more gaps around this topic.

3/ The design of your posts matters a lot.

Almost all of my posts contain both a link to the website and a call-to-action to ask for a trial, if the reader is interested. Some people like to explore the tool themselves, and some want a demo. It helps to target both types.

4/ I underestimated how deep I should dive into it to make it work.

I still feel that I can get much more from it via:

• experimenting with bids, budgets, and campaign objectives;

• creating more audience-based email lists and predictive audiences;

• publishing more posts in different formats;

• adding campaigns for more countries.

Now I understand how to merge organic posting and paid ads into one system.

The organic posts build credibility and basic awareness, but you are limited by LinkedIn, and most importantly, you often get likes and engagement from different people than you target.

I would like to hear your thoughts if you have had some experience with this type of ads.

Try my templates, if you are tired of the non-friendly interfaces of GA, GSC & GAds:

• AI chats visibility tracking template;

• GA4 Looker Studio template;

• GSC Looker Studio template;

• Google Ads Looker Studio template.

Sitechecker

At the beginning of the year, I finally told myself the truth that we don’t have product-market fit at Sitechecker yet.

And when you don’t have it, setting any goals for Revenue growth in percentages makes little sense.

We had 2 problems at once:

1. Bad retention, because the basis of the product was a technical site audit, which is regularly needed only by large sites

2. The main acquisition channel (SEO) sent us the wrong audience.

For the product, we decided to build advanced analytics based on GSC / GA4.

I saw demand for this building and distributing my own Looker Studio templates, as well as an example of the growth of mono-tools SEOgets and SEOstack.

As always, it took longer than we wanted, and we still haven’t finished, but this bet has paid off, and now it is one of the main reasons people buy the tool.

When it comes to customer acquisition, I took Rob Snyder’s product-market fit assessment model and decided to follow it step by step:

1. Main goal is to convert users to demos instead of self-sales, even if the unit economics don’t work yet.

2. You can understand customer needs and what exactly motivates them to buy your product only with a significant number of calls, ideally 40-50 demos per month.

3. While there are no such numbers of calls, all other problems are irrelevant.

So, we changed our focus in user acquisition to cold email outreach, LinkedIn outreach, and paid LinkedIn ads, but only in Q4. This gave results (we currently have about 30 demos per month), but their fruits should be fully manifested only next year.

In general:

• we reduced the Monthly Churn Rate by several percent;

• we increased ARPU and LTV;

• we are currently attracting fewer customers than before, but all these customers are from the same segment and a similar use case.

The main goal for the next year is to scale paid advertising and increase conversion from demos to sales through the right product solutions.

Ivanhoe Digital (Looker Studio templates)

This direction brought in $4k in a year. I didn’t pay enough attention to it, as I devoted all my free time to consulting, which brings in more.

But I made 2 important changes that I regret not having done earlier:

1/ I turned the site into an e-commerce store on WooCommerce.

Before that, it was just regular pages with a payment button without any design. It still needs a normal design, but orders are coming in.

2/ I added the ability to get free templates through the cart, where you need to at least enter your email to get the template.

I see that the leader in this niche earns an average of $10k per month without investing in advertising and with almost zero operating expenses, and I predict that I can also reach this figure if I successfully implement the following steps:

• Adding a beautiful website design to build trust and improve conversion.

• Create a separate all-in-one offer that includes all templates for $1k.

• Hack distribution through content marketing, where my competitor is underperforming (LinkedIn, Twitter, Reddit, newsletter).

Even if these steps don’t work, I plan to keep this direction, as this project nicely reinforces other projects. Templates work well as lead magnets for services and software where LTV is much higher.

SEO growth advisorship

I started the year with one regular client, a startup from France, influencer marketing platform Favikon. The owner, Jeremy Boissinot, wrote to me in November 2024 after reading my posts on LinkedIn.

In the second half of 2025, I began to receive more and more requests for consulting and a separate service on Reddit SEO, but I did not bring these leads to sales, as there was no time for them, and I realized that further in this direction can only be developed in the agency format or by switching to full-time consulting.

I asked some top SEO advisors how much they charge clients per month, what services they provide, how many clients they manage at the same time, and why they do not switch to the agency format.

This was the most interesting and important strategic question that I wanted to solve for myself.

Consultants working with US-based companies charge $5k-6k and manage 4-5 clients at a time. At first, I liked this model more than an agency, but when I started experimenting with Reddit SEO, parasite SEO on Medium, and in general, the more requests I received from B2B SaaS companies, the more I noticed that:

1. Recommendations alone are not enough. To deliver a good result, you need a strategy and a lot of work, which a junior SEO or content marketer should do.

2. When working with one type of company, this service can be standardized quite a lot and packaged into a product, gradually reducing its cost and increasing the price.

3. Some things can only pay off if you do them for 10-20 clients at once.

Therefore, an agency looks like a better solution for now. I have already come up with the B2B Gaps brand and launched a draft of the site.

Personal brand/build in public

I continue to use social media, because it is a good lever for the growth of the three projects mentioned above.

LinkedIn gives me the most leads and clients, but my growth has slowed down a lot, even though I made 200 posts per year:

• LinkedIn continues to cut the organic reach of posts.

• I published fewer lead magnets this year.

I’ve grown my LinkedIn audience from 11k to 18k subscribers, but the launch of thought leadership ads had a big impact on growth in Q4. I will tell about my experience with this type of advertising in one of the next newsletters.

Also in Q3, I received 2 invitations to podcasts, one from LinkedIn, the second from Twitter.

This newsletter, Hack the Algo, grew to 500 subscribers, and this is a bad result. The reason is a few emails. Intellectually, this is the most difficult type of content.

In the long term, I see the value in growing this channel, but it’s hard to sell myself on the idea of ​​spending 3-4 hours on one post/letter per week, instead of spending it on something that can make money right now.

Why I did it

It’s an important question. There are already 4 popular SEO communities on Reddit: /r/seo, /r/bigseo/, /r/techseo/, /r/seogrowth, and many small ones.

A week ago, I was permanently banned from the biggest SEO community /r/seo, because one of my posts was marked as spam.

My story about it on LinkedIn became hot. I got a lot of comments that other popular SEOs were also banned there. I felt that something was wrong here.

Self-promotion is restricted or limited in almost all popular SEO subreddits. I understand this. However, such self-promotion remains, but appears to be honest recommendations from anonymous accounts.

I am sure it creates wrong incentives, and I want to do the opposite in my community.

Rules of my SEO community

1/ Self-promotion isn’t restricted, if it’s done right. Discussing tools, methods, industry leaders, etc, is part of the industry.

2/ Users aren’t equal in their rights:

• If you have a real profile and it clearly says who you are, you have more rights.

• If you have a track record of valuable comments and posts, you have more rights.

3/ If you’ve created a new tool, framework, agent, or guide, you can do a post about it, but you have to explain why it’s better than existing solutions.

4/ I want to see marketers and product managers from all SEO / AI tools there. People often have questions about brands, and it’s great when they can be answered with details by official representatives.

5/ If you have published a great post on LinkedIn / X, I want to see your post in my subreddit too.

5/ No AI-generated content.

I understand that over time, I will probably have to further detail the community rules and add new ones to remove spam.

But I openly say that the work of moderators is a rather subjective thing. I will also be subjective.

Content types to expect

For now, I publish just my own posts there, but after reaching the first 200 members, I want to start the AMA section with the best SEO / marketers in our industry. If this is you and you are interested in taking part in it, let me know.

Also, this is the only place where you can ask any question about SEO, B2B marketing, web analytics, etc, and get a detailed answer from me.

Step by step, we’ll cover more topics there:

• How to grow in an SEO career and business

• Being an SEO consultant vs in-house vs running own agency

• The future of SEO

• Communication with customers and stakeholders

• How to price your services and products

• How to get track AI visibility

• etc.

If you like my content and feel it can be helpful for you, join now → https://www.reddit.com/r/seogaps/.

I really like Reddit as a user. I see companies try to build their communities on Facebook Groups, Skool, Discord, and Slack, but it doesn’t work in many cases. Reddit is a much better place.

P.S. I understand that growing your own subreddit is hard. It can take years, but I don’t wait for quick results. I just feel that this is the right decision. This is an experiment that is worth trying.

Try my templates, if you are tired of the non-friendly interfaces of GA, GSC & GAds:

• AI chats visibility tracking template;

• GA4 Looker Studio template;

• GSC Looker Studio template;

• Google Ads Looker Studio template.

1. Reddit threads appear 1-2 times in Google's top 10 for almost all informational and commercial keywords.

2. Reddit threads appear in AI chat responses and citations, because Reddit has tons of unique, detailed answers to popular questions, you won’t find anywhere else.

3. It creates a positive feedback loop: more and more people join Reddit as new active users after finding this forum via Google search or AI chats.

Now, Reddit is the 7th most visited website in the world according to Similarweb.

This is also an Ahrefs chart that covers only organic search traffic growth.

x10 growth in 2 years, from 100mln to 1bln monthly visitors!

I’ve been playing with all possible Reddit SEO growth options for the last 2 years.

I helped grow visibility on Reddit only for B2B brands, like Ivanhoe Digital (my Looker Studio templates business), Sitechecker, Favikon, and others, and developed my own framework for how to do it properly.

Try my templates, if you are tired of the non-friendly interfaces of GA, GSC & GAds:

• AI chats visibility tracking template;

• GSC Looker Studio template;

• Google Ads Looker Studio template.

2 only mindsets for Reddit growth

1. Anonymous

In this case, you try to hack the algo by following the steps:

• Hire a freelancer, or an agency, or build an in-house team.

• They buy old anonymous accounts or create new ones and warm them up.

• They use multiple accounts to publish as many comments and get as many upvotes as possible.

• They simulate discussions, publishing both posts and comments from their own network of accounts.

This is the most popular approach. It reduces the cost of one brand mention and has the opportunity for scaling, because you delegate these tasks to junior marketers.

However, it has 2 huge problems: trust and advanced Reddit tactics to reduce spam.

To win trust, you have to explain why this product or service is the better solution in a specific use case and what your experience of using it.

It’s hard to scale, because you need either expensive, experienced marketers or advanced workflows of building legends around your accounts, and generating meaningful, deep comments via AI chats.

Also, Reddit has one of the best anti-spam algorithms. Warming up accounts requires resources.

It’s very similar to backlinks in Google. Everybody buys them, but because backlinks have become more expensive, it becomes a great filter. As a result, win only 2 types of businesses: the ones who found a way to acquire backlinks organically, or ones who ready to invest a lot of money into it for a long time.

2. Brand ambassador

This is the approach I use. I promote only B2B SaaS brands I know, use, or build. It’s not scalable because it’s hard to outsource, but it helps to win trust and win first places with own comments organically.

In this case, I use the best practices of building in public from X / LinkedIn. I share my experience, mistakes, lessons, and best practices.

However, often this is not enough. Anyway, you have to involve other people to upvote your comments and posts. If you won’t do that, you’ll lose to those who does it.

3 only methods for Reddit promotion

Leave comments

This is the main method most companies use and sounds like an easy task, but there are 3 pitfalls.

1. Finding threads that are worth attention

1.1. Topics that are already at the top of Google for your keywords

This is the fastest way to start. You can get the first results in 1 hour!

Some of them are already 1-2 years old, and sometimes you can't leave a comment there because they are achieved or deleted, but in 50% of cases, you can.

When I started to do this 2 years ago, I could leave comments with links to my websites. With this approach, it was easy both to get traffic to your website and track conversions from this channel.

Due to these comments, Reddit is still the 3rd biggest traffic source to Ivanhoe Digital.

Now, Reddit and subreddit owners are more and more restricting such comments.

That’s why in 90% of comments today, I leave only a brand name and share links only when people ask for that.

In this case, you have such options to track your efforts:

• Check the number of views under your comments (it’s hard anyway, because you have to do it manually).

• Check the impressions growth by brand search queries in Google Search Console.

• Check the number of direct messages you get from people interested in your product/service.

1.2 New threads for category keywords and your competitors' keywords that constantly appear.

For this case, I described how I use the free Reddit keyword monitoring tool to get real-time notifications on new posts or comments.

Primarily, I target 2 types of keywords:

• competitors’ brand names or competitor brand name + alternative;

• bottom- and middle of the funnel keywords with high intent.

This requires constant efforts, and it’s harder to measure the ROI. The most valuable threads are ones that:

• will become viral on Reddit;

• will start ranking in the top 10 of Google SERP;

• will be included in the answers of AI chats.

But you can’t forecast it when the new post appears! This is a game of numbers. 1 comment can pay back 100 comments that didn’t bring results.

The only tip here is to save links to all such threads and review them once per quarter, to see whether some of them started ranking in Google's top 10, AI chats, or became viral.

2 Drive your comment to the top in the relevant threads

This is the big pain. Constant commenting isn’t enough. The highest visibility gets the post itself and the first comment.

If you left a valuable comment, the first one (because you did it immediately after notification from F5bot), you have high chances to get organic upvotes and become the 1st comment in the thread.

However, it’s hard to replicate, and you can’t get these results when commenting in the old threads.

To get the 1st place, you ideally need about 5-10 upvotes for your comment. To get this, you need to constantly involve other people with live accounts to upvote for your comments, because the anti-spam systems on Reddit work very well.

At the same time, anti-spam rules work separately at the level of the entire Reddit and separately at the level of different subreddits. Often, even upvotes from users with old and trusted accounts aren’t counted if they didn’t take part in a specific subreddit before.

Some of the popular subreddits can block you not only for a link, but for mentioning a brand or even just the phrase "DM me". So you have to be very attentive to each subreddit's rules.

However, even getting the 1st place with your comment isn’t enough.

3. Leave comments with rich context to increase conversion

Anyway, you need sales, not just visibility. Sales come from trust. The short comment “try this product” lacks trust.

This is the hardest to delegate to an outsourcer, because fake comments are easy to read, and Reddit users are some of the most aggressive and will downvote you harshly.

Publish your own posts in popular subreddits

Answering questions is easier than creating new topics that engage people. Also, admins of subreddits check posts for spam more strictly than comments.

Sometimes, even threads without brand mentions, with a great engagement and 100k views, can be deleted after 1-2 days. Below is an example of my post with a data study that became extremely popular on the /SEO subreddit, but was deleted after 2 days.

Anyway, publishing own post is one of the valuable methods because:

• Some subreddits approve posts about your product and services.

• It’s a great option to get feedback from your ideal customers.

• You can share your product in comments later.

• You can attract attention to your profile and start getting DMs from potential customers.

Also, consider that you define the title and text of the post, and these are the main parts of the content that Google evaluates by which keyword to rank this thread.

So, publishing posts is the main way of growing traffic, and via parasite SEO tactics, similar to parasite SEO on Medium.

However, people create much more content on the same keywords on Reddit. To win first place in Google SERP you must have both a better content and better engagement (it means many comments and valuable comments).

Create and grow your own subreddit

Popular subreddits are the fastest way to get a lot of reach, whether via virality or ranking in Google, but it’s hard to do because the admins of such subreddits strictly review posts.

Launching and growing your own subreddit requires a lot of time and resources, but the outcome is 100% power to decide what to publish.

For example, 1 month ago, I suggested Favikon team create a company page on Reddit. Jeremy Boissinot, CEO of the company considered this idea seriously and started acting immediately (btw, he just launched his own newsletter with influencer marketing data studies).

He designed a Reddit page himself, started posting the first content, and allocated the team resources to grow it as fast as possible.

After 30 days, there are already 100 members and 8k impressions. I believe until the end of the year, there will be 1,000 members and 100k impressions.

You can create the subreddit designing it as a company page, or design it as a niche subreddit around your topic, for example /b2binfluencermarketing. I see 4 reasons why this is a must-have for popular brands to launch such pages.

1. Own a narrative

There are many niche-related subreddits, but they often have too few interesting posts, and they don't give you the option to publish news about your company.

Growing your own interesting subreddit around a high-level topic (in this case, influencer marketing), you can become the first place your potential users visit to ask questions, read news, and get help.

2. Attract a new audience from Reddit

This is the most interesting. Reddit has a similar feed algorithm as LinkedIn / X / Substack and shows you threads not only from subreddits you subscribed to, but also from relevant subreddits based on your interests. If you publish engaging content, Reddit will promote it.

3. Win more Google SERPs

Google indexes Reddit threads faster, better, and longer than LinkedIn posts. A lot of the content you create isn't worth publishing on your website, but on a scale, it can generate a lot of new users to your threads on Reddit by long tail keywords.

4. Add one more channel to serve your customers

Reddit is the best place to ask questions, and there are a lot of people from all over the world now. Add this channel to help your customers succeed, and you win their hearts.

Reddit SEO for enterprises is different

A week ago, I talked with an SEO at a big enterprise B2B SaaS brand. She shared that they also work with Reddit, but in most cases, it’s not a game to get more visibility. It’s a game of reputation management.

When you are the leader of the market, competitors are ready to spend a lot of resources to destroy your reputation by publishing fake, bad stories from anonymous accounts.

In this case, your team still has to get notifications from F5bot every time your brand is mentioned, but it’s important to train your team as customer success agents and product marketers. They have to know well what people like and what they don’t like in your product, and should be able to extinguish the negative.

That’s all. If you run a B2B SaaS brand and feel that I can help you with the growth on Reddit, write me on LinkedIn.

P.S. Don’t miss my previous posts:

• 12 lessons on how to grow on LinkedIn

• SEO product manager role is the future

• 2 types of anonymized data in Search Console

• Top SEO influencers to follow

• Top B2B influencers to follow

The question of HOW to grow is more popular because things change fast: LinkedIn updates its algorithm often, it creates new restrictions, and competition grows fast as more and more people start publishing content.

Often, people with more experience, better content, and case studies lose to people who just figured out the rules of this game better and work more consistently.

I grew from 2k to 10k followers in 10 months, and then from 10k to 15k followers in 8 months. I believe you’ll be able to move faster after reading these lessons.

Try my templates, if you are tired of the non-friendly interfaces of GA, GSC & GAds:

• GA4 Looker Studio template;

• GSC Looker Studio template;

• Google Ads Looker Studio template.

1. Viral posts are the only leverage to grow fast

My goal in 2024 was to achieve 10k followers by the end of 2024. In the summer, I started to worry because I was adding 500-600 subscribers per month, while I needed at least 700 per month.

Then this happened. One viral post about the fight between Semrush and Ahrefs brought me 1k followers in a week!

After researching the stats from other SEO influencers, I found similar patterns. Most of their charts of the growth in followers have spikes.

In my case, two types of posts were the most successful: my Looker Studio templates and my thoughts about trending news in the SEO space.

So, there are two lessons for growth here:

1/ Create a lot of free value and give it only as a reward for engagement.

You were probably involved in such posts as a reader.

2/ Constantly practice riding the wave of trending news in your industry.

It may be harder. You have to monitor news in your industry, and when something spicy happens, you should publish this news and your thoughts immediately.

2. Consider your comments as posts

For most people, it was hard to consider comments seriously. Especially, after seeing how many AI comments and non-valuable comments appear under posts.

However, LinkedIn changed it after adding an option to see how many impressions your comments generate.

Once you start doing it, you’ll find that often your comments generate more impressions than your average post. However, it’s not enough to leave comments under all posts in your feed.

To succeed in this tactic, you have:

1. leave highly valuable comments;

2. leave them first;

3. leave them under the posts of big influencers.

To implement it, find top LinkedIn influencers in your industry and choose to get notifications for all their posts.

3. Collaborate with local influencers

I publish my posts with Looker Studio templates in English. Even when they become viral and I reach 50k people, there is still a huge worldwide audience that hasn’t seen them.

I’ve tried distributing it by partnering with influencers from Brazil, Spain, France, Italy, Turkey, etc. They published the same posts in their language, tagged me, and said that people need to connect with me to get the template.

Also, there are two lessons here:

1. The cost of replication is always cheaper than creating new value, so don't stop distributing your lead magnet until you reach your entire target audience.

2. A huge number of people in your industry do not speak English but need your product or lead magnet.

4. Send connection requests to your ICP

Sending friend requests is the most limited option for growing followers, but it helps to attract the biggest share of your ICP.

Most influencers with more than 10k followers stop doing this and gradually reduce the share of active, highly qualified specialists who read their content and participate in discussions.

Also, adding non-relevant or inactive people to contacts is a big risk for your reach.

I didn't see it in the LinkedIn algorithm guides or updates, but I assume here the same logic works as on all social media.

LinkedIn evaluates your post performance in the first hour, showing it to your followers. If you have too many non-relevant or inactive followers, you'll have a low 1st hour engagement rate, and it will kill all your efforts.

That's why I almost don't add people who didn't post anything on LinkedIn yet and send connection requests only to my ICPs: SEO experts and B2B influencers.

5. Add LinkedIn as an everyday task to your calendar

You have to take it seriously. Every day when I visit LinkedIn, I try to:

• publish one post;

• leave 3-5 comments;

• send connection requests to 10-20 people;

• write a message to 10-20 people who accepted my connection.

Once you’ve set up a routine, it’s important to stop measuring whether it's worth it!

You won’t get anything in 1 day or 1 week. You have to do a retrospective only once per month, quarter.

Sometimes you just don’t do good enough or not long enough. Considering LinkedIn as a daily task, you’ll get better at writing, your ICP detection, understanding what the biggest pain of your market is now, etc.

For half of my posts, I didn’t expect that they would become viral. The more you write, the more you increase your chances of becoming viral.

6. Block AI comments under your posts

If you won’t do it, people who leave good comments will ignore your posts. You are responsible for the quality of discussions under your posts!

It’s easy to detect people who leave AI comments. If you see that the comment is too basic, too obvious, visit the person’s profile and check the last 3 comments they left. In most cases, you’ll see that they leave comments every minute. It’s a clear sign.

7. Experimenting with different formats is overrated

After several experiments with different formats, I realized that I don't like carousels, neither creating nor reading.

So I decided for myself that the text + image format is my strongest side and I will concentrate only on it.

The biggest influencers I see follow this format in 80% cases.

8. Don't be afraid to ignore the wrong audience

Once you start growing in impressions and followers, more and more people will write you for different reasons.

I tried to help everyone who wrote me a message or comment. But as the number of requests grew, I realized that it would end badly. You have to protect your time and keep your goal: reaching as many people as possible who need your product or service.

9. Number of followers is a proxy metric

It shouldn’t be your primary goal.

This is the most visible and the easiest to measure; however, there is too much noise:

• How many of these followers engage with your content regularly?

• How many of these followers are your target audience?

• How many of these followers are willing to answer your question in private messages?

So, if not the number of followers, then what goal should you set for yourself?

• How many people who your ICP engage with your content?

• How many deep conversations have you had with your ICP?

• How many high-authority influencers engage with your content?

• How many people ask you for advice via DM?

• How many people who booked a demo say they found you on LinkedIn?

• How many people invite you to take part in a podcast, conference, or other event?

• How many brands want to hire you as an advisor or brand ambassador?

10. Followers is a proxy metric, but it works for trust

The number of followers doesn’t pay bills. However, this proxy metric has a huge impact on the decision of your ICP whether it is worth accepting your connection request and reading your first message.

I discovered it after reaching 10k followers. More and more people who didn’t accept my friend requests before start accepting them.

Social proof worked, works, and will work. On landing pages, offline ads, or LinkedIn profiles. This is a proxy metric, but it is still hard to hack and repeat. It's like backlinks for Google.

11. Don’t underestimate the side effects of growth on LinkedIn

If you try to measure the ROI of your LinkedIn activity each month, you'll be sad and stop soon. For 3 reasons:

1. You don't count the compounding effect of your efforts (it may be worth writing for 5 years for only one post in the future that will generate you $1mln ARR in 1 week).

2. You never know what impact the next contact will make on your business; it may new big enterprise customer or investor, or partner.

3. You don't know how much value it will create for other channels like cold email outreach.

12. If you don't know how to earn with 5k followers, you won't earn with 50k followers

I saw this statement in a post on LinkedIn and agree with it. The key to success is to:

1. Create your high LTV offer.

2. Create a spicy narrative.

3. Define your ICP and focus all activity around it.

4. Create a lot of free value related to the core high LTV offer

For example, my spicy narrative: most agencies do SEO reporting wrong. My Looker Studio templates and Sitechecker help to solve that.

15k is a small milestone, but I feel that after 10k, the game has changed.

When you start your journey, the "low base effect" works. You have a lot of new interesting things to share. Then it becomes harder to deliver value every month.

However:

• Now I understand the rules of this game better.

• I know that discipline is the most important thing here.

• I feel I can hit 100k followers in the SEO / marketing niche in 3 years.

Yes, an algorithm changes often. Yes, many new people start creating content here because they see huge value in it.

However, too few have a unique combination of the ability to create a unique value and the ability to keep the rhythm of being active here for years.

It’s only a B2B influencers list that got on my radar and who helped me with their content in my specific situation (growing B2B SaaS Sitechecker and Looker Studio agency). I don't use numbers. It's not a rating. I don’t rank influencers by followers.

If you need to find more people, use the Favikon’s “Top 100 B2B influencers” list. They have filters by categories and a transparent and accurate scoring system.

Try my templates, if you are tired of the non-friendly interfaces of GA, GSC & GAds:

• GA4 Looker Studio template;

• GSC Looker Studio template;

• Google Ads Looker Studio template.

Rob Snyder

(LinkedIn, Newsletter)

Focus: finding product-market fit for startups.

If you launch a startup or hit a plateau, you need to read his newsletter from A to Z.

John Rush

(LinkedIn, Twitter, Newsletter)

Focus: bootstrapping 20+ startups, automating everything, indie hacking

Most business experts say you have to focus on one thing to succeed (and I agree). John shows the opposite. I learn from him how to write to grow on social media, how to launch monoproducts, and how to prioritize your tasks.

Brian Balfour

(LinkedIn, Twitter, Newsletter)

Focus: teaching how to grow the startup

His article on product-channel fit and related topics helped me understand how to approach marketing channels and why SEO product managers are the future of SEO.

Patrick Campbell

(LinkedIn, Twitter, Newsletter)

Focus: pricing and monetization strategies, subscription analytics, SaaS growth.

I read Patrick’s blog on Profitwell for a long time before it was acquired by Paddle. It’s a great resource to understand how to reduce churn and grow the LTV of your SaaS.

Nathan Latka

(LinkedIn, Twitter)

Focus: sharing the best stories of SaaS growth.

Nathan’s unique interviews with SaaS founders help to learn the best patterns and strategies of growth at different stages of the company.

Jeremy Boissinot

(LinkedIn, Twitter)

Focus: influencer marketing for brands, growing and earning as a content creator.

As the CEO of Favikon, Jeremy constantly shares lessons, best decisions, and mistakes during the SaaS growth. The data studies and rankings the Favikon team made help a lot of new creators understand how much they can achieve.

Greg Icenberg

(LinkedIn, Twitter, Newsletter)

Focus: how to launch and grow a startup.

Greg shares a helicopter view of what’s going on with the startup industry, how AI changes it, and how you can ride this wave.

Christoph Janz

(LinkedIn, Twitter, Blog)

Focus: how to grow a startup.

Now Christoph writes rarely on Medium, but his old blog on Blogspot has a ton of value for startup founders, even after 10 years.

Daniel Vassallo

(LinkedIn, Twitter)

Focus: how to bootstrap and why it’s better than venture capital.

Daniel’s story of switching from a high-paying job at Amazon to an indie hacker is worth attention. The biggest lessons are: how to grow on Twitter quickly and build a product around the community.

Noah Kagan

(LinkedIn, Twitter, Newsletter)

Focus: how to launch and grow a startup

Even after building a $100M company, AppSumo, Noah creates a lot of useful content for startup founders. His email newsletter feels very personal discussion about what helped him to grow.

Ayman Al-Abdullah

(LinkedIn, Twitter, Newsletter)

Focus: helping CEO's go from 7 to 9 figures by working less.

Ayman worked with Noah at Appsumo. I found his profile on Twitter only 1 year ago, but his approach to evaluating a company and CEO is so simple and effective, that his posts are real diamonds.

Jasmin Alic

(LinkedIn, Newsletter)

Focus: growing a personal brand on LinkedIn.

If you enter LinkedIn and want to grow there, this is the number 1 person you should follow.

Robert Kaminski

(LinkedIn)

Focus: positioning and messaging for B2B startups.

Robert, with his partner Anthon, created great frameworks on how you should approach positioning for your startup. Don’t look at big brands’ messages: they often make basic mistakes, and they often are at a different stage than your business.

Elena Verna

(LinkedIn, Newsletter)

Focus: product-led growth for B2B SaaS companies.

I always open Elena’s newsletters. Now she writes about how AI changes the markets and how old rules often stop working.

Joe Davies

(LinkedIn, Twitter)

Focus: launching and growing an agency.

Joe shares a lot on how he is growing his agency, Fatjoe, and is an ambassador of productized services. If you ever thought of starting your agency, you must follow him.

Peep Laja

(LinkedIn, Twitter, Newsletter)

Focus: messaging for B2B companies.

Peep is doing a lot of valuable data studies on how people buy B2B products, how B2B marketers make decisions, etc. I am always waiting for his posts.

Ognjen Bošković

(LinkedIn)

Focus: growing a startup via building a founder brand on LinkedIn.

Ognjen helps to align your content marketing on LinkedIn with your lead generation and business goals.

Harry Dry

(LinkedIn, Twitter, Newsletter)

Focus: marketing case studies and copywriting.

If you know everything about copywriting and if you know nothing about copywriting, you have to visit Harry’s website and read at least a couple of case studies.

Alex Hormozi

(LinkedIn, Twitter)

Focus: teaching on how to start and scale companies.

It’s a big guy, you probably know him :) But anyway, I like to watch his videos. I’m shocked that I found something valuable and new in each video. Alex focuses on the basics of business, but all of them, and with a huge attention to detail.

Lenny Rachitsky

(LinkedIn, Twitter, Newsletter)

Focus: deeply researched product, growth, and career advice.

It’s hard to view each interview Lenny publishes, but when he does data studies like good churn rate or finding a product-market fit, it’s usually a must-read.

Daniel Priestley

(LinkedIn, Twitter)

Focus: how to become an influencer, how to use surveys for lead generation.

I discovered Daniel only 3 months ago, and I wish I had learned about him earlier. It looks like he was one of the first who understand the impact of creators and influencer marketing and the importance of a founder's brand on business.

Jason Cohen

(LinkedIn, Twitter, Newsletter)

Focus: frameworks for decision making for founders and CEOs.

After building two unicorns, Jason has what to say about each decision you make growing a startup. I like his explanations, graphics, and frameworks.

Adam Robinson

(LinkedIn, Newsletter)

Focus: bootstrapping B2B SaaS, growing founder brand on LinkedIn.

Adam is one of the most successful examples of how you can use LinkedIn to grow your B2B SaaS. He is extremely transparent about his numbers and mistakes, and his content is like a real-time course, where you can’t miss any new lesson.

Nick Kolenda

(LinkedIn, Twitter, Newsletter)

Focus: tactics that boost conversions, backed by science-backed data studies.

Nick doesn’t publish on social media too much, but his newsletter it’s a big gold mine. Many topics in marketing are myths, or not myths, but rules that no one knows why they work. Nick’s newsletters help to destroy myths and confirm working rules via data studies.

Rand Fishkin

(LinkedIn, Twitter)

Focus: audience research, marketing attribution.

Rand was one of the most famous SEO experts running Moz. Now he runs a new product, SpartToro, but his influence may be even bigger and goes beyond SEO.

That’s it! Who are your favorite B2B creators, which I didn’t include, and why do you value them?

However, if you want to go deeper and analyze more than 1 website, and do it fast, you have to try my free template based on GA4 data. I am sure you’ll love it.

Buy template here >>

This template was free for 3 months; now, it’s paid only.

How to use the AI chat traffic analytics template

View a quick video or read the text instructions below.

The first page (AI vs search vs social)

This page is built for one goal: to compare the traffic from AI chats with traffic from other organic channels like organic search and organic social.

Considering how fast the adoption of AI chats grows, it makes sense.

To create such a report, I’ve created a custom dimension with the following formula.

You can copy the code below if you want to use it in your own GA4 template.

CASE
  WHEN REGEXP_CONTAINS(Session source / medium, "(chatgpt\\.com|perplexity\\.ai|claude\\.ai|claude\\.anthropic\\.com|gemini\\.google\\.com|bard\\.google\\.com|character\\.ai|poe\\.com|huggingface\\.co|you\\.com|replika\\.ai|copilot\\.microsoft\\.com).*") 
    THEN "AI Chats" 

  WHEN REGEXP_CONTAINS(Session source / medium, "(t\\.co|reddit\\.com|linkedin\\.com|lnkdn\\.in|facebook\\.com|fb\\.com|youtube\\.com|youtu\\.be|instagram\\.com|twitter\\.com|x\\.com|tiktok\\.com|pinterest\\.com|snapchat\\.com|quora\\.com|threads\\.net)\\s*/\\s*referral") 
    THEN "Organic Social"

  WHEN REGEXP_CONTAINS(Session source / medium, "(google|bing|yahoo|duckduckgo|ecosia|baidu)\\s*/\\s*organic") 
    THEN "Organic Search"
  ELSE "Other" 
END 

By default, I use the Sessions metric on the charts and pivot tables, but you can change it to Key events or New users, or add your optional metrics after copying.

After this screen, you’ll find the breakdown by sources for all 3 organic channels. You can also change metrics on the pie charts from Sessions to Key Events.

After this, you’ll find the table I like the most on this page: an easy comparison of sessions from 3 organic channels by landing pages.

You may be surprised that AI chats may send the same amount of traffic as organic search engines to some pages, and sometimes even more! It's worth analyzing.

The second page (sources)

Here you can view the detailed performance by specific source.

Including performance in dynamics.

The third page (landing pages)

It has the same charts and tables as the previous page, but also a valuable pivot table where you can compare traffic from different AI chats for each landing page.

The 4th page has the same charts as the 3rd page, but for countries.

The fifth page (page segments)

This page is for advanced users who work on big websites where page segmentation is a must.

By default, I use a Content Group dimension from GA4, which I’ve set up via Google Tag Manager for my website. You can use my way, or you can create a custom dimension in Looker Studio after copying the template.

The problem with a Content Group is that it’s not applied to historical data, while a custom dimension in Looker Studio is applied to historical data.

If you create a custom dimension in Looker Studio, you should replace all charts in a Content Group with the name of your custom dimension.

Here is my detailed guide on why I recommend using page segmentation for reporting and how to do it properly.

How to copy the template

Unfortunately, you can’t copy a template in 1 click without the issues.

This is because the custom dimension Organic channels is created on a data connector level and can’t be copied when you copy the template.

Also, all filters in the template work based on this custom dimension.

You have 2 choices here:

1. Continue using my template without copying. It will be enough for you in most cases.

2. If you want to copy the template to own it and customize it for your own purposes, view my video from this time.

Let me know what you think about that.

P.S. Don’t miss my other popular Looker Studio templates:

• Keyword Cannibalization Checker (based on GSC data);

• Keyword Ranking Report Template (for keyword research);

• SEO forecasting template based on blending GA4 and GSC data ($249);

• Advanced GA4 Looker Studio template ($199);

• Advanced Google Ads Looker Studio template ($199).

Many limitations make it almost impossible to dive deeper and work fast with data.

With my team, we’ve built a better solution, but at first, let me do a short intro on how SEOs tried to go beyond GSC limitations before.

For a long time, there were 2 popular solutions to this problem:

1/ Work with Google Search Console API

It usually means connecting GSC data to data warehouses or tools for better storage and visualization:

• BigQuery — for large-scale storage and querying.

• Google Sheets — using Google Apps Script or connectors (like Search Analytics for Sheets)

• Looker Studio — via community connectors (often with row limits unless enhanced via BigQuery)

• Python or R scripts — for automated data pulls, transformations, and reporting.

All these solutions require a lot of time to learn new things. Using Google Sheets is easier, but it has its limits, too.

2/ Using pre-built Looker Studio templates

This is one of the fastest solutions. People build a lot of great things in Looker Studio, and you can use pre-built tables, charts, and filters just connecting your GSC property.

I built and sold my SEO & PPC Looker templates for years. There is a huge demand for it.

However, the more I work with Looker Studio, the more I hit limitations it has, too.

5 Looker Studio limitations for GSC reporting

1/ It’s slow and broken too often

If you request data for more than 1-3 months and apply many filters, you may wait for 10-30 seconds! until you see the data.

The other issue is that when you reach the GSC API usage limits, you won’t be able to work with data at all. All your charts will be unavailable sometimes for 10 minutes, sometimes for 1 day.

2/ It doesn’t have weekly grouping

It sounds like a small issue, but weekly grouping is the best way to detect anomalies in charts.

3/ It requires a lot of skills for customization

There are some basic things you still need to add or update to work with the template:

• brand / non-brand keywords grouping

• grouping pages by intent

• grouping pages by language version

• grouping keywords by intent

Even when you copy a template from somebody, you have to update these fields or create your custom fields for each website.

The other issue is that custom metrics set up on the data source side aren’t copied when you copy the template.

4/ It’s hard to combine with other data sources

For me, this is the main one, for 2 reasons:

• The best insights you usually find are on the intersection of different data sources.

• You usually want to switch quickly between different tools.

In Looker Studio, I can’t quickly check:

• what technical issues does the page have;

• which title, h1-h6 structure it has;

• which internal backlinks does it have;

• the impact of Google updates and content changes I made on website and page performance.

5/ You still need BigQuery set up to store more data and use metrics as filters

The basic GSC Looker Studio template extends your opportunities to some level. But for more, you still need to dive deeper and spend a lot of time and money on BigQuery.

That’s why I decided that Sitechecker can become a better place to work with GSC.

We’ve solved both Search Console limitations and Looker Studio limitations.

• It’s easier to set up than setting up BigQuery and Looker Studio.

• It is easier to switch between GSC data and Site Audit, Site Monitoring.

• It’s easy to share and collaborate.

5 Sitechecker features that go beyond Search Console limitations

1/ View and export more than 1,000 rows of keywords and pages

2/ View the number of ranked pages and the number of ranked keywords

3/ Apply multi-condition filters by pages and keywords

4/ Filter keywords and pages by metrics ranges

5/ View a top-ranking page for each keyword and a top-ranking keyword for each page

This is so important and so simple to implement that I wonder why Search Console still doesn't have it.

Note that when we show the top keyword or top page, we don't apply it as a filter.

You also have access to data grouping by weeks, adding custom notes, and viewing when Google updates happened.

This is just a first iteration. In the next weeks, we will release:

• Comparison report

• Keyword cannibalization report

• Keyword gap report

• New and lost keywords

• New and lost pages

• Performance by page segments

• Performance by keyword segments

• Brand / non-brand filter

If you are on a free Sitechecker account or don't have an account at all, this is a good time to test it.

Please, share in comments what is the most frustrating for you in Search Console?

Try my Looker templates, if you are tired of the non-friendly interfaces of GA & GAds:

• GA4 Looker Studio template;

• Google Ads Looker Studio template.

Most websites with written content (without programmatic SEO) develop evolutionarily — they improve the content gradually with each new unit.

Usually, after 1-2 years of publishing content:

• The website already has enough data on what type of content and which specific pages bring conversions.

• The website already has enough pages that do not meet the newly established quality standards, and as a rule, are poorly ranked in organic search.

• Updating the old content became a better ROI activity than creating a new one.

So, you have to choose which pages to update and in which order.

I use 2 variables to prioritize landing pages: conversion potential and content gap.

1/ Conversion potential

I use my own Looker Studio SEO forecasting template to merge GSC and GA4 data to calculate how many additional conversions the specific page will get if it were to rank #1 by all keywords it ranks now.

If the website is big and has many types of different pages, I create custom dimensions with a list of page segments and a separate table to get the same answer on the segment level.

Here are my formulas I use to calculate the clicks, conversions, and revenue potential.

Lost Сlicks = (Impressions * 0.2) — URL Clicks

Lost Key Events = ((Impressions * 0.2) — URL Clicks) * Session key event rate

Lost Revenue = ((Impressions * 0.2 — URL Clicks) * Session key event rate * (Event value/Key events))

The value 0.2 is a pessimistic assumption for the CTR of the #1 position.

These are very valuable formulas because they focus attention on 2 things at once:

• How well a particular page converts overall

• Is there still organic traffic potential on this page?

You should remember that this SEO forecasting approach is not 100% accurate. There are too many things we don’t count:

• impact of brand keywords;

• broad keywords, by which landing pages rank, but never will get the #1 position;

• lower CTR for many search queries where AI overviews are added.

However, it’s still the best approach because real conversion data is involved.

2/ Content gap

It’s not enough to KNOW which page can bring you more conversions.

It’s important to have an option for content improvement.

So, on this stage, I visit the page and review manually how much new value I can add to this page.

Sometimes a page has a great quality and you can’t improve it anymore. In this case, you may need more internal and external backlinks to this page or SEO experiments on the product level.

The most popular ways to add more value to the page on the content level are:

1/ Give the answers as fast as possible (whether by changing the order of paragraphs or creating a summary of the article).

2/ Add internal and external outbound links to relevant sources.

3/ Add more structure (h2-h6, tables, bullet points).

Note that you don’t have to create new content. You just need to organize better the existing one.

4/ Add screenshots and videos (to help a reader find the solution faster).

5/ Add more real-life experience (quotes, screenshots).

6/ Add data studies if they exist on this topic.

7/ Delete outdated information.

8/ Delete information that doesn’t have additional value.

For example, long paragraphs about “What is X” when the user looks for “How to use X”.

I don't try to add words to make the article longer. I believe that the best articles are the ones that say more with fewer words.

So, finally, you always have to start content refresh with a page that:

• has a good conversion rate;

• has a lot of impressions, but few clicks;

• has a lot of opportunities for improvement.

How do you prioritize pages for content refresh?

P.S. Don’t miss my other popular Looker Studio templates:

• Free Keyword Cannibalization Checker (based on GSC data);

• Free Keyword Ranking Report Template (for keyword research);

• Advanced GA4 Looker Studio template ($199);

• Advanced Google Ads Looker Studio template ($199).

You have to keep this axiom in mind to remain open to new keyword ideas.

I'm sure that even 10-year-old SaaS brands have such gaps.

There are 3 main reasons for that:

• Your product solves more problems than you think.

• People search for the same thing in dozens of ways.

• New keywords appear and old keywords rise in the search volume.

This creates a huge set of keyword opportunities. Let me share examples of my wins and mistakes.

Try my Looker templates, if you are tired of the non-friendly interfaces of GA, GSC & GAds:

• Google Analytics 4 Looker Studio report;

• Google Search Console Looker Studio report;

• Google Ads Looker Studio report.

1/ Your product solves more problems than you think

Below is an example of a product use case I found for Favikon recently.

Favikon has much data about the influencers, frequency of posting, growth rate by followers, etc. They are leaders in LinkedIn influencers analysis, but they didn’t have a separate landing page about that.

I suggested creating 2 separate pages for narrow use cases: LinkedIn profile analyzer and LinkedIn competitor analysis tool.

These topics look too small in search volume and too narrow. Favikon at first is an influencer marketing platform, and then everything else.

However, such keywords have a good CPC rate and are closely related to the core value Favikon provides for brands and influencers.

At the end, the conversion rate of these pages confirmed my assumptions.

Another example. 9 months ago, I realized that we have too little traffic at Sitechecker for keywords containing the words monitoring and alert.

Considering our core offer and the features that our customers value most, this was a crime. Doing keyword research, we saw that the search volume of such keywords is small, but we decided to create 8 specialized pages for the experiment.

Here are the results.

1. We received 70 clicks for the last 3 months and 247 visits for all time.

2. Search Console does not show the keywords by which we received them, as always.

3. We received 18 trials and 2 subscriptions from this landing page.

These are small results, but a big signal about what is important to do.

1. You need more product pages. Every product has dozens of small features that users are looking for.

2. The closer the keyword is to your ICP, the less important its volume is.

3. GSC is not enough, it will never be enough to evaluate the impact on revenue.

For big and old brands, such opportunities are especially low-hanging fruit.

Their new pages related to the core topic of the website are usually indexed and ranked by Google in the top 10 in 24-48 hours!

Sometimes we even see such topics during keyword research, but leave them because of too low search volume. It’s a big mistake.

2/ People search for the same thing in dozens of ways

For example, Sitechecker ranks well for such keywords:

• website checker

• website crawler

• seo checker

• site audit tool

• seo audit tool

These topics are too broad. Sometimes people who look for seo checker and seo audit tool mean the same thing, sometimes not. So, Google often has different SERP for such keywords.

That’s why we had to create different landing pages for them:

• website checker — https://sitechecker.pro/website-safety/

• website crawler — https://sitechecker.pro/website-crawler/

• seo checker — https://sitechecker.pro/on-page-seo-checker/

• site audit tool — https://sitechecker.pro/

• seo audit tool — no separate landing page yet

Ahrefs did the same, creating two pages https://ahrefs.com/site-audit/ and https://ahrefs.com/seo-audit-tool, about the same product.

We are used to thinking that if we use clustering by SERP, we can rely on Google. As if Google always understands the user's search intent well, and will always show the same page for different keywords with the same intent.

As we can see, this often does not work. Sometimes it is worth creating a page about the same product, but in a slightly different form, and using different words.

3/ New keywords appear and old keywords rise

1. AI technology becomes more popular = more and more people look for tools that use this technology.

So, if you add AI to your product, you may need to create a new landing page or update the old ones to rank well for such keywords.

2. Some of your competitors that were small grew a lot, and people look for their alternatives more and more.

I am ashamed that for 7 years we lived without [competitor] alternative pages on Sitechecker. What stopped us from creating these pages for so long?

• Stupidity;

• Poor understanding of who we compete with and how we are better.

I am sure that such pages should be created as early as possible, even if part of your strengths are just your yet unrealized plans. Such keywords also have a low search volume often, but high conversion potential.

In our case, our clients started asking so often how we are better than Semrush that it became obvious—such a page is needed not only for SEO but also for the sales process.

Once I realized how valuable such keywords are, I started to run tests with parasite SEO on Medium.

Targeting keywords related to growing competitors is something that most SEOs won’t do, because they decide that such keywords have too small a search volume.

However, if the competitor acquires investments or invests a lot into media ads, it usually means that in the next 3-6-12 months, there will be more search related to this brand:

• [competitor] pricing,

• [competitor] alternative,

• how to cancel [competitor] subscription.

Why are all these chances left on the table?

1. Product managers rarely dive deep into keyword research.

2. SEOs dive deeper but often don't know the product and its all use cases well enough.

3. SEOs aren’t incentivized for revenue and conversions, but only traffic.

4. Teams don’t have a system for updating their SEO content plan every month.

That's another reason why the SEO product manager role is key to organic growth for SaaS.

Only the person who:

• understand both sides, SEO and product management,

• is ready to invest a lot of time into learning the product and audience,

• always keep in mind that there are keyword opportunities we missed,

will do keyword research constantly and find the gems in the ocean of potential product use cases.

That’s why keyword research is the most interesting thing for me in SEO.

You never know what you will dig up, but you know for sure that there is gold there.

P.S. If you run a B2B or SaaS website and leave a comment under this post, I will find one interesting keyword idea that you missed :)

1/ Anonymized queries when filter by query

You probably know that filtering Search Console data by any search query decreases impressions and clicks on charts a lot. The reason — anonymized queries.

This is a popular issue, and Google even created a separate guide to explain the root of this problem.

For example, the page https://sitechecker.pro/semrush-alternative/ has 18 clicks for the last 3 months on the chart.

And 4 clicks in the table with search queries.

Almost always, you will see in the table with search queries fewer clicks and impressions than on the chart. You can check it now for any of your pages too.

I created a simple scheme to explain the accuracy of search volume data.

Google Search Console doesn’t show you all search queries people use to find your website, but this is still the most accurate source in comparison to Google Keyword Planner and click-stream data tools like Ahrefs and Semrush.

2/ More impressions and clicks when filtering by page

I noticed this by accident when I wanted to see the number of impressions for the sitechecker search query to measure brand awareness growth, but by mistake, I selected the page filter instead of the search query filter.

Here are the numbers for Sitechecker

1/ Default mode, without any filter

899K clicks and 60M impressions

2/ Page filter includes the domain name (it means there is no real filtering by page)

904K clicks and 84M impressions

3/ Filter with regex rule .* by search query (it means there is no real filtering by query)

597K clicks and 27M impressions

Surprised, I double-checked it on another large site, Favikon — the same pattern.

Here are the numbers for Favikon

1/ Default mode, without any filter

452K clicks and 35M impressions

2/ Page filter includes the domain name

459K clicks and 33M impressions

3/ Filter with regex rule .* by search query

233K clicks and 19M impressions

I asked on LinkedIn about the hypotheses people have about it. Here are some interesting comments.

1/ Answer from Mihir Naik.

“Without any kind of filters, the aggregation happens by property, but when you use a page filter, the aggregation happens at a page level, and that is what is causing the difference in metrics.”

I assume that this answer is the most accurate. You can find the quote from Google Help that explains it in this guide.

2/ Answer from Volodymyr Kuriatnyk

“In the default view, techniques like bloom filters or sampling might skip some data points for performance reasons. Filtering by page could bypass these approximations, retrieving a fuller count of clicks and impressions that were previously underreported.”

There is an interesting article about the bloom filters Google uses, from SEJ. I’ve never heard of it, and this can explain other discrepancies.

3/ Answer from Charles Meaden

Charles didn’t answer why he thinks it happens. He ran his experiment and found that in most cases applying a domain name as a page filter decreases the number of impressions and clicks.

However, he didn’t compare it with the metrics Search Console native interface. He ran all calculations in the Search Console API data.

After all, it’s clear that you have to use the native Search Performance chart carefully.

You can use it to present your work, but when you dive deeper to measure performance by segments, pages, and search queries, don’t expect to see accurate summed-up metrics as you see on the chart.

When I use Search Console, I focus less on absolute metrics and more on:

• trends (what grows and what falls);

• variables (which segments, pages, queries perform better than others).

Let me know if this guide helped you, or if you can add something interesting to it.

Try my Looker templates, if you are tired of the non-friendly interfaces of GA, GSC & GAds:

• GA4 Looker Studio template;

• GSC Looker Studio template;

• Google Ads Looker Studio template.

Suddenly all content creators realized that there is no way back, and it is unlikely to be possible to change it.

You've probably seen Rand Fishkin's video about it. If not, I recommend to view it.

Try my Looker templates, if you are tired of the non-friendly interfaces of GA, GSC & GAds:

• GA4 Looker Studio template;

• GSC Looker Studio template;

• Google Ads Looker Studio template.

2 simple ideas of how digital space is changing

1/ Platforms (search engines and social media) work hard to keep the user's attention on their platforms.

For example, most social media (especially LinkedIn, X, and Facebook) penalize your posts if you include links.

2/ In many cases users also don't want to leave a platform to get the answer.

We can't change the path where big platforms go on, we can only adapt.

Rand says that it leads to zero-click marketing. Brands are fighting more and more for impressions, not website traffic.

I agree with this statement. I observe it every day during my SEO and LinkedIn experiments with Sitechecker and Favikon.

I guess this is a big shift that will have long-term consequences, especially for B2B brands. In B2B sales cycles are longer and usually more touchpoints are needed to convert a user into the customer.

7 consequences of the zero-click marketing world

1/ The accuracy of measuring ROI by one specific channel will drop significantly.

It means B2B marketers will make more mistakes. The cost of mistakes will rise too.

The ROI calculation by traffic channel was built on the rule that you acquire users to the website where web analytics tools can track the conversion.

Even if multiple channels are involved in the user journey you could use different multi-channel attribution approaches to calculate the impact of each channel.

Now, if you want to reach more people, you avoid sending users to the website. As a result, more and more people who see your content on social media will find your website via brand search queries and you won't track the first touch in web analytics.

2/ As a result more B2B brands will ask you, where you find them the first time, during onboarding.

I bet it will become almost a must-have feature. This will be the only way to reduce the risk of spending money on the channels that don’t work and get quick feedback about what works.

3/ Brands will spend more resources on designing content for each platform

It is no longer enough to publish an interesting article on your corporate blog and distribute a link to it through social networks.

The content creation process has changed completely. When I have an interesting idea I think about how I should design it in different channels even before I created it.

Writing a blog post is the simplest part of the job. On LinkedIn, X, and YouTube you have to use fewer words and learn how to engage people and keep their attention.

4/ Email newsletters never died, but now they're getting a second wind.

Platforms aren't just trying to keep people's attention. They're showing your content to all your followers less and less. That's also why I launched this newsletter in Jan 2025.

I have 10k+ followers on LinkedIn, but my median amount of impressions per post is around 2-3k impressions.

So, my content isn’t distributed to all my followers, and I don’t paste external links to my posts.

I believe more and more B2B founders and marketing will start their email newsletters.

5/ The B2B influencer marketing boom is just the beginning.

The rise of LinkedIn can be both a cause and a consequence of this.

Influencers are the fastest way to get more impressions. They already have access to your audience, and they already have the trust of their audience.

I see how Favikon rankings become viral in hours and how many people are already looking for these ratings on Google.

Creators need these ratings, but brands need them even more because it makes it much easier for them to understand who invest in.

6/ CRO and copywriting will become even more important.

Less traffic on the website = each visitor is more expensive = you have to figure out how to convert him/her.

Also, only the right message to the right audience can force people to leave the platform and visit your website by brand search queries.

7/ SEO isn't dead.

It looks like, this is the only good point from this list. However, I think so.

1. There is always new information people will look for that AI chats haven't learned yet.

2. For many SaaS websites, SEO becomes a part of product management, because it helps to understand how to improve UX too (people still don't want duplicates, they want live pages, visible images, easy tools, etc).

3. I believe we still need static pages that are easy to find, recognize who is behind them, link to them, and send friends. Posts on social media and excerpts from AI chats aren't good for it.

That’s all. Correct me if you disagree with any statement.

On Feb 6, 2025, I launched an A/B test on the Sitechecker home page:

1/ 50% of new users saw the home page as usual (control variation).

2/ 50% of new users were sent to the /solutions/agencies/ page (test variation).

It was a product activation experiment, not an SEO experiment! I’ve tested different user funnels.

My only goal was to improve the conversion rate from creating the first project into a Google Search Console connection.

We added a required step with a GSC connection to the test variation during the creation of the first project. If the user doesn’t connect GSC, he can’t move forward.

I know that for such product experiments, it’s better when users from both variations land on the same landing page before they see 2 different variants of the onboarding.

However, I’ve decided to use a redirect to another page because it helped me to set up an experiment much easier. I chose the /solutions/agencies/ page because it has a similar value proposition as a home page.

The experiment ran for 1 month. Changes in the conversion and retention data on the test variation are interesting, but this deserves a separate article.

The most interesting, unexpected thing I discovered when I dug into the rankings analysis of /solutions/agencies/ page.

This is my usual practice. From time to time I check the search performance of the most important landing pages in Sitechecker Page Audit.

This time I found that rankings for the highly competitive keywords SEO software for agencies and SEO platform for agencies improved significantly and entered in the top 10.

This happened the 2nd time in the history of /solutions/agencies/ landing page and the 1st time in the last 6 months.

Note, that this landing page has many impressions because it’s ranked as an additional blue link by home page keywords. These impressions don’t matter and this page had almost 0 traffic.

Rankings by the agencies-related keywords are the only important rankings for this page.

These are the keywords for which this page was created and I was curious why we can’t get top 10 by them so long. It was strange considering that we’ve built 500 backlinks to this page!

It’s not a joke, considering that this was the 3rd place by the amount of backlinks in SERP.

So, what has my product experiment accidentally changed so that we have such improvement?

The impact of 30x times traffic increase

During this experiment, new traffic to /solutions/agencies/ page increased 30 times!

Before that, it had 100 visitors per week (it’s not from organic search, it’s primarily from a link in the header).

During the experiment, 3000 visitors land on this page per week. It’s because our home page has a lot of traffic, 80% of which are branded searches.

So, I assume that user behavior factors lead to improvement in rankings. For SEO product managers it’s not a new idea, it’s pretty banal. We all already know that user behavior impacts rankings. However, here the idea is a little bit different.

I hypothesize that while /solutions/agencies/ page ranked in the top 10-20 positions, there was not enough data for Google, to decide whether the page satisfied the user intent and whether it was better than the competitor's pages.

When I started to send a huge amount of highly motivated traffic (again, 80% of our home page organic traffic is from brand searches) to this page, I helped Google to collect enough data (I guess via Chrome browser and GA4) that this page worths to rank higher.

3 lessons, if this SEO hypothesis is true

1. If you rank in the top 10-20, the fastest way to improve your rankings is by sending more highly motivated traffic to the page.

A/B test via redirect, where you send 50% of users from the page with high traffic to a similar page with no traffic is the easiest way to do it. However, in this case, you are also limited in options. Pages should have similar intent!

You can't send people to completely another offer and expect that they will generate great user behavior.

2. You can send such traffic from Google Ads, social media, email newsletter, or from your existing high-traffic page with a similar intent.

In our case, it was branded traffic. Such traffic in most cases has a higher conversion rate because people already know about you and trust you. They don't compare 10 pages from SERP and then choose which website is better.

Google Ads traffic by commercial keywords also should work. Traffic from social media, parasite SEO campaigns on Medium, email newsletters also should work if you promised something interesting for your audience.

3. If paid traffic or social organic traffic has so huge impact on rankings, it may be worth adding it to the link-building budget :)

Conclusion

We all know that we have to create a better user experience to get better rankings.

However, you should remember that Google needs data to decide whether your page’s user engagement is great and better than competitors.

While you rank in the top 10-20 in organic SERP you’ll get a couple of clicks per month. It’s nothing.

If you won’t help Google to collect user engagement data by sending traffic from other sources, it can take months and years until Google itself collects data by the landing page.

I believe that if this hypothesis is true, it opens many opportunities. Now, I am planning to launch similar SEO experiments on Favikon, sending 50% of the home page traffic to the product landing page about the influencer search tool.

I hope some SEOs have run similar experiments and can say if they observed the same results. Share your thoughts in comments.

P.S. Don’t miss my popular Looker Studio templates:

• Free Keyword Cannibalization Checker (based on GSC data);

• Free Keyword Ranking Report Template (for keyword research);

• SEO forecasting template based on blending GA4 and GSC data ($249);

• Advanced GA4 Looker Studio template ($199);

• Advanced Google Ads Looker Studio template ($199).

This statement has been born based on doing SEO for various B2B SaaS products including well-known Sitechecker and Favikon. There are 2 reasons for that.

1/ Products are built to fit with channels. Channels do not mold to products.

I found this quote from Brian Balfour 2 years ago and kept coming back to it.

For a long time, we were promoting Sitechecker incorrectly. We created pages and tried to promote them only through experiments with content and backlinks.

Although these factors are important, after getting into the top 10, they fade into the background.

Further, only user satisfaction makes it possible to move to the first place in SERP.

In SaaS products, this most often means giving the user some value for free before requiring creating an account.

Once we realized it and started to implement this rule to each page we had (70% of our traffic are many extra tools like h1 checker, title checker, hreflang checker, etc.), we overcame the plateau in organic search traffic.

It also works for competitive keywords with a high search volume. This approach helped us defeat even market leaders Semrush and Ahrefs by keyword SEO checker. Here is the full story behind this battle.

After many experiments, for me it becomes clear.

In most SaaS products for non-blog traffic, to get the #1 position SEOs should have the power to change the user funnel.

It means that during the SERP analysis, you have to compare not only backlinks, titles, and the number of words on the page, but also the user experience.

No SERP analysis tool will show you this! You have to do it manually or build an AI assistant for this purpose.

This sounds simple. But often the problem is precisely in the division of power in the team. Who is responsible for the final result in the form of revenue from organic search? The SEO or the product manager?

In most cases, the SEO product manager is an evolution of an SEO manager who focuses on results and is ready to force product changes that will help it rank higher.

There is one important fact you as an SEO have to communicate with your marketing and product team when get the power to design a user funnel.

Better user experience = better rankings = but in 90% of cases it means less conversion to create an account or start a free trial.

I published an example of this contradiction based on real data.

We had to decide what was more important to us: 2000 new users and 500 registrations or 4000 new users and 500 registrations

Conversion to registration has become worse 2x times, but in absolute terms, the number of registrations remained the same.

So, if products are built to fit with channels, only an SEO product manager can help you build a product that will fit with Google.

2/ Becoming an SEO product manager gives a competitive advantage

This reason is a continuation of the previous one.

1. Google understands user intent better and better.

2. Google is increasingly prioritizing user satisfaction in its ranking algorithms.

3. More and more brands understand the rules I mentioned above and change their pages to give at least part of the value for free.

4. It’s harder to get traffic to your website by informational keywords because of AI overviews.

So, the old rules work less and less. You still need good content, you still need good backlinks. However, at some point, they become less important, and only changes in the product can increase your traffic and visibility in organic search.

SEOs without a product approach will show worse results and will lose credibility.

It means an opportunity for you to gain trust and become more competitive:

• Explain these pitfalls of investing in SEO to your clients.

• Be honest — not all businesses need SEO, or at least not at the first stage, while they are looking for product-market fit.

• Don't promise results without giving you the authority to change the product.

Do you agree with my statement?

P.S. If you haven’t installed our SEO checker Chrome extension, it’s time to fix this. It makes Search Console metrics and indexation status 2x closer to you. You can check them in 1 click when visiting your website page.

P.P.S. Don’t miss my popular Looker Studio templates:

• Free Keyword Cannibalization Checker (based on GSC data);

• Free Keyword Ranking Report Template (for keyword research);

• SEO forecasting template based on blending GA4 and GSC data ($249);

• Advanced GA4 Looker Studio template ($199);

• Advanced Google Ads Looker Studio template ($199).

If you haven’t heard about this template, read the guide above first. Here, I’m sharing what has changed compared to the first version.

Here is the link to the template >>

After the first post on LinkedIn, I started distributing it through non-English influencers to reach as many SEOs and marketers as I could all over the world.

Almost every post no matter the language became viral too.

Such a big demand pushed me to 2 thoughts:

1. I should add similar insights based on GA4 data to Sitechecker, because we’ll be able to set up alerts for new and lost valuable backlinks in the app, which isn’t available in Looker Studio.

2. I have to dig even deeper into how to give users even more insights based on existing data.

The first step is in progress, the second is done now!

A small update with a huge impact

So, I’ve created, a custom field to segment traffic from all backlinks into valuable segments.

ChatGPT helped a lot in it. Below is a code for this custom field. After copying the template you can update it as you want or you can use this code for the template you created yourself.

For example, you can decide to extract Reddit and Quora into a separate category called Q&A websites.

CASE 
  WHEN REGEXP_CONTAINS(Page referrer, "(^https://t\\.co/|reddit\\.com|linkedin\\.com|lnkdn\\.in|facebook\\.com|fb\\.com|youtube\\.com|youtu\\.be|instagram\\.com|twitter\\.com|x\\.com|tiktok\\.com|pinterest\\.com|snapchat\\.com|quora\\.com|threads\\.net)") THEN "Social Media"
  WHEN REGEXP_CONTAINS(Page referrer, "(chatgpt\\.com|perplexity\\.ai|claude\\.ai|claude\\.anthropic\\.com|gemini\\.google\\.com|bard\\.google\\.com|character\\.ai|poe\\.com|huggingface\\.co/chat|you\\.com/chat|replika\\.ai|copilot\\.microsoft\\.com)") THEN "AI Chats"
  WHEN REGEXP_CONTAINS(Page referrer, "(jira\\.com|atlassian\\.com|atlassian\\.net|asana\\.com|trello\\.com|basecamp\\.com|monday\\.com|clickup\\.com|wrike\\.com|notion\\.so|slack\\.com|teams\\.microsoft\\.com|zoom\\.us|meet\\.google\\.com|office\\.com|microsoft\\.com|docs\\.google\\.com|drive\\.google\\.com|toggl\\.com|clockify\\.me)") THEN "Corporate Workspaces"
  WHEN REGEXP_CONTAINS(Page referrer, "(fiverr\\.com|upwork\\.com|freelancer\\.com|toptal\\.com|peopleperhour\\.com|guru\\.com|99designs\\.com|designcrowd\\.com|behance\\.net|dribbble\\.com|workana\\.com|truelancer\\.com|malt\\.com|taskrabbit\\.com|thumbtack\\.com|bark\\.com)") THEN "Freelance Marketplaces"
  WHEN REGEXP_CONTAINS(Page referrer, "(chrome\\.google\\.com|addons\\.mozilla\\.org|microsoftedge\\.microsoft\\.com/addons|addons\\.opera\\.com|greasyfork\\.org|tampermonkey\\.net|experiments\\.withgoogle\\.com|extensionrank\\.com|crxextractor\\.com)") THEN "Browser Extensions"
  WHEN REGEXP_CONTAINS(Page referrer, "(medium\\.com|substack\\.com|ghost\\.org|wordpress\\.com|blogger\\.com|tumblr\\.com|wix\\.com|weebly\\.com|jekyllrb\\.com|vocal\\.media|hackernoon\\.com|dev\\.to|linkedin\\.com/pulse)") THEN "Blog Platforms"
  WHEN REGEXP_CONTAINS(Page referrer, "(mailchimp\\.com|convertkit\\.com|campaignmonitor\\.com|sendgrid\\.com|mailerlite\\.com|moosend\\.com|aweber\\.com|getresponse\\.com|buttondown\\.email)") THEN "Email Newsletter Platforms"
  WHEN REGEXP_CONTAINS(Page referrer, "(stripe\\.com|paypal\\.com|paddle\\.com|squareup\\.com|braintreepayments\\.com|adyen\\.com|razorpay\\.com|authorize\\.net|2checkout\\.com|worldpay\\.com|coinbase\\.com|bitpay\\.com|coinpayments\\.net|blockchain\\.com|klarna\\.com|alipay\\.com|wepay\\.com|skrill\\.com|payoneer\\.com|lemonsqueezy\\.com)") THEN "Payment Providers"
  ELSE "Other"
END

Note! This update will be valuable primarily for websites that have a lot of traffic from different backlinks.

There are such segments:

• Social Media

• AI Chats

• Corporate Workspaces

• Freelance Marketplaces

• Browser Extensions

• Blog Platforms

• Email Newsletter Platforms

• Payment Providers

• Others.

Based on this custom field I changed 2 things:

1/ Added a new filter “page referer segment” on a report level.

So, you can choose which types of backlinks you would like to analyze. Once you filter data it works across all pages of the report.

2/ Created a separate page to analyze traffic on the segment level

I especially love the separate pivot table where all page referrers are segmented.

What is the value behind the backlink segments I created?

If you have a lot of traffic from different segments sometimes it’s hard to identify patterns important for your business.

For example, for a startup, if somebody places a link to your website from Jira, Trello, Asana, Slack, or Microsoft Teams it’s almost always a good sign.

It means that people use your content or product inside their company to solve their problems.

If people place a link to your website on freelance marketplaces — they want:

• to do something similar as you did;

• or use your content as an instruction;

• or use your tool as a control point.

For example, I saw multiple times people add backlinks to Sitechecker reports on Fiverr and Upwork to instruct freelancers about which technical issues they should fix.

The biggest problem is with the Others segment. There are collected unique backlinks in this segment, that weren’t added to previous segments.

Usually in this section, there are the most interesting insights. Somebody added a backlink to you from their website! Sometimes this is a strong website and sometimes it can send you tons of traffic.

That’s it. Let me know what updates you would like to make to this formula. Maybe you would like to extract more segments.

Each website and industry has its unique list of domains that send traffic to it. So, you may need to create your list of forums, partners’ websites, etc.

Also, let me know if you would like to get alerts by new or lost valuable backlinks based on GA4 data in Sitechecker.

This will be +1 reason why Sitechecker will be the best cheaper Semrush alternative :)

P.S. Don’t miss my other popular Looker Studio templates:

• Free Keyword Cannibalization Checker (based on GSC data);

• Free Keyword Ranking Report Template (for keyword research);

• SEO forecasting template based on blending GA4 and GSC data ($249);

• Advanced GA4 Looker Studio template ($199);

• Advanced Google Ads Looker Studio template ($199).

My stats on Medium for 2024

From Medium articles, I generated almost 1k visits to my Looker Studio templates website. Yes, Reddit generated more, but most of the traffic from Reddit is from comments I left under the posts that rank in the top 10 in Google.

Try my Looker templates, if you are tired of the non-friendly interfaces of GA, GSC & GAds:

• Google Analytics 4 Looker Studio template;

• Google Search Console Looker Studio template;

• Google Ads Looker Studio template.

Here are also some stats from Medium analytics. On average, I generate 1k views for all my articles on Medium per month.

Here are the statistics from the articles I wrote 1 month ago. I didn’t promote it anywhere. 95% of traffic is from organic search.

Here is the screenshot from Sitechecker Rank Tracker with rankings by keywords I target.

You see, almost all pages are in the top 10! I feel that I learned how to get traffic from there.

However, I started posting regularly on Medium only in Q4-2024.

How has my approach to posting evolved?

Before Q4-2024, I primarily duplicated content from my website ivanhoe.pro trying to get a +1 page at the top of Google by my target keywords:

• google search console looker studio template;

• google analytics 4 looker studio template;

• google ads looker studio template;

• youtube looker studio template.

The articles have similar content to mine on my website but with more screenshots and details. Anyway, it was easy to replicate them.

Some articles went down through time.

Some rank in the top 10-20 for a long time.

However, in Q4-2024 I decided to test another approach: repurposing my posts on LinkedIn into the articles on Medium.

My approach is simple:

1. I review my LinkedIn posts and think by which keywords I can rank such content.

2. I publish the same LinkedIn post with more images and details (it’s important to add uniqueness to it because Google indexes LinkedIn posts too).

3. Sometimes I make a big guide aggregating 2-3 posts.

What is the value in acquiring traffic from Medium?

I shared my experiments a lot, but people continue to ask whether it’s worth it. I hear more and more: “Did you generate any revenue from it”?

Here is why I believe it’s worth it.

1. The most important reason

For many topics, I can rank in the top 10 of Google the next day after publishing a post! It's often even easier than publishing a blog post on Sitechecker which has 78DR and 300K+ monthly organic traffic.

2. Copying information is always easier than creating a new one.

With one piece of content, I get organic traffic from LinkedIn in 1 week and will get organic traffic from Google for years.

3. I build backlinks to all my websites from pages with traffic.

I see in web analytics that my posts on Medium generate high-intent traffic. Backlinks by which people visit your website are valuable even if they are nofollow.

For example, I use my articles “Why Is Semrush So Expensive” and “How to Cancel Semrush Subscription” which rank in the 2nd position in SERP to place a baclink to the “Cheaper Semrush Alternative” landing page on Sitechecker.

The same when I share my experience of becoming an influencer on LinkedIn.

It’s essential to place a backlink to Favikon LinkedIn Profile Analyzer in such an article.

4. I can publish the post on any theme there.

Do you remember about relevance of the website? Google evaluates how far new content you publish from the core topic of your website. The closer it to your core topic the higher your chances of ranking in the top.

On the Sitechecker blog, I always have a chance that Google will decide that some pages are non-related to the core topic of the website.

For example, I know very well that my articles related to growth on LinkedIn will rank better on Medium than on Sitechecker.

“Ivan, you still don’t say anything about the revenue”

Yes, exactly! Because revenue is the function of both: the high-value traffic and your ability to convert it.

You can master traffic acquisition and lose the conversion of traffic. In my case, I have sales of my Looker Studio templates from Medium traffic, but the main goal of these articles is still backlinks and traffic to money pages on my websites.

Try to put some similar articles as I did without backlinks in the top 10 in 1 week using your website. Let me know if you can do it (don't write me if your website DR is 80+ :).

I also found a great comment on Reddit under my post from the man who does a parasite SEO on Medium on an industrial scale. Here is the full post about it.

I fully agree with this comment.

My hypotheses about why articles on Medium rank so well

1. Huge Domain Rating and huge traffic

Yes, it's important, but not the only one.

2. Medium has a better UX for reading content than 80% of blogs on corporate websites

This impacts user satisfaction a lot! I haven't heard anyone talk about this. We already know that Google evaluates user behavior on the site and that most sites can't make a normal design for their blog.

3. Medium is still perceived as a platform for independent writers

If you see a page from a brand you know that 100% it will be biased. With a Medium article, you have at least some chance to read non-biased thoughts.

This gives a huge boost to the CTR of Medium articles in SERP among other pages! This is the same reason why people so often choose Reddit in SERP and use the word "reddit" in their search terms.

4. The quality of my content

In any case, my parasite SEO is not classic parasite SEO as it is often understood:

• I do not use AI content;

• I research the topic myself deeply;

• I give a lot of screenshots.

My content deserves to be ranked at the top! I am just forced to publish it on Medium since Google will not give it the same positions if I publish it on my website.

5. My personal brand on Medium and other social networks

I published a lot of content on different websites for years. Perhaps Google recognizes my author and assigns more weight to such content.

Here I am not sure! Please share, if you have links to some experiments or Google's patents in this matter.

The 4th and 5th are related to me. But the first 3 points explain why the entire Medium website has advantages corporate websites often lack.

Why do you need to start posting on Medium now?

Parasite SEO on Medium is a zero-sum game with limited time!

The first person to create good content gets 90% of the opportunities to be at the top. The rest become victims of cannibalization.

Look at this SERP. In most cases, Google won’t rank more than 2 Medium articles by the keyword.

The person who publishes the content first has more time to build backlinks to such content and collect good user signals.

Let me know your thoughts on that.

P.S. Also, don’t miss my other popular Looker Studio templates:

• Free Keyword Cannibalization Checker (based on GSC data);

• Free Keyword Ranking Report Template (for keyword research);

• SEO forecasting template (based on blending GA4 and GSC data).