Olga Mykhoparkina On Building Trust With White Hat SEO [Interview]

[vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]As part of my “SaaS vs SEO” Interview Series, I’m talking to founders and marketers on all things SEO, content, and growth for SaaS companies.

“I’d rather run a marathon than a sprint, that’s why I believe in a white-hat SEO even if it’s slowly, but steadily”.

I recently caught up with Olga Mykhoparkina of Chanty to discuss her approach to SEO.

Hello! Can you give us a little introduction and background on yourself and what you are working on?

Hi there, my name is Olga Mykhoparkina, my role now is a chief marketing officer at Chanty, here’s our website: https://www.chanty.com/.

Unlike many entrepreneurs out there who’ve started their career by working a full-time job and then shifted to their own business, my path was reversed the other way.

Starting from my university years, I used to have a few small local businesses of my own that I had to learn how to market. So the initial knowledge and marketing interest rooted there. It’s pretty much how I came to online marketing.

My first full-time job was the PPC manager forwarded by an SEO expert at another company leading to a marketing position at a third company and finally to CMO at Chanty. Our team at Chanty is working on generating traffic, acquiring leads as well as optimizing conversion to ensure the growth of our product.

Doesn’t end there, though. Being a growth-oriented team, we all make sure every step of the user journey is optimized: from acquisition to retention.

Why did you decide to use SEO to attract users and grow your product and what results did you achieve?

Search engine marketing is my expertise and it was natural to start there when we were making our first steps with Chanty.

After making a brief keyword research, it was quite obvious that our buyer personas are searching for a team communication tool in Google. It meant we had to grow our presence there. I think we’ve achieved pretty decent results.

In less than 18 months and using white-hat SEO techniques only, we were able to grow our traffic from 0 to 30K per month as well as getting 5K leads during that time.

In what phase of the business lifecycle have you started your blog and when did you start to see a significant ROI from it?

We’ve started our blog from day 1. As we’ve put our bet on content marketing, we had to make sure we were delivering the best content for our visitors.

I think the real breakthrough happened when we wrote our Slack alternatives article. We then worked on a series of team chat tool reviews that also contributed to our lead generation ecosystem.

Looking at how other SaaS operate, I can say that if you want to be good at SEO, you should find your high-intent keywords in the first place. When you do, make landing pages, write blog posts and see what works best for you.

What’s been working well for you and why (with SEO)?

As I mentioned, we’ve been writing a lot of reviews of our colleagues-slash-competitors.

When we write one, we try to be as honest and as unbiased as possible. We don’t write that our tool is the best of the best and the rest is just bad. We know that Chanty isn’t perfect yet and we are transparent about our cons.

I think it’s what drives many people to sign up. They appreciate honesty and it builds some level of trust right there as they are reading our blog.

So high-intent keywords covered with articles on our blog and guest posting on great resources referring to some of our blog pages worked really well for us.

What have you tried that hasn’t worked very well (with SEO)?

We’ve tried to work with Quora. From a certain perspective, I think it could be also considered SEO activity.

Many of the Quora questions rank in Google top so people looking for a team communication tool would often visit Quora and read the answers. It was our job to ensure our presence there.

However, we failed.

Our accounts were banned twice although, can’t say we were doing anything over promotional there. I think, there are just certain things that don’t work out although I know many of our SaaS colleagues have found a good way to “hack” it 🙂

What kind of link building or promotion have you tried if any?

I’d rather run a marathon than a sprint, that’s why I believe in a white-hat SEO even if it’s “slowly, but steadily”. We don’t buy backlinks or use any kind of spammy methods that some of our competitors do.

Google is smart enough to know who’s been tricking the system and it’s just a matter of time when your site goes down if you’re up for cheating.

What we do is mainly guest blogging on high authority platforms. We’ve written a number of articles for websites like Entrepreneur, HubSpot, Upwork, GoDaddy, InVision, etc. It turned out, it’s not that hard to get there.

I’ve shared the exact strategy that we followed with our guest blogging in this article.

What would you like to know more about regarding SEO that you currently don’t know?

I Guess it’s pretty easy these days to find out any information regarding SEO as tons of articles are being written on the topic every day.

One of the concerns I have is staying up-to-date with the latest hacks in the SEO industry.

E.g. there’s this Google schema markup for software products that is now in beta. It’ll allow you to show the logo next to your search snippet in Google. When it’s out in public, you have to be the first to implement it as it’s a matter of weeks for everyone else to copy it.

Little chances to stand out like this really make difference and the hack is only beneficial for the those few who discovered it first.

Many of our competitors are copying now our strategy so there’s no time for us to relax.

You have to continuously innovate to stay competitive.

Is there anything I can help promote for you?

Well, we have the upcoming Chanty release on December 6-7th!

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