Martijn Scheijbeler is the head of SEO at Postmates, one of the fastest growing startups in Silicon Valley. Before that, he was head of growth at The Next Web based in Amsterdam. In this video, we talk about the challenges and opportunities of doing SEO/growth for high growth companies and well known brands. I hope you find it as fascinating as I did!

Quick note: my video did some weird things and so you’ll only see Martijn’s face and not split screen like usual. The audio is fine!

Martijn on Twitter

Postmates

Transcript

John: Hey there, everyone. Welcome back to the show. Today with me, I have Martijn Scheijbeler, which he’s going to make so much fun of me for that. But Martijn is the head of SEO at Postmates in the Bay Area and formerly, he was at The Next Web, based over in Europe. And so, Martijn, welcome to the show. Thank you for being here with me. I really appreciate it. It’d be awesome if you could give us a little bit of background into yourself and what you do and how you do it.

Martijn: Cool. Thanks, John. And that’s one of the best pronunciations of my name.

John: Yes!

Martijn: So yeah, since five to six months, I’ve been running the SEO team here at Postmates and like you said, I was previously the marketing director at The Next Web. I was running a marketing team of 15 people there. We were basically working for all the different business units there. We were basically a publisher for that media company, most well-known of…from thenextweb.com, where we were writing about technology and mostly Internet in the industry, organizing events like TNW conferences.

So five to six months ago, I moved to San Francisco from Amsterdam, started here at Postmates, where I’m responsible for everything related to SEO and growth, basically with the goal to drive more organic search visibility and obviously, mostly clicks from organic search towards the businesses of Postmates, which is basically on-demand food delivery. So we can basically deliver anything that fits into a certain size box to you 24/7, on demand. And usually, we would deliver that between…depending on the item and depending on the location and the distance…between 25 to 50 minutes.

John: Wow, that’s awesome. So you’re basically tasked with getting more people to come find you through Google or through looking for some sort of…yeah, like getting dog food delivered or something like that…

Martijn: Sure.

John: …they can order through Postmates?

Martijn: Exactly. The majority of our business is basically focused around food. So if you’re looking for sushi delivery in New York or sushi delivery in Minneapolis, we’re the company that can get that food to you from your favorite local restaurant or your favorite restaurant, just a little bit further than a walk away within that amount of time. And next to that, we focus on alcohol and drinks. Like, what if you’re thirsty, but you can’t drive to a liquor store anymore? Then, we don’t want you to drive, obviously, so we can deliver that for you.

And another thing is general items. Like, if you’re working on your home and you need some paint from a certain store, we can deliver that your place as well…

John: Wow.

Martijn: …to basically keep you painting.

John: I hadn’t even considered that, that I could use Postmates if I need a specific thing while working on my house. I could just order it on Postmates and keep working on something else and not have to take 20 minutes, drive to the hardware store, get it, come back and lose an hour.

Martijn: Yeah, it’s one of our biggest USPs as a company. You don’t want to…I, at least…as a person in this company, but also as a user, I don’t want to be stuck with going up and down to the supermarket to pick up one or two things. If I can also get that delivered through Postmates, that’s basically what I would like.

John: Totally.

Martijn: And of course, we see an incredible market fit, so there’s a lot of demand for the things that we do.

John: Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. That totally makes sense. So you’re at Postmates now and you worked on The Next Web before. Obviously, these are two quite large websites. And I know…I’m sure Postmates is only going to grow as you move into new markets and all that. And the next level is…

Martijn: Totally.

John: …just constantly growing. As you have more contributors and that sort of thing, there’s more stuff being published. And of course, your team’s growing and we were just talking off-line that your team there at Postmates is growing as well. So today, I wanted to talk with you about basically large website SEO, which is my specialty as well. I don’t work on websites that are less than a million pages when I’m working with clients. And so, large site SEO has its own kind of set of challenges, so I’d definitely like to talk about that. But I’d also love to talk about getting things done within a company like that, right? I mean…

Martijn: Mm-hmm.

John: …Postmates is what, 500 people, you said, or something like that…

Martijn: Yeah, something like that. We have…

John: …at the time?

Martijn: …around 200, 250 people at this point, in San Francisco, at least. That’s our headquarters. We have around…I think around 200 people in our national office, which is a big sales support customer service office. And we have another–I think–around 15 in Bellevue, Seattle, Washington and then, probably a few dozen working remote from all kinds of places, or on a more local level. So as we’re active in so many different markets, it’s good to have a lot of boots on the ground there.

John: Yeah, totally. Totally. That 100% makes sense. So when you come into a new website, whether it’s coming into Postmates…and you guys basically have, like…you have different markets, then you have different categories within those markets, it seems. Or, like The Next Web, where you had your different areas. What are the first things that you tend to go to, in order to…what are normally the quickest wins that you find? Or what are the things that you get in place first? Is it processes…

Martijn: Yeah.

John: …is it in audit? What do you do?

Martijn: Yeah. So when I joined The Next Web, they basically just told me, like, “Okay, we need to grow.” And we believe that one of the more easy channels to grow and one of the most scalable solutions is, of course, SEO. I know it’s the same with Postmates. The funny thing with Postmates is that they basically didn’t, ever, any SEO in their life. We’re an incredibly big company. If you look at our funding numbers and the number of users that we reach on a monthly basis, it’s basically crazy, if you consider that they’ve never done SEO.

John: Yeah.

Martijn: Yeah. But for basically both companies, where I would always start in if they’ve got it is figuring out what that actually shows us. So they’ve never done SEO, but does that mean it’s chaos, or is it already in a stable state? When I joined The Next Web, it was definitely in a stable state. We were running WordPress, so it was relatively easy, because so many sites in the world are obviously running on WordPress. So it’s very easy to figure out what you can do with that.

Postmates was a little different. There was zero sets of…there were no tools, there was no team. Basically, nobody really knew what…where to start. So we started there, mostly looking at okay, what are the tools, what’s available? And on top of that, Postmates is totally a custom-built platform, there’s no CMS there. So I’ll start with a big technical audit, figuring out what you get access to, what tools we had in place. It turned out we didn’t have any tools in place, basically not even Google search console which I would recommend to start with, for any site or whatever skill.

So I started there and basically figured out what the first things would be that we wanted to work on. Like, they promised me–at least at Postmates–that we would have engineering support, which turned out to be the case. I’ve got three to four juniors on my team already…

John: Fantastic.

Martijn: …in five months. So start there. Make a quick hit list of things that you want to take care of in your first…either a week–depending on how big your organization is–or the first month. And that can range from things that really can provide a quick win, like optimizing titles. One of the things that they did in that new place, every page had the same title. It didn’t matter what kind of templates, what kind of restaurant, it was all the same.

John: Interesting.

Martijn: Same with heading structures, like, H1s, H2s, H3s. That’s what every…our SEO team is aware of. That was not there. That structure, there was no relevancy, there was no uniqueness. Mostly every page was exactly the same type the structure there. So this is one of the first things we focused on and we saw some early wins there. And they were also very minor changes, because changing a title tag based on the scale of the site, that’s super easy to change for a company at this scale.

And from there, it was mostly…I think these were the first two to three weeks: working with the engineers, getting to know them, getting to know how they work as well, and figuring out what we could do from there. And after that, it was mostly a lot of research, figuring out what our audience or what our users are needing, what are they searching for, tons of geared research. And in the food market, that’s really hard, because you’ve got to look at food all day long, which makes you hungry.

John: But you work at Postmates, so you can get it delivered.

Martijn: I know. And also, I’m in the office, so that’s something I could think, yeah. So that provided a lot of input. And basically from there, we started to build a more robust product roadmap…

John: Gotcha.

Martijn: …and think about what kind of features and what kind of templates are we missing right now that we see a lot of search demands for, but nobody…or that there’s no page for. And we’re still in…basically in the process of building out these kind of pages and we hope to launch them soon and at a rapid pace. And from there, we’ll start more ongoing optimization efforts, I would say.

John: Sure.

Martijn: At least, that’s one of the areas that we focus on as a team.

John: Gotcha, gotcha. It’s amazing to me how you come into a site like Postmates that…I mean, I pulled it up and you guys have a strong website, you’re a well-known brand, you have a ton of mobile usage. And you can come in and those basics are not in place. And you can go and optimize your title tags, optimize your H1s, add in H1s or H2s and just pretty quickly, see it start to rise, even with publishing no new content, right? Or just basic…

Martijn: Yeah.

John: …like, add small site maps, or add a crawlable site structure. And everything just starts…like, number of indexed pages starts going up in a good way and it just like…it can move the needle really quick.

Martijn: Absolutely, because there’s so much low-hanging fruit and there’s so much that needs to be done, you’re going to show results regardless. So it’s mostly like…for other people on the team…like, keeping track of what’s going on and making sure that you can measure that impact, but also that you can keep up that pace, because over time, you will slow down and you can’t keep on shipping at that same rate. That’s basically impossible.

John: Yeah, totally.

Martijn: But so far, so good.

John: Yeah, totally. Totally. So let’s talk about…I mean, let’s talk about getting things done inside a big company for SEO purposes, because I’m sure a lot of people that are listening have dealt with this. I’m sure you’ve dealt with it, I’ve dealt with it, where you want to get something done and you basically…if you don’t have…if you’re not the final say to get it done with an engineering team or something like that, which is amazing you have that at Postmates.

I have that at HotPads or Trulia, and it was just…it was awesome. Once I got that team in place, it was just like everything just sped up. And we just saw so much growth really fast, people are actually able to get things done. But…

Martijn: Yeah. That was actually even one of the questions I asked them. When I was interviewing with the team here, I was like, “Well, you can hire me. But if you don’t give me either design or engineering support from day one or very soon after, I don’t really…” I wouldn’t say it’s a requirement, but you can’t just put an SEO there and don’t give him or her the support that she or he needs. And definitely in bigger companies, they will need engineering support or…although it can depend what kind of company you work in. But…

John: That’s true.

Martijn: …in our case, it was required for me from the start that I would have engineers on my team.

John: Yeah, gotcha. Gotcha. How have you gone about…? And did you really have to…did you have to pitch that, or were they like, “Oh, that makes sense?”

Martijn: No, no. The great thing at Postmates is luckily that they have a great belief in growth. I’m part of the growth team.

John: Awesome.

Martijn: Our FIPI growth is amazing. I’ve seen it all. So we always had engineers. I think when I came on board in the growth team, we had around…I think around…I think…would say 10 engineers in total.

John: Wow.

Martijn: So there…basically, out of that, there was already a lot of support. And once you start growing and the overall team is growing, that makes it harder to basically bitch that you need more engineers, because you can provide them with a roadmap and with a backlog of things, like, “Okay, this is what we want to do. And this is our results we’ve proved so far.” So for more results, I just need more people, because at such a big company or at such a big scale, the things that you’re doing, very minor changes can have a very big impact.

John: Absolutely, yeah.

Martijn: So that’s what you’re mostly working towards.

John: Yeah. And then, at that point it just becomes a matter of just getting things done. It’s like, “Look, we can get it done,” they get…in a true growth team, again, it’s hypothesis, roll it out, measure it, decide to double down on it or move in a different direction, as opposed to, “Well, what exactly are we going to get? What money are we going to get back for getting these…”

Martijn: Yeah.

John: “…title word changes?” It’s like, I can give you some bullshit numbers, right, and say, “If we get this much traffic, then we can…at our current conversion rate, we’ll make X,” right? But at the end of the day, we’re kind of like…it’s a data-driven figure in the air, just to get the resources to get it done. And it sounds like yours…

Martijn: Yeah. So at the beginning, it was…

John: …yours is very different.

Martijn: …it was pretty fake, yeah. But these days, we’re getting a little better at it. And probably in a…I hope in, like, a quarter from now, we’re getting pretty good, as far as testing what the effect could be from certain features.

John: Totally.

Martijn: But mostly, at the beginning, there’s so much stuff to be done that basically, you–as an SEO manager or a person working on SEO or probably any area in a certain growth team–you create a backlog or a roadmap so fast that there’s way more…basically with every hour you put in, you probably produce a day of work for engineers or for designers. So very rapidly, you basically need the support to keep going, otherwise you’re left stuck in your own little world and you can’t get things done.

John: Right, totally. So let’s talk about that real quick, because you said you do an hour’s worth of research and you can come up with a day’s worth of work or two days’ worth of work for an engineer or a couple engineers. How do you…? I mean, are you basically a PM as well, like, you’re doing any investigations, or someone on your team is doing the investigations? And then, you all are putting together the roadmap, giving the roadmap, working with your engineering counterpart to scope the size of work in running spreads? How does that work for you?

Martijn: Yeah. Yeah, very close to that. So how our teams are restructured is that basically every different area has its own PM. So some of the other teams are more product management-focused than my team is, because we have a longer roadmap, too. We don’t work until it’s a certain product, because we keep going. And it’s very ongoing, so that’s changing a lot of things. But from a traditional perspective, yeah, I’m basically also the PM at the same time and based on that, we’ve built out the roadmap as well. I’m responsible for the roadmap, I decide what gets done based on the research that we’re doing, too.

John: Nice.

Martijn: Over time, that will likely change and we’ll get…we’re probably not going to give it a title. Not the title of PM, but basically in a similar role. Then, we’ll take over the…let’s say the ongoing responsibilities, so I can focus more on a strategic level and the smaller sub-teams that we’re creating over time. And we’re still looking for analytics support to build…or analytics and data support at the same time, to basically make research easier, because  there’s so much data out there. And definitely at the skill drop rating now, you need more support there–very fast as well–to make better decisions, make more…to make prioritization easier, but also to focus on forecasting. And over time, that’s not based on some Excel calculations anymore, but that goes way further down to basically the bottom line of what you’re…what certain efforts can contribute to overall growth, as either the team or the company.

John: Totally, totally. So when you were at The Next Web and kind of going through this sort of thinking and trying to figure out how you grew their organic traffic, what were the things that you went through, or…? How did you basically go about…or I guess, what were the questions that you were asking about growth, trying to ask of the data in order to know, “What do we prioritize, what are the processes we need to put in place?” Because enterprise SEO’s all about processes, right?

It’s not about, “Oh, change this H1 tag.” It’s like, “You know, we need to launch these 50,000 new pages. And how do we interlink them and all of that?” It’s just a very different scale of thinking than, “We need the name, address, phone number the same across the site in 300 words of content.”

Martijn: Yeah. Yeah, exactly. So it’s usually mostly like where you got the biggest return without…and the biggest impact. And then, usually, of course, with as less investment as possible. So I think that we were basically looking in another stage of the company. We had already done so much stuff when we were growing, hopefully, at the end when I was there. We’ve tried so many things, but you’re basically looking for things that are sometimes scalable but also not scalable, because you need to try…or to keep on trying…new things that hopefully move in either one, some way or the other.

John: Can you give me an example?

Martijn: So usually… So one of the things…for a publisher in general, social media is obviously super important then, for any site, other than the price level. But over time, you just keep growing at the same rate. So let’s say social media’s responsible for 25% of your traffic and then, Facebook is responsible for 60% of your social media traffic. But 60% of 25% is just becoming, over time, more…or way less of a priority, because it basically degrades, over time, the value of only one platform out of the hundreds that are driving traffic to a publisher.

So you’re trying to come up with new ideas, basically to drive more growth from a certain channel. And that’s really hard, because you have a baseline. And we had–I think–over a million Facebook likes…

John: Oh, wow.

Martijn: …and actually, they just hit…

John: Yeah, that’s pretty…

Martijn: …a million Facebook likes, just after I left. So even moving the needle there, one percent’s really not going to have an impact then, by getting this from 1 million to 1.01 million. These are still very big numbers, right…

John: Yeah, yeah.

Martijn: …than 1000 new likes or followers or even search traffic. So making an impact that’s very scalable and at the same time, really move the needle instead of moving it forward one percent, because one percent of a channel is only driving one percent of traffic. That’s not really going to…

John: That’s not very much.

Martijn: …do much. That’s going to…

John: Yeah, yeah.

Martijn: And as a publisher, I think that you have the unique…well, if you’ve done a lot of content that’s outdated in seven days from now, but the lifespan of what you’re pushing out is very short. So making sure that you can do stuff with that for organic search, social or socially in a more viral component. Some news that comes up today and that goes viral tomorrow, that’s making life very hard in such a company. And here, that’s a little bit easier, because your business model’s different, you can scale more things. It’s more…

John: More evergreen.

Martijn: …transactional-driven. Yeah.

John: Yeah. Yeah, gotcha. Yeah, and you could directly tie back to, if we drive 100 people to this restaurant in Denver and then, we know that 10% are going to buy or five percent are going to buy, then it’s going to mean X, on average.

Martijn: Exactly. Based on averages in cities or different food deliveries, I can do a lot of calculations, basically to figure out whether to invest more time or not.

John: Yeah, totally. Gotcha, gotcha. But at…versus at The Next Web, it was much more, like…

Martijn: Yeah.

John: …raw audience. You’re just…you’re driving page views, so it’s more, like…

Martijn: Yeah.

John: I’m not going to say it’s tricks, but it’s just a very different…there are different strategies that you employed in an evergreen sort of thing like Postmates.

Martijn: Yeah, yeah. So traditional marketing, of course, you can easily say, “Okay, five more customers bring in this amount of money.” In a sale…or in a software-as-a-service company, you can say, “Okay five more leads is, like…” or, “…five qualified leads is one customer in the end.” So you can basically provide your value. But as a publisher, that’s very hard, because tomorrow, if you hit the front page of Reddit, Hacker News or Facebook, you can get a million extra views. But that isn’t monetized in the same way as bringing in a million extra users to Postmates these days.

John: Right, totally.

Martijn: Bringing that in tomorrow is going to incredibly boost the bottom line potentially, while at a publisher, that’s more a long-term effect, because you have higher numbers in terms of reach, but you mostly go out to…and of course, that doesn’t impact because of programmatic advertising. So you get more ads, of course. But the more pages you push through on a certain day, the lower your CPM will be, eventually. So it’s hard to basically monetize that at the same rate from start to finish…

John: Right, right.

Martijn: …while in a transactional business or a qualified one. It’s making it harder.

John: Gotcha. So what are some of the lessons…?

Martijn: Or…I’m sorry, easier. Sorry.

John: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Easier. So what are some of the lessons that you took…that you learned, working on a site like The Next Web that you’ve taken over to Postmates that are going to serve you well into the future?

Martijn: So basically what we just discussed. Working with a return on investment that’s very unknown is making things very hard, because it’s making it harder to do a page for resources. It’s harder to calculate what a certain campaign will contribute back to either marketing budgets, company in general or your total reach, while in transactional business, that’s making forecasting really hard. So one of the areas I tend to focus on a little bit more is proving what a certain customer can bring in on a return base.

John: Interesting.

Martijn: So you could…but even bigger investments, it’s making it hard to justify what you need, because you can say, “Okay, we’re driving a million extra users over”–let’s say–“the next year.” Just an example. And that’s basically bringing in this amount of money, but if I want to speed up the growth there, I need two engineers and from probably 1 million, I can bring it to 1.5 million.

John: Right, right.

Martijn: That number is more easy to justify to…or to justify in general, as a bigger company.

John: Totally, totally. You can say, “If I have…”

Martijn: And bigger companies have just more riches.

John: Yeah. You could say, like, “If I have one full stack developer and one designer, we can do 1 million. But if I can get two full stack developers and keep that same designer, then we can hit 1.5 million. And they’re costing us $150,000, so then, it makes sense,” right?

Martijn: Yeah. I’ll leave the salary number open, but yeah, it basically worked like this.

John: You wish that you could get a full stack developer in the Bay Area for $150,000.

Martijn: Yeah, I wish I could.

John: Totally, totally. Well, that’s really interesting. I mean, I hadn’t really thought about the challenge that you…that people can have or that businesses have, like the publication model versus the transactional model like you have now. And it must be fun to move away…well, I guess, how’s it been to move away from that constant churning out of new content, to…? Now, you’re focused on…I mean, yeah, you’re adding in new cities and new page types and new restaurants and whatever, but it’s a much…it’s less of a churn-and-burn sort of thing. You really get to invest down. How has that…?

Martijn: Yeah.

John: How has that been and how has that changed your thinking around SEO? What did you stop doing and what have you started doing?

Martijn: Yeah. So actually, before I was at The Next Web, I was also in a marketplace kennel business, where we were working with buyers and sellers and we were the kind of middleman. Here, it’s three-sided, because you have drivers, the merchant, the restaurant and you and I, as the customer, ordering stuff. And it brings up very interesting problems, but also very interesting ideas, because in basically a marketplace business, you’re always dealing with content that’s not yours.

John: Oh, yeah.

Martijn: So you need to create a lot of content around that, while at a publisher, the only thing you do is basically creating content, because that’s your core business. So that’s making the core of what you’re working on and mostly from what you’re looking at from an SEO perspective different, like, of course, way different. So here, I’m mostly looking at, I have tons of data. I can basically produce more data here, or I have the opportunity to work with more data than at The Next Web, because you can only produce X amount of blog posts per person a day. But here, it could be that we add a certain restaurant chain or a certain company that’s providing us with 100 locations or 1000 locations, all of a sudden.

So it’s mostly finding out what you can do on such a scalable level. We’re working with only companies that are on your local street corner. So providing that local feeling that’s still providing all the information that you really need to know about, like, when to post an order. That’s making it really, really different, but ends up makes you think in a little bit more scalable way, although you have that approach across both companies. But you have a…like, at Postmates, I have the opportunity to work more with scalable solutions that work across the board, while from time to time at The Next Web, you needed to think more about one-off cases.

John: Interesting. Like, we wrote this piece, it blew up. How do we make sure that now when people are searching it and it’s trending, we’re number one in stories, we’re number one in top stories, we’re number one in organic? And so, you’re being pulled into those individual areas.

Martijn: Yeah, exactly. That was basically the life…a life at The Next Web, which was like…okay, you’re always bringing in a certain baseline–let’s say–of visitors. So I think that 60% or 70% of numbers would be very stable across the board over a month, even if you wouldn’t produce any content that month. But the additional 30% to 40% was really being influenced by the amount of content you’re producing, like, what are your performances…what’s your performance on social media for the month? Are you hitting the Reddit homepage or the Yahoo homepage? So if you’d hit that, then of course, your targets or your performance in that month would completely switch.

Well, here, I’m mostly thinking about, “Okay, by making certain tweaks to certain pages, I can show a five percent improvement this month. And probably if I iterate on top of that, I can add another five percent.” And of course, that’s more than 10% at the end, because you’re adding an iterative five percent a month over a month.

John: Totally, totally. Yeah…

Martijn: So you…it’s more of a…

John: …that’s over a month, yeah.

Martijn: …compounding effect here than it was at The Next Web.

John: Gotcha, gotcha. Interesting. And you probably also dealt with…and every marketplace and every content site deals with this as well…is, expired content, right, and expired offers. And it seems like you don’t really deal with that too much at Postmates. I’m sure you’d rather just tick it off, but…

Martijn: Yeah, it sometimes happens, but it’s less of an issue. And with TNW, that was definitely an issue. We know exactly…not necessarily for specific categories or for specific companies that we wrote about, what the last one was for an article. But the average lifespan is pretty short. I can’t really disclose the actual number, but…

John: But it’s short?

Martijn: …it’s really short, yeah.

John: Yeah. Gotcha, gotcha. And so, what would you…? If someone is…last question for you on this whole thing and then, we’ll wrap it up. How did you deal with expiring content or content that had gone past its shelf life or whatever?

Martijn: So we were basically dividing the content in certain buckets. One of them is news and news content. It’s news that basically is outdated in three days and nobody’s ever going to look at it, besides somebody who’s very curious on what happened on that certain date. But that’s going to bring in maybe one percent more traffic to that segment of posts. The other thing is posts from contributors, because that’s a scalable thing. You could add as many contributors as you want to, as long as you basically check your quality. So that’s more scalable and their lifespan is way longer, because they’re not focused on news…

John: Breaking news, right.

Martijn: …like, it takes you a week or so. Yeah, breaking news or even regular news that just comes up. And then, there’s a third area which is more that content that was written by our staff. And that’s a more long-term thing about our goals or background artists, they’re…a review of your latest iPhone or latest Android device. That’s going to have a longer-lasting impact, like, for six months to a year or until the new version comes out. So all of them basically have a different lifespan and that’s basically looking at the different segments and what you can do there and how much, overall, they contribute to your traffic.

John: Yeah, yeah.

Martijn: And then, that’s what we were focused on.

John: Gotcha. And so, would you pull out stuff that wasn’t driving traffic anymore, like, no indexing it or removing it from site maps, that sort of thing?

Martijn: No.

John: No?

Martijn: No, no. We were never doing that. Basically, we know when a blog post would be outdated, but for…in some cases, it was worth it to update the blog post with new information and just push it out. You can easily do that. One of our…I remember the…one of the very well-performing posts, like the “Tough Blog Post Platforms In The World.” That stuff that never is outdated, although the article might be two years old. But the topic is still up and coming and…because still, over time, more people are searching for that. So you could…basically, what our editorial team is doing is looking at these kind of blog posts and adding them and basically renew the content to make it ready for republication, basically.

John: Totally.

Martijn: It’s likely that for that blog content, 60% to 80% is still completely relevant. Just like 20% to 40% of either the tools that you mentioned might have been acquired, stopped, ran out of business, I don’t know.

John: Yeah, yeah. But you can go back…

Martijn: And that…

John: …you can update that content, maybe publish a new URL, redirect the old one in. And it gives that…just that continuing to search…people want to search.

Martijn: Yeah. Actually, we didn’t didn’t even do that. So we kept it at the old URL, basically updated content and pushed it out again on social media. And in terms of how much time that takes compared to writing new blog posts, it was definitely worth it for us.

John: Yeah, totally. Totally. Less fun for a writer, but if they’re incentivized properly, then…to drive traffic and…

Martijn: Yeah, yeah. You wouldn’t…yeah. We wouldn’t have them do it all day long, but…

John: Sure.

Martijn: …it was part of their regular editorial process.

John: Gotcha.

Martijn: I think they picked up maybe five to ten blog posts a day, max, divided for…in a…of a team size of about 10 people or so.

John: Right, right, right. And was that actually SEO-driven there, or was that more editorial-driven, or partner-driven?

Martijn: Both.

John: Both?

Martijn: Yeah, both, because we were providing them with the data and mostly, providing them with the blog posts that were still driving traffic from search, because you know for sure at that point that social media traffic is dead, because it’s definitely outdated. So we were doing that in cooperation with them, but they were doing the actual work, because you still have your editorial strategy around them.

John: Absolutely, absolutely. Awesome. Well, Martijn, I don’t want to take up any more of your time. You’ve been super nice to be here with me. I really appreciate you talking a bit about enterprise SEO and the work you did at The Next Web and lessons you learned and what you’re doing at Postmates. It’s super cool. I look forward to seeing you all grow. I’ll keep an eye on you in AHREFs or somewhere like that. To wrap it up, could you tell the watchers who have made it to this point where they can find you online, where it’s best to get in touch?

Martijn: Sure. You can easily find me on LinkedIn. Google my name, find me on Twitter, LinkedIn. I think my email address is relatively easy to find, luckily and unfortunately. And find me there and get in touch with me, if you want to know more. I’m always open to help everybody out, so shoot me a message and I’ll try to see what I can do.

John: Awesome, sounds good. Well, I will put a link to your website, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc., in the show notes. Martijn, once again, thank you for being here and we’ll speak to you next time.

Martijn: You’re welcome, John. Thanks a lot for having me.

John: You bet.