The APTK Framework: How to get more customers from SEO

Most notably, I spent some time at Webflow, a no-code website builder and experience platform, and was an early employee there.

At Webflow, I got to work on content initiatives, growth initiatives, and mostly SEO initiatives. I got really lucky there in that the company had an amazing product and a huge, loyal customer base that eventually propelled the company to being worth over $4.2 billion. 

During my time there, I honed in on my skills around SEO and content marketing, and it gave me the confidence to go out and help other brands in the SaaS space, as well as build my own media company, Marketer Milk.

Once I left Webflow, I started to work with a lot of different B2B SaaS companies, and I was very tactical in that. I had seen what types of content actually converted. And I saw the types of queries that people were searching for that eventually led to a conversion.

This was mostly formats or types of keywords that people would search for — think like "best [topic]" listicle articles, "how to" keywords, alternative keywords, etc.

As I started to work with bigger and bigger tech companies and consult with them, I realized that I needed to be a bit more methodical in how I presented my content strategy in a way that made a lot of sense to stakeholders and leadership.

So, I started to work backward and try to figure out how I could put my own intuition of content marketing and SEO on paper and how I could create a framework that you can generally follow. 

Now, the effectiveness of frameworks is up for debate because there's just so much nuance in marketing in general, and especially in SEO. However, I think this format of thinking about creating a content strategy that is search-driven or SEO-first has served me really well, and it's served my clients really well.

So today, I'm going to reveal it, and it's a term I coined called the APTK Framework.

What is the APTK Framework?

The APTK Framework is a search-driven content marketing strategy that allows you to create content in a way that reaches your ideal customer, while also ranking high in search engines. The core idea is to only create content that you know will benefit your ICP while also showing up for every query and keyword in your ideal customers' search journey.

It stands for:

• Audience(s)
• Product(s)
• Topics
• Keywords

The core idea is that you first want to map out all the audiences that your product serves. In other words, this is the "who" part of your content strategy. Knowing who you're talking to is arguably the most important step when you begin any content strategy.

From there, you want to map your products or services to each audience.

Initially, I created this framework for SaaS companies because many different SaaS companies have multiple audiences. For example, during my time at Webflow, we had audiences like marketers and web designers. But then, we also had more specific audiences, like in-house marketers versus people who run marketing agencies, and the same went for web designers.

So, the first step is figuring out who that main Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) or target customer is. This is very much a product marketing function, so in this case, you'll want to partner with a product marketer on your team.

If you're a solo operator, then you should become the product marketer yourself, because the best content marketers are both product marketers and growth marketers (which we'll get into later).

After you map out your audiences, you want to pick one audience type and figure out the different product features or services that your company offers, and then map those features/services to that specific audience.

For example, here's what this could look like for a brand like Notion:

• Audiences: Marketers, Project Managers, Students, Engineers, HR Professionals…
• Products: Projects, Docs, Wiki, Calendar, Automations...

In this case, we have multiple different audiences and multiple different products. From here, we can actually mix and match them to create different combinations. Each combination then becomes the seed from which we figure out our topic pillars.

So, let's say we take this combination:

• Audience: Marketers
• Product: Projects

From this combination, we can come up with topic content calendars. Now we have:

• Audience: Marketers
• Product: Projects
• Topic: Content calendars

And now, the next step is to figure out the keywords that fall into the topic of content calendars.

When it comes to keywords, I also think about them within their own specific framework of whether the keyword is top of funnel (problem aware), middle of funnel (solution aware), or bottom of funnel (product aware). I won't go too in-depth here, but you can check out this blog post I wrote that dives deeper into this concept.

So, for the topic of content calendars, I can come up with these different keywords:

• Top of funnel: content calendar examples
• Middle of funnel: how to create a content calendar, content calendar template
• Bottom of funnel: best content calendar software

And now, when we put everything together, this entire strategy for this specific ICP, for this specific product line, and for a specific topic comes out to:

• Audience: Marketers
• Product: Projects
• Topic: Content Calendar
• Keyword: how to create a content calendar

And just like that, we've come up with a relevant keyword where we can actually take a product-led approach and showcase using Notion to create a content calendar. We know that it maps back to our topic of content calendars, which can highlight the Notion Projects feature, and we know that this content is for marketers or marketing managers.

Here’s what it looks like on my iPad (sorry for the bad handwriting):

Now, all we do is rinse and repeat this process for every audience and every product suite. Mix and match all the combinations, come up with topics, and then, from there, come up with keywords.

This will give us tons of content ideas that can serve us for multiple quarters and even multiple years.

The key thing here, though, is that while this is very much a holistic content strategy, the types of keywords you go after are also very important. So here’s this blog post where you can learn more about keyword research for your content marketing strategy.

And of course, having the right strategy is extremely important, but if you don't create the content in the right way — if you don't understand search intent, don't hit the right pain points, don't relate to the customer in the way that you write, and aren't persuasive enough — all these other things and factors matter when it comes to actually producing your content.

So, I also have this video that you can check out on how I actually approach creating content:

And if you want me to help you with your SEO strategy, you can check out this page and submit an inquiry. Or, you can check out my content marketing course that goes over all of this in 100% detail — no stone left unturned.

Okay, that's it. Hope you learned something from this post. Catch you in the next one.

Peace out!