My SEO Journey [Pro Edition]: Jamie I.F from answersocrates.com – Scaling Free SEO Tools, Surviving Google Hits & Winning With Affiliate-Led Growth
My SEO Journey [PRO Edition] is a series where professionals in the SEO Industry, Digital Marketing, or Web Design share their honest SEO Journey filled with failure, success, and most importantly, proven results. Episode #165 features Jamie I.F from Answer Socrates.
Hey! I’m Jamie I.F., and I’m an ex-SEO affiliate, turned SEO tool owner!
I help run Answer Socrates – a free keyword research and keyword clustering tool for finding thousands of keywords on any topic, to create fast topical maps to scale your content strategy.
We wanted to make keyword research and content strategy as accessible as possible, as a lot of the existing tools are just so expensive now. And Answer Socrates was a tool we had used in the past, so we purchased it from the original founders, fixed it, and added some new tools like the keyword clustering!
We now have over 100,000 active users, and 7,000 new SEOs sign up every month to use the free SEO tools we have.
What’s your backstory and how did you come up with the idea?
was a fan of Answer Socrates for years before we ran it!
But before that, I graduated from university in 2019. My DREAM was to start a social enterprise soup company – where for every soup we sold, we’d give one to a soup kitchen or a person in need.
Unfortunately… I ran out of money, and couldn’t make it work. And in trying to find new ways to make money, discovered SEO!
Using what I was researching, I built websites designed to rank for specific keywords, found out you could monetise them from display ads and affiliate links, and by mid-2020 had managed to make what is an average salary in the UK from the SEO traffic.
I got really lucky from there, and we built a 10-person SEO team to scale the content across these brands over the next couple years. During this time, a tool we loved using for FAQs and finding content gaps was Answer Socrates.
We managed to scale these affiliate sites to around $80,000 per month by 2023 from hundreds of thousands of monthly organic page views, but then Google’s Helpful Content Update destroyed them overnight. It was really soul-destroying – we were in the middle of an exit for $1.5 million, and this update killed the deal dead. Eventually I had to write all the sites off as worthless and abandon them, and let the team go. It was a tough time.
About a year later, through complete chance, we had the opportunity to buy Answer Socrates, which had since then been neglected and wasn’t working. It was a dream to fix it back up and try to grow it again, so we had to try and do a deal! Honestly, it’s such a dopamine hit to type in a topic, for example “3D printer”, and see 1,000+ keywords come up on the screen which you could create content on.
But, keywords aren’t the end goal anymore – tightly created topical maps, clusters, and clear content strategies are. And we wanted to democratise that for all SEOs, even if you don’t have $300+ per month for the top-level SEO tools.
So, we built our custom machine learning and semantics into Answer Socrates for keyword clustering, this was something we were really proud of. Most tools cost $100+ per month for clustering, but we let ALL our users cluster 3,000 keywords per month, completely for free.
Since launch, what has worked to attract more organic traffic?
What’s really great is that Answer Socrates complements my other major SaaS project so well, which we have used to grow traffic – both the organic traffic, and referral traffic.
My other main project is Endorsely – a free affiliate marketing software for SaaS brands to build their affiliate programs with. Because a lot of affiliates for our users are using SEO to send traffic, there’s a lot of overlap with the SEO world.
And, it means we could hook Answer Socrates up to Endorsely to create an affiliate program. Now our 100,000+ active users can refer friends to either the free or paid version using tracked affiliate links and earn money by sending us extra traffic.
This has directly helped with organic traffic, as the more brand mentions we’ve started getting online, the more our organic traffic has risen. We get over 30,000 direct visitors to the website every month, and the brand name gets 10,000+ searches on Google from our Search Console data.
We’ve had great success writing “Alternatives” listicles, too. A tool we are similar to with Answer Socrates is Answer The Public, and we created the “Answer The Public Alternatives” blog post to compare us with them and help people make a decision there. We quickly hit #1 for this keyword, and it drives a lot of high buyer intent traffic.
The fact that it is a well-known and liked free tool has also made influencer marketing easier, as more of the people we reach out to have already heard of us, and respond positively.
We’ve built some great relationships with YouTubers and other SEO influencers who help raise attention with the tool, helping with those TOFU brand awareness signals that help sustain your brand in the SERPs.
Have you learned anything particularly helpful in your SEO Journey?
Since HCU, I’ve learned that not all content is the same. And the exact same content published on different types of websites can perform very differently. If your website isn’t the type of website Google wants to rank, then it’s far less likely to rank.
We used to publish content on affiliate websites, with affiliate links and display ads, and since HCU, Google hates this. But if you published the same content on an e-commerce store’s blog, it would rank #1. So I’ve learned to be more mindful of a website’s positioning and intent, so we’re swimming with the tide – not fighting against it.
I also learned that you can focus all your time on content, and creating what you think is the best, most fulfilling experience for the reader – but if it’s not on the right website, or you lack brand signals – then it’s a waste of time. And that’s unfortunate, because I think caring about quality should be rewarded, but in a lot of cases it’s not.
Across my SEO journey, I’ve gone from being an optimist, to being brutally pragmatic and transactional. Everything is an ROI and expected value decision – it’s not about making the best content, because this isn’t what’s often rewarded.
Now it’s time to discover the other 102 steps that will get more organic traffic flowing to your website. Get the SEO Checklist here.
Want to get a sneak peek of what it looks like?
Enter your email and get a free demo version of the SEO Checklist.
What SEO tools do you use for your business? (your SEO Tech Stack)
- Answer Socrates – of course! Haha! It’s the best free keyword research tool, and it also has amazing free keyword clustering tools, as well as an AI statistics generator, and more!
- Content Raptor – this is a great content optimisation tool, similar to Surfer SEO, but it analyses your GSC data to make specific optimisation recommendations, and also has A/B testing to see IF your changes actually had an impact on click, rankings, impressions, CTR, etc.
- JournoFinder – it’s the best digital PR software out there for finding journalists to email for your digital PR campaigns.
- ParasiteSEO.com – if you’re in the parasite SEO game, this is the best tool for saving you time.
- Ahrefs – it’s the best tool for finding links, affiliate links to reverse engineer for outreaching influencers, and some more advanced types of keyword research.
- Link-Finder.net – lets you compare backlink prices across 300,000+ domains, and lets you find which of your competitors’ links are available if you put their domains in, so you can close the link gap.
Can you share your efforts related to Link-Building?
Sure. My personal philosophy is when I’m getting links (or buying them), I want them to help me with at least one additional business goal, beyond just the hypothetical “link juice”.
And, if you have a real product, the links you can buy/earn to support these can be so great for these business goals, that the added SEO benefit from the juice is just the cherry on top!
For example, if you have a product with an affiliate program, buying placements on the “top SEO affiliate programs” or “top SaaS affiliate programs” listicles with traffic not only is a great link (as you’re in a place where REAL brands SHOULD be…) but if that article leads to 5 new signups to your affiliate program per month, and just 1 of those actives and sends $1,000 in sales, then it’s also a fantastic ROI, even before accounting for the power of the link.
It’s the same thing when getting placements on your competitors’ “Alternatives” keywords. Buying placements to get yourself #1 is usually expensive, but the value of these page views is 1000x more than some fluffy TOFU informational blog post, and this link + placement can drive you massive business revenue.
The Link Chest is a collection of high-quality, easy-to-win backlink opportunities. It’s the smart way to kickstart your SEO mission and improve the rank of your website in Google.
“This is such a simple idea but very well executed. I’ve been powering through this giant list of backlinks for a few hours and already have loads pointing to my site. Link Chest is an essential tool for early stage link building.”
It’s also training LLMs and Google’s AI to associate you with these big brands / making you seem like a bigger brand, which will pay off massively in the near future where AI agents are making all the recommendations for people, and are searching more online than their human counterparts.
Digital PR is also a great way to get the links you can’t buy or get elsewhere. But, some industries are better than others for this as they naturally lead to more viral campaigns. We’re trying to figure out how to make this work for Answer Socrates.
Our affiliate program also leads to a lot of links. I do not mind if they’re nofollow, or if they have a rel=sponsored tag AT ALL, and people need to get with the times and understand this. A REAL BRAND WOULD HAVE THESE MIXED TYPES OF LINKS. If you just have dofollow links then it’s weird – a real brand WOULD have these incentives in place for people to link to them and send them traffic. In my opinion, it’s a more realistic brand signal if you do have some sponsored, nofollow links.
And, if you’re reading this, and want a free software to run your affiliate program, try out Endorsely! It’s completely free to use up until you’re earning $1,000 per month from your affiliate program – the most generous free plan in the world!
What have been the most influential books, podcasts, or other resources?
I learned a lot about SEO and building websites from the Authority Hacker courses – they helped us get past the plateau we had at around 150,000 page views per month a few years back that let us start scaling again.
Zero To One by Peter Thiel has some frank realities of building big companies, The E-Myth Revisited by Michael Gerber is absolute essential for building a sellable and scalable business, Loonshots by Safi Bahcal is great for managing growth vs legacy business streams, Blitzscaling by Reid Hoffman is the best scaling startups book I’ve read, Meditations by Marcus Aurelius is a book I come back to because the teachings are so valuable.
What’s the next step in your SEO Journey?
We’re going to keep focusing on direct SEO traffic growth with our software companies, I don’t care about the doom-and-gloomers with AI. In my opinion, if you have a real product, then all this SEO and brand growth it setting you up to gain distribution in the AI world – it’s a reason to push harder, not give up.
And, to win in the post-AI distribution war, we’re doing all the other things, too, which also help with SEO.
Growing brand search via affiliate programs and influencer partnerships, creating amazing co-marketing partnerships with companies that similar audiences to ours, and more.
I think people mistakenly think you have to just do SEO things to grow your company’s SEO traffic. But actually, so many non-SEO things you can do to protect and strengthen your business are absolutely critical to the brand signals part of SEO growth, and making Google look kindly upon you.
Where can we go to learn more?
Here’s my socials:
- Twitter: https://x.com/Jamie_IF
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jamie-if/
- My personal website: https://increasing.com/
- My weekly newsletter: https://increasing.com/newsletter
Founder of Endorsely
