Hey 👋

I’m Nicolas Mérouze and you’re receiving this email because you’ve subscribed to my newsletter either on my website, on Twitter, on LinkedIn, or on Customer Fitted.

This time, let's talk about the current state of SEO, ads, and Google for SaaS companies.

It's the holiday season, meaning I have some time to reflect and set up my goals for 2025.

At the beginning of the year, I changed my positioning to focus my agency on writing bottom-of-the-funnel content and I've had my best year since I started my agency in 2019. 🎉

A few months ago, I've also added ads to my services because it has become a requirement.

Here's why.

Google is pay to win: Being #1 isn't a guarantee of traffic

Here's the stats for a guide I wrote for one of my clients at the beginning of the year.

It was #1 on Google for a few months (avg position of 30 is bc of unrelated keywords) and is now #2 for "employee survey tools".

Yet, only 0.3% CTR...

There are 4 ads before the article.

While CTR is usually much higher on the other guides I've placed in the top 3, I'm getting >10% CTR for some BoFu keywords with ads. Not possible organically.

Competition is crushing small bootstrapped companies

I have recently rewritten a few comparison guides for a client and while there is a 4x increase in impressions and a decent increase in clicks, there's just no way to compete organically on those keywords when there are 10 unicorns on page 1.

Getting more backlinks is a requirement but it's not going to be enough even with the best content.

And there are very rarely unexploited low competition keywords that are bottom-of-the-funnel.

The only solution is ads.

Ongoing SEO work is more important than ever before

The idea of writing an article once and ripping the benefits off for years isn't possible anymore.

As you saw on the chart above, the guide grew for a few months and then started to lose some steam. There was no update to the guide (reason: no budget for SEO).

And it's the same pattern for all the guides I've worked on. Companies hire me to write or optimize articles but without ongoing updates and SEO work to improve domain authority, it will trend down.

The new thing is the speed it gets down on Google. Before it took at least a couple of years, now it takes just a few months.

But it has a cost, and ads are cheaper.

And AI?

AI is just an accelerator of competitiveness.

I'm using AI for a lot of things now but there's one thing that is still not replaceable by AI: good strategy.

That's why I have really good results with ads and BoFu despite using AI a lot.

Because of the amount of time I take to create a solid strategy (ICP, positioning, messaging, etc...).

I'll leave you with a BoFu case study I wrote a few months ago. If you want to work with me, just reply to this email and say hi. 👋

Case study: +95.9% of BoFu traffic for Feature Upvote with strategic content optimization

Feature Upvote is a B2B SaaS offering a user-friendly platform to let customers suggest and upvote ideas to improve products.

As their new SEO agency, I was tasked with increasing traffic that converts after previous efforts had fallen short.

TL;DR

• Identified and targeted high-conversion BoFu keywords
• Updated existing content, focusing on buying guides
• Increased traffic by 95.9% on average across 4 key guides
• Achieved significant improvements in clicks, impressions, and positions
• Experience with the market helped get good results faster

Problem: Traffic was good, conversion was bad

Feature Upvote had previously invested in SEO, but the resulting traffic wasn’t converting.

They needed a strategy that would not only attract visitors but also guide them toward conversion.

Solution: SEO strategy backed by customer research

To address this challenge, I:

1. Conducted an in-depth interview with the founder
2. Analyzed customer interviews and analytics
3. Identified high-potential BoFu keywords for conversion
4. Diagnosed issues in existing content (e.g. cannibalization, mismatched content types, shallow content)

The best opportunities were mostly on existing content, that’s why the initial focus was on updating them.

But it wasn’t small edits. I rewrote almost everything in all the guides and doubled their length to 4000-5000 words per guide.

Results: Significant increase in clicks, impressions, and positions

Here are the results on the 4 guides I've worked on recently:

• Feature request software guide: +383% clicks, +57.75% impressions
• Feature voting guide: +148.8% clicks, +244.4% impressions
• Idea management software guide: +28.6% clicks, +44.2% impressions
• Customer feedback software: +45.5% clicks, +44.5% impressions

On average, these guides saw a 95.9% increase in traffic.

Notable achievements include:

• Transforming the “feature voting” how-to article into a hybrid how-to and comparison guide to better fit search intent, significantly boosting its performance.
• Achieving a nearly 4x increase in clicks for the “feature request software” guide with just a 50% increase in impressions.
• Making good progress in clicks, impressions, and positions for the 2 other guides despite much more competitive keywords.

Side note: Experience with the market helped

My background as a product manager (among other things) proved invaluable in this project.

Familiarity with the product category, competitors, and use cases accelerated the progress and amplified the results.

If you have a B2B SaaS in a specific niche, it’s hard to find the right copywriting expert.

With a background in programming, design, product management, and being an B2B SaaS founder myself, I have extensive knowledge of many markets.