Murat Yatagan - Advanced Search Summit Napa 2021

Product and the C-Suite
Buy-in for SEO Projects
Setting and scaling up SEO organizations to support fast-paced growth of your company
June 2021

What is Brainly?
Poland, 2009
World’s largest online learning community
350M+ MUU across 35 countries
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How does our business work?
Globally, 1.2B students need help in learning
Students wants to go from frustration to understanding
A platform to learn in a collaborative community with
extensive knowledge base of explanations
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What’s our business model?
Ad-supported freemium monetization
Developing a marketplace ecosystem
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How important is SEO for us?
CAC = 0$
Global SEO strategy & SaaT to empower Product and
Content teams
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What’s our team structure?
No SEO silo
There is not one owner of SEO
Every team uses SEO as an instrument towards
reaching their goals
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How to lead ununified SEO
efforts?
CoE governs company wide SEO strategy
- Ensures knowledge transfer
- Empower Product & Content
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Are there dedicated SEO
resources?
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SEO CoE Team SEO Systems Team Product and Marketing
Organizations

This case is about empowering
Product teams by SEO know-how and
strategies to reach their goals.
Case Study:
Getting buy-in for an SEO
project;
Restructuring internal links
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1. Better user experience
2. Advising users what’s more significant in the site
3. Enhancing content discoverability
Why internal linking is important? (Theory)
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1. Intuition and experience
a. Uncover issues
b. Build up hypothesis
2. Audit and data triangulation
a. Invest in tools and systems
b. Inspire others
How did we discover we may have an issue with internal
link structure? (Practice)
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What was the process behind internal link
restructuring? (Practice)
DISCOVERY
● Consulted to experts
● Focused on right
metrics
AUDIT
● Partnered up with
Oncrawl
● Triangulated crawl,
log files, and user
visits data
PRESENT
● Transformed the
findings into
actionable items

Showing a correlation between better ranking pages and number of
incoming links strengthened my case for Brainly business model.
How did we extrapolate the internal link charts and page
rank flows to a revenue opportunity?
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In highest level, clicks from organic search.
In detail:
1. Average number of internal links towards question pages (QP)
2. Number of new discovered QP
3. Average number of impressions of all crawled QP
What numbers did we expect to move?
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1. Clear demonstration of the issue to relevant stakeholders
2. Highlight KPIs
3. Unbundle the project from SEO while indicating SEO needs for
production
4. Knowledge share and enabling the access to self-service
Once we had buy-in, what were the steps to take plan
forward?
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● We over delivered on our initial forecasted results of YoY Monthly
Unique Users by 30% within the 6 weeks of deployment.
Did we see a meaningful acceleration in traffic or
revenue?
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Links flow

● There is a very solid high level awareness about SEO impact
● CoE leads by influence
● Whole organization is more adaptive to industry updates
● More SEO projects are unleashed
Are executives and other teams more responsive to SEO
asks now?
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● Define SEO health metrics and monitor them
● Create actionable insights via monitoring
● Prioritize
● Ensure providing tangible added value towards company goals
● Articulate your case with relevant semantics to your audience
○ Level it up for C-suite
○ Adjust the level of detail for POs, Engineers, Designers, etc.
Advice for those who struggle to get buy-in for SEO?
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DO DON’T
Challenge your intuition with data Follow solely your intuitions
Align with company level goals Use generic semantics
Be very specific Keep goals only in SEO specific level

Murat Yatagan - Advanced Search Summit Napa 2021

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