Farzad Rashidi's marketing team at Visme spent months creating content and got two website visitors - one was his mom. Then he flipped the SaaS SEO strategy playbook: 80% promotion, 20% creation.

That SaaS content marketing approach grew Visme to 3 million monthly organic visitors and 14 million active users. Along the way, the internal link-building tool became Respona - but selling it as a standalone product nearly failed because they positioned it for everyone instead of one specific buyer. You will learn Farzad's keyword prioritization formula, his content promotion strategy for earning backlinks from top-tier publications, and why SaaS SEO success requires spending most of your budget on promotion.

What You Will Learn

How an 80/20 SaaS SEO strategy drove Visme from 2 visitors to 3M monthly organic
The keyword opportunity score formula combining traffic potential, difficulty, and CPC
How a Game of Thrones campaign earned 60 backlinks from Forbes and Psychology Today
Why broad positioning killed Respona's early traction

🔑 Key Lessons

🚀 SaaS SEO strategy requires promotion-first budgeting: Visme spends 80% of marketing resources on content promotion and link building and only 20% on creation - driving 3M monthly organic visitors.
🎯 Prioritize keywords with a data-driven opportunity score: Farzad's formula multiplies traffic potential by the inverse of keyword difficulty, weighted by CPC for commercial intent.
🔗 Build links through original research, not cold spam: Visme pitched data visualizations to journalists covering related topics, earning hundreds of backlinks in a single content promotion strategy campaign.
📉 Broad positioning kills early SaaS traction: Respona targeted PR, influencer marketing, sales, and SaaS SEO teams simultaneously, diluting its message until Farzad narrowed to link-building software.
🛠️ Use your own SaaS content marketing stack to validate demand: Farzad built Respona internally first, proved it saved time, then validated external demand through a 160-page playbook generating 10,000 downloads.

Chapters

Introduction
Farzad's favorite quote and Respona overview
Business size and bootstrapped growth
Origin story at Visme and first marketing hire
Why SEO was the right channel for Visme
Two website visitors and the content wake-up call
Timeline from zero to 3M organic visitors
Content promotion vs. content creation: the 80/20 shift
Link building without spamming: relationship-based outreach
Podcast guesting as a link building strategy
Recap of Visme's content marketing journey
Getting Respona's first 10 customers through AppSumo
The 160-page ebook and lead magnet strategy
Keyword research: the opportunity score formula
Three types of content with different objectives
The Game of Thrones link magnet campaign
Why link magnet content is not conversion content
The positioning mistake: selling to everyone
Finding product-market fit through niching down
Rebuilding Respona from scratch in 2021
Lightning round
Wrap-up and where to find Farzad

Resources

Full show notes: https://saasclub.io/323
Join 5,000+ SaaS founders: https://saasclub.io/email