How TripleDart Scaled B2B SaaS SEO for 100+ Brands with 80 People in 2024 (Interview with Founder Shiyam Sunder)

Introduction and Speaker Background

Shiyam Sunder

00:03Cool. Let's get started.

00:08So, yeah, I mean, we're gonna talk about one of the very important topics for the last two years about SEO and AI, how this deadly combination is going to work. So we're talk about priority challenges and opportunities for the next twenty minutes. So I'm Shyam. I'm founder of Triple Dart. Triple Dart is a B2B SaaS growth agency. We work with over 100 plus brands. Previous to Triple Dart, I used to run marketing at remo.com, Freshworks, Zoho,

Session Agenda: AI, SEO, and Programmatic SEO

Shiyam Sunder

00:34and Hey Digital. And I also advise and invest in startups. So if you want to connect, here's my QR code. So for the next twenty five minutes, we are going to basically talk about AI and SEO, right, 2023 versus 2024, impact of AI and SEO, what is SEO 2.0, and we're going to cover some of the most important and productive tools that we use in our day to day practices at Triple Dart and, how the new

TripleDart Overview: 80 People, 100+ SaaS Clients

Shiyam Sunder

01:01SEO is gonna work and how to basically do backlink, alright, in 2024, and ahead. And also, one other important topic that I'm gonna cover is, like, how you can scale programmatic SEO without scaling content, without heavier budgets. So that's also we're going to basically talk about today. Right? And so quick quick facts about Triple DApp. We founded in 2021. We are about, like, you know, 80 people. We only work with SaaS companies. Right? These are all

01:26the companies that we work with. We have three stages, basically. Like, you know, for Metsha, we work with companies like Freshworks and Sprinklr. Growth stage, we work with companies like Privile. Fast growing, we work with companies like Factors dot ai, Multiplayer, and stuff like that. Right? Cool. Let's quickly dive in. Right? So now we're going to talk about the role of AI in SEO in 2024 and what challenges, priorities and opportunities that we have. So this

SEO Challenges in 2024 vs 2023

Shiyam Sunder

01:52is a very important and interesting stat that I took from search engine

01:59engine land survey. So you can basically compare what is the difficulty and most important task in 2024 compared to 2023. In 2023, most of the marketing leaders and founders reported content production is the very difficult or challenging task to do. But in 2024, algorithm changes and link building and technical SEO are the three important or difficult things to basically do. Why? Because in the last eighteen months, there are about 16 core algorithm update and in which

02:29there are three very important updates. So if your website is five year old or six year old or seven year old, you just need to basically get equip yourself with the new changes that has been there. So that's why technical SEO is becoming important right? And also link building and algorithm changes. And if you look at this, this is again from the same survey. 71% of the respondents, they said like, you know, this AI in SEO

Impact of AI on SEO and SGE Explained

Shiyam Sunder

02:55is disruptive, right? And you can see like, you know, 32% is somewhat disruptive, 26% is slightly disruptive. Like only 18% is not disruptive. But let's move on to the priorities, right? For example, people are saying after this SG, SG is nothing. It's called search generative experience. So Google use another traditional, like, you know, concept called SERP, search engine results page, which is a very traditional way of pulling data from on the back end. Now it is

03:30using SGE. SGE is nothing but search generative experience, which uses AI to basically pull in the data and then and then showing it upfront. Right? So now you just need to be aware of three things. One, now whatever your website is, you need to update it for mobile first because almost all your website would be mobile first indexing than desktop first indexing. That's one. And second one is, earlier, like three years or four years back, people

03:55used to follow this top of funnel keywords, go behind, like, a lot of search volume keywords and stuff like that. Now you don't need to do that. You can focus on very long tail, very less search volume keywords. We call it as long tail semantic keywords. That is, again, works really well for companies. And you should also give importance to more rich text elements like images, visuals, and other factors. So that is also an important factor

SEO 2.0: AI Workflows and Automation

Shiyam Sunder

04:20when it comes to SEO. Alright? And if you look at this, this is a very important factor. 80% of the respondents said it is positively impacted. There is no negative impact about this SEO. I mean, like, about this AI algorithm update with an SEO. So, you know, we can still be confident about whatever the changes that we are making that will impact us in a good way. Right? And these are all the priorities, for a for

04:44from an SEO department. Like, you know, I have I have categorized this this into practitioners, managers, and leaders. If you look at for practitioners, right, and and, you know, adapting to the impact of AI is the second priority. And if you look at for managers and leader, this is their main or important priority. Right? So let's quickly talk about that. Right? Like, you know, in long story short, so your bottom funnel and high converting pages may

05:08still reap traffic and conversions. Your top of funnel pages is called as informational, intent pages. And those pages, the impressions are declining month on month. Right? Now the second point is you need to give more importance to your brand and your brand reputation. So don't spam your brand with a lot of multiple domains for sending emails and stuff like that. Now your brand reputation is very important and focusing on improving a brand reputation is the the

05:34core important. And the third part which is called a content qualification methodology. So Google comes up with something called EEAT which is experience, expertise, authority and trust. So if you are let's say if you are a fintech brand, hire a couple of journalists who used to write for fintech brands and then ask them to write your pillar pages. If you are a cyber security brand, work with someone who actually written a lot of cyber security content.

06:01So that is how you can basically generate unique content which stands out compared to your competition. Right? Now, like, what is SEO 2.0? Right? It's very simple. You can use AI. You can use workflows. You can use automations to do like a 10 checklist. So first, you can leverage AI to create high quality content ideas, not the content. You shouldn't use AI to create content that will penalize or that will impact in a wrong way. You

06:32can use AI to find ideas. Second, there are a lot of experimentation tools right now so that will guide you whether a particular SEO experiment is going on the right track or not. Third, programmatic that we are going to cover. And fourth, right now, you don't need to basically, like, you know, spend time on building calculators, tools, and stuff like that. So there are lot of linkable asset creation tool like Replit Copilot where you can use

06:57to build mini tools for your website. Right and finally you can use an AI agent to track what is happening within your website it's more like a virtual assistant that sits within your website that will notify if there is some problem it's more like a system monitoring but it'll update you if there is any problem that's happened within your website. So I'll I'll talk about that as well. Right? And and and and the and the other

07:23part would be, like, you know, it's not just AI. So it's also there are a lot of workflows you can use in the SEO world. You can use Makeup, Zapier, and you can use chat ChatGPT four to basically create all those different, variations. Right? So in short, with this SEO 2.0, you can 10x your results with half of the investment and 2x more productive. Right? Now let's talk about how you can be more productive and how

Rare SEO Tools for Founders and Marketers

Shiyam Sunder

07:49you can basically generate this 10x results and stuff like that. Right? So, yeah, this is an important part. Right? Like, you know, these are all very, I would say, rare tools in the SEO world that not many leaders in marketing I mean, founders know of. So first, this tool. It's called completely.ai. Right? So I mean, like, you know, if you're a founder or a marketing leader, there is something called battle cards. You have to compare your

08:15product or your solution with another company. So it will take about roughly two days to create this battle cards. Right? So now with Compete.ai, you just need to add who's your competitor, and this particular competee.ai will give you a 10 pager battle card comparing almost all possible, what information available on the Internet. So it will it will completely saves like, you know, one day minimum. Right? Now let's go to the second tool, which is lot

08:43of founders here, you want to know how is your personas have been searching but you're not good at SEO but you know what is your product is doing and stuff like that. You can write in this tool called you know seo.ai saying that like you know okay like you know my product is a fintech solution selling for SMB and what kind of keywords that that probably you know fit into my top funnel. If you ask this

09:08question, this tool will give you the set of keywords then use this tool called seed keywords to further expand that. Again, this is a very very useful tool and once this is again right like you know let's say you don't have a big web development team Right? Or you got the keywords, but you wanted to structure this in a proper way. So that's when this keywordinsights.ai will come in. Let's say you get 100 keywords, and you're

09:34going to basically publish all those 100 keywords into keyword clustering tool. It will cluster what is your top of funnel, what is the middle of funnel, what is your bottom funnel, and how many pages you need, and which pages are top priority, which pages are less priority and stuff like that. Every single thing. So for example, this will take about minimum four hours to plan one month calendar just for clustering. So within this tool, can do

09:58it within ten minutes, not even ten minutes, just five minutes. Right? And again, let's say, through.com. So this is this tool called let's say you have a content writing team, but you don't know I mean, you're not confident about the brief that you're sharing with your team. Right? So through.com, you can basically give the exact persona, what kind of messaging that you wanted to share with these personas, what kind of tonality, and what is the context

10:26behind this particular, content. Right? And this through.com will basically give you a very detailed, a brief, and that can be shared with your writers. So, again, like, you know, very useful tool. And this one. Right? So AI inner linking. So which is a very, very time consuming task. Let's say your website has thousand pages. Each page will probably have around, like, you know, 15 to 20 links. Right? 15 to 20 links into thousand. So I mean,

10:54like, you know, you you you calculate. Right? So it's a very, very manual repetitive task. So there is this tool called Junia in which there is an AI in in the linking capability. You just need to add the URL of your website and then that will scrape almost all possible inner link for your page. Again, like, you know, one of my favorite. Hopefully, this tool, most of you know, which is called Surfer SEO. What this tool

11:19will do is this will grade your content. Let's say you're writing a new content and you don't know exactly what others have written and why their content is ranking better than your content. Right? So what this will do is it will guide the writer. So you can see on the right side, there is a 90 out of 100 score, which means and and below that, you will see an average of 83 and top 88. What it

11:45means is the number one link that is ranking for this keyword, they have 88 score and the average of the first 10 rank, so that is having 83. So the goal for our content writers to basically cross that 88 mark. Right? So that's why Surfer is like inevitable tool for triple that internally we use for all our clients. Alright? So there is other tools like ClearScope, Razer and stuff like that but Surfer is one of the

12:11best tool. And here, it's a one stop SEO extension. You don't need to basically have a bunch of extension within your Chrome Web Store. You just need to download this detail.com. It has eight tabs, actually seven tabs, sorry, which gives you a complete picture about your website and you can look at it look this whenever you want to basically identify what kind of changes that you wanted to make. Right? And finally, SEO is also moving towards

12:40audience led. Right? So we use Parktaro and we use audience.com to find the demographic, technographic signals about different companies. And this will help you identify, okay, like, you know, a company a visits like you know freshworks.com and after that like in about two minutes they are visiting zendesk.com. So that kind of an information you can easily get from SparkToro. From audience you can basically find the where your personas have been hanging out. Let's say a CFO,

13:15for a 100,000,000 company versus a CFO for a 50,000,000 company. There is a bigger difference in terms of like you know where they hang out, what content they read and stuff like that. So you can use audience for that to basically identify, like, you know, what they're doing and stuff like that. And finally, let's say you don't want it to go with an agency. You don't have a big budget, but you want to run an SEO.

13:35This is called this auto SEO. It's an AI agent. You just need to add the JavaScript on the website. Right? And it will do almost all the work. Right? So but, I mean, like, you know, I don't prefer using this. But if you are an early stage founders, marketing leaders, you can use that. But I advise to go with a consultant or an in house team, but this is for much cheaper and much better. Okay. Now

New SEO vs Old SEO: Traffic vs Conversion Pages

Shiyam Sunder

13:59let's talk about new SEO versus old SEO, which is very interesting, at least for me. You can see here, so there are 23 types of SEO content. Towards the left, you will see these are all content that just drives traffic. Towards the right, you see content that drives conversions. So whenever you look at SEO, you should basically classify your SEO strategy into two types. One, there are about 100 to 150 keywords which we call internally as

14:30money keywords or money pages that drives business. Right? And for any company that you take, the ceiling is ceiling would be around, like, you know, two hundred two hundred keywords. Right? And each keyword will basically have around 500 to thousand search volume. So 20,000 volume would be more than enough to drive close to, like, you know, thousand sign ups or 500 sign ups, a very good sign up someone or or demo someone. Right? But on the

14:55right left side, these are all very traffic generating keywords, which is very good for all your visibility content. Right? So I have I have classified this into traffic focused, conversion focused, difficulty versus easy. So you can you can I mean, like, for example, your list, your FAQs, your step by step guides, your interviews, that creates more traffic and to to towards your right? Right? Like, you know, how to guides, landing pages, product pages, that creates more

15:21conversions. Alright. Now, outdated SEOs, people will start doing keyword research, then they do topic research, then they write content. Right? Now you should do the other way around. You should first identify, like, what's your what's the pain points of the personas that you deal with, then create topics that you think of which is very, you know, like, relevant to your audience, then do keyword research. So that's what we call it. Right? Like, for for example, then

Job-to-Be-Done Keyword Framework

Shiyam Sunder

15:49do a funnel saying that which are all your unaware content, which are all your problem aware content, which are all your solution aware content. And start with product aware, then go to solution aware, then go to problem aware, then finally go to unaware. So so this is this is a, like, you know, three step easy process. Right? Learn pain points, think of topic ideas, find keywords. So we use internally at triple dot. We use this framework

16:09called job to be done framework. So which is we pick a persona. Right? And we pick the core job of that persona. And we also pick the related job of that persona. And what we do is we look what they are searching on Internet day in, day out. Right? And then we map that funnel. Right? And then we start towards the right. We we write content for more more more like, closer to the evaluation, then basically

16:34pick up the middle of funnel and top of funnel later. So, yeah, this is a very popular framework that we use internally. And finally, new SEO is not just within your website, it's also outside your website. So for example, let's say I'm writing a blog today and my domain authority is 40 and Google will take about two days to index my own URL. Instead, if you write the same content within Medium or Reddit or Quora or

16:59just answer to some of the questions that is already there, so your chances of indexing your website or that URL would be much faster than your own content. Why? Because Reddit or Quora's domain authority would be ninety, ninety nine, 95. Our domain authority would be lesser than fifty, sixty. So, you know, like, some of the social signals will be much faster to index compared to our own, domain. Right? And which is I mean, like now we

Backlink Building: Digital PR and Free Tools

Shiyam Sunder

17:26are going to talk about a very, very important topic when it comes to SEO. A lot of people are struggling in it. They don't know how to basically get backlink. In 2024, again, if you wanted to get backlinks, it's for two purpose. One, to increase domain authority and two, to increase your topical authority. To increase domain authority, don't do reach outs, don't do guest blogging and stuff like that. A better way to do is you can

17:52just do a digital PR. You spend $1,000 and you'll get listed in Forbes, Entrepreneur and whatever the best website that you can like listed on. These are all like 90 plus domain authority side and your domain authority will also get boosted. But to get topical authority, that's when, you know, like, for example, you need to basically get ranked for. What So I mean by domain authority and topical authorities? Topical authority is a specific topic that you

18:15wanted to, like, you know, acquire links for. Right? To get what I'm going to talk about is to get topical authority, again, like, you know, there is a way in which you can get it. So the best way is to basically build free tools.

Free Tool Case Studies: ESOP Calculator and Social Media Client

Shiyam Sunder

18:31These are all some of the examples. Can build a freelance rate calculator. You can build a project timeline estimator. You can build a project budget estimator and stuff like that. I'll show you a couple of examples. So this is one of our client. We built this ESOP pool size calculator and, this got indexed two and a half months back and we got 30 free backlinks. There are a lot of newsletters have been reported this and also

18:55there are couple of other, websites have been like, you know, given this. These are all like, know, very big of this thing. And towards the right, so we work with this company who who is a social media management portal, right. We have we have created like 10 free tools like that and you can look at, like, you know, we got around one sixty free backlinks in about two and a half, three months. Right? So, again, that's

19:15a easy way to, drive backlinks. And finally, we are we are going to end the session with the programmatic SEO and b to b SaaS. So so programmatic SEO is nothing but publishing more than 100 pages in a very short time. Right? How you can do this? So it's very simple. Right? You need a like an optimized page template. You need a database of all the information. You need super, like, long tail keywords. So it's one

Programmatic SEO Explained: Templates, Database, Keywords

Shiyam Sunder

19:45into two into three. That's it. Right? How we are going to do that? Right? So so there are three myths in the programmatic world. One is programmatic SEO spam because you're going to repeat the content. Right? So, the search engine will might look, okay. This is a duplicate content. It's not it's not right. You can see the difference. Right? Towards the left, you can see a very generic answer for a topic, and towards the right, you

20:10can see, like, you know, for every, like, you know, delta, what is the miles worth? Right? So the right will have more context according to Google compared to the left. Second, programmatic SEO only works with AI. Completely wrong. Right? AI will only give flexibility. Right? I'll talk about even before this AI thing comes. Like, you know, we work with manage engine. We basically created thousands of pages back in 2012. Right? So I'll talk about that later.

20:39But, yeah, third thing, programmatic content does not convert, which is partially true if you if you create programmatic SEO without having that relevancy or context. But for few companies, it works really well. That that also we are going to talk about. Cool. So these are all some examples, but you but, yeah, if you if you want to understand whether PSEO is right for you, there are three things. First, you need to put little bit upfront, like,

21:07you know, investment and time is needed, but not always just one time. Right? And second, your current SEO strategy. You you you brand should be little bit matured brand. And third, you should be selling some very big TAM. That's it. These are all the three pre request for PSEO and the first thing, programmatic SEO works really well for localization. For example, let's say you wanted to build like 100 pages for different states, thousand pages for different

21:36cities, for zip codes and stuff like that. For example, you can see an example. Right? Minimum wage in Los Angeles for best restaurants. And it works for job to be done. JTBD is job to be done. Use a particular tool for a particular task. Third, it works for different industries and also comparisons. Right? I don't know if you've, like, attended this demo led, SEO session. So, like, you know, com Storyline used to basically build all comparison

22:01using their, like, you know, programmatic way of doing SEO only. Right? And for, like, niche, it's based on metrics and brands. So once you get to the keywords, then you're going to SEMrush and and find all the existing keywords. Then what are you going to do is you need to identify, let's say, if you hit a particular traffic, how much like revenue or pipeline that you get. So for that, let me let me let me quickly

22:28show that in later. But just for PSEO, you just need these three things, page content, content database, and AI prompts. This is how a page template would look like. So if you look at the blue color content blocks, all these are dynamic. If you look at like you know welcome to what industry and for what job title and if you look at the second content block, top three percentage of job title and third content block at

Programmatic SEO Case Studies: SentinelOne, Multiplier, Freight Forwarding

Shiyam Sunder

22:54different keyword and stuff like Once this is done, then, again, like, know, this is a little bit tricky. I would give you an automated way. So you can use that for building better this thing. Right? So so this is an automated way. So you can use either one of these two tools. One is called byword dot a I. Another one is called Withdraydeam. So if you are not a programmatic ninja, so what you can do is

23:17instead of using Excel or Google Sheets and stuff like that, you can either use Byword or Withdraydeam to basically build this like, back end infrastructure for doing programmatic. That's it. Right? So, as I as I told you, like, you know, you just need to find keyword patterns. You just need to basically build page template, set up database, build AI prompts, and publish. So this is the tool that we have built. Alright? So you can, you know,

23:41like, if you can just, you know, scan this, it will take you to a Google Sheet. And in that, whatever I've I've I've discussed so far would be explained in a, like, you know, step by step manner. And

23:56this is how it works. After completing a programmatic SEO, it will take one to three months for indexation, one to six months for impression, one to nine months for ranking, one to twelve months for traffic conversions pipeline revenue. So so let's quickly talk about the results. So this is one company called Multiplier. So they are a global payroll UR company, one one of our one of our customers. So for them, what we have done was we

24:18have created a country encyclopedia. Right? So you can see there is very low results for their brand SEO. So what we have done was we have created programmatic templates for work permit and for employment guides. Right? We have a database in the back end. We use that database and created content and and published this. And if you look at the second, which is, for this company called Bydance Lark, and if you look at, we have basically

24:41built close to, 500 plus templates because, you know, Bydance, it's I mean, Lark is more like a ClickUp competitor. So they are a project management software. We used to create a lot of templates and then use that as, for our own programmatic issue. And for SentinelOne. Right? So SentinelOne has this ransomware anthology. So there are about, like, you know, thousand plus ransomwares. For each ransomware, we've created a, like, you know, a page, and there are about

TripleDart's Own Programmatic SEO Rankings

Shiyam Sunder

25:07thousand plus pages. It's not 100. So there it results about 10,000 plus traffic. And this company is a freight forwarding company. So for that, we basically build a, like, a to and fro freight forwarding calculator. Again, at 400 pages, like, you know, we got around 5,000 plus traffic and stuff like that. The final one is r one case study. Alright? So you can you can look at, like, you know, if you search for b to b

25:28SaaS SEO agency in New York, b to b, SEO agency in California, Like, you know, even after SEMrush, we are the number one or number two, position, for almost all the keywords. All keywords I mean, all pages have the same content. We just change the state and country names, and then it automatically started ranking. Yeah, that's pretty much about it. If you have any questions, connect with me offline. Happy to answer whatever questions, whatever you have.