Canva's $26B SEO strategy, Communities gaining SEO traffic, & A cautionary tale for affiliate sites

0:00Do you know how much Canva is valued at? 40 billion or did they drop the valuation? Canva, last I saw was 26 billion, but I think you could be right. So when I type Canva valuation, the information says 26 billion as of March, 2024, which means I'm not seeing a 40. It probably dropped. I believe Canva at one point was worth 40 billion. Oh, yeah, you're correct. So 2021 is valued at 40 billion and then it got adjusted to 26 billion, but still a lot of money, right? I want to give you guys the Canva SEO strategy here. So just for context, they drive 209 million visitors per month. The traffic value is 41.5 million per month if they were to pay Google for that traffic, right?

0:39And by the way, they have 290 ,000 referring domains. So their domain rating is 92 out of 100. So what their SEO person started to notice, and this is a long time ago, is that if you search for like Halloween template or Halloween posters, he noticed that a lot of people, there's a lot of search volume. And then you realize for every single holiday, every permutation, all these things, there's templates, there's posters, everything, right? So you just started going hard on all these templates and posters. And then they would just make sure that they had – I think they have a product-led growth motion where like a freemium option people can sign up to.

1:10And people got the templates that they wanted, and that's how they grew. Workable does the same thing too. They do job description templates. So oftentimes, templates will work really well because a lot of people just want the – there's a lot of search traffic for those. It's an amazing model. What you'll find, though, is when people type in these template-related keywords, they don't convert as well as people just typing in photo editing software, right? But you can get so much volume, and it's cheap traffic, especially if you can rank organically, where your conversion rate may not be as high to paid because they may just download the templates, and then they don't want to pay for the product or use anything.

1:48but it's okay because you're getting a brand awareness be a portion of those people are going to sign up and see a portion of the people that sign up will eventually pay even if it's a smaller percentage than the person typing in photo editing software yep by the way on that note too so when people try to push lead magnets let's say they're running traffic from meta or linkedin to these uh checklists or templates they don't they also don't convert as well because people just want the template oftentimes when i used to download templates in the past i just download it. And then it feel really good that I downloaded it.

2:19And oftentimes I wouldn't even open it. And so you're actually better off giving like a how to, cause then you can build like a VSL or like a webinar. Cause you can actually build a relationship with them. That's going to convert a lot better. You might get more drop-off cause people aren't going to watch the whole thing, but still you're qualifying the traffic better. Yeah, no. And if you want to grow and you want to grow to be a big company, you're going to have to take multiple angles to generate signups and revenue. Not all of them are going to be equal. Some are going to be amazing. Some of them are going to be mediocre.

2:50Some of them are going to be crap, but it really is a numbers game. If you want to scale to become a large company, like a Canva. Yeah. By the way, I mean, I've been sending you these text messages, but, uh, this guy that's going after Cody Sanchez, a Hill blue, Nick Huber, Andrew Wilkinson, and more, this guy's name is a horny Adolf Hitler. And so just for context, everyone so neil and i are we're friends with some of these people um but this guy is growing his his twitter account so what are your what are your thoughts on horny adolf hitler so i didn't read most of them that you sent me my bad i did wow i did see the cody one he was making a claim that she didn't go to golden sacks for seven years she went for two years or one year or whatever the number was right yeah that one doesn't that one doesn't matter as much i think he's i think the ones where he's hitting pretty hard right now is is is andrew wilkinson um and he's he's a mutual friend of ours right i just i think this this hater approach is anonymous hater account approach the i think it's it's interesting right it's it's kind of like that guy coffee zilla on youtube who has like a ton of subscribers but the problem with that is you're not making any friends and um it it tends to generate when i look at all the comments it's it's the schneidenfreuden people right it's like wanting to see other people fail and then you see all those people in the comments Yeah.

4:07So just to give you context for Andrew, he's just saying that what, like his company isn't worth as much. And so he's okay. What he called out this morning and we had a mutual friend that sent this to me this morning. And so, you know, Andrew reported$46 billion, 46 billion, 46 million EBITDA in 2023. And he's saying, dude, he's saying like 42 of that was added in from another company and it's a non-cash thing and it shouldn't be counted as an EBITDA. so really the the iboda is maybe three or four million or so and he's like how is this thing worth 600 million dollars and the guy that sent it to to me he's like this guy seems really smart i want to know who he is so because this mutual friend um actually no we'll just leave it at that i don't want to review anything else but continue okay and then what is he saying about nick nick is like the guy who does i follow him on uh twitter i think i believe he's the one that does like storage, public storage type business?

5:01Yeah. Yeah. He's saying his portfolio is underwater and it's only like 67 % occupancy. And then like when he has to refinance, everything's going to go underwater because of the rates, the interest rates. Right. And then like Nick responded, I think he responded with his own thing saying like, no, this is where we're at. Like we're, we're going to be fine. I don't know enough details around it, but basically it's like real estate, right? When you have to refinance, it goes, it goes underwater. It wants the interest rates go much higher right so it's a little um you would know more than i would because you used to invest in real estate the the big thing that i don't get is all right so forget whether this a what is it something adolf hitler horny adolf hitler he actually he actually has like other accounts like horny joseph stalin and like all these all these uh people that were terrorizing the world all right so whether he's right or wrong what's the point of just releasing all this stuff A, he's not going to end up making money out of it.

5:55It's not like these are publicly traded companies that you can just go in short. And B, the other problem that you end up having is, all right, let's say he builds up a massive following. How do you monetize a hate account? Those are really tough to monetize and make money from. So you're spending all this effort to put out information. And if you just want to do it for shits and giggles, by all means do whatever you want. But if you're actually trying to build a business, hating is a terrible way to monetize. It just doesn't convert too well in the long run. So it's a very short-term strategy.

6:26And if you want to do something for long-term, same thing what we said in the past, if you're going to do SEO, do things the long-term way, right? And usually that means it's the white hat way, right? In this case too, you're better off building relationships with people and taking the time to build people up versus tearing them down. I don't know if he's right or not on these things. I think I've seen him wrong on a couple of occasions, but nonetheless, it's interesting to see that he's been growing and we'll continue to monitor this over time. I used to have a blog back in the day called Prona Advertising, and I would release a version of hate articles, but not like this, more so productive hate articles.

7:07So I would release articles. What does that even mean? Productive hate articles? Yeah. So I would be like, let's say there was a company called like.com. I think they eventually sold. It was like a picture site. I think they changed the name to Raya or maybe it was Raya before and like.com and I'd be like uh I'd create articles on making it up it was something like it was just too long ago for me to remember but like um why like.com is not liked by google and then I would end up breaking down everything that they're doing wrong from an seo standpoint and what they can do to fix it to get more traffic and grow their business and some of the people didn't like me writing an article about their business but when I say it was hate it was productive I wasn't saying crap product or you guys don't know what you're doing I was talking about, Hey, you're not ranking.

7:49You're not doing your marketing, right? This is how you fix it. And a lot of those people would call me up, be like, Hey, I don't know why you wrote the article, but I want to fix it. And how do we hire you? And it was a great way to generate revenue. Yeah. That is a productive, I don't even see that as hating. So if you're talking about websites, like, Hey, you're doing this wrong over here that gets people interested because they don't want to do things wrong. And then also if you showed their competitors to nothing riles them up more than seeing them do worse than their competitors. And then what I would do after I wrote the article, so I'd go after venture funded companies.

8:20I would then email the board members and I'm like, hey, you may want to send this to the founder of like.com, you know, they would get emails from their board members just forwarding it. And they're like, yeah, X and Y VC sent this to me. You know, I want to get a fix. Because if your board members, a few of them send you. Yeah, they have to listen to their board. It's like, whoa, where did this thing come from? It's like, whoa, and then the CEO will then send it to the decision makers on the marketing side. And it was a really effective strategy to generate revenue. All right, everyone. Quick message from the Agency Owners Association.

8:52So this is the peer group for agency owners that Neil and I both put together. This is for people that are doing six figures, seven figures, eight figures, even nine figures as well. And we're all here to help you grow your agency faster. In this group, we share leads. We share learnings with each other. It's a community where people can ask questions. Their most burning questions personally, professionally. We'll share templates, reports, things like that. We're constantly adding more value to the group. I will tell you that the price is continuing to increase. The good news is that there's no long-term commitment.

9:18So you can just learn more by going to marketingschool.io slash agency. Once again, that's marketingschool.io slash agency to learn more. And we hope to see you inside. You know what else is effective right now? So we've talked about the rise of Reddit and Quora, right? Now, so check this out. Kevin Indig wrote this. So the rise of communities. Not only Reddit has gained a crazy amount of visibility on Google now at the level of Amazon.com since the hidden gems update in May 2023, small communities have sprouted from search soil too. So you can see in the black over here, this is the HubSpot community.

9:52It's gone up and to the right. Community.Zapier.com, it's gone up, not necessarily as hockey stickish as the other ones. And then Shopify has gone up, right? Both HubSpot and Shopify have very strong domain authority. Same thing with Zapier too. um but zapier has i don't know they have such a strong programmatic seo strategy that it might be diluting this over here um that would be my guess but this is interesting that and school.com is growing very quickly too yeah you know community generated content is a great way to grow you just got to make sure the community isn't putting out a ton of spam comment content because it can hurt you or like they start putting in you know keywords like gambling and Viagra and all this kind of stuff.

10:34But what's funny, if you think about a lot of the sites that are community-based, like Reddit, remember Reddit has a deal with ChatGPT. I think Google also has a deal with them too, right? Correct. There's a lot of these licensing deals. I think there's like two more that's popped up for OpenAI this week. What's funny is that someone pointed to me that, isn't it funny how Reddit's going public and as they were going public, all these announcements came out about partnerships like ChatGPT is sponsoring. And I'm like, oh, yeah, Sam Altman does, you know, he's involved in both of them. And I was like, oh, that's a smart move.

11:13I'm not hating him for that. I would do the same thing. And I'm not saying he did the deal just for that. But, you know, if that's extra cherry on the top, why not? Yeah, he's good on money. He's way smarter than us. Yeah. All right. All right, so I wanted to take a second to tell you about leveling up founders. This is an event slash mastermind for people doing seven, eight, nine figures. These are founders that are doing that amount. And we've been doing this event for a couple of years now. We've had amazing speakers, but more than anything, it's about the people. What I mean by that is like-minded people want to hang out with like-minded people.

11:46And this is the best spot to connect with people of a certain caliber. And we vet every single person that comes through. So if people are, even though they make a lot of money, but their character, we don't really align with that. We're not necessarily going to let them in. We did this event in Beverly Hills and it's happening in the beginning of August. All you have to do to learn more about it is just go to levelingup.com slash founders. Again, it's levelingup.com slash founders. If you want to hang out with amazing people, Neil, my podcast co-host is going to be there. I'm going to be there.

12:13People like Syed Balki, he will be there as well. And again, it's going to be a great time. Levelingup.com slash founders to learn more. and we'll see you inside. By the way, so this actually ties in with these affiliate sites too, right? So here's a cautionary tale for affiliate websites. So this tweet comes from Lily Ray. And so you can see the site bestproducts.com and its trajectory serve as a good summary for what happened with SEO in the last year. So let's just look at this over here. This is the traffic we can see for best products, which is like, you know, best blender, best ice cream machine, right?

12:46Just writing reviews on these things. It was going pretty well. 2021 is pretty good. 2022 is still pretty good. And then after that, it just, it's tanked. Like you look at June, 2024, it's like, maybe the search visibility index was a 20 before. Now it seems like it's like a one out of 20, right? On this graph over here. And by the way, this website, they've done everything pretty well. It's like, Hey, here's why you should trust us. The articles are very high quality. They follow all the Google guidelines, but the reality is Reddit, e-commerce, other forums now, they own the top positions for these comparison type keywords because people do tend to trust communities or like reviews.

13:28Reviews are also user-generated. Communities are also user-generated too versus just one blog post that tends to just favor itself to generate more revenue for the website. My favorite is those sites that review others and other companies. And we've gotten them where like people will review my company and be like, Neil Patel's company scan me we gave him$200 to do SEO and I'm like we don't do SEO for$200 we would lose money oh wait where did it show up it didn't show up on Google it was like really far down and then those people and then I get emails from those website owners to write the reviews I'm like hey we can get this removed we know the website owner for 20 grand we'll remove it and I'm like you know what you can keep it up i'm not paying you your 20 grand and uh at the beginning we used to pay and we're like well we never did i'm like show me what the website was because we never took on anything for 200 bucks and when we would just say it's false and we send legal letters and all this kind of stuff and when we started looking at like the hours that we're spending in legal we're like if someone actually only wanted like two grand it would be cheaper to do that give them the two grand and pay the legal bill.

14:40And funny enough, what we found is you pay them. And then another similar looking site with the same template just pops up with a new review. I'm like, oh, cool. This is just a scheme where these people are making quick money. So it's like, it's again, it's to me, it's kind of, it feels the same as like making a hater account. It also like, to me, this is such a short term business model and you could feel it in your guts, right? If you feel it, just don't do it. And if you feel like it's going to be work and it feels like you're doing the right thing and people like your product, then yeah, probably keep doing it.

15:10No, totally. And like we had all that kind of stuff. Like we even had people who had reviews and like, yeah, I was paying a month to month. Technically, we don't do month to month contracts. All our contracts are annual. It has always been that way from day one. We do have out clauses after a certain period of time. Let's say if it's a really long-term contract, like a two-year contract or three-year contract, et cetera. But still, I'm just like, you just know some of these people are lying. and they're just here to make a quick buck. Yep. You got one on interest rates over here. Yeah. Did you see the European Union cut the interest rates?

15:44I think Canada did too. Yeah. European Union, first time in five years, I believe it was. Yep. What do you think that means? Globally, hopefully things start going better because the world is tied together, right? Whether the US has a higher interest rate or Japan or Brazil or you know UK or Europe in general all the companies in the eurozone or whatever leveraging that currency a lot of them are buying for companies like America are stimulating economy so hopefully if their rates start going down it starts stimulating the whole world economy and you're spot on Canada reduced their rates Europe reduced their rates or not the eurozone reduce their rates and i'm hoping over time the u.s starts reducing their rates and uk and others follow and i think that'll start stimulating the economy and it'll start creating a better 2025 than what we're experiencing in 2024 but i think most people forget when the economy is bad whether you want to call it a recession or not when the economy is bad it just doesn't flip a light switch like we had in COVID and it just turns around.

16:59The economy only boomed during COVID because they took down rates and they pumped a ton of money into the economy. A lot of countries did, right? Like PPP and all these other programs that just gave businesses millions of dollars. They're putting checks in people's accounts and it was causing them to spend more. This all stimulated the economy. But normally when the economy is bad for it to recover, it's not just in one or two years, bam, everything just goes back to where it was. It takes a long time and it's a slow and steady recovery and growth. All right, everyone. So that's it for today. Speaking of which, the agency accelerator or sorry, agency owners association, I should say, Neil and I will both be doing a session this week.

17:43And so we do these, we do these group coaching calls every now and then. So that's happening. You can learn more about this group, marketing school.io slash agency. Please don't forget to rate, read, subscribe. It helps this podcast grow and we will catch you later.