CONTENTS

Key Findings

Competition

Organic Growth Breakdown

Content and SEO Opportunities

Wrapping Up

5 mins

From 0 to 500K Monthly Visitors: Veed.io SEO Success Story

HUMAN CRAFTED
Human Crafted illustration
This piece of content is the work of a human mind.

Let’s face it: SEO isn’t for everyone. There are several cases where SEO can’t – and shouldn’t – be used as a growth lever for a SaaS company. The space of online video editing isn’t one of these cases. A relative newcomer in that category that has experienced exponential growth over the last two years, Veed.io, is a shining example of that.

Veed.io is an online video editing software that allows you to do pretty much everything you need in terms of online video creation and editing. Having followed one of the company’s co-founders, Sabba Keynejad, since the early days of their journey, we’ve been impressed with Veed’s growth, not only in terms of revenue and number of customers, but also in terms of their organic growth.

In our first post of this new series, we’re going to try to break down how Veed.io managed to achieve frankly astounding levels of organic growth in such a short amount of time. Let’s get into it. 

Disclaimer: Most of the data we’re using to conduct this analysis is provided by SEO software Ahrefs. As with most SEO software, we’re not getting absolute numbers on any of the metrics (e.g. search volume), rather the information is averages based on the various data sources Ahrefs uses to provide us with this data. Practically, this means that you should always take the data presented below with a pinch of salt. Everything presented here is accurate as of today, August 12, 2021.

Key Findings

First, let’s take a look at some of the key findings of our analysis:

  • There’s a high correlation between the number of referring domains and the number of organic visits that the website is receiving.

  • The biggest driver of organic traffic for Veed is their /tools/ folder.

  • Veed has a better traffic performance compared to its competitors, despite lower numbers of backlinks and referring domains.

  • Veed creates valuable and SEO-friendly blog posts, and they’re anticipated to perform even better long term.

  • Landing pages are all structured in a similar way, based on a template.

  • Veed pays a lot of attention to constantly launching new products and posting them on directories.

  • The use of forums and online communities is a key part of Veed’s strategy.

Competition

As we noted earlier, Veed is an online video editing software.

Their market is crowded and competition is fierce. However, this doesn’t mean that all products have the same approach when it comes to acquisition channels. Some rely on PPC, others on organic search, and others on social media. 

What’s important is understanding early on where you should focus your efforts. In the case of Veed, the co-founders saw that similar tools were mainly focusing on organic search, so that’s where they concentrated on, too.

While we’ll talk more about Veed’s traffic further on, for now, we’ll say that the vast majority comes from organic search. How does it compare to some of its competitors?

By looking at the organic traffic of Veed and four of its most prominent friendly rivals – we’ll call them tools A, B, C, and D for now –  we can see that it’s the only one with a clear and consistent growth over the past year.

Tool’s A traffic seems to have been stagnant over the past few months, following a major drop in July 2020.

Meanwhile, Tool B has been in a clear downward trend over the past 14 months, with its organic traffic dropping more than 60% since May 2020.

When it comes to Tool C, you’ll notice that organic traffic has plateaued since the beginning of the year, following a 34% decline since June 2020.

Lastly, the case of Tool D shows a big drop in traffic from a brief surge in July 2020, but things have been stagnant ever since.

Traffic does seem to have been slowly picking up of late.

All this makes it clear that Veed is the only case where organic traffic has had an exponential growth that’s kept on going.

What’s also interesting to notice is the fact that Veed has managed to outgrow its competitors in traffic performance, while having a significantly lower number of referring domains and backlinks.

Pretty impressive, right?

As you can see above, by performing a domain comparison, we can see that Veed clearly has the lowest number of referring domains; it’s almost 90% less than the highest one with 27,507.

It’s the same story with backlinks; Veed has 30K compared to the 8.3M that Tool D has.

It’s clear that, despite the fact that Veed has received less backlinks than its competition up to now – mainly due to it being fairly new to the market – its organic traffic has seen a far better performance.

This doesn’t mean, however, that Veed’s backlink performance is flatlining. It’s actually growing at very fast rates and could even catch up with some of its competitors in the future.

That’s assuming it continues to grow at a similar rate, which, at the moment, is the second-fastest compared to the rest of the tools.

Just to give you an idea, let’s take a two-year period as an example. From August 2019 to August 2021, Veed’s referring domains have grown more than 790%, while:

  • Tool’s A has grown 115%

  • Tool’s B has grown 243%

  • Tool’s C has grown 606%

  • Tool’s D has grown 2,800%

Meaning Veed’s growth is second only to that being achieved by Tool D.

Backlink performance is something we’ll cover further on, in element #3.

What we can tell for sure is that Veed has done a great job in other aspects of SEO as well, such as creating content that attracts traffic and optimizing its pages.

Let’s have a deeper look into them.

Organic Growth Breakdown

Now that we’ve seen how Veed compares to some of its competitors, let’s have a deeper look into the website’s organic growth and how it managed to reach more than 500K in monthly organic traffic as of today, August 12.

Let’s get into it.

Element #1: Website architecture and traffic breakdown

The first element that’s interesting to look at is how Veed has structured its website in order for it to be optimized for organic growth.

As you can see from the screenshot of the homepage below, we can categorize the main pages into:

  • Tools

  • Create

  • Resources

Plus the pricing page, but we’re going to focus on the Tools, Create, and Resources pages for now, since they’re the main sources of traffic.

Each of those three pages works as a drop-down list for users to discover more parts of them, such as more tools and resources.

To be precise, Tools has 117 pages under it, Create has 73, and Resources has 45.

In the following graphic, you can see the parent and child relationship for those landing pages.

Let’s do a breakdown of those pages.

Tools

Tools are one of Veed’s most noticeable and important features; with almost 120 for users to take advantage of, meaning they can really take their video editing to the next level.

In the screenshot below, you can see the most prominent ones.

What’s important to mention – and a strong sign of the importance that tools have for the website’s visibility – is that when the Tools page first started picking up traffic in September 2020, the website’s organic traffic was around 30K visits, following a few months of stagnation after a 37% decline from April 2020.

In the screenshot below, you can see the point when the traffic slowly starts growing, before skyrocketing to over half a million monthly visits.

That’s exactly the point when the Tools page started picking up as well, as we said earlier.

By those charts alone, you can see the impact the tool’s landing pages have on the website’s organic visibility as a whole.

This is something the team behind Veed understood early on and we’ll go through how they optimized those pages in the next section.

After all, out of the total traffic, the Tools folder and all its subfolders are accountable for the majority of visits, which is 460K, making 72.2% of the traffic!

Pretty impressive, right?

Veed has actually got a separate landing page for every tool, each contributing to the website’s organic visibility.

To give you a few examples, the video editor page generates over 45K visits, the GIF editor page over 40K, and the YouTube cutter one over 35K.

This doesn’t go to say that each of the tools attracts such impressive amounts of traffic, but the vast majority of them have a substantial contribution.

Does the same thing apply to the number of organic keywords and the traffic value?

The answer is yes, since the total number of keywords Veed ranks for is 154K, and of that, the Tools page is accountable for 67K, or 43.5% of the total amount.

When it comes to the total traffic value which currently stands at $523K, the Tools page is responsible for 85% of it, translating to $443K!

Now that we’ve seen how vital tools pages have been for the organic growth of Veed, let’s have a look at the Create page.

Create

Create is a page consisting of 75 landing pages of various tools, or “makers”, despite only a few of them appearing in the drop-down list on the homepage.

Those makers help users create stunning content around:

  • Videos

  • Social media

  • Marketing

In the screenshot below, you can only see a few of the makers that Veed has available, but the wide variety of them is still clear.

Makers range from Facebook Video Makers and Training Video Makers to Pitch Makers and Trailer Makers.

There are loads of options available.

For any marketer or content creator coming to the page, it’ll be clear they can get great use out of them to elevate their content strategy.

How do the Create pages perform organically?

In terms of organic traffic, they’re responsible for 25.4K monthly organic visits –  4.25% of the total 597K the website receives.

Some of the best-performing pages include: the Lyric Video Maker, generating 29% of the total traffic the Create pages receive; the Video Meme Maker which gets 26%; followed by the Minecraft Animation Maker with 9%.

It’s worth saying that this section of the website was put into effect in the first half of 2020 and reached this huge volume of organic visibility in just over a year.

Quite impressive, we must say.

Another interesting point is the fact that, since this particular page started reporting traffic, the website’s total organic traffic has only been growing.

To be precise, on July 19, 2020, Veed was generating 28.5K organic visits and has never dropped below that point since.

Does that mean that Create is solely responsible for this?

Definitely not; it takes many factors and pages to create a strong organic background

However, the contribution this page has had – and keeps having – is undeniable.

In terms of organic keywords, it ranks for 29.2K, that’s 18.9% of the total of 154K.

Once again, Create isn’t solely responsible for the exponential growth that Veed has had when it comes to organic keywords, but the fact that it generates almost one-fifth of the total amount indicates a very strong contribution.

In the chart above, you can see what the organic keywords looked like when the page first started reporting traffic on July 19, 2020.

Ever since then, the keywords have been in a constant upwards trend and have never fallen below 25K; the number that the website ranked for at that point.

How about the traffic value?

Well, the value of Create’s monthly traffic is currently worth $17.5K; that’s 3.3% of the total amount, which is $523K.

Sure, it’s not as much as the value of the Tools page, as we saw earlier, but it’s still a substantial amount.

Let’s move on to the next section of the website, which is the Resources page, i.e. the blog.

Resources

Blogging is, more often than not, one of the most impactful sources of organic traffic and something every major SaaS has – or should have – taken advantage of. Veed is no exception to this.

Like Sabba – Veed’s co-founder – once said in a blog post of his…

We couldn’t agree more with this here at MINUTTIA; we’re a content and SEO agency, after all.

It’s true that Veed has paid a lot of attention to its blog posts by creating valuable and SEO-friendly content that’ll attract relevant traffic.

For instance, look at the following blog post on how to make Instagram Reels

It’s content that makes total sense to be on their blog; it checks all the boxes, meaning that it’s relevant to the product’s capabilities since Veed offers an Instagram Reels Maker

… and the keyword “how to make reels on Instagram” has a good level of demand, so there are people actively searching for how to make them.

It’s clear that this blog post can attract the right audience, who may well go ahead and use Veed’s Instagram Reels Maker after reading it.

Before seeing how the blog section performs organically, it’s worth mentioning that Veed has a separate blog page called Veed.io/blog/, mainly with stories that the co-founders share about their journey.

However, every piece of content currently published on the website is added to another page (Resources -> Veed Blog), under the folder learn.

A blog post’s URL is currently in the form of:

“www.veed.io/learn/example-blog-post/”

Let’s now have a look at the organic traffic the blog is generating on a monthly basis.

As of today, August 12, that amount is 6.7K organic visits, or 1.12% of the total traffic.

We should point out, however, that this concerns blog posts in the learn folder, which began generating traffic in May 2021. 6.7K visits might not seem as big as the 25.4K visits the Create page generates – and it’s not – the short time frame is something we should take into consideration.

After all, creating content that’ll perform well organically is a long-term process

When it comes to organic keywords, the blog section ranks for 7.8K of them, which is 5% of the total amount.

As for the traffic value, it currently stands at $1.4K – 0.26% of the total amount.

All in all, it’s clear that the Tools page generates the most organic traffic and consequently, the most traffic value and the number of organic keywords that Veed ranks for.

However, all pages we just analyzed contribute substantially and are part of a well-structured website. This is why Veed has managed to go from 0 to over 500K monthly visitors.

Now, let’s have a detailed look at another factor to this success, which is how the team behind Veed has utilized many of its landing pages and optimized them for organic search.

Element #2: Landing pages with ‘Job to Be Done’ intent at scale

Landing pages are a great way for any website to attract valuable traffic, especially when talking about features that the product has.

This doesn’t mean that creating them alone is enough; optimizing them with the right elements is a crucial part of any successful landing page.

Veed’s co-founders seem to have taken advantage of this early on and, as they say themselves, it’s worked out very well for them:

“Landing pages are great and have been a key strategy for us to acquire users at scale… I would recommend getting them started asap as you will benefit from the traffic later…”

One great way to make a successful landing page is to create it with the “Job to be done intent in mind. This is a type of search intent we’ve coined internally here at MINUTTIA and use it often among the other four types:

  • Informational

  • Commercial

  • Navigational

  • Transactional

Job to be done basically indicates the intent a searcher has to find a tool, calculator, checker, or anything else that’ll help them get a very specific job done.

Veed has quite a few such landing pages regarding its tools; a good example is the “Add Text to Video” tool.

As you can tell, the intent is very clear and the tool does exactly what its name suggests. 

That’s why any user looking for a tool that’ll help them add text to a video can easily stumble upon Veed’s landing page.

Let’s search for that particular keyword with Google…

As you can see, Veed currently ranks in second place in the SERPs for “add text to video”, thus gaining valuable traffic from searchers specifically looking to get that job done.

What’s more, landing pages around that search intent have high demand and their titles have been carefully selected.

For example, “add text to video” has a monthly search volume of just under 3.5K.

Meanwhile, “add text on video” which is basically the same thing, has far less demand…

…making it clear why the first keyword was selected and not the second.

The same thing applies to many other landing pages, such as “Add Music to GIF” and “Resize Video for Instagram”.

Another interesting thing we noticed is the fact that all landing pages have a similar structure

They begin with a headline followed by an image and a button with a CTA (call-to-action).

What follows are some of Veed’s best-known clients and a piece of text, which is usually a brief description of what the tool offers and the problem it solves.

Up next, what all landing pages have – and rightfully so – are a few steps for how to use the particular tool, each with an image so the process is visually appealing.

This is not only useful for users, but also for search engines since the right implementation can help the website gain more real estate on the SERPs.

For instance, when searching for “add text to video” in Google, we can find answers to some questions in the “People also ask” section.

Sure enough, by clicking on “How can I add text and logo to my video?” what comes up is an extraction of the steps we just looked at.

The next part of each landing page is a video tutorial on how to use the tool.

The video is from Veed’s YouTube channel which offers a wide variety of tutorials about its tools and guides users through the process of using them.

What Veed does next is add some points to explain what you can do with the particular tool and how it’ll help with a purpose. There’s also some information about Veed in general and what it has to offer.

In the “Add Text to Video” landing page, the points used are:

  • Add text to different parts of your video

  • Get your message across

  • Free video editing software

What’s worth pointing out is that, apart from each landing page being beautifully structured, on-page SEO optimization has also been utilized, with the use of the right headings for instance.

This is something we’ll cover in element #4.

Following this part, an FAQ section can be found.

This not only answers potential questions a user might have regarding the tool, but it’s also a part of the on-page optimization we just talked about. This means that one or more questions might appear in the SERPs as a snippet, like in the case of the steps.

Next up, Veed usually adds a section with a few compatible files or relevant tools in the form of tags that a user might also find useful, as well as some reviews.

Reviews are important for E-A-T purposes, a factor Google often takes into consideration when ranking a page. The acronym stands for expertise, authoritativeness, and trust, and things like honest and positive reviews can increase those factors.

Finally, landing pages usually end with a CTA prompting users to “choose a video” to edit or “get started”.

Overall, landing pages are something Veed has paid a lot of attention to, and rightfully so. After all, the tools are the most important source of traffic, as we saw in element #1.

In the following graphic, you can see how the landing pages are generally structured.

Let’s move on to the next element.

Element #3: Link building

One of the most important aspects when it comes to SEO is having plenty of relevant and high-quality backlinks linking back to your website.

Each backlink acts as a vote of trust and search engines consider them when ranking a website since it’s a sign of increased trustworthiness.

This is also something that Veed’s co-founders paid attention to from the early days.

Before seeing what tactics they used to acquire backlinks, let’s have a look at Veed’s backlink profile.

As of today, Veed has received 30K backlinks from 2.4K unique referring domains, thus increasing its Domain Rating to 70. This number shows the strength of a website’s backlink profile on a scale of 1-100.

It also seems like the website has a healthy backlink profile, meaning that the pages linking back to it are, for the most part, relevant and high-quality and not irrelevant and spammy.

In the screenshot below, you can see the distribution of the TLDs (top-level domains), meaning a referring domain’s country.

Since the majority of them (60%) are in the “.com” form, this is a strong indication that they mostly come from non-spammy domains.

What’s more, the anchor texts used to link back to Veed seem to be relevant to it. For instance, the top two anchor texts are branded terms, which is great for a healthy backlink profile.

On the flip side, irrelevant anchor texts from low-quality pages could do more harm than good.

We could delve much deeper into analyzing the website’s backlink profile by conducting a backlink audit, but what’s clear is that the profile seems to be healthy.

When it comes to the top pages by incoming links, the website’s homepage receives the most, which comes as no surprise. It has 1.4K referring domains linking back to it (58% of the total), from websites like Uscreen, Filmora, and FounderJar.

The second page top page is Veed’s login page with 202 referring domains (8.4%).

How did Veed manage to acquire so many backlinks in a relatively short period of time?

A vital factor of this success has been the free tools available, since they get shared a lot more than the paid ones. For example, Veed has launched a tool called VYOO which contains free vertical stock videos. 

This tool was then launched on Product Hunt and subsequently became quite popular. It resulted in over 440 backlinks from people talking about it in their blogs and discussions online, such as on GitHub, which has Domain Rating of 90. 

Another tactic the co-founders followed is a classic one and it involves actively seeking backlinks.

Instead of simply emailing and asking people to link back to Veed, as part of their link-building strategy they offered to write blog posts for them.

Put simply, they wrote content pieces for their old universities and past contracting clients – after getting permission from them – and linked back to Veed in their bios or inside the pieces themselves.

What’s more, constantly launching new products and adding them to directories such as Product Hunt, Crunchbase, and Indie Hackers, meant gaining awareness plus backlinks at the same time.

Look at an image of the organic traffic performance that Veed published in a blog post after they reached $1M ARR in a year.

Despite it being outdated – since it only goes as far as mid-2020 – it’s interesting to see the big and small spikes that occur in traffic after a certain action.

For instance, you can see the three spikes that “Product Launch” points to, which takes us back to our previous point that launching products on directories can boost traffic.

There are also some major but brief surges after an important blog post was published, such as the one about their rejection by YC and the one the screenshot above was taken from.

Let’s now have a look at another important element, which is on-page optimization.

Element #4: On-page optimization

We briefly touched on on-page SEO optimization in element #2, but in case you don’t know, it’s basically the practice of optimizing your pages for a search audience.

This can be done with the right use of title tags, meta-descriptions, headings, URLs, keywords, and much more.

Veed seems to have done a great job with on-page optimization, which explains its rapid organic growth.

For example, let’s examine a blog post to see how optimized it is; we can use a list post on the best fonts for subtitles.

With the help of Clearscope, a content optimization platform that uses NLP – which we also use for our own clients – we can see that the blog post has a content grade of A+.

This is based on how many of the key terms used by the top-performing pieces for the target term have been used in this particular content piece as well.

Also, the word count is significantly higher (4,764) than the top-performing piece on the SERPs (1,320).

On the right hand side, you can see all the key terms that should ideally be used, as well as the ones used in Veed’s piece.

To be precise, 41 out of the 50 recommended ones have been used.

Needless to say, other aspects of the on-page optimization process have also been implemented. This includes the use of high-quality multimedia and the right types of headings, which increase the overall readability level of the piece.

What’s more, the keyword “best font for subtitles” has a monthly search volume of 500 and a low difficulty level to rank high for.

It’s no wonder this particular piece ranks in the third position on Google search and has also gained a spot in the “People also ask” section of the SERPs.

These practices covered above are applied to all of Veed’s pieces of content, which explains why they gain a lot of visibility and, mostly, rank high.

Can on-page optimization only be implemented on content pieces?

Definitely not! Applying such techniques to landing pages and the homepage is a vital part of a successful SEO strategy.

Earlier, in element #2, we saw how landing pages are structured and how the use of the right headings and elements like FAQ sections can help bring more traffic to the page.

When we take it all in, on-page optimization is something Veed has pretty much nailed!

Moving on to the last element.

Element #5: Digital PR and building authority online

Since we just covered on-page optimization, it feels only right to talk about how Veed’s team has taken advantage of off-page optimization. That is,the process of taking actions away from a website in order to improve its online visibility.

A typical action in this process is sharing content in online groups and forums such as Reddit, like Sabba started doing three years ago on a subreddit about side projects.

As you can see from the homepage in the screenshot above, Veed was still in beta mode back then and forums are a great way for products to start getting awareness during that phase.

Sabba’s post sparked a conversation of 16 comments with people talking and asking about Veed.

Other comments include “This is a great idea. I will have to try it out this week” and “gonna start using this for my short film projects!”

Such conversations might not always have a significant impact on the traffic, but – as we said earlier – they can really help out during a product’s early days.

However, posting product updates is not a thing of the past. Veed has stuck to this tactic to this very day. In the screenshot below, you can see Sabba’s Reddit post about their latest tool, which has gained over 100 upvotes.

It seems like the only thing that’s changed is the fact that Sabba has now got more Reddit awards!

Another great platform that Veed has taken advantage of is Quora, where Sabba has answered hundreds of questions around the tool and linked back to it many times.

It also seems like his content and responses have generated a good amount of awareness which – to a certain extent – can be converted to website traffic.

Interesting, right?

Indie Hackers is yet another great example of how sharing content and participating in discussions can generate awareness around your website.

The following post by Sabba has sparked a discussion with 47 comments, while he also made sure to link back to Veed for people to visit it.

Another crucial aspect of off-page optimization is the use of social media.

For instance, YouTube is a very strong channel that Veed has taken advantage of, managing to gain over 25K subscribers and 5.6M views in total.

Image Source: Socialblade.com

The videos are mainly tutorials on how to use a certain tool, like how to add subtitles to a video automatically.

This video in particular has gained over 365K views and viewers can go straight to Veed’s subtitle tool by clicking on the links in the description.

To sum up, actively sharing content online can really be a traffic booster for any type of website.

Veed seems to have this as a core part of its strategy, which is one of the reasons why organic growth has been so rapid.

Despite the fact that things seem to be going great organically, we believe there are a few things that could be changed regarding content creation and the structure of certain pages. 

All with the purpose of helping Veed go to even greater heights, we’re going to get into them.

Content and SEO Opportunities

No matter how well a website performs organically, there’ll always be opportunities to take advantage of or things to improve on in order to perform even better.

Let’s have a look at a few of the opportunities we identified during our research.

Opportunity #1: Presence in non-English speaking countries

One of the main things that Veed is missing right now is the fact that the website hasn’t been translated into other languages. As a result, Veed’s missing visibility for several relevant terms in other languages. To paint the picture here, let’s start by taking a look at Veed’s current organic visibility. 

As we can see below, ten of the countries that drive the most traffic to Veed’s website are the following:

It’s expected that we get English-speaking countries like the United States, United Kingdom, Australia, and Canada in the top ten since Veed’s website is in English – even though there isn’t a lang=”en” parameter in the HTML of the page to specify the language of the page.

Let’s dive a little deeper into things and try to uncover what Veed’s missing when it comes to its presence in other countries where English isn’t the main language. For the sake of example, we’re going to be using a few different terms in different languages and countries. 

The first one is the term “video maken” (translation according to Google: make video) with Dutch being the language and the Netherlands being the target country. As we can see below, this is a term that has a decent search volume in the Netherlands, with 900 monthly searches, while it has a really low keyword difficulty, which means that it won’t be as difficult to rank for the target term. 

Also, by taking a look at the top ten results in that particular SERP…

… we can see that prominent competitors in the space of video editing – and online design with dedicated pages for that feature of their product – are getting visibility, which shows us that this is indeed a relevant term that Veed’s currently missing.

If we stay in the Netherlands and use the term “filmpje maken” (translation according to Google: make a movie) this time, we notice that it’s a very relevant term with a decent search volume for the target country and relatively easy to rank for…

… but, Veed doesn’t have visibility for in the top ten results, nor in the top 100 results for that term. 

The same doesn’t apply to English terms in that same country. In fact, Veed has visibility for some of those terms. However, it’s evident that in a developed country like the Netherlands, there are many opportunities for Dutch terms that the website’s currently missing visibility for. 

Let’s take a look at another example, this time for Spanish as the target language and Spain as the target country. We’re looking at the term ‘editor de videos’ (translation according to Google: video editor), which, as we can see below, is a great term with a high search volume and relatively low keyword difficulty. 

Taking a look at the search results in Spain for that term, we can see that Veed isn’t anywhere near the top 100, which simply means that it doesn’t have a presence for that language or in that country, while some direct and indirect competitors of Veed have visibility, as shown below. 

This is obviously a missed opportunity that extends across different non-English terms and for different countries. We hope that Veed’s going to leverage it soon. 

Opportunity #2: On-website search engine for tools

We saw earlier that one of the main drivers of organic traffic for Veed is their /tools/ folder and the landing pages that are included in it. These are essentially pages for jobs to be done by using the product. There are landing pages for…

  • Adding subtitles to video

  • Removing background noise from video

  • Cropping video

And, many more. 

In total, Veed has 117 such pages included in the /tools/ folder, according to the website’s XML sitemap. As you can imagine, there are a lot of functions and jobs to be done. Assuming that the page veed.io/tools is the hub page here…  

… it would make perfect sense if the page were to have a search function so that visitors can search by the specific job they need to do with the tool. Ideally, the search bar should be above the fold and should have an auto-suggestion function based on the terms the searcher is using to conduct the search.

Even though there’s a list of all the tools Veed’s offering, as shown below, it can’t really help someone find what they’re looking for quickly and easily. The information is a little overwhelming, even though it’s obviously done primarily for internal linking purposes. 

Thus, we believe that having a built-in search engine for the tools and all the jobs that someone can do with the product is essential for usability and user experience purposes. 

Opportunity #3: Video templates

We’ve inserted the term ‘video templates’ into Ahrefs’ Keywords Explorer and can see that, even though the term is slightly competitive, there’s potential for Veed to take some of the pie.

Obviously, the benefit of having a hub page around video templates…

https://www.veed.io/video-templates/

… as well as video template categories inside that folder/hub page, such as the following one…

https://www.veed.io/video-templates/social-media

… isn’t only the potential for getting organic traffic back to your website. There’s also huge potential on a product level; templates can help users get the most out of your product without spending too much time creating a video – or any other kind of creative for that matter – from scratch. 

We believe that creating a video templates page and categorizing the different templates inside a folder called /video-templates/ is a great opportunity that will have an impact both on an organic search and at a product level and we’re sure that Veed’s already working on it.

Opportunity #4: Using topic clusters

Even though this topic, as well as its implementation, can be quite controversial, we believe that it’s something that we need to cover. To illustrate how it could be implemented, we’ll use an example from Veed’s website. 

Right now, Veed has 84 pages – according to the website’s XML sitemap – that follow the pattern:

https://www.veed.io/create/{function}-video-maker

Essentially, this means that there are 84 pages like this:

All of which follow the same pattern and, in one way or another, repeat the words “video maker”, separated by a hyphen. That’s not fundamentally wrong and we’ve noticed that, in some cases, it can help in getting short-term gains. However, we believe that it’s structurally not optimal. 

What does that mean and what could Veed do differently here? This is a classic case of how a topic cluster with one page could work as the hub page and other pages – topic clusters – could be used. 

To make this more specific, based on the pages we noted above, Veed could have one hub page…

https://www.veed.io/create/video-maker

… then, have all the other pages that follow the same pattern — and, are also relevant product-wise — inside the folder. In that case, the pages we looked at before would be structured like so:

Of course, the implementation of a topic cluster like the one above isn’t easy. You need to apply breadcrumbs and also make sure to avoid duplication issues for the content of the page as well as for meta elements like the title tags and meta descriptions of the pages. Obviously, that’s a danger that’s also present in the current pattern that Veed’s using.

All in all, the above structure is evergreen and can help a lot from the perspective of site architecture and navigation. That’s not something we’d recommend lightly at this point, since the scale at which Veed’s has created those pages is relatively high – there are already 84 such pages on the website! However, it’s definitely something that needs to be kept in mind for later.

Opportunity #5: Content with informational search intent

There’s no doubt that Veed has done an excellent job so far at identifying opportunities for terms that indicate the need to have a very specific job done. We’d assume that those are the terms that drive the vast majority of sign-ups and free trials for Veed. 

However, something that we’ve seen missing from Veed’s content and SEO strategy is the fact that there are still many untapped opportunities for content with informational search intent, or top-of-the-funnel (TOFU) content, if you prefer this term. Some of these opportunities are the following:

  • How to add music to Instagram story

  • How to make a youtube video

  • How to get verified on YouTube

  • Video marketing

  • YouTube channel ideas

  • How to embed a video in PowerPoint

  • How to make a slideshow

  • How to embed a YouTube video in PowerPoint

  • How to make animations

  • How long can an Instagram video be

Which, as you can see below, have a combined search volume of 77K in the US alone. 

It’s obvious that these terms — and many more like them — don’t have the same search intent as terms with commercial intent. This doesn’t mean they’re not useful though. They can be particularly helpful in the context of raising awareness for Veed as a brand and can help the company start establishing a relationship with the website’s visitors, from the early stages of their online journey to all things around video editing and video marketing. 

We hope that Veed will create a solid plan around covering these terms moving forward.

Opportunity #6: Veed alternatives page

We know that there are many companies that don’t want to go down that road. However, we believe that we have to accept two facts:

  1. Especially when it comes to SaaS, people compare different solutions online before making a decision.
  2. At the same time, there’s a chance that after using a specific software, people may not be convinced that it’s the best for them based on their current needs. 

Thus, it’s essential to be there, e.g. to have a presence on the SERPs for as many of the relevant terms as possible, to tell your side of the story instead of letting review sites dominate the search results and tell their story. 

To put that in perspective, let’s take a look at Google’s auto-suggest results for the term veed.io, one of the main branded terms for Veed:

It’s evident that as people are searching for things like Veed’s pricing and login pages, they search for an alternative to Veed. When they click on the suggested query by Google, they’ll land on a SERP that’s dominated — as explained earlier — by review sites that share their side of the story.

We believe that this is an opportunity for Veed. The company can — and must — create a landing page that could easily live in the URL… 

https://www.veed.io/alternatives

Providing a place for all those searchers, regardless of whether they’re already a user of Veed or not, who are searching for alternatives to Veed. 

As Veed raises awareness and grows its brand, the average monthly search for branded terms, alternatives one included, will grow. Thus, it’s essential to capture as much of that traffic as possible, especially for terms that could also have some commercial intent to them, such as the ‘veed.io alternative’ one.

Wrapping Up

That was Veed’s SEO success story. 

We believe that Veed has done an amazing job so far when it comes to capturing traffic for terms that indicate the need for having a specific job done. That’s not something easy to achieve in such a short timeframe.

Obviously, the product played an important role in that growth. The constant development and improvement of the product so that it can support the creation of these landing pages has been really critical. At the same time, as explained above, there are many more things that Veed can do to continue growing its organic traffic. 

In the next post of the series, we’ll present you with another case study of a company that has achieved great success through content and SEO. Feel free to share this post if you’ve found it useful and go ahead and reach out to us if you have any examples of companies you think we should feature in one of our future posts by sending us an email to hello@minuttia.com

Thanks for reading!

HUMAN CRAFTED
Human Crafted illustration
This piece of content is the work of a human mind.

Related Posts

Stay Tuned for More Content

Join smart content marketers from companies like Oracle, Shopify, ClickUp, Gorgias, DemandCurve, and more.