Steve Toth

The speaker is Steve Toth who has a lot of experience:

• Former SEO Manager at FreshBooks.com
• Ranked #1 for multiple 300,000 SV keywords
• Grew blog traffic from 0 to 50,000 unique visitors per day in 12 months
• Expert in Keyword Verticalization and People Also Ask blogging strategy
• Grew SEO Notebook from 0 to over 10,000 subscribers in 2.5 years
• Sign up for weekly email strategy tips for free at seonotebook.com
• Enterprise SEO Consultant with a focus on SEO strategy
• Grew solo SEO Consulting business to over 1 million revenue/year in 2 years

Steve talks about the case study for FreshBooks. He states that there are numerous opportunities to optimize keywords and at this conference, he discusses one keyword – “invoice template.” The following will not apply to every SEO strategy, but if it applies to your use case, you will have incredible results.

At FreshBooks, they took the keyword “invoice template” and created 121 pages about invoice templates. It is important to consider that people are looking for content that is tailored exactly to them. This means that it is essential to provide them with it. 

Steve did it several times in his consulting practice:

• Contract templates
• Online portfolio
• Indoor maps
• Online courses
• Estimates
• +more

It is also essential to invest in data collection: 

• Google autosuggest
• Competitor research
• Paid search data
• Ahrefs
• First-party customer data
• One huge spreadsheet!

Steve also shares some secrets to on-page optimization:

Money Page Optimization Keys to Success

• Cora SEO software (seotoollab.com)
• An excellent writer
• Super-detailed brief, every heading, supporting keywords for each paragraph
• Re-optimization with Google Search Console data
• Methodical internal linking
• Outbound linking to authority sites
• Optimized video on the page
• Focus on above-the-fold appearance on mobile
• High attention to CRO using paid search traffic

It is also essential to choose high converting, high traffic pages to be linked from the main page.

There are also certain tips for image optimization:

1. We achieved over 400,000 image clicks over a 16 month timespan. 
2. Key elements include: descriptive filename, alt text, surrounding text, H3 for each image.
3. We also found that the more an invoice looked like the other invoices on the image pack and used the same words for OCR, the more likely they were to rank. 

In order to signify the importance of the money page: freshbooks.com/invoice-templates, Steve’s team linked back up to it as the first internal link for each secondary page.

They also focused the link building on the money page and let the internal links filter the link juice down.

All of these brought incredible results.

• They relaunched the pages in January 2019 and Steve remained an SEO Manager until February 2020. After that, he was hired as a consultant.
• Ahrefs data is not entirely accurate, but they held “invoice template” 300k SV for a little under 2 years.
• Overall, the pages increased free trials by over 10X and set records for SEO’s contributions to the company. 
• By the end of Steve’s time at FreshBooks, he could do no wrong and would often come into work around lunchtime 🙂

Steve also quickly describes the second case study: How to Turn 17 People also ask Questions into 170 436k Traffic Value/

They worked with an online course provider. Live courses, high ticket courses $5000+

Offered courses like:

• Data science
• Web development
• Product management
• UX design
• Cyber security
• Digital marketing
• Python

They identified 17 common questions people also ask before they purchase a high ticket, live online course. Questions like:

• What is web development?
• What do web developers do?
• Do web developers work from home?
• How to become a web developer? (money page)
• What skills do you need to become a web developer?
• Do you need a degree to become a web developer?
• Is web development a good career?
• How hard is it to become a web developer?
• What companies hire web developers? etc.

Then, they took these 17 questions and applied them to different careers:

As a result, they earned over 70,000 high-value clicks. Moreover, they gave the client a chance to earn revenue from SEO without focusing on the very bottom-funnel pages like “web development course” which are all dominated by aggregators and review sites.

In the end of the speech, Steve answers some questions, so watch the full video on YouTube to get more insights.