Episode Details

Farzad Rashidi's marketing team at Visme spent months creating content and got two website visitors - one was his mom. Then he flipped the SaaS SEO strategy playbook: 80% promotion, 20% creation.

That SaaS content marketing approach grew Visme to 3 million monthly organic visitors and 14 million active users. Along the way, the internal link-building tool became Respona - but selling it as a standalone product nearly failed because they positioned it for everyone instead of one specific buyer. You will learn Farzad's keyword prioritization formula, his content promotion strategy for earning backlinks from top-tier publications, and why SaaS SEO success requires spending most of your budget on promotion.

What You Will Learn

• How an 80/20 SaaS SEO strategy drove Visme from 2 visitors to 3M monthly organic
• The keyword opportunity score formula combining traffic potential, difficulty, and CPC
• How a Game of Thrones campaign earned 60 backlinks from Forbes and Psychology Today
• Why broad positioning killed Respona's early traction

🔑 Key Lessons

• 🚀 SaaS SEO strategy requires promotion-first budgeting: Visme spends 80% of marketing resources on content promotion and link building and only 20% on creation - driving 3M monthly organic visitors.
• 🎯 Prioritize keywords with a data-driven opportunity score: Farzad's formula multiplies traffic potential by the inverse of keyword difficulty, weighted by CPC for commercial intent.
• 🔗 Build links through original research, not cold spam: Visme pitched data visualizations to journalists covering related topics, earning hundreds of backlinks in a single content promotion strategy campaign.
• 📉 Broad positioning kills early SaaS traction: Respona targeted PR, influencer marketing, sales, and SaaS SEO teams simultaneously, diluting its message until Farzad narrowed to link-building software.
• 🛠️ Use your own SaaS content marketing stack to validate demand: Farzad built Respona internally first, proved it saved time, then validated external demand through a 160-page playbook generating 10,000 downloads.

Chapters

• Introduction
• Farzad's favorite quote and Respona overview
• Business size and bootstrapped growth
• Origin story at Visme and first marketing hire
• Why SEO was the right channel for Visme
• Two website visitors and the content wake-up call
• Timeline from zero to 3M organic visitors
• Content promotion vs. content creation: the 80/20 shift
• Link building without spamming: relationship-based outreach
• Podcast guesting as a link building strategy
• Recap of Visme's content marketing journey
• Getting Respona's first 10 customers through AppSumo
• The 160-page ebook and lead magnet strategy
• Keyword research: the opportunity score formula
• Three types of content with different objectives
• The Game of Thrones link magnet campaign
• Why link magnet content is not conversion content
• The positioning mistake: selling to everyone
• Finding product-market fit through niching down
• Rebuilding Respona from scratch in 2021
• Lightning round
• Wrap-up and where to find Farzad

Resources

• Full show notes: https://saasclub.io/323
• Join 5,000+ SaaS founders: https://saasclub.io/email