LinkedIn's Genius New SEO Strategy?

0:00All right. So we're going to talk about LinkedIn's potentially genius new SEO strategy. And we'll give you thoughts on whether we think this is going to last or not. So I'm going to share my screen. This is from Tim Solo. And Tim Solo is the CMO at Ahrefs. And so hat tip to him. But he says, wow, I'm very late to the party. But whoever came up with LinkedIn's collaborative articles deserve a big raise. Combining UGC plus AI plus SEO generated a very good looking hockey stick traffic growth for them. So you can look at this, you can see the hockey stick growth on this graph and it's leading up to about, it goes from like nothing to like 1.8 million visits a month or so.

0:40Neil, let me pull up what this looks like as well. Watch, check this out. Okay, take that graph. Okay, and then you tab, no, no, go back. Okay, I'm on the graph. Okay, and pull up your Ahrefs and do it for LinkedIn.com. Okay, so I got to sign in. One second, everyone. This will be worth it, everyone. It's worth the wait. It is worth the wait. I actually think whoever did that did a great job at LinkedIn, but it won't move the needle much for LinkedIn as a whole company. Oh, so you're looking at the whole thing. Okay, so here we go. Yeah. So I'm logging in right now. A million visitors or whatnot, and I'll pull up SimilarWeb at the same time.

1:16So SimilarWeb is stating LinkedIn is the 16th most popular site in the world with 1.8 billion visits a month. Wow. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think these, you know, similar webs a little more accurate, I think, because Ahrefs is showing 75 million or so. But that's organic traffic. Similar web just takes total traffic. Got it. Yeah. Right. And they did a good SEO job. But what I'm getting at is when you get extra 1.8 million visits a month, when you have 1.8 billion with the B, it doesn't make a difference. It's a rounding. Let's take a look at this first. So LinkedIn.com slash advice. So these are the collaborative articles, right?

1:55And so basically what it does is it's like, okay, here's a question. How can you expand your network to increase your chance of success? So these are basically FAQs. And then you can see the people that are contributing, they're other professionals that are being invited to contribute. And I've gotten a couple of these emails as well. Reach out and follow up, offer value and reciprocity, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, right? A lot of these are kind of tried and true, but new people need to see this in their career, right? The thing I would call out, Neil, is it might be a rounding error, but at the same time, it's just starting to compound.

2:23So it could be more significant in the coming months. I think it will compound, but check this out. 1.8 million divided by 1.8 billion is 0.001. It's going to take a lot bigger of a number for them to move the needle. Now, I'm not saying this is bad. I actually think whoever did this is great. And Tim is spot on in which they did an amazing job. It's also not that hard to get that much traffic when you already have the authority, the backlinks, and everyone's already talking about you. but still if you do a hundred of those things it really does add up for organization so all these little things do add up and they are great i think that was a really smart marketing move but people forget in marketing and even in business that you really have to move the needle when you're large and if you're just doing stuff you're getting visitors but you're not really moving the needle it doesn't matter well i don't think it's going to last too so it could potentially, you know, tank, right?

3:20Because it's like, it's not the highest quality stuff out there, but continue your thought. Yeah. But like I was on an interview earlier, right before we're recording this podcast, I did an interview with someone and I was with founder magazine. Yeah, exactly. Nathan. So, you know, and he was asking me how many visits you get a month. I'm like, I don't know. I haven't logged into my Google analytics, like probably in like 120 days or something like that. And he's like, why? Well, it's like, if I look at it, it's somewhere between 70 and 80%. I don't have the exact percentage, but I know it's more than 70%.

3:48I know it's less than 80. But within that band, that's a percent of our revenue that comes from RFPs, client referrals, and employee referrals. So when you add up those three, it typically makes us somewhere between 70 % to 80 % of our revenue. I do look at analytics and data, not necessarily Google Analytics, but I look at analytics and data related to our RFPs, our inbound leads, our sales conversion. So I'm focusing my efforts on a different kind of analytics, not really Google Analytics, because that's what's driving my business. It's not necessarily, hey, more people I'm getting to read a blog post means more sales.

4:23If that was the case, I'd be logging into Google Analytics 10 times a day like I used to. But the business has shifted. And once we went more enterprise, the KPIs change, the way you get the customers change. So you got to adapt. And all I'm getting at is more traffic is great, like in LinkedIn's case, but if it's not going to provide much more signups or revenue, it doesn't really matter. Especially as 0.01 % or 0.01 % of their traffic. So look, I think the key takeaway here for everyone is if you are a site that gets good domain authority, you have a bunch of backlinks, this strategy might be worth deploying because I'm assuming most people don't have a billion visits, right?

4:57And so like a couple million is significant for most companies, I would say for LinkedIn. Time will tell. It's not significant yet, but this could compound into a monster. It could be torched fairly quickly too. So we'll see what happens. but I think it's just worth calling out. Anything else, Neil? Nope, that's it. All right, that's it for today. Please don't forget to rate, if you subscribe, five stars please, and we'll see you tomorrow.