Optimize Episode 002: Aakash Shah on How Wyndly Scaled SEO to 100k+ Visitors Per Month in Under 18 Months

Learn More About Aakash Shah

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mraakashshah/ 

Twitter: https://twitter.com/aakashdotio 

Website: https://www.wyndly.com/ 

Episode Transcript

Aakash Shah (Speaking)
0:00:00
We went, like, kind of viral on TikTok. I think it was, like, 300 or 400,000 views. And that actually directly correlated with a spike in organic traffic. And I think that told Google a signal that people were interested. And about three weeks after that, we were at 300 clicks per day. So that's, what, 9,000 per month.

‍

Nate Matherson (Speaking)
0:00:17
Hi, and welcome to the Optimize Podcast. My name is Nate Matherson, and I'm your host. On this weekly podcast, we sit down with some of the smartest minds in content marketing and SEO. Our goal is to give you perspective and insights on what's moving the needle in organic search right now. Today, I'm thrilled to sit down with Akash Shah. Akash is the co-founder and CEO of Wyndly. He's also a fellow YC alum, and he's built an incredible content marketing and SEO channel at Wyndly over the last 15 months. Wyndly is in a competitive space, that being healthcare, and it's been amazing to watch them grow their content channel exponentially over the last six months, crossing 100,000 visitors per month from organic search. I know Akash has a lot of interesting thoughts around doing keyword research, the use of video content and its impact on SEO, and I'm really excited to unpack all of that on our episode today. 

‍

Nate Matherson (Speaking)

01:43 

Hey, Aakash, thanks for coming on the podcast. I'm really excited to chat with you today.

‍

Aakash Shah (Speaking)
0:01:47
Yeah, thanks for having me, Nathan. What an incredible intro. It's like I'm just ready. I feel fired up. 

‍

Nate Matherson (Speaking)

Well, I'm excited to chat with you. I know we chatted a couple of weeks ago, and it was such an interesting conversation that I knew that we had to go deeper on the podcast. And it's been amazing to watch you grow the content and SEO channel at Wyndly. I know that you guys first started working on this around January of 2022. So it's been about 15 months, and you've already grown the channel to over 100,000 visitors per month from organic search, which is just an amazing accomplishment. And so I know that our listeners are going to be pretty interested in this episode. And there's a lot for us to unpack — everything from, you know, using video within your content to your approach to doing keyword research. And so thank you so much for coming on.

‍

Aakash Shah (Speaking)
0:02:30
Hey, I appreciate it. Yeah, we ended up getting started about a year ago — I guess a little, like, oh my gosh, it's been a year and a half now. It's crazy. Time flies. Just realizing that they're like — our customers were looking for information, and it just wasn't online. And so the choice then is, well, let's just provide that information to them. And that's what really drove us to SEO in the first place. I think when you're a very early company … what we do at Wendley is we fix allergies for life. And the way we do it is by sending our patients personalized medicine that changes the immune system. And this is the treatment that you would get in a doctor's office. We've just made it very accessible and very easy to get at home without having to step outside. We realized that there was a whole host of people asking questions that should be answered by the healthcare system, either trying to get into it like you would get an answer if you talk to a doctor — or you should get an answer if you even call the doctor's office and, like, talk to the front desk person. But the internet wasn't currently serving up these answers — means there was an opportunity there, and the only reason we knew that opportunity existed is because we just listened to our customers. A lot of times people ask, “Well how'd you get your first customer so that you can listen to them?” We went to the place where everyone goes when they're frustrated and want to shout into the void, and that's Reddit. There are always people asking health questions on Reddit, and we just started answering them. To build trust, we were answering them with video instead of, like, through text. It's also faster to just answer a question through video and just upload it to YouTube and our website, because you know it's just good to get something hosted in a good way. And that's kind of where we got our first batch of customers. And that's when we realized that there is an opportunity to educate and an opportunity to just put the right information out there, which will kind of match up with what people want to read.

‍

Nate Matherson (Speaking)
0:04:12
Yeah. And before starting the content and SEO channel at Wyndly, had you been in this space before? Had you built a blog or an organic search channel in the past, or was this, like, your first rodeo?

‍

Aakash Shah (Speaking)
0:04:23
Yeah. I think every founder needs to have a founder channel match in the sense that, like, you should do something that you've already done before, right? So if you have no experience with SEO at all, picking a company … like, I would not suggest starting, like, a travel blog. It's going to be a hard channel for you to master. In the same vein, like, I didn't know how to do paid marketing really at all. So going after paid marketing to find our customers wasn't going to be something I was going to excel at. When I really sat down and looked at what I was good at, I had a background not in SEO but in content analytics, because I worked at a company called Parsley Analytics, which did just that. And I knew there's generally things you could do to at least get Google to send you a few page views. It's certainly been a journey to get to the 100,000 page views per month we're getting right now, but I was pretty confident I'd be able to get us to a thousand, especially if you're kind of matching, like, what people want to hear and kind of telling Google that you're kind of matching that intent. 

‍

Nate Matherson (Speaking)

So it sounds like when you were first thinking about the content that you wanted to create on the Wyndly site, you first kind of been on Reddit and have been answering questions on Reddit and have been using video to answer those questions. And then it sounds like the next step was actually creating content on the Wyndly site. And I know that there are tons of tools out there for doing keyword research. I know that when we chatted before, you had some interesting thoughts on keyword research and how it should be used and how it shouldn't be used. How at Wyndly have you built that editorial calendar? How did you choose what were those first 10, 20, 100 articles to create on the site as you first started building this channel?

‍

Aakash Shah (Speaking)
0:06:00
Yeah, I think the 100 articles that you brought up is, like, the right number to aim for, because I think whenever you're trying to create anything, you have to get through 100 reps to figure out what you're good at, to figure out, like, are you actually practicing the task or are you just like learning? Are you getting better at the task or are you just learning what you're doing in the first place? So that first 100 articles, I think, is a good barometer. And we did no keyword research at all, right? So our first 100 articles were entirely … they weren't even articles; they were just videos and then transcripts on our website. And that got us enough traffic from Google. And we were also kind of trending a little bit on TikTok and YouTube with the same shorts that we were like, “OK, there is enough interest that we should continue investing.” And so literally what we started to do is, like, OK, we'll put up a video and then if it gets over — I think we had said like 20 visits in a week — then we'll turn it into a full-fledged article. I think a lot of times when you first start a company, when SEO … to do it correctly, so to speak, people feel like you have to put a ton of energy and that there's, like, the right way to do it. And that's the right way, people say like, you have to start with keyword research, and then you have to build out, like, 3,000-page articles, and you need infographics. And I'm pretty sure that works. But when you're in a resource-constrained startup environment, you might not be able to have a full-on editorial team kind of pushing that through. So we did it really simply. It was my co-founder recording himself. He's a doctor, so he had his lab coat on and he had a stethoscope — like, literally the same type of stuff he would have done if he was in the office and you saw him in the office. I think it was literally recorded in his office, too. So it was almost exactly as if you were his patient. We were just kind of finding questions to answer from what we were hearing from our customers. As we kind of scaled up, we needed to … we did incorporate keyword research, but I feel like when you start doing keyword research, you're only looking at what everyone else is looking at, right? Like, by definition, everyone doing SEO is probably looking at keyword research to figure out, oh, what search terms get the most volume. What ends up being missed is, you get these really golden nuggets that your niche of customers are answering, but your niche is probably very small compared to the entirety of all internet searchers. A few of our top articles are, you know … they get, like, only four or five clicks per keyword they rank for, but they rank for, like, a hundred, two hundred keywords. So, you know, it's a lot of traffic per month even though there's not, like, one umbrella keyword. I think Google — like this goes back to Google knowing how to match the searcher's intent to the right thing they're looking for. And a lot of times in the consumer, at least, people don't know what they're looking for. So they're just kind of using human language to ask and, you know, you just answer it and let Google figure out the rest.

‍

Nate Matherson (Speaking)
0:08:40
You know, when I talk to a lot of our customers, one of the challenges that they have, kind of very early on in building this channel, is doing keyword research. For some companies, it's quite easy. The keywords are obvious. But for others, it's actually quite difficult to get search volume for a large number of keywords or pieces of content to create. And what I always say to them is “Use your own experience.” Talking to customers, what are those questions your customers ask? What do you intuitively know about your market as the founder? Even if a tool like Positional isn't providing a search volume for you, just intuitively know whether your customers are interested in this thing or have a question on this thing. But it's really interesting that you guys use video on TikTok as a way to get data on topics that might also make for good blog posts. So you're effectively, like, doing keyword research through video channels to then drive, like, the topic and ideation for the actual pieces of content you create on your blog. And I have not seen another startup approach keyword research in this way, but it's clearly working for you. And I think it's something that we all should be thinking about, especially as TikTok and Instagram and all of these other channels grow from here. And then as far as content creation goes, because, like, you're a founder, you've got a ton of things to do every single day. I appreciate you coming on this podcast, but I'm sure you have eight other things on your to-do list right now. Like, it's often hard to invest time in a content and SEO channel. As you know, it takes work every single day over long periods of time to ultimately build a large channel. My first question is, like, how much time were you or your team dedicating to building out the blog and the content marketing channel? And then also, like, how much have you invested — maybe in a general sense in terms of capital — in this channel over the last year and a half? 

‍

Aakash Shah (Speaking)
0:10:22
Yeah, I think initially … I think every founder has to consider the timeline of return for their channel. And so this actually almost goes back into, like, why we were video first when it came to, like, our SEO. And the answer is, you know, with Facebook ads, you generally know in two weeks if something is working or not. But it might cost you about 1,000 to 2,000 dollars to figure that out. With SEO, the best, outside of literal news — like, literally the news — the best blogs I have seen, they start getting page one rankings in eight weeks, and usually it's more around like six months, right? So that's kind of your range, and that's a huge range. And since you're probably not an exceptional operator, since most people aren't exceptional operators by definition, they're probably going to be more in that four- to six-month range. So we had to ask ourselves if SEO was the right channel, because it was going to be a long investment versus paid versus something else. And what we realized is we knew how our current customers were speaking, but we didn't know how our prospects were talking. We didn't know how the people who were good Wyndly patients — we didn't know what they sound like. We didn't know what their questions were. And the best way to get in front of them is literally TikTok and Facebook and Instagram nowadays. You are for sure going to get 100 impressions on your video. And then, you know, if you get more than 100 impressions — like, for example, if you get 1,000, you know that that language that you used hit a nerve, right? You said something that people responded well to; you had a hook which was compelling. Especially in healthcare, we get in our heads a lot and sound very science-y. We do sublingual allergy immunotherapy, which changes your immune reaction from being histamine mediated to non-histamine mediated. That content doesn't perform well, surprise! But sometimes it does. But most of the time when you lead with that, people just swipe away. And at the end of the day, all of these platforms want the same thing. They want to engage their user, and they want to put interesting things in front of their user. And so with video, we were able to get, like, a feedback loop of probably four hours. Within four hours, you knew if the content hook that you put out there was actually compelling. We would come up with these plans of, like — OK, so these are, like, four broad … these are, like, 10 broad themes that we want to go after. Let's make three to four videos per theme. Let's upload them, and then let's just see how they perform. And if any of them do well, we know to kind of start going deeper in that sphere. And that is where we want to invest either our paid dollars or SEO dollars for full-on channel development. And then to answer your question on how much time, initially it did take a lot of time, but it's almost like we were harvesting these questions from just talking to our customers, which as an early stage founder, you absolutely should be doing. Now it's in our customer support, and we hear it from our customer support team all the time. I mean, I'm still doing customer support. So once again, I'm hearing it directly. My co-founder is seeing these customers in person because — he's not in person but, like, on Zooms — because he's, like, doing doctor's appointments with them. And so we're continuing to hear these questions. So kind of, like, finding that initial things to talk about was not difficult for us. What was difficult was getting over that frustration of, like, OK, let's just sit down and, like, make the content. And we got over that barrier by doing something which is, like, I don't want to say easy, but more doable. We figured out, like, OK, for a video, initially, it takes us about maybe an hour, five or six takes — we're a little awkward with it. And then I figured out the editing process, I figured out the upload process. So I would say at the beginning, each video probably took us maybe 12 hours to figure out end to end. Now it takes us three hours from concept to editing to publishing, and we can see that if we see that the video is doing well, we'll put a full article underneath it within ... because we have writers we work with, right? Like, we've kind of built out the whole process. So we got better at it as we went along. As for our dollar investment, it hasn't been that high because we've mostly kept it all in-house. We do have writers we work with, and I think they have the standard rates. We use a company called Draft.co to help us find writers. So whatever they do is what we're paying. 

‍

Nate Matherson (Speaking) 

As far as ROI, you don't have to get too specific, but we do know your blog has now grown to over 100,000 visitors per month. Has it been worth it in terms of actual customers and dollars and revenue going back to Wyndly — like, the time that you've invested in this channel so far?

‍

Aakash Shah (Speaking)

0:14:48
I definitely think so. We haven't locked in our analytics to know very well, like, you know, what cohorts are driven by organic and how long are those … how are those cohorts performing, but it has been a positive ROI channel already. That much I do know. And it's at least a 3x return on this as a channel. And also one of the great things is, like, we can stop investing in it whenever we want. And it's, like half-life will exist for a while. Does that make sense?

‍

Nate Matherson (Speaking)
0:15:15
Yeah,100%. That's why I love content marketing and SEO. It takes, like — and the same goes with video — it takes a lot of upfront work and building and creation, but you build that portfolio of content that's going to exist forever into the future and drive many hundreds of thousands of visitors back to your website for the next five or 10 or longer years. And I would say if you guys did no more work on this channel, like Wyndly would probably still get over a hundred thousand visitors, if not more, per month for the next three years. And so I always say to founders, like, it is a lot of upfront work and investment, but over the long term, it can become one of those, like, highest-margin channels for you. You'll also hit different inflection points along the way. Founders always ask me, like, “How long does it take to get to like my first 1,000 visitors per month or first 10,000 or first 100,000?” And in my career, I've noticed there are different inflection points where, all of a sudden, things will start to accelerate and will add new visitors at a much faster pace. Over the last year and a half, did you see or experience any different inflection points where, like, all of a sudden things just started to grow a lot faster?

‍

Aakash Shah (Speaking)
0:16:28
Absolutely. So I understood content and SEO from, like, making good content and, like, making sure that it speaks to your customers’ perspective. I don't really understand the backlinking and giving Google good signals and that type of stuff. I followed basic best practices, which are to make sure you don't have, like, 300 character titles and make sure you have a good description — like, you know, that very, like, SEO 101 stuff. It took us about six months to hit our first … for us to get to, like, a hundred clicks per day, which sounds like not a lot, but that's 3,000 a month, and we started at zero, right? So at six months, I was, like, OK, this is good. And that's when I started asking people who were a few steps ahead of me if this was noise or if this was signal, and basically they all said it was enough traffic to know. Then we went kind of viral on TikTok. I think it was, like, 300,000 or 400,000 views. And that actually directly correlated with a spike in organic traffic. And I think that told Google a signal that people were interested. And about three weeks after that, we were at 300 clicks per day. So that's 9,000 per month. 

‍

Nate Matherson (Speaking)

And so you saw a lift across like the entire portfolio of content as, like, your brand started to go viral on a different channel, which was TikTok. You actually saw a lift site-wide from the organic search channel, too.

‍

Aakash Shah (Speaking)
0:17:43
Yeah. And then sometime last year, Google started testing shorts in the Google search page and in YouTube search. That took us to 500 per day. So that's 15,000 per month. And at 15,000 per month, I started talking to people again, being, like, is this a signal or a noise? And they were, like, now you have a decent signal. You should at least invest for another six months. But that's still, like, a long time, right? Like, I had to … there was an algorithm change, I had to go viral. But I wasn't actually surprised because I knew if we kept on making the content and I knew our content was good, it was eventually going to do well, right? And the way I knew the content was good is, like, people were spending time on the site, right? Like, the engagement time was really high. The bounce rate was low. And, you know, if you know the content is good, eventually you'll climb up. It’s kind of a waiting game, I feel, until the algorithms have enough data to actually find your audience. And I think that actually works for Google, TikTok, any organic and actually even paid platform. You're kind of, like, feeding the algorithms data, and they'll test it out and they'll find you your audience — but they're so good now that they will find you your audience. You have to give it enough data for it to, like, train against. I think one thing that we did that a lot of people don't do is have consistency and volume. So we were consistently putting out good content, but it was also a high volume of content, right? We were publishing three to four times per week. And so if you're publishing four times per week, that's actually four times as much content as publishing once per month. So maybe we needed to publish … like, maybe for us, we actually needed to publish, like, 300 articles before we found this audience. If you're publishing once per month, you're literally just never going to hit that break point soon enough.

‍

Nate Matherson (Speaking)
0:19:18
I totally agree. I always recommend to founders, if they're serious about this channel, to post at least once a week. Like, a big mistake I'll see startups make is they'll post, like, four blog posts and then forget about it for six months and say, like, why did content marketing not work for me? And it's, like, consistency over long periods of time is, like, how you're successful. But I find it so interesting that you had these viral bumps on a channel that wasn't organic search, which then ultimately led to more traffic on organic search. And it seems like as you went viral on other channels over time with video, it had this compounding effect in a positive way in terms of how Google saw your website as a whole and ultimately started to drive more traffic to you from organic search as well. I find that so interesting. I've actually not talked to another person who's had this experience, but it makes complete sense.

‍

Aakash Shah (Speaking)
0:20:11
I mean, you can still see the spikes. Like, when our TikToks went viral, you can still see, like, OK, so now the trajectory explicitly changed on our organic traffic.

‍

Nate Matherson (Speaking)
0:20:20
That's amazing.

‍

Aakash Shah (Speaking)
0:20:21
I think also what's interesting there is that people are more willing to talk to you on TikTok and YouTube than on any other channel. There's, like, this content loop where we are producing content. These two video channels are finding our audience who then ask us more questions. It makes us, OK, well, what do we produce next? Well, you know what? I don't have three hours today to go deep into our customer support tool. I'm just going to pluck something from TikTok and answer it, and it'll get out. And it's just important to keep that consistency and keep feeding the algorithms so that they can keep finding the audience.

‍

Nate Matherson (Speaking)

20:52

I love that you haven't made content marketing or inbound marketing in a general sense overly complicated. I feel like a big mistake founders will make is they'll think that content and SEO is this dark art or science and they need to go out and build hundreds of backlinks. And what I always tell them is pick the right topics, create great content, and if you do that consistently over time, it will work well. And you've done that. You haven't worried about building backlinks. You've done the basics from a technical SEO standpoint, and you've got internal links, and you've created great content, and it's clearly working. So for those founders who say that they don't have enough time to go out and build a content or a SEO channel, I think if you simplify it down to those key inputs, which are the right topics and great content, if you just do that, then it'll work for you. And it's been amazing to see how fast you've grown with that strategy at Wyndly. 

‍

Aakash Shah (Speaking)

Yeah, I think that's actually — you've pretty much hit the nail on the head is, like, just speak to the right person. And just, like, the difference between nothing and something is really, really high when it comes to content, right? And a lot of times I suggest to people who want to replicate this, they're like, “Well, how do I make it not take 18 months or whatever the timeline is?” And I was like, “You start today in a very the same way you brush your teeth every day. You just publish something every few days, so that when you do want to invest, you can invest like you've kind of set the stage, right?” I bet even if we had been publishing once per week, instead of four times per week, if we had done that for six months and then started putting it … like, pushing it aggressively, it would have been, like … we would have been able to compress our timeline. But we and a lot of people, like, they're like, “Well, what do I write about?” I was like, “You are an early stage founder, you are getting customer support questions — create a resource for yourself to send customers, and then that's what you make.” Right? Like, that can be the easiest thing; it doesn't have to be, like, optimized for conversion. It doesn't have to be optimized for anything. It just needs to be out there and exist. And the craziest thing is, I know for a fact that when I try out a new SaaS tool, I Google first  … What's the SaaS tool that I just started using? This is called type.ai. I searched for type.ai pricing. OK, well, maybe I found something; maybe I didn't. OK, type.ai tutorial. Right? There are these, like, very basic things that you probably want, regardless, and it can be branded. It's OK if it's branded or not. Like, that part doesn't matter, because you're just kind of, like, establishing yourself and building the habit — just getting used to it, and then, you know, maybe you do decide to start doing inbound, or you do decide even if you start doing outbound when someone looks at your site they're gonna start Googling around and asking these same questions.

‍

Nate Matherson (Speaking)

23:35

Yeah, I think that's a really good point. Like, as a starting point for your content marketing strategy, just creating this collateral that you'll need anyways for customer support or for outbound. Just by having it, it's only going to then help you as you then expand on the organic search strategy as, like, a standalone thing that you are working on every day. And also from a timing perspective, like you said, it takes time for Google to understand what your site's about — like, what you're a good resource on. And so the earlier you can get started in actually creating content, even if that's just for your own customers, ultimately it's going to make things a lot easier and faster when you do want to dedicate more resources to this channel later on. And at Wyndly, you guys are a seed stage company, right? 

‍

Aakash Shah (Speaking)

Yeah, we did — I guess we were a little more pre-seed. I don't know, healthcare: it's all weird. I think we're a pre-seed company ’cause we were, like … we were finding the market, and the market didn't really exist. Now I would say it's so funny because, like, you could say the market didn't exist, but now Google has actually found us that audience. But two years ago, I didn't even know if the market existed. Like, who was capturing this demand for sublingual immunotherapy or allergy immunotherapy? Did people actually want deeper information, or did people only want a high level? So let's say we were pre-seed, but we did understand that, like, it was just a bet we made, right? We just made a bet that this would be the right channel because we just knew that our customer wanted to do a lot of self-education. And you mentioned this, like, just making the collateral. Like, we literally use so many of our videos that we make just to answer questions. You needed this content anyways, so why not create it and then build a channel around it? You're probably going to need some content in the first place, regardless. So you might as well just get it out there, get it public. I mean, I think you kind of see it with Substack, where people were writing newsletters anyway. OK, now they're discoverable, right? That's what you're choosing to do when you make content. You're choosing to do this, you're choosing to make the work you're already doing, and then you're saying, “OK, I'm going to spend 10% of the time to make these incredible algorithms work for me. Right? That makes a ton of sense. You were going to create this content, regardless, so why not put it in the right places, optimize it so that you get even more value out of that work that you already need to be doing? 

‍

Nate Matherson (Speaking) 

25:39

I think that's a great way to think about building a content channel. Actually, almost every one of the blog posts we've written on our blog addresses a customer question that I was asked. So we've recently published articles on thin content, how to write a title tag, how to build backlinks — and these were customer support questions I got in our Slack channels. And then, of course, I went and then tied a primary keyword to those topics. And then I actually wrote a blog post around it. So what you're about, what you're actually describing — like, creating content for customer support, but also using it as a way to start building your inbound channel — is exactly what we're doing at Positional. And I don't know that I'd thought about it this way until this conversation, but, yeah, I think it's been working for us, and it's something we're definitely going to continue doing.

‍

Aakash Shah (Speaking)
0:26:23
And then eventually you start, like, moving from your customers to, like, OK, what about the people who could become customers? OK, what about the people who don't even know that they want to be customers? And that's actually a very common motion in any sort of marketing or sales, which is, like, you know, start with the people that are down the funnel and then move up the funnel. I will say this: When we were at a B2B company, the sales team loved a content-first approach, because you arm a sales team with an infinite amount of content and you say, “If a customer asks, how does this feature work?” And they're able to just deluge them and, like, “OK, so this is, like, why it matters. And this is how you actually use it. And this is a case study with it.” Oh, man, it just shows an expertise and a competence that a lot of prospects don't usually see from sales teams.

‍

Nate Matherson (Speaking)
0:27:07
100%. And I think there's something to be said for just building brand equity in your space. Like when someone has a question about allergies, or in my past life, when someone had a question about Kubernetes and they found our brand as part of that learning and discovery process before we were even trying to sell them anything. But, like, we started the conversation by helping them answer their questions. I think it's completely different, you know: sales approach versus someone clicking on your ad, knowing that they're being sold something. It's, like, a much more natural conversation to start with someone. And I think that's often why content marketing has one of the higher conversion rates, at least in my career, versus a channel like Facebook or AdWords, even for certain products. I want to dive into how you're using video to supplement the blog posts you are creating. I know you and I had talked about this a couple of weeks ago. It sounds like you ran an experiment where you identified — I think it was, like, 20 or so — pages that didn't have videos on those pieces of content on your site. And then you went and added videos to that content to see if that video content would actually have a positive impact on the ultimate rankings and performance of those pages. I'd be curious to learn a little bit more about that experiment and what you ultimately decided. Like, was adding video content helpful in terms of actually ranking your posts better in search?

‍

Aakash Shah (Speaking)
0:28:26
Yeah, absolutely. The way I think about it is, we're gonna create a resource for a question and now we do two videos and then two articles per week, and we want to kind of keep … like, even if we don't necessarily know the best strategy for our writers at any given time, they've worked with us, we like them, we want to make sure that they have a steady stream of work. because the best way to lose like a writer that you finally developed a relationship with is by saying, “OK, bye, we'll come back in six months when we have a new idea.” Like, eventually you do start thinking about keywords because you need to start moving up the funnel, and that's kind of where keywords come in and we were like, “OK, we'll have the writers focus on keywords, and we'll just keep our videos on our customers and our customer insights.” The written pages were getting some rankings, but they weren't really very high up. When we added the video, what we really realized is people engage with video in a different way than they engage with text on a page. People engage with videos differently, and especially when they see a video that's only, like, 30 seconds, they're like, “Oh, this is definitely going to answer my question, and I'm not going to have to go looking around in this ridiculously long article, which I'm viewing on mobile.” You know how long 3,000 words are on mobile? It's, like, so long. No one is reaching the bottom of your pages. And so the videos were just, like, really crushing it when it came to engagement, and, like, people felt like they were getting their answer faster, and I think that's how video really helps. Personally, it's very frustrating to me that I think Google has rewarded people for saying way too much. I think like a lot of times the suggested content length is between 1,500 to 3,000 words, but people don't want to deal with that. There's this weird back and forth where Google incentivizes people to make these super long pages, and then they introduce features to the search page which extract the useful information. I don't really know how it all plays out, but I do know that no one enjoys having to fight to find their answer, and that's what a really long page effectively does. So our videos were a way to kind of show people like, “Look, we're gonna get your information quickly.” People generally don't like reading because, in general, we don't as humans. We don't like thinking; we like just getting what we want to hear. So that's kind of, like, where the videos cut through the noise.

‍

Nate Matherson (Speaking)

0:30:39
Yeah, it makes complete sense. This video is a way to increase time on page and reduce bounce rate and ultimately probably reduce, like, the return to search rate, where someone doesn't get their answer and has to go to another listing. And so those are all quality signals that you're sending Google to say, “Hey, people are actually enjoying our pages and they're aligning to the intent of that searcher.” And I always say to people — people always ask me, “How do you create good blog posts?” And I always tell them, “You want to be actionable and helpful.” Video is a way to be more helpful and more actionable and give someone exactly what they're looking for faster without them having to go to another web page. It makes complete sense to me that your pages would rank better in search as a result. And I'm sure clips from this podcast are going to end up on our eventual blog post about using video and SEO content. So I'm excited about that. As far as placement of the videos in the articles go, like, would you put the videos, like, right at the top? Or would you try to, like, put the videos, like, slightly lower in the page, like, actually, like, in the context of the blogs themselves?

‍

Aakash Shah (Speaking)

0:31:46
So, yeah, the video is right at the top of the page. It's underneath the title, the byline. And then we do, like, just, like, a quick answer up at the top, similar to, like, how Google kind of has, like, the answer right at the top. And then it goes into the video. And then underneath the video is, like, a full-on article. It used to be, I think when we first started, we transcribed the video and then we would just edit the transcription and add headers to different parts of the transcription. We saw different lists, right? Like, when it was just video, that was useful. And then when we added the transcript, I think that the engagement on the page didn't change at all, but it told Google a little bit more about what the page was about. And we added headers, which further told Google what the page was about. Then that jump from headers and transcript — there was no improvement until we hit 2,000 words compared to the video. So personally, I think a minute-long video, you have three headers in it, and then you have a call to action, like a text-based, repeatable, copy-pasted call to action across your site, and you would probably hit 500, 600 words right there. And that's enough. I think Google has changed their rules. They can figure out if you have a video on your site. They can figure out how many people are hitting play. I mean, I use YouTube because I assume somewhere in the mastermind of Google, there's some correlation between search rankings and YouTube. But I could be wrong.

‍

Nate Matherson (Speaking) 

0:33:05
Yeah, we'll see what Congress has to say about that. But yeah, I think as far as thin content goes, how long should your blog post be? I think it's certainly changed over time. I think when I first started in this business back in 2014, 2015, the way that you used to be able to win was to create a 6,000 word mega guide and use that to overpower rankings for like 20 different primary keywords. But I think search has changed where the actual more specific your result is, even if it's shorter, the better it is. I mean, if you're covering a very in-depth topic like manufacturing processes with AI, maybe you do need three or 4,000 words to write an actually fantastic post on that topic. But in other cases, like, you know, if 500 words gives that searcher exactly what they're looking for, you've also got a video. I don't think that, you know, just because the words on the page are low, that makes that content thin or unhelpful. And I think Google has gotten much better at being able to decide, like, is this actually a helpful piece of content or is that a thin piece of content?

‍

Aakash Shah (Speaking)
0:34:11
I don't even think it's just Google. I think the audience knows, too. The audience knows what the kind of content-optimized voice versus an authentic voice is. We've all landed on those review sites that we realize are just like Amazon affiliate link farms. There's a reason that Wirecutter differentiated their reviews — is because there was an authentic voice and POV. In the same vein, I think AI content is inevitable. Like, it doesn't actually matter if more content is created because they're just not going to be on the first page of rankings. People are worried about the tsunami of content. I was like, “The tsunami's been here. It's not new.” Google will figure out what is worth showing because it knows how people are engaging with your content. If people are sitting on your pages and watching and scrolling and clicking around to other pages that they know that that's a good thing. I think video is a way of differentiating yourself — at least for the next, hopefully, a year, probably a while after that. I suspect there's going to be a shift in trusting just like random content on the internet. I don't think people know how to create a real person talking on camera yet, but I could be wrong. It's probably out there.

‍

Nate Matherson (Speaking) 

0:35:17
Well, I hope that that doesn't happen to your industry because you've actually got, like, a real doctor and your co-founder who's going in-depth on these topics that they are, you know, licensed and trained to speak and create content about. Like, if I were to try to start Wyndly’s content channel, like, I probably could put together like a hundred articles with chat GPT, but, like, there's no way that I could actually tell you if those articles were helpful or not, or actually gave, like, that customer, that patient, what they were looking for. And I agree with you that low-quality content is not a new concept. Like, there's been massive amounts of low-quality content since Google first created its search engine. And for the last 25 years, Google has been trying to remove and segment off low-quality or unhelpful content. I think the proliferation of AI-generated content certainly makes Google's job harder in terms of being able to dissect what's good versus not helpful when you've got thousands of new pages coming into their index. But this is definitely not, like, a new problem for Google. So hopefully, they've had time over the last 20 years to get out in front of this. And I'm sure it's something they've been thinking about even before GPT broke the internet. I do just want to quickly ask maybe a pointed question, like, should we be using AI-generated content as part of our content creation process? Or do you still think that content should largely be written by actual humans?

‍

Aakash Shah (Speaking)

0:36:40
That's a good question. I think it comes down to how much trust is involved in the content, right? So if Wyndly publishes something, we publish medical claims. We want to make sure, as a society, that medical claims, there's a high risk of a medical claim being wrong. In the healthcare industry, I hope that there is always at least an editor who has a science background. I don't necessarily see a very large difference between using some AI to spin up the very draft to zero, not even the first draft, but the roughest version of a draft or to create an outline and then kind of help put it in versus, like, when the editor or copywriter comes through and actually, like, polishes it, double-checks the claims, all that type of stuff. Especially because, like, if I'm giving you a list of, hey, here are the drug interactions, there's not, like … I'm not going to juice that up with, like, a sassy, authentic voice, right? That's just a fact. But in spaces where you know if you publish something wrong and it's frustrating — I'm an engineer and Stack Overflow has existed for like 15 years. It's not always right. Wrong information on the internet is not new. You just have to have critical thinking. Do I trust the publishing source here?

‍

Nate Matherson (Speaking)
0:37:48
And I love that you've built those processes internally to, like, doing that sourcing and fact-checking. And I think it's probably a lot easier given that your starting point is often, like, your co-founder, who's actually, like, a licensed and trained physician in this industry, which is great. And I think your website falls into that, like, Your Money, Your Life category of search where Google is increasingly judgmental in terms of what types of websites and what types of content it wants to show for a given search result. And I think in those industries, especially … I think anyone that's churning out massive amounts of content with AI and it isn't fact-checking or validating the claims being made, I think they're going to have a very difficult time to ultimately rank that content in search. But it sounds like you're doing everything correctly. I think we see that in the traffic coming back to your site.

‍

Aakash Shah (Speaking)
0:38:35
Also, people are afraid, they're like, “Well, why should we get started if it's just gonna come down to AI?” AI can't write about things it doesn't know about. Does that make sense? I probably can't ask any AI tool to tell me about Positional and its great features because it doesn't know what it is. There's still a lot of information which is, like, in people's brains, which is not on the internet. AI is just not going to be able to expose that. 

‍

Nate Matherson (Speaking) 

Yeah, and I know that Google's, like, highlighted this new search experience, you know, where they provide instant answers to a lot more queries. And I know that they've also said that in industries like finance and health, it's going to be a much slower or non-existent rollout, given that they know that there's a high degree of risk with these topics. And the last thing Google wants to do is provide someone a health claim that then is inaccurate and then ultimately someone harms themself as a result. So I think especially in your industry, I don't think search is maybe going to change as much as it may in an industry like fractions. I talked to a founder the other day that was building a website on math problems. And I think for a question like “What's five times five?” like, Google's already gotten very good at answering that question very quickly. Well, I do want to transition to the rapid-fire round. It's been so great to have you on. I think we've covered a lot. And so we'll make this relatively quick. I'm going to ask you five or six kind of pointed questions, and you can give me a very quick answer. Does that sound good? 

‍

Aakash Shah (Speaking)

Yeah, for sure. Let's do it. 

‍

Nate Matherson (Speaking)

So as far as tooling goes, is there a tool that you use most often or every single day at Wyndly as part of building out this channel?

‍

Aakash Shah (Speaking)

Slack and Notion. We use Shopify's blog as a CMS. When I tell that to SEO experts, I think I see some of them visibly recoil: Slack for comms, Notion for tracking where the content is. I think the content itself gets written in Google Docs because it's just easier than editing in Notion. And then Descript is what we use for transcriptions and video editing.

‍

Nate Matherson (Speaking)

Is there one thing in content marketing or SEO that you think is a total waste of time? Like, you've maybe heard people talk about it and say that you need to do it, but ultimately it just is a complete waste of time and it's not something you're thinking about?

‍

Aakash Shah (Speaking)

I think at scale, most of it does matter. I think technical SEO starts mattering at, like, 5,000 clicks per month. And then backlinks, I don't know when they start mattering, but I do know they do start mattering — but I just don't know at what scale. And when I say backlinks, I mean, like, a backlinking strategy where you're asking people to link to you or you're working with folks to create new properties that will link to you. I don't mean just like some PR here and there.

‍

Nate Matherson (Speaking)
0:41:13
I think it depends on the industry that you're in. I think for certain founders, I tell them, “Ddon't worry about backlinks.” For other founders and industries like finance, I do think it's quite important as you get your website into the running. My next question is around where do you go from here? Like, what does the next six or 12 months look like for Wyndly from a content marketing and/or SEO perspective?

‍

Aakash Shah (Speaking)

0:41:35
I think what's hard is, I think we've almost saturated everything at this point around our primary treatment, which is allergy drop immunotherapy. You know, there's only so many ways you can say the same thing over and over. This might now start to be a time for us to start listening. OK, what are adjacent questions? Instead of our treatment, what else are our customers asking? What else are our prospects asking? So kind of expanding past this niche that we've created. Also, I want to get a lot better at turning a page view into a customer. Six months ago, we were not at 100,000 page views per month. And so we were still focused on driving traffic and driving volume. But now it's definitely time to be, like, OK, so we're getting there, we're getting people to come to our website. How do we actually turn this channel into something that is going to be valuable for the company? Because page views without customers aren't actually valuable. It's just a vanity metric.

‍

Nate Matherson (Speaking)

0:42:25
100%. I've really enjoyed having you on this podcast. I've learned a few things and there are a number of things we are going to implement here at Positional as a result of this podcast. So I really appreciate you coming on, and you'll certainly get a backlink from us from our website when we publish this podcast onto our website. So thank you so much for coming on. Is there anything else you wanted to cover here today?

‍

Aakash Shah (Speaking)
0:42:46
Yeah. If any listeners have allergies, you can find me on LinkedIn. You can find me at Wyndly.com. Yeah, just ping me, and I'll make sure that you get taken care of in the best way because you shouldn't have to live with allergies. Thanks so much for having me on, Nate. I really enjoyed the conversation.

‍

Ad Spot
0:43:01
This episode of the Optimize podcast is brought to you by a special sponsor. If you're anything like me, you've probably got a lot of content that's not very well optimized and it can be a total pain in your butt to optimize it and ultimately get it to rank better in search. And that's what Positional does. Positional has an incredible toolset for everything from content optimization to technical SEO and planning your editorial calendar. And if you don't know by now, I'm one of the co-founders of Positional, and I'd love for you to check it out.

‍