😻 Maeva Cifuentes

Flying Cat 

We help fast-growing B2B SaaS companies turn their website into one of their greatest inbound revenue channels through SEO and content.

Founder

Purposeful Living

Purposeful Living is my passion project. I coach ambitious women how to align with their cycles, build unshakeable confidence, release the need for external validation and communicate effectively and freely. The podcast is about work-life balance, achieving "it all" while staying soft, living a life of pleasure and joy and not burning out, and developing thriving relationships.

Follow my account on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/purposefulliving.co/
Listen to the podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/purposeful-living/id1692072031

Founder & Host

Spitche

Investor and shareholder. Also, as fractional Head of Marketing/Marketing Advisor, I'm diversifying Spitche's revenue streams and acquisition channels, focusing on organic inbound growth.

Investor

Hospitable.com

Hospitable gives short-term rental hosts time back by automating manual tasks and connecting the STR tech stack to work together.

Cifuentes Translations

A family translation company. We provide transcreation, localization and translation services. We know SEO, conversion writing, and do more than translate words. Our family team specializes in: tech, legal, fitness, health & humanitarian subjects.

Freelance

Translated over 1 million words from 2009-2021. I worked from French and Spanish into my native English. Projects included variant localization (UK to US and vice versa), transcreation of marketing and sales assets, and SEO-optimized content, including multilingual keyword research.

French and Spanish to English Translator | SEO, Article & Website Translation

Get Paid For Your Pad 

I grew Get Paid For Your Pad's traffic by 60% in 4 months using SEO and an organic strategy. We also grew the email list from 3,000 to 8,000 qualified subscribers within the same time  using only organic and user-focused strategies.

Head Of Content

MeltinLab

MeltinLab is one of Barcelona's biggest events for early-stage startups. We aim to provide entrepreneurs with actionable content, tips, workshops and panel talks to take their businesses to the next level. I manage the blog writing articles and interviews and manage the social media accounts.

Branding & Content

SEO & Content for B2B SaaS // Starting and scaling an agency. I help B2B SaaS companies drive sustainable revenue.

Our strategies have helped B2B SaaS companies like ActiveCampaign, Hotjar, Mixmax, Stonly and Livestorm drive predictable and sustainable 5-20% MoM growth through search. 

📍 I post weekly about SEO, content, and building an agency. 
👍 Like the content? Follow me. 👍

WHAT CLIENTS HAVE SAID:

"Flying Cat's approach led to a significant increase in monthly revenue and contributed to our rapid growth." - Rob Hartman, former Creative Director and Operto Guest Technologies

“Together, we were able to increase our yearly organic traffic by 700% at the time that I left the company. Additionally, 56% of our traffic coming into the English website was coming through the blog, which is what they were working on. It was such a smooth partnership and really felt effortless on my side.” - Molly Holcutt, Content Manager at Livestorm

"Within two quarters, we were able to drive an additional 80k visits to the website. Flying Cat provided high-quality SEO content that met the needs of our SEO strategy and market goals." - Joe Baugnet, Global SEO at ActiveCampaign



Message / Connect with me for more info on:

⚡️ Predictable revenue growth through search. We've helped our clients drive millions in revenue through highly engaging, SME-driven content combined with our proprietary data-driven SEO framework.

⚡️ Agency Building & Scaling. I teach freelancers, solopreneurs and small teams the techniques I used to bootstrap and scale the agency from $0-$1M and 1-35 people in 18 months while staying profitable.

⚡️ Speaking. I speak about 4 things (a) SEO for revenue growth (b) long-form/thought leadership content for B2B SaaS (c) organic social content for agencies and B2B SaaS (d) profitable team building and operations.

maeva@flyingcatmarketing.com
🌐 @maevaeverywhere
 
—
Content Marketing • Content Strategy • Content Agency • Content Marketing Agency  •  SEO Agency

Angel Investor & Marketing Advisor

WHAT A YEAR. I finally just mapped out LinkedIn content for the next month... I had to pause for most of this year. For those curious....



It's not even about the fatigue of seeing the same exact post reiterated a million times on LinkedIn about which acronym is right or debating whether something (GEO?) exists or not, or all the other stuff that is just not anything new or useful to me...

(No offense... still lots of y'all whose content I adore on here)


But it was just life!

This year I made drastic changes to my business due to a massive revenue loss and also general malaise with my day to day and where agency CEO life had taken me, I moved across the Atlantic, I got married, and just generally had a lot of stuff going on that I won't discuss on here.

In the spring I got shingles from stress. I don't recommend it. I thought I was either having a heart attack or my back was breaking, but I was also really itchy? It was a huge wakeup call for me.

Anyway it took me a while but I think I'm finally back in the groove of things. 

Missing my community and I'm losing my touch on social media - so I need to start exercising that muscle again.

But I needed that break from LinkedIn (I still kinda checked in every day though?)

What are topics you are OH SO TIRED of seeing on LinkedIn, and what do you WISH you were seeing? Help me out!

🔥 Organic growth advisor for forward-thinking companies

We had a client grow 300% in traffic in 9 months and they still churned.
That's when I learned visibility speaks louder than results.



From what I've experienced running Flying Cat, results DO NOT speak for themselves. Whether you're in-house or a vendor, you need to be your own cheerleader always. Not just for results, but for alignment too.

For years we had this misalignment problem. Despite getting killer results for our clients, there was this communication drop. Our POC's supervisor and execs had no idea what the "point" of our program was.

So I took responsibility and implemented Quarterly Business Reviews.

It completely transformed our client relationships.

Every 3 months now I:
• Review what we did in the last 90 days
• Remind them WHY we did it
• Do a full new audit and upkeep of their website
• Set the plan for the next 90 days with clear rationale

But I always invite execs to share their vision for the program too.

Sometimes I pitch a strategy and we have these amazing conversations about current priorities. Just last month, a client's Head of Product shared a new initiative, and we immediately pivoted our Q4 plan to support it. The clients get excited about what's coming next. They gain clarity on what this program is actually for.

Since implementing QBRs, we've been executing faster with way fewer questions because everyone's finally aligned on what we're trying to achieve.

One of my Series E clients got so happy after the first QBR that the CMO invited me to present it at their marketing all-hands. Pretty good sign, if you ask me.

From my perspective, it's your responsibility to create visibility into your work. Nobody else will do it for you.

I think results alone aren't enough anymore. You need to make sure everyone understands and connects with those results too.

What's your method for visibility?

I had a call last week with a prospect who has been "doing SEO" for 18 months with nothing to show for it. The founder's been hiring writers, asking them to write blog posts. No traction.

"We're getting some traffic from ChatGPT!" they said. Microsoft Clarity shows maybe 50 visits a month.

So I ran their site through Peec AI to check their AI visibility for important prompts. They weren't mentioned. Not once. Their competitor with 2,000 pages and 9 years of SEO was first on every list.

One pattern I saw was their competitor had 300+ listicles. "Best [category] companies", "top [category] solutions". This is where most of the citations were coming from. 

Also, their SEO was very successful in general.

I learned a few things from this.
1 - Founders who don't know how to do SEO can be safe to know their time doing literally anything else will be more ROI-positive. Hiring a writer when nobody has done a proper SEO/AEO strategy will do nothing for you
2 - "SEO/AEO is slow".... yes but if you've gone more than 6 months and haven't seen any traction, that's not the slowness of the channel. You're in trouble
3 - SEO supports AEO. I see this across the board - the websites that dominate in SEO also dominate in AEO, most of the time
4 - That said, I've also seen websites "ranking" in SEO but with zero visibility in LLMs. That's because none of the content they're creating for SEO is conducive to mentioning their brand or a solution - it's all problem-aware content (or maybe not even quite there yet). They're afraid of mentioning their brand because it usually means they also have to mention their competitors, which they're afraid to do. 
5 - If they're still super focused on "high volume" keywords (as measured by their keyword research tool), it can be hard to do AEO visibility, because many of the prompts are more specific and niche and won't get picked up in keyword research tools.
6 - They let their content decay/get old. Get your content refresh program in order and keep your content that gets your brand mentioned 3-6 month fresh at all times.

You can't just hire writers with no strategy anymore, there are too many details to keep in mind, too much strategy to consider. A writer will not know to do that, nor is it their job - yet you'll hold them accountable.

(You cannot hold a writer accountable for the results of SEO program - you can only hold them accountable for the quality of the writing).

The only person responsible for the results of the SEO program is the person who designed it, so if you're a founder hiring a writer - you are the person accountable for the results.

Want me to take a look at what tweaks you might need for your brand to start appearing in search and LLMs?

Hit me in the DMs!

"We need to take about our competitors on our website."
 
90% of my clients make a face when I bring this up.
 
Not only are they afraid of giving oxygen to the competitors, they also find it "pretty weird" to build a list of best tools and name themselves at the top.

But if you want to:
- Rank for "best [category] software"
- Appear in the lists that ChatGPT and AI Overviews serves users when they search for "best [category] software"

You're going to have to build a dang list and be in it.

We did a test listicle with a client recently, and within 2 weeks of publishing it had been cited over 100 times for the exact search, and delivered 5 quality signups in the same time. The page has a 9% conversion rate when the rest of the website is about 0.25%, and regular JTBD content can convert around 0.75%-2% at best.

Acknowledging competitors builds, rather than erodes, authority and trust.

Be transparent, be honest, acknowledge your potential bias and speak of your differentiators. 

People are used to reading listicles where the author (a SaaS brand) includes themselves in it. 

It's only weird if your post doesn't help them make an educated decision, or if you lie.

If you want your brand to appear in LLMs and in search - this is the way to do it.

OR if you really don't want to do it, you must understand this is going to strongly impact the ROI of your SEO program.

I'd love to hear from those who are on the fence - why don't you want to publish these pages?

Here is the breakdown for how I'm doing GEO for my clients:




1. We're not doing a strictly separate strategy, and I would never charge an extra fee for it. It's part of what we're doing in SEO. However, we do have a dedicated experimentation track for it.

2. Listicles. If we're tracking brand mentions for BOFU prompts (which is what our top KPI is), all the cited pages are tools roundups. So we're building more of those specifically.

3. The listicles are formatted to be CLEAR and easily parsed. And to provide the most helpful information. Information Gain (IG) is very important here - how can you provide the information that is cleaner and more easy/helpful (and most able to be grabbed AS IS to be used directly by AI) than anything else on the internet?

4. Listicle outreach. We're getting our clients placed on more listicles where they aren't there yet. 

5. Not really optimizing for referral traffic from LLMs (though we're tracking it and it's growing) or regular citations for content that don't bring actual brand mentions. Brand mentions and brand visibility is what's important.

I don't find it useful to debate whether and how SEO and GEO are different. This is a waste of time.

Search has evolved and now involves LLMs - even if the scope of work for search also now extends beyond an SEO team and into the full organization.

GEO can't work if you don't have great product reviews and a strong brand. That's not in the hands of the SEO.

But within the constraints of what the SEO can influence, that's what we influence, and it's all a part of search optimization.

What would you add to this?

Do you have a bunch non-SEOs going into your orgs website, publishing their own content, and diluting the results of your hard work? I created a handy guide you can share with them so they can still think SEO-first.


It's totally ungated, you don't even need to leave a comment, just gonna leave it in the first comment.

But if you want to support me because I didn't make you comment to get it, maybe leave a comment anyway to say hi :D

I figured out why the bigger websites are the ones losing the most traffic right now:



1. Rapid content decay
When you've been publishing for 5-10 years, (some at a pretty high scale), your library starts getting out of hand. While some big website teams will have a solid  content update workflow in place - it's rarer than you think. Content today needs to be fresher than 2 years ago, and if you're investing the majority of your budget to new content, you're just adding to the problem (more to keep up with). Set yourself up with a clean content update workflow.

2. Way too much content
I've been pruning all of my clients' content and all we see is traffic growing. I even recommend pruning content that DOES drive traffic if it's attracting the wrong audience. Just cut it down so it's easier on Google bots AND those who are managing and keeping your library up to date.

3. Too much irrelevant content
Big websites who succeeded in the top-funnel strategies of the last 15 years are still paying the price now. Google is very actively trying to figure out what websites are about right now and cutting irrelevant keywords ruthlessly. It's probably not bad for you revenue wise, but if you're stressing out about the traffic drop, know that it *should* regulate, though you'll have a new baseline. I'd say help Google out and again, PRUNE what's not relevant and update the rest.


Who has a whole team or process dedicated to just updates? Would love to hear from you in the comments!

I just wrote up our case study from 6 months with Bizzabo. Together, we grew their product and solutions page visits by 67%. I think this case study proves what's actually working in SEO right now.



When Kerri Moore and the Bizzabo team brought us in, they'd been bleeding traffic for 14 months. AI Overviews were answering queries directly. They had 400+ pages all competing for attention on a 10-year-old domain.


But Kerri Moore's team did something most companies won't - they gave us their sales call and voice of customer recordings so we could hear exactly what event managers ask when they're evaluating platforms. This allowed us to pull true pain points and target actual ICP to increase the value of the traffic they were getting.

I LOVE working with smart clients who set us up to win.

I think most people know by now that traffic/clicks isn't the metric to track anymore. But organizations are still holding on to that metric. We went the opposite direction.

We rebuilt their entire SEO strategy around buyer intent:
- Cleaned up redirects bogging down their domain
- Pruned pages that were just creating crawl waste  
- Reorganized everything into topic clusters based on actual buyer questions
- Reoptimized pages that were targeting the wrong audience
- Aligned every CTA with where someone actually is in their buying process

The technical cleanup was brutal. But Kerri's team stuck with it because they understood we weren't optimizing for everyone - we were optimizing for the right people finding the right pages.

𝗣𝗿𝗼𝗱𝘂𝗰𝘁 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝘀𝗼𝗹𝘂𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻𝘀 𝗽𝗮𝗴𝗲 𝘃𝗶𝘀𝗶𝘁𝘀 𝗳𝗿𝗼𝗺 𝗼𝗿𝗴𝗮𝗻𝗶𝗰: 𝘂𝗽 67% 𝗶𝗻 4 𝗺𝗼𝗻𝘁𝗵𝘀
𝗢𝘃𝗲𝗿𝗮𝗹𝗹 𝘁𝗿𝗮𝗳𝗳𝗶𝗰: 𝗱𝗼𝘄𝗻 22.7%

We also got them #1 positions for the commercial keywords that actually bring in enterprise deals (some even over $15 CPC).

Kerri put it perfectly: "Working with Flying Cat felt like adding a fully functional SEO arm to our team. The strategy was clear, easy for us to use, and changed how we create content. Their topic-cluster approach and structural fixes drastically improved how visitors moved from our blog into product and solutions pages, and we're still using that framework today."

I think what this proves is AI didn't kill SEO. It just exposed how much of our traffic was never valuable anyway. The companies winning now are the ones brave enough to let go of vanity metrics.

The framework we built together is still driving their results today. That's what happens when you focus on qualified journeys over generic traffic.

If your traffic is tanking but you know your buyers are still searching - let's talk. This is exactly what we do at Flying Cat.

Who else is seeing pipeline grow while traffic drops?

Organic signups for my one of my clients grew 75% in the last 6 months compared to the prior period. In the same 6 months, traffic has only grown 32% - what gives?




As many are finding today (shout out to Gaetano Nino DiNardi who recently posted a very similar finding) - traffic has very little, if no, correlation with pipeline and signups.

Not only is AI eating up traffic.
People are changing the way they search.

I have clients whose traffic is DECLINING but demos growing by double digits MoM.

Traffic isn't the metric anymore.

Other things you can track instead:
- Are signups and demos going up?
- Is my brand getting mentioned more by ChatGPT and other LLMs?
- Are my core money making pages growing in traffic?

If your traffic is declining, you might have less of a problem than you think.

In fact, you might have an opportunity to finally reframe SEO and GEO for the channel it should be: a performance channel.

Are you still getting pressure to track traffic as a main metric? What's the argument?

Women are significantly more prone to anxiety than men, and significantly more prone to anxious attachment. And it shows up in our careers.



Attachment styles have always been studied under the lens of romantic relationships, but I believe it affects how we show up at work too.

If you're anxiously attached - you're more likely to:

👉🏽 Not advocate for yourself. The fear of rejection makes salary negotiations, asking for promotions, or pushing back on unreasonable requests feel genuinely threatening.
👉🏽 Focus too much on how people feel about you rather than getting work done. Spending mental energy monitoring colleagues' energy, reading into Slack messages, thinking about whether you said something wrong.
👉🏽 People please yourself to death. Saying yes to everything, never setting boundaries, making sure everyone stays happy with you.
👉🏽 Constantly seek external validation. Masked as asking for feedback, you're really trying to get people to tell you you're doing a good job instead of trusting your internal compass.
👉🏽 Interpret feedback as rejection.

All of this is damaging to your career (and relationships in general!).

People may "like" you just fine, but they won't respect you.

Good news: anxious attachment can be healed into secure attachment. Meanwhile, here are things you can do to combat how it interferes with your work:

👉🏽 Make requests without over-explaining. Brevity with warmth works. "I'd love to talk about compensation when we meet next week" is complete. Over-explaining ("I know budgets are tight and I hate to ask but...") creates more awkwardness—it puts the other person in the position of reassuring you.
👉🏽 Let people be disappointed. A kind "I can't take that on right now" is enough. You're not responsible for managing their reaction. Most people respect a clear no far more than a resentful yes.
👉🏽 Stop asking for reassurance. If you genuinely need feedback to do your job, ask for something specific. But if you're just looking for someone to tell you you're on the right track, that's the anxiety talking.
👉🏽 Take action before you feel ready. I think "ready" is a feeling you get after doing the thing, not before. "I'm still building my perspective, but I'd love to be considered" is honest and human.
👉🏽 Document your wins privately. Keep a running note on your phone. When your brain starts its "you're a fraud" loop, you have evidence. This also makes performance reviews and salary negotiations easier.
👉🏽 Make decisions without polling everyone. Shift from "What should I do?" (handing over authority) to "I'm planning to do X—flag anything I should consider." People respect decisiveness more than you'd expect.

If this resonates at all, hit the 🔔 - I post weekly about supporting ambitious female consultants and marketers grow their careers as well as SEO and GEO.

Prompt research isn't as straightforward as keyword research. I was trying to solve one problem. How to get a  structured and repeatable approach to prompt research.


So I built the Flying Cat Question Extractor.

It's essentially RAG database with information about the client's ICP. I use it simulate the prompts their ICP is likely to ask at different stages of their buying journey. 

Built from sales calls,

Scraped G2 reviews,

Customer success tickets,

Anything that has the customer's actual voice.

And it reverse engineers that into questions they might be asking ChatGPT and LLMs.

I can also even plop those into Peec AI to then see clickstream or volume data.

And we have a custom, ICP-focused set of prompts that I know are going to drive the right kind of people.

How do you do prompt research?

"Traffic is down for everyone", "You can't grow traffic now cause of AI Overviews". This is not correct.



Traffic is down for some accounts. 

Big websites with lots of pages that haven't been updated in a long time.

Big websites with lots of irrelevant pages.

Small websites you haven't touched in over a year (ahem, sorry to my own website).

Websites that have:
- A clean architecture
- Pruned old content
- Fresh content and an always-on content refresh system
- Enough relevant, new content
- Minimal technical issues
- A strong and consistent link building program

Or if you're in the process of what can be a MONTHS long clean-up process - it will get worse before it gets better. But it can still get better.

Can still grow right now. Even if it's not as fast as before - it's more relevant than before.

SEOs/GEOs should take responsibility and not blame AI Overviews for all traffic drops.

There is still a LOT you can fix on most websites.

It will never recover to pre-2024, especially if your sit had been live there for a while.

But traffic isn't automatically doomed.

Don't use it as your main KPI, but it's a leading indicator for important pages and clusters.

Is your SEO blaming AI for everything?

I'm obsessed with this A24 campaign for Marty Supreme. After watching Timothée Chalamet spend 18 minutes trolling fake marketing executives on Zoom, I looked out the window at WeWork and saw the actual blimp he'd joked about floating over LA.



If you haven't seen it yet, Chalamet sits in a fake Zoom call pitching increasingly unhinged ideas for Marty Supreme's campaign - painting the statue of liberty and Eiffel Tower orange, orange Wheaties boxes, a fleet of orange blimps raining ping pong balls. The marketing executives scramble to accommodate his absurd demands while keeping straight faces.

From what I've seen, the genius lies in the execution layers.

They nailed our collective Zoom trauma with the awkward intros, painful screen share transitions, and Chalamet's desktop background showing himself receiving an award. Every beat feels like actual meetings we've suffered through. They perfectly mocked and dissected corporate culture.

Then there's the meta-advertising play: an ad campaign about an ad campaign, posted on Chalamet's Instagram (10M views) and A24's YouTube (100K views). They're literally advertising by making fun of advertising, and we're eating it up because it acknowledges what we all know - most marketing meetings are performative nonsense.

And then they actually implemented the idea!

When Chalamet suggests blimps in the video, you think it's just another joke. Then you walk outside and see an actual Marty Supreme blimp floating over LA. They committed to the bit so hard it became reality.

I think this is what happens when you stop protecting your brand and start playing with it. This felt like an inside joke I was a part of because I saw the Zoom meeting.

From my perspective, the campaign works because it operates on three levels simultaneously:
- Surface: funny video of actor being difficult
- Middle: satire of corporate marketing culture  
- Deep: actual execution of the "joke" ideas

What can we pull from this? In my experience, the memorable campaigns are the ones that stop trying to look professional and safe and start being memorable. And if you're gonna joke about something ridiculous, maybe actually do it.

Because somewhere in LA today, someone else is looking up at that blimp thinking "wait, was that real?"

Did anybody else catch the blimp?

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