LinkedIn vs. SEO — a playbook for content distribution
Thenuka Karunaratne
Jul 25, 2024
daydream, as an SEO company, spends nearly all of its marketing budget on content that is not optimized for SEO. Instead, most of our viewership comes through alternative distribution channels — particularly LinkedIn. This bet has now paid off to the tune of hundreds of high-quality, inbound leads.
This strategy isn’t daydream-specific—for many startups, content marketing is a better strategy for near-term results than SEO. The difference is that while all SEO content is content marketing, not all content marketing is SEO content (i.e primarily relies on Google for traffic).
Our content playbook
daydream’s content playbook is made up of four different types of content.
Playbooks: Case studies of companies that have done SEO exceptionally well, like G2, Canva, and Zapier.
Ex. How Canva’s international programmatic SEO strategy drives 38M+ visits to Canva every month
Essays: A collection of articles that focus on the future of search and SEO, written by me personally.
Ex. The winners of SEO’s AI era will have access to unique data
Headlines: Fundraising announcements and other company-level announcements.
Guides: Tactical guides that address key questions and topics about SEO.
If you look at the first three content types, you’ll notice that none of them target a pre-defined search term. Very few people search “Wise SEO strategy” or “Winners of SEO’s AI era” on Google.
Guides are in a slightly different category. While people may search for questions like “Should I outsource SEO or do it in-house?” we still view Google as a secondary distribution channel rather than the primary one for now. This is because SEO takes a long time to scale—far more than almost any other acquisition channel.
Why is it hard to achieve results quickly with SEO?
SEO is a powerful distribution channel, but it takes time to build a strong foundation. Results should be measured in months, not days or weeks. Look at any great SEO success story (Canva, Zapier, G2, Wise), and you’ll see that it took them years of sustained effort to achieve what they did.
This is primarily because Google’s approach to prioritizing results leans heavily on several factors that take time to develop. This includes the quality of your content, comprehensiveness of coverage, quality, and number of links pointing to your domain, among other factors.
Certain companies will offer “shortcuts” like selling you backlinks from reputable websites, but doing this puts your domain at risk. Google openly dislikes this behavior and says as much in its official guidelines.
The consequences for a linkselling site start with losing trust in Google's search results, as well as reduction of the site's visible PageRank in the Google Toolbar. The consequences can also include lower rankings for that site in Google's search results.
Leverage LinkedIn as an alternative distribution channel
In contrast, alternative distribution channels like LinkedIn don’t rely on the same long-term factors and can be jump-started much faster.
In an interview with Entrepreneur last year, LinkedIn’s Editor-in-Chief Dan Roth and Director of Product Management Alice Xiong summarized two key changes to their algorithms:
LinkedIn wants to reduce the amount of irrelevant content in the feed. During the pandemic, LinkedIn’s feed became dominated by personal posts and clickbait that many users found irrelevant to their professional interests. Since launching this algorithm update, LinkedIn has reported an 80% reduction in the amount of irrelevant content people see.
Post that share knowledge and advice are prioritized throughout the platform. LinkedIn identifies posts that have genuinely useful advice by looking at four key factors, which we explore in-depth below.
Signals that boost your content
We’ll explain the general principle behind each signal, along with an analysis of how we validated that we’re on the right side of each signal.
The post has a distinct audience — You should have a clearly defined target reader for your posts. In daydream’s case, these are SEO or marketing professionals. This is slightly different from our ICP, which is typically a Head of Marketing or Head of Growth. In other words, your target IRP (ideal reader persona) will be closely aligned but broader than your ICP.
The author is writing in their core subject area — LinkedIn appears to check your profile to ensure that you have subject matter expertise in the area you’re writing about. As the founder of a venture-backed SEO SaaS company, I should qualify to write about SEO.
The post has meaningful comments — Merely having a large number of comments no longer wins favor with the algorithm. Comments need to respond to the substance of the post rather than saying “cool” or “amazing!” Many of daydream’s thesis-driven pieces spark a lot of meaningful commentary, like this post, which received 30+ high-quality comments.
The post has a perspective — LinkedIn’s algorithm analyzes a post to determine if the post contains “generic information (which is less rewarded) or is drawn from the writer's perspective and insights (which is more rewarded).” daydream tends to avoid producing content with very generic insights (ex. keyword research is important!) and instead focuses on touching less-understood topics, particularly around programmatic SEO. When we produce a content piece, we try to include insights grounded in real, practical experience or draw from our extended network of SEO experts for unique perspectives.
All of this has resulted in some excellent reach and distribution for daydream’s content. Here are a few examples 👇🏾
Where does programmatic SEO fall in all of this?
Content produced using programmatic SEO is still subject to the same channel-level constraints I mentioned earlier. However, programmatic SEO is unique in that it effectively targets long-tail keywords at scale in a cost-effective way.
According to one estimate, long-tail searches account for 70% of the total search volume of Google searches and are generally much less competitive than shorter keywords. If you’re a company investing in SEO for the first time, it makes more sense to start with the long tail and work your way up to more competitive keywords, as compared to the opposite.
When you’re ready to invest in programmatic SEO, reach out to us at [email protected]! We’re building the best programmatic SEO business in the industry, working with customers like Notion, Clay, Descript, and others.