This year’s Series A startups have some blogging heavy-hitters who are defining success for early-stage companies.
We took the biggest trafficked companies, looked at their top blogs, and found some patterns. The early stage blogs aren’t doing some of the high-level/high-expense tricks that all the podcasts are teaching these days. But they’re still having some successes.
What are they doing instead?
They’re all using People Also Ask (PAA) informational content for top-of-funnel traffic, but they’re not all doing it similarly or for the long haul.
Let’s look at the top 3 trafficked blogs from 3 top contenders in content from among this year’s funded Series A companies.
Testsigma is Winning on Long Blog Posts
Testsigma is a platform that automates testing for apps, web, and APIs with natural language AI. In other words, you don’t need to code scripts to test products anymore. That makes them a good fit for medium and large organizations running fast-paced development cycles, so you wouldn’t think that they’re a traffic leader aiming to speak to tens of thousands of web visitors per month.
But Testsigma is grabbing over 6K monthly views for its blog post, “Common Screen Resolutions: What Are They and How to Test.“
By the way, this is by far the most popular blog among all this year’s funded Series A’s.
Further, it’s a brand new blog post, barely 3 weeks old, but guess what? It’s working big-time for them.
How’d they pull this off?
Well, while the writing doesn’t instill trust and authority, it does set the stage for SEO success right:
- It’s got “People Also Ask” (PAA) style informational content in multiple sections, each focusing on a related question that Google users ask frequently like “Why does screen resolution matter?” and “What is the most common screen resolution today?”
- It has several user-friendly, skimmable content best practices, from short paragraphs to bullet points and tables.
- It uses images throughout.
- It uses a table of contents with internal links to sections.
- It’s a large 2,788 words.
With a total of 2.15K keywords ranking, 134 of them are sitting pretty at position #1 in the SERPS. One of them, “typical screen resolution,” has a respectable 1.9K monthly searches and scant competition. Another, “display resolutions” has 8.1K searches.
So, ok. This is a keyword goldmine with little competition. Most of the people who search this term and click on this post aren’t looking for a testing solution, but for those who are, the post becomes an extremely public funnel starter.
The caveat: Testigma will need to build trust before all that traffic converts to its top potential. Writing quality, MOFU content, backing up claims with examples and quotes, and having a strong, relevant CTA all go into the formula of how much this content can do for them.
Clickpost is Appealing to Huge Traffic Potential
Like Testsigma, Clickpost may seem a little too enterprise to be raking in the huge traffic (or even wanting to!), but this post-purchase retail platform nevertheless makes a bold content play.
They’re competing (and winning) on high-traffic keywords around shipping labels, shipping costs, shipping calculators, best courier companies, and alternatives pieces (“top 10 best pirate ship alternatives and competitors in 2024”). In other words, someone at Clickpost is familiar with common content plays and is going all-in on getting eyeballs on Clickpost…even when those eyeballs aren’t attached to potential Clickpost customers.
Their top-trafficked post, “USPS Priority Mail vs. USPS Flat Rates (Differences in 2024),” is certain to grab views, since there’s an audience of hundreds of millions of people shipping things through the mail in the US.
Here are some ways the post claims so many views:
- It’s got a table of contents around informational sections like how much you can save, what common items are shipped with different USPS products, etc.
- You’ll also see business-oriented sections on “which service is best for my business needs,” which funnel small business owners and small retailers to the funnel. In a “related blogs” sidebar, these readers will see more professionally focused articles about lowering cost per order.
- While the audience is consumers, the business shipper ICP is front-of-mind in the writing, as the author notes ways to lower eCommerce shipping costs, bring down employee costs, etc. That’s a nice touch that makes the piece stand out from consumer-oriented pieces on shipping prices. They may be getting clicks from B2B readers who read something more general already and didn’t find it was directed at their needs.
- Includes frequently asked questions in breakout sections.
- At 1,206 words, this shortie still packs in 9 section headers plus 3 FAQs. In other words, lots of small sections are more important in this piece than building up the post to be an “ultimate guide”-level pillar.
RemotePass is Slowly Tackling High-Competition Keywords
Their Biggest Traffic Blog
Global hiring is the norm these days, but that doesn’t mean compliance, payroll, and legal have caught up. Enter RemotePass, which seeks to secure global teams’ HR needs in one spot. Their blog traffic is currently tiny, but it is pulling in more traffic to one post than to any other company page. Their big winner is a post called “US Independent Contractor Tax Forms — All You Need to Know.”
Yup, it’s another information-based keyword play at the top of the funnel.
- At 2,450 words, it’s another encyclopedic “ultimate guide to” designed around the needs of companies hiring remotely (RemotePass’ target audience). The introduction and the CTA both underline that RemotePass can handle all the forms for you, so if that’s what you’re here for, book a demo.
- With 20 headings, readers chomp through this meal-sized article full of related Google PAA questions. While there are tons of answers here, they’re also easy to digest.
- There are no images, no tables, no interviews, and no walk-throughs of how other companies have learned to manage these tax-form headaches.
If RemotePass’ keywords had the kind of traffic that Testigma is going after, they’d have to augment this piece with images, tables, or interviews to make it more in-depth, helpful, and unique (and to fend off AI answers from their poaching their readers). They need more authority in this topic to make that move yet, but it should be on their quarterly content update calendar!
But with a Domain Authority (DA) 15 points less than Testigma, ResmotePass isn’t after that traffic yet. They’re diligently building downstream authority first, and this post is evidence they’re starting to reap the benefits. It’s ranking for 463 incredibly competitive small business, payroll, and HR keywords. In the future, their authority on these topics, and their rankings, will increase exponentially if they stay the course.
RemotePass Lessons for All Series A Bloggers
Sometimes you have to bite the bullet in a competitive landscape and try to own high-competition topics like payroll.
After all, breakthroughs are the foundations of future topical authority.
For example, this post ranks #1 for “forms contractors” and is knocking at the door for the more trafficked “forms for independent contractors”.
Further, RemotePass is already winning traffic for high-competition glossary terms like “work permit” and “per diem.” All this groundwork lays the foundation for the right readers to make the leap to their higher-intent MOFU posts.
What authority RemotePass doesn’t get from Google (yet), they can build with MOFU blog posts their readers may find while on-site.
The company’s content plan includes blog interviews with in-house talent on some of the glossary topics like “onboarding” and a series of big TOFU “how-to” guides about hiring in various countries.
Both of these are seasoned playbook plays that stand to buttress the high-trafficked blogs’ power, even as they take more time to prove their own value. They can even be templated for easier production and mass-produced like OpenPhone’s personalized area code landing pages.
These kinds of posts are easier to write than from-scratch keyword pages, and more likely to get indexed and ranked than automatically generated template posts (called programmatic SEO).
Should We Still be Making PAA Content?
“People Also Ask” (PAA) content, including basic answers to commonly asked questions, is the most ubiquitous content performing well for Series A blogs today, even in 2024.
That’s risky! PAA content took a hit this past year. But for B2Bs that can hand-walk users through their informational needs with unique and specific examples, PAA still reigns.
People Also Ask (PAA) content is controversial. Some sites with sub-headers based on PAA search inquiries hit a brick wall in late 2023 and haven’t recovered yet.
In spite of uncertainty, there are still good reasons to invest in PAA content. Firstly, it’s easy and cheap to create around your topic clusters. You don’t need to hire anyone to conduct surveys or interviews, source quotes like a journalist, or walk through tech content like an engineer. Just hand over the PAA questions, tell your writer to make each one a header, and wrap it in an intro and a CTA.
With a competent content writer, you’re off to the races.
And for companies (not bloggers), PAA content is still winning. But it’s also the internet’s biggest content risk of 2024.
So no, we don’t recommend doing PAA content for your Series A blog in 2024. At least…not like this.
How To Win in 2024 and Beyond
Because PAA content is easy to replace with artificial intelligence, it will not be a reliable source of traffic in the coming years.
There aren’t a lot of people who need to ask *you* what screen sizes exist. In the future, that’s going to a job for ChatGPT, and companies banking on that traffic will lose out.
But people still need educational content. They just need it to be taught. Like they’re human. And like you’re human. So we recommend you take a more hands-on and in-depth approach to informational content. Pile on images, examples, and testimonials from people who have walked this path before.
Give your TOFU audience things they can’t get from AI or from any other source.
Here are some ways to dress up informational content, gain staying power in the search results, and increase conversions while you’re at it.
- Add specificity in your walk-throughs. For common screen resolutions,
- I may ask a couple of graphic designers what the different resolutions look like or mean to them and add their quotes.
- You can even add pictures showing the differences. Ever thought of a slider so readers can interact with the different resolutions side by side? Google image search is also SEO, y’all.
- Or a table comparing costs versus benefits in 2024?
- What about a chart based on the user’s job role about which resolutions are required for graphic-intensive jobs with the pros and cons of each based on job position?
- Invest in original data. What is the most common resolution chosen by your app’s audience? Do a survey and deliver this reconn to your audience.
- Start a podcast to complement blog posts and support SEO efforts. That’s an easy way to partner with like-minded peeps and your ICP, source journalistic quotes for your blog posts, gain authority and trust that increases conversion, distribute your content farther, and recycle content for more bang for your buck.
- Add relevance. The companies doing their PAA content really well do tailor it to your ICP’s job role, and speak to their ICP even as they don’t add much more information than is available elsewhere on the internet. If you can weave in hypothetical examples to illustrate your points that are relevant to your exact readership, you’re improving your content.
- Make sure you own the entire vertical. Informational content doesn’t rank very well without supporting content in the same subject matter holding it up. Today, Google expects companies to own an entire topic, not just a keyword or a single article. If you’re covering screen resolution testing, you shouldn’t ust have your hefty ultimate guide covering the topic. You should make ten more bogs on testing and ten more blogs on screen resolution. Show Google you got this. Show your customers you also own this corner of the internet, too.
Get More Traffic that Lasts Longer with Kefi
Informational content is winning right now, but there are headwinds we can help you navigate to steer your new strategy toward long-term content success even as you position yourself as a teacher and educator in your space. Get on our calendar to talk about your particular industry. Even if we don’t work together, we love to meet new friends and hear about new industries, along with handing out our basic blueprint for Series A content strategy.
