2022 Website Trends: Memorable Experiences with George Chasiotis

George Chasiotis is the Managing Director of MINUTTIA, which helps B2B SaaS companies accelerate organic growth through data-driven content marketing and SEO.

He is also the host of the SaaS SEO Show, a platform for meaningful connections and honest conversations with people who are real, hard-working practitioners and high performers in the SaaS industry.

In this interview, we discuss:

• How Loom is nailing the “memorable experience”
• Why original content is the next level of content marketing
• Why 2,000 words shouldn’t be the blog benchmark anymore

As you mentioned, I’m the managing director at MINUTTIA. We help B2B SaaS companies achieve growth through content marketing and SEO.

Before that, I was a marketing consultant and freelancer. And after many iterations and learnings, I’m where I’m at today.

That’s a great question. One of the things I’ve noticed is that most websites don’t pay enough attention to the customer experience. SaaS has reached a high level of commoditization, so every company in this category looks very similar.

To really stand out, you need to make it a memorable experience for your leads. Basically, it’s all about how you present yourself to people who may have never heard of your company before.

Website #1: Loom

Loom does a fantastic job with its unique colors and design. They even call their blog “The Transcript,” which is a fun play on words. It shows me that they don’t see their blog as just another blog – they see it as a publication.

Loom’s aesthetics are also excellent; the images they use and the layout of their blogs are very appealing. They also place emphasis on the people who have authored their blogs, sharing their names, photo, and title, making me remember who wrote a piece and why.

Explore an interactive demo of Loom:

See why George choose Loom’s blog as his gold standard website.

I’m going to focus this answer on content.

If you take the traditional SaaS content marketing playbook, you’ll see two content formats dominate: product-focused and SEO-friendly content.

But at MINUTTIA, we feel that those two are only part of a holistic content marketing strategy. You should also develop original content.

For example, Semrush is doing its own original research, surveying Americans on their search habits. They only surveyed about 1,000 people and got a very original, valuable piece of content out of it.

Here’s another example by Zyppy. The title, “Google Rewrites 61% of Page Title Tags,” is immediately eye-catching. Why would Google rewrite that many tags? Zyppy answers that question in the post and shows how they can help you solve title tag problems you may have.

At MINUTTIA, we’ve been writing some pieces with a contrarian approach. For instance, I wrote a piece this year about how SEO strategy is hurting companies’ brands.

Our prospects respond especially well to this content, asking for a chat after they read these posts, feeling like their values and ours align. Of course, you really have to know what you’re talking about when writing controversial content and be able to back it up.

Original content is here to stay. Perspective is something we will see more and more often. I’d like to thank Bernard Huang from Clearscope for coining this term first.

A good rule of thumb for blog posts used to be 2,000 words. But I think the SEO community mistakenly adopted this because of correlation studies conducted many years ago.

Length doesn’t mean anything. A blog post over 2,000 words doesn’t necessarily serve a purpose, nor is it necessarily high-quality.

And having this benchmark incentivizes the writer the wrong way. If they are paid by word count, they may stuff the post with extraneous information to charge more. Some people use AI to get around that, but again, the content isn’t always meaningful – it’s more like a puddle of words.

This is a trend I feel should come to an end. We should stop thinking about words and start thinking about experiences. Companies should get clear on their objectives. If you can accomplish your objectives with a 500-word blog post, do that.

People don’t have the time to write or read long blog posts anyhow.

Even though we’re using many tools in our process, one made me rethink our approach and open my eyes: SparkToro.

We use SparkToro mainly for research purposes. You can find out what words your audience is using in their social media bios, you can see what publications they follow, and you can see what kinds of podcasts they’re listening to. It gives you a very granular view of who you’re trying to reach.

For example, we were working on a landing page for one of the biggest VPN providers in the world. The landing page was focused on gaming VPN, or VPN that gamers use. With SparkToro, we understood how these people talk about themselves as streamers or Youtubers and about their work.

By weaving certain phrases into our landing page copy, we could resonate with customers without having to do lengthy interviews.

Don’t get me wrong, that research is important. But if you want to get information right away, SparkToro is great. And as it grows, they collect more data, strengthening its capabilities.

First, I’d suggest people visit our blog and read our content, which you won’t find on most agency websites. We do a lot of research and break down the case studies and landing pages we’ve created for other clients in detail.

Then, I’d recommend subscribing to our YouTube channel. We upload the video version of every episode of the SaaS SEO Show, a weekly podcast where I interview the brightest minds of the industry. You can also find the podcast on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

If you’d like to connect with me personally, the best place to do that is LinkedIn. I’m quite active there and would love to chat.