Case Study: Full Service SEO for an AI Start Up

Kirill Sajaev

SEO & Founder

 ·  2 min read

Table of contents

Project Summary

Akool.com hired us as their first SEO agency to help with a wide range of issues and goals including:

  • Fixing indexation errors due to a heavily javascript influenced website
  • Designing and building a blog in Webflow
  • Designing landing pages
  • Researching & maintaining a content calendar
  • Linkbuilding

The ultimate goal of course, is to win traffic in a crowded market for “AI Marketing Tools”.

Phase 1: Building a Content Delivery Vehicle

While we worked out Akool’s technical issues we also understood that before we publish content we need a vehicle to deliver this content. This required a 3 step approach.

  1. Understanding the content types we want to create
  2. Designing the content templates
  3. Building the content templates

We planned to build 2 template types, tool pages for bottom funnel use case searches, and an SEO optimized blog for general blog content that would reflect our content calendar.

Design

You can see the final tool pages here and blog pages here, and our initial designs below.

FIGMA file of the tool pages we designed
Blog Figma File

Development

The blog was built by our team in Webflow, this way the content and marketing teams can quickly edit article content and add SEO optimizations without waiting for the development team to push changes live.

The tool pages were built by Akool’s web team with our SEO input. Together we tackled issues like:

  • Indexation errors with React.JS
  • Heavy javascript usage
  • Subdomain vs Subfolder SEO
  • Content optimization

After the new pages launched we started running a monthly technical crawl to identify any potential new errors.

Phase 2: Content Planning + Creation

Simultaneously with the design & development work, we’ve also started planning for content creation.

  1. Identify & hire authors with AI experience
  2. Plan a 6 month content calendar
  3. Produce outlines for each month’s content

Author Search

One of the critical aspects of building a content machine is hiring authors that are subject matter experts in the industry.

For Akool we reviewed candidates on Upwork, Linkedin and our extended network and settled on 2 writers that we’ve worked with since. We look for freelance writers that have experience with AI tools, SaaS marketing or software development so that they can speak intelligently about the topics we cover.

Content Calendar

Our content calendar is the corner stone of our work. We plan ahead and organize our ideas by clusters, keyword targets, search volume and probability for conversion.

Depending on the client and the competitive landscape we like to work on a variety of content types including:

  1. Long form educational articles for TOFU terms
  2. Comparison articles to rank for competitor brand searches
  3. Specific use cases or customer pain points

Phase 3: Linkbuilding & Distribution

For Akool we focused on 2 main methods of content promotion and distribution:

  1. Linkbuilding: We’ve developed our own internal system of evaluating websites for placement and have been utilizing the “niche edit” strategy for scale and ROI. We work to deliver about 10 links / month from vetted sources.
  2. Reddit: This is a more challenging and experimental channel. Reddit is popular in the tech community and a great way to be noticed and included in conversations about “tool questions”, “ai benchmarking”, “how do I do [xyz] with AI”. However navigating and working within moderator guidelines can be a challenge.

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