A Community Generated Content Flywheel: SEO

date

Apr 23, 2023

slug

public-library-seo

author

status

Public

Templates, templates, templates

I was recently listening to a podcast and someone from Airtable talked about their template library very rarely delivered new users, despite being seen as the gold class. At SafetyCulture template library did and I worked really hard for couple of years on spinning that flywheel harder.

I no longer work at SafetyCulture so I shouldn’t talk about specific numbers but this chart from Ahrefs shows the massive growth of organic traffic to SafetyCulture.com. This is primarily driven by the template strategy we built. FYI: the conversion rate of these pages were very very good.

What is SafetyCulture (and the use case monster)

SafetyCulture is now an operations platform for working teams. Back when I started it was simply the world’s best checklist app and it was called iAuditor. The power of a checklist app is not to be understated. Pretty much everyone that doesn’t work behind a desk, and some that do, ensure that things go smoothly, safely, and to the highest quality using a checklist.

My dad spent his career installing lifts - he used checklists all day, every day. My mum was a nurse and she did the same. My neighbour works in waste management, same. My son goes to a daycare centre, I even fill out a checklist when I drop him off in the morning. Whilst there is a bit of compliance with some of this stuff, the bigger reason is as a means to capture data to make improvements. If you’re familiar with process improvement concepts like Six Sigma you’ll know all about how much impact this can have an on an organisation.

The magic of SafetyCulture is this massive spread of potential use cases that encompass the activities of most of the working world can be improved by using SafetyCulture (formerly iAuditor). This means that everyday there is literally millions of people looking for solutions to problems that SafetyCulture solves. From ‘risk assessment’ to ‘pre-start checklist’ to ‘gemba walk’… and on and on and on. What a monster of an opportunity!

The Public Library

The public library was a really big reason why I joined SafetyCulture but when I arrived I found it wasn’t prioritised. The founder of SafetyCulture will often say that the Public Library is the secret sauce that made iAuditor bigger and better than it’s rivals. Without trying too hard, the Public Library is the biggest depositary of checklists and forms for working teams globally. The reason why people contribute to the Public Library is that it allows them to share templates with people outside of their teams within the SafetyCuture Platform. There are many legitimate reasons why someone might want to do this but another powerful reason was that it meant that you didn’t need to pay for iAuditor. The user limit was the big reason why people needed to upgrade and a big reason for that was to share templates amongst their teams. Internally we were happy with the trade - we got some content and they spread the word about our product. Once a team got to a certain size this ‘loop-hole’ didn’t work very well and teams would upgrade (also there were other benefits).

This existed long before my time at SafetyCulture but there were improvements to be made and it allowed us to easily get someone into the product with a template that solved their problem. So basically… I took ownership of it.

The Opportunity

The audience of people searching for a use-case or tool where SafetyCulture can assist far exceeds the audience of people searching for our brand or an inspection app. This is why it plays so well as an SEO strategy.

So… what did we do?

To supercharge this we did four things.

Fixed some of the technical issues with the Public Library in terms of indexing, we saw a big jump from that as there was some weird cloaking going on.
Added an editorial aspect. We created a team of 10 writers that focused on creating editorial content on any topic you could imagine. However, we focused on topics that our product solved - SafetyCulture is a B2B platform. We wrote on 1000s of topics and constantly optimised and revisited the content.
Improved the conversion rate of it by making changes to the Public Library itself.
Localised into 4 languages.

It was very successful.