Growth @ Sitechecker -> SEO monitoring platform for agencies.

Hi, I'm Ivan, and I simplify the data analysis routine for digital marketers. 

Here is how can I help you:

→ Try one of my unique Looker Studio templates for SEO, PPC, website traffic analysis, and client reporting — https://ivanhoe.pro/google-data-studio-templates/
→ Try Sitechecker to upgrade your SEO performance monitoring and customer reporting to the next level — https://sitechecker.pro/
→ Drop me a message on LinkedIn if you would like to invite me to a podcast, interview, workshop, or conference.
→ Drop me a message on LinkedIn if you have a quick well-structured question about SEO, content marketing, B2B SaaS growth, product analytics, and data visualization. I'll be glad to help in a quick chat.

A few facts from my experience:
 
1. Set up the first personal website on WordPress in 2015.
2. Worked at MarTech (SaaS), EdTech (affiliate), and e-commerce.
3. Led 3 SaaS tools (Sitechecker, Copywritely, Kparser) to 500k monthly unique visitor traffic overall.
4. Made Sitechecker #1 product of the day on Product Hunt.
5. Ran an AppSumo monthly campaign for Copywritely and got 2k sales $100k worth.
6. In 2 years got 100+ happy customers of my unique Looker Studio templates.

"SEO is dead" is a dangerous advice.

I respect Elena Verna, but her take on SEO & paid search in the last newsletter is wrong. Here is why:

1/ Yes, AI chats killed or almost killed some companies, but it doesn't kill the entire industry.

2/ Yes, business can create a lot of AI-generated content now, but it's not easy to index it, rank it and keep in the top for a long time.

3/ Search, as an important element of user behavior, has not gone anywhere. People can change WHERE they search for something, but they search anyway. 

The fact that we have to produce content not only for Google but also for UGC platforms is a good thing for SEO. It's a huge opportunity.

4/ People switch more to searching in LLMs, okay. But how do LLMs decide which product or brand to recommend to them? They look for information that somebody has published, updated, or linked. This is SEO.

5/ The impact of AI is very different for different SEO niches. 

It has the biggest impact on news/media and content/affiliate sites, but it's not that big for B2B / SaaS, e-commerce, and local sites.

5/ SEO is one of a few scalable channels. 

Communities, built-in-public posts on social, employee-led social: these are good examples of channels you have to use when you start and try to do things that don't scale. But it's hard to grow a business with them only.

If you need growth, anyway you need to invest in:

- outbound (email, LinkedIn, phone calls)
- paid social (influencers, ads on LinkedIn, Reddit, Meta)
- search (organic and paid, search engines and LLMs, Google and Reddit, etc)

Moreover, when you invest in the first 2 channels and don't invest in the search, you lose a lot of the value that your demand generation campaigns created. 

Do you have a lot of brand searches and only a homepage or a couple of product pages? It may look okay for OpenAI or Lovable, but it's a bad decision for the majority of startups.

This is an example of how overly general advice can be harmful.

SEO has changed. These changes vary greatly by niche. But SEO as a channel is not dead and is only growing.

Am I wrong?

P.S. Subscribe to my newsletter hackthealgo.com to read deep guides on how the search changes and how to grow organic visibility in AI world.

Ivan Palii

SEO & AI visibility analytics for agencies @ Sitechecker. Author of unique Looker Studio templates and Hack the Algo newsletter. Advisor for B2B startups.

You updated a page. Rankings moved. But you still don’t know why.

This Looker template connects user behavior with rankings in one view.

It has 3 time series charts:

- Average position (GSC) + Avg. session duration (GA4)
- Average position (GSC) + Bounce rate (GA4)
- Average position (GSC) + Session key even rate (GA4)

How to use it:

1/ Make an update in content, design, or user funnel on a specific page, page segment, or entire website.
2/ Wait for 7-14 days.
3/ Open this template and check how the user behaviour (GA4 metrics) changed, and how it impacted the rankings in search (GSC metrics)
4/ Bonus: analyze what's going on with a page, segment, or site in retrospective (pay attention to changes in user behavior before Google updates)

Want to get it for free?

- Comment "happy users" under this post
- Make sure we are connected (so I can DM you)

P.S. Yes, you can build it yourself, but it takes longer than you expect :)

4 biggest reasons why SEO agencies switch from Semrush to Sitechecker

(we analyzed dozens of closed-won deals)

1/ It became too expensive

- Invited user costs $45 each
- Invited user to the AI visibility toolkit costs $99 each, additionally

The monthly price for a team with 10+ projects often ends with $700-$1k. Sitechecker is x2 cheaper and doesn’t charge for invited users at all.

2/ It lacks real GSC / GA4 insights

Semrush connects to GSC and GA4, but it doesn’t think with that data. It doesn’t have actionable reports that will show you low-hanging fruit.

The real insights are born:

- when you merge GSC and GA4 in one report
- when you combine its data with content changes / new pages tracking
- when you find a unique way to visualise data by pages, segments
- when you give additional options to work with this data, which native GSC / GA4 interfaces don’t have 

3/ It has non-reliable AI visibility tracking

“Semrush has built an AI visibility tool very fast, but at what cost… The interface and functionality are very basic, and the data is far from accurate.” (quote from a user on one of the calls)

Yes, it’s hard to compare the accuracy of AI tracking tools. It’s not a static Google SERP, and the level of personalization is much higher, but people compare multiple tools for this purpose and have a feeling of what works better.

The problem is that SEMrush does not live up to its status as a market leader, does not keep up with changes, and users worry about what will happen next.

4/ It has too limited support or no support at all

At their help center, you can either book a sales call or have to find the answer yourself. This one hurts the most when you’re an agency. 

You don’t have the luxury of “we’ll get back to you”. You need fast answers, even if the answer is “here’s a workaround”.

Have you ever been confused by any of these 4 things while using Semrush?

If yes, try Sitechecker for free -> sitechecker.pro or ask for a demo in comments

72% of people want to merge GSC & GA4 to prioritize pages by conversion

I expected it, but I was surprised by the "internal link paths" in the 2nd place.

This is a good sign. Internal links are the old fundamentals that are often underestimated, in a new world where more and more people want to sell AEO as a completely innovative, unique service.

Internal links are also interesting because this is one of the topics where most of the contradictions between marketers, product managers, and SEOs arise.

The conflict is inevitable when you have to define:

- which internal links should the header and footer include
- which anchor text internal links in the header and footer should have
- which product landing pages should we link to from the blog

I've just published a new newsletter on Hack the Algo about all 5 insights you can get by merging GSC & GA4 data, with screenshots, examples and drafts of new Looker templates. Don't miss it.

P.S. I got 25 votes from 3k+ impressions, but I assume the numbers will be the same even with 100 votes.

We've added SERP opportunities to Rank Tracker at Sitechecker

2 problems it helps solve and how it works:

1. You get an overall picture of which URLs and content types win in SERPs for all keywords you track.

Google at first decides which content type will satisfy the user's search query, and only then decides which URL among the URLs of a specific type is better.

It means that sometimes you have to:

- publish videos on YouTube, not pages on the website.
- publish listicles, not feature/service landing pages about your product only
- try rank your home page by high-intent keyword, not the landing page

2. You get a ready-to-use list of Reddit threads and listings on other websites for all keywords that matter to you.

It's a to-do list for your outreach or AEO team. You have to act to be presented there to win visibility in AI chats and Google AI Overviews.

How it works:

- We create a database of all URLs from SERPs by keywords you track, then we group them, and add content type labels to each URL.
- We have our own methodology to define content type. It's not AI-powered, but it's accurate enough in 70-80% of cases. We'll improve it step-by-step.
- We update this report once per month.
- It is available for all paid users starting from the Basic plan with $89/m.

Try yourself https://sitechecker.pro or drop a comment to schedule a live demo.

P.S. If you see any mistakes in content type labeling, please let me know.

This is the 2nd time I found that creating a list of brand keywords isn't so easy

(and I'm curious how the GSC team plans to do it with the help of AI)

I've started to work with Tango as an advisor, and the first things I noticed were:

- they generate 40k clicks/month only with 100 pages
- 75% of these clicks are from the brand keywords

So, there is good and bad news. 

- good: their investments in paid campaigns create a huge search demand
- bad: there is a B2C live stream app with the same name & bigger volume

It creates 2 problems:

1/ Big problem. Google doesn't know which brand to show №1 when a user enters the search query that could work for both intents (tango, tango app).

Google experiments with that, but anyway, the Tango B2B app can lose some portion of users who heard something about it and would like to try it.

2/ Small problem. It's harder to measure the growth by brand keywords because some of the users who enter "tango" or "tango app" definitely look for a B2B app, but you don't know exactly how many of them. 

The only way to improve accuracy is to include in brand keywords only those keywords that are definitely about the B2B brand. 

How often do you see this problem with your customers?

Interestingly, so many influencers with 30k-50k followers and a real audience get a median of 500-1.5k impressions of their posts.

They worked hard to build it, they published a lot of great content for years, but it doesn't matter. Social media platforms have their own goals.

So, they have only 4 choices now:

1/ Continue publishing content, hoping that the algorithm will change someday again.

Bad approach. 

2/ Switch focus to viral content: news, memes, lead magnets, etc. 

It gives more impressions, but conversion is much lower than from your expert posts. Even lead magnets, we see it works, but people usually forget about the person who sent them the lead magnet after 2 days.

3/ Add thought leader ads on LinkedIn as part of the business model

This is what I did, and more and more influencers who have their own product/service do it. After this, you usually divide your posts on 2 types:

- posts that build trust and grow awareness
- posts that were created only for running TL ads (in most cases, they generate fewer impressions than viral posts, but conversion from ads is much higher)

4/ Launch and grow a newsletter

I'm proud that I did it 1 year ago on Substack -> hackthealgo.com

I have only 500+ subscribers now, but:

- my articles generate a minimum of 300 reads
- they rank well in Google Search
- it creates much more trust, because people spend more time reading it

The newsletter is a huge filter. You can publish on LinkedIn some garbage with 3 sentences, and LinkedIn will distribute it. With a newsletter, you have a bigger feeling of responsibility. You care about your audience. You write only when you have something to say.

What do you choose?

I spent 6 months growing 3 subreddits. 

Here’s the uncomfortable truth about hitting 1,000 members.

It's a damn hard.

You can check the results in the screenshots, but the conclusion is simple. It's hard to motivate people join your community. 

I was actively involved in growing 3 subreddits for the last 6 months:

- /r/favikon -> branded community for Favikon influencer marketing platform
- /r/sitechecker -> branded community for Sitechecker
- /r/seogaps -> my own SEO community

Even for Favikon, which:

- has a huge popularity and has sent traffic from their other social media
- dedicated a full-time person to grow this community
- spent 6 months and generated 100k+ impressions of the content

Why is this so hard?

- Old popular communities get most of the attention. Real users constantly create real interesting topics there.
- Many new small communities that target the same audience appear on Reddit.
- People prefer join non-branded subreddits (but it doesn't mean that a community around a niche is better than around a brand).

I see that I can achieve 1k members with /r/seogaps in 6 months from the start, but for branded subreddits, it can take 9-12 months.

In the end, only those communities will survive and thrive that:

- will not stop creating unique content
- will maintain the quality of posts and replies
- will be able to get a core of fans who will publish something only in them
- will have a clear positioning
- (for brand-related) will build in the subreddit into all their funnels and make it part of their customer support and marketing

Yes, it is long and expensive, but it is worth it.

P.S. Tomorrow, I'll send a detailed guide to all hackthealgo.com subscribers 
on how to launch and grow a subreddit in the B2B niche.

3 variables that define website traffic growth from AI chats:

1/ AI chats adoption by more people
2/ some SEO / AEO work we do 
3/ how AI chats present results in the answer (they can include fewer citations in the future and send less traffic)

Based on this:

- If AI traffic grows the same way as SEO traffic, it is usually the result of the work we do
- If AI traffic grows, but SEO traffic remains at a plateau or even declines, it's because AI chat adoption grows and Google sends fewer clicks.

I think we have to educate customers about these things.

Have I missed any variable?

taplio

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