Over the years, I’ve worked for and against marketing, advertising, and SEO agencies. It’s not that they don’t do great work—they do. Agencies focus on deliverables, because deliverables mean more billable hours, and more billable hours mean more money, for them.
And who doesn’t want more money?
But for startups, founders, and indie hackers who might not have a VC-sized war chest of marketing dollars an agency can be wildly inefficient. Sure, you’ll get monthly reports showing something is up and to the right but if that doesn’t impact your bottom line, what’s the point?
Whether you’re just getting your business off the ground, or getting ready to scale to the moon you need people who get stuff done. At Subfolder, we believe that nobody should get paid for talking about growing your business. It’s why we don’t bill for meetings ever. There’s a difference between talking about growth and doing it.
I learned this the hard way.
It wasn’t that long ago that I was the marketing acquisition lead at a billion-dollar startup. But after three years of working with our SEO agency, we had to fire them. We’d spent a lot of time and money and still couldn’t quantify their impact.
We had no shortage of reports. But reporting on growth isn’t the same as doing growth.
The crazy part is that we were killing it on the SEO side of things. In just two years we’d scaled organic traffic from around 20k to nearly 200k visitors per month. And almost every single piece of content driving traffic came from our internal process.
This wasn’t a coincidence.
I’d built our internal process from the ground up and done the work of every single role. In the early days, it was just me—researching, writing, editing, publishing, promoting, optimizing, repeating.
It wasn’t that I was special, I had just learned from years of copywriting, that website traffic doesn’t magically appear. For most websites, it comes from three sources—search engines, ads, referrals (this includes social).
So while you might not need SEO content writing services, you do need website traffic. And not just any website traffic. You need predictable website traffic that grows month over month and converts at a consistent rate. How else are you going to build a predictable business?
Every business should be using paid advertising, social media, and SEO to drive website visitors. But each has its pros and cons.
- Paid advertising works instantly. It’s the fastest way to get high-quality website visitors that convert into customers. The downside is that it’s expensive and it’s getting less and less effective as platforms squeeze every dollar they can out of your marketing budget. Also, many ads are being blocked by default on today’s most popular operating systems.
- Referral traffic from social media, PR, and influencers can be a great investment if you really know your audience. Getting featured by the right publisher or influencer drives massive spikes in website traffic. I’ve worked at companies that were frequently featured by tier-one publications like Techcrunch and Forbes. Even though we saw a flood of website visitors almost none of them would turn into actual customers.
- SEO content writing is the most consistent way I’ve found to drive high-converting website visitors month over month. All you have to do is publish consistent content, optimized for in-market keywords your customers are already searching for.
Great content doesn’t just drive good website traffic, it also gives you more to post on social media, share in email newsletters, and enable your sales team. It will drive demand, help you build thought leadership, and make every other aspect of growth marketing easier.
I know what you’re thinking—if this process is so easy, why doesn’t everyone just do it. The truth is that a lot of companies, especially high-growth startups like Hubspot, Shopify, and Oberlo, are already doing this exact thing. The challenge is that great writers are usually annoyed by writing for SEO. And SEO specialists are usually bad writers.
This is where Subfolder’s content writing process comes in.
With experience in copywriting, SEO, and marketing acquisition, we combine great writing with SEO-driven outlines. So you get world-class content that drives predictable website traffic and converts visitors into customers month over month over month.
Quality Keyword Research
We get to know your company, website, team, writing style, competitors, industry, and more. We find the best opportunities for creating new content based on keywords your customers are searching for. Our keyword research culminates in a 90-day content plan (preview) you can get for free by getting in touch with us.
After finalizing keyword research, we’ll meet with you to review the content plan, ensure proper event tracking is in place, and kick off the writing process.
Vetted Content Writers
We only hire published authors and industry experts to ensure you get the best possible content. Before joining our team every writer is vetted for quality, experience, and ability to hit deadlines. Once onboarded all of our writers must complete an SEO content writing certification course and submit test articles for our SEO agency blog. If it’s not good enough for us, then it’s not good enough for our clients.
So before new articles are delivered to you for feedback they’re triple-checked by writers, editors, and artificial intelligence. We look for voice and tone, grammar, engagement, depth, and a dozen other criteria to make sure you get the best of the best.
We’ll write and review until you’re 100% satisfied. You get unlimited revisions on every plan that we offer, so you don’t have to worry about wasting resources on deliverables that don’t get the job done.
On-page Optimization for SEO
We take things a step further by optimizing every single article we work on for search engines. We’ll even hit publish for you on every article so you don’t have to sweat meta titles, meta descriptions, LSI keywords, indexing, and H2s.
Our deliverable isn’t just great content, it’s traffic, leads, and customers. So we’re not finished until we’ve published trajectory-changing content for your business.
Even though you don’t need SEO content writing services, you do need healthy and predictable website traffic. You need a scalable content team that’s going to deliver on deadlines like clockwork, and never miss a beat.
Get in Touch with us and see just how performant your content could be.
- Jared | Founder, Subfolder