Zety's $15M copy-paste content template empire

Helloooo content connoisseurs.

It’s Perrin from Content Bites.

Anyone who’s ever done any kind of content marketing (and especially anyone who has run a team) has tried to build and use content templates. Makes everything more efficient. Today, I want to show you the extreme version of that that led Zety to $15M of revenue.

• Appetizers: Links from Ahrefs, SparkToro, CMI, and more

• Main Course: Zety’s $15M content templates & how they built a copy-paste content empire

Let’s dig in.

Appetizers: Content marketing links

• How to Build (And Structure) an SEO Team (Iink)

• Is Social Media Even Worth It Anymore? (Iink)

• Why You Can’t Just Crank Up Marketing to Get More Sales (Iink)

• SEO and Social Media: How to Use Search to Boost Your Social Marketing (Iink)

• How One Content Leader Launched a 150-Year Old Brand Into the Modern Era (Iink)

Main Course: Zety’s $15M content templates & how they built a copy-paste content empire

I haven’t told many people about this.

But for a time between selling my agency and starting Content Bites, I was briefly entertaining the idea of building software to help people write resumes. 

I did not do it. 

Mostly because I realized I had no idea what I was doing lol. 

But why? 

Do I love writing resumes? Not really.

Am I passionate about helping people get jobs? I mean kind of? I’m passionate about being a good boss, and I’m passionate about not being broke, lol. 

But it’s not an actual passion of mine. So why then?

Because I saw ridiculous content opportunity. 

In the end, I scrapped the project – but what I found in my competitor research stuck with me, and one of the companies in that space became one of my favorite content case studies of all time. 

That company is Zety. They do make resume builder software.

Today, I want to tell you about Zety, and then I want to give you the roadmap I was using to steal their strategy. 

Because odds are, you can use it in some for in your own niche. 

First: a quick breakdown of what Zety does and just how well Zety is doing. 

As a company, Zety is a banger. They crush it in every conceivable way.

Zety sells software that helps you build resumes, CVs and cover letters – exactly what I was thinking about doing. 

They’ve grown from zero to an estimated $15-20M ARR (Apollo) in about eight years, and almost all of that can be attributed to content marketing.

Primarily, they’re an SEO-driven company.

They get an estimated 6 million visits per month (similar web), and about 4.5 million of that is from organic search (screenshot). 

They have barely any social media presence. They have what appears to be a token Facebook page. They don’t link to any Instagram on their site. And the only other social pages they have are a LinkedIn page and a Twitter page, either of which have any following to speak of. 

They also don’t spend much on ads. 

It’s just content, content, and more content. 

And that, to me, indicates they saw the exact same thing I did. 

And that brings me one of their key insights… 

Zety’s key insight: finding massive pools of keywords in Google that you can serve with just one content template 

THIS is what makes Zety great. 

This is also what I was calling their “copy-paste content empire” – and it is by far the most important thing we can learn from this company.

That’s probably a slight exaggeration, but you’ll understand where I’m getting that here in a second. 

It’s also the exact opportunity I saw when i was looking at the market, which was…

Zety’s key insight: In the resume space, there are LOTS of keywords that follow the formula “[X career] resume examples”. 

Literally every single career has keywords and keyword variations that follow this formula:

• “aviation technician resume examples”

• “registered nurse resume examples”

• “graphic designer resume examples’

• “paralegal resume examples”

• … and so on

There are keyword clusters for this formula around every single career that exists. 

There are also other keywords that exist that fall into the “examples” bucket without attaching to a career: stuff like “resume objective examples”.

There are also a few similar buckets: 

• “...examples”

• “...samples”

• “...templates”

In Ahrefs, when filtering keywords that include the word “resume” and at least one of the other modifiers (“examples,” “samples” or “templates”), there are…

…186,000 keywords that account for 1,700,000 monthly search volume. 

Zety essentially targets ALL of them. 

Literally, go to Google right now and type in any career you can think of + any of the modifiers above, and Zety will almost certainly be on the first page.

Over 8 years, they’ve built a database of content that serves users examples, samples, and templates for every career in existence (here’s their index). 

Here’s the cool thing… 

Because almost all resumes have the same stuff in them, most of those articles are VERY similar to one another. 

Look at these two articles from Zety’s site:

• Accounting Clerk Resume Example, Job Description, & Skills

• Construction Manager Resume Sample [+Objective & Skills]

The words are the different. 

The articles are being written with unique content. 

But they’re extremely similar in structure, tone, information, etc. 

It’s as close to a copy-paste template as you can get without actually copying and pasting. 

And clearly it works. 

And it works because even though the content templates are similar, Google’s users need good pages for every single career. 

So Google is happy to reward the businesses that serve these kinds of templates. 

In other words, even though they’re templates, they still add value. 

And THAT’S the golden goose: when we can add value with templated content, we can create huuuuuuuuuge amounts really efficiently based off one good template. 

How can WE do this?

Guys… we can do this for our own businesses. 

We just need to find template-able buckets of keywords.

Here’s quick example…

Suppose we ran a print-on-demand hoodie business. We sell regular old hoodies with funny sayings on them. 

Of course, if we were making an SEO play, we’d want to rank for the obvious stuff: “funny hoodies” or whatever.

But what if there was a way we could replicate what Zety did in our own market. 

After a quick brainstorm and a poke around Ahrefs, I found one. 

In Ahrefs, I searched for “hoodies” and added the modifier “for”. 

That search returned tons of keywords that were similar enough to be served with a single content template, like:

• “cool hoodies for men”

• “zip up hoodies for men”

• “pink hoodies for women”

• “long hoodies for women”

• “gym hoodies for men”

• “hoodies for couples”

And I’m sure you can picture the template, right? It’s probably, like, a listicle in a “top” or “best” format that includes images of hoodies, and it lists our hoodies on the top of the list. 

It would be super easy to hire a low-cost VA/writer to build these out really quick – as long as we had a really clear, really robust template for them to work from.

And the opportunity? 

That keyword pool includes 13,000 keywords that account for 292,000 monthly search volume. 

Suppose we do a really great job and capture about 10% of that, we’d have generated about 175,000 annual visitors to our hoodie store, and every article they landed on would suggest our products. 

Maybe the opportunities aren’t as juicy in your niche.

But even if they’re smaller than these, they’re generally a bigger overall content opportunity than creating a couple unique blog posts per week, and you can usually run them as one large campaign and then move on. 

Super worth it. 

A couple other things you can steal: Massive category pages & free tools. 

This post is mostly about the insane power of templatized content.

But I’m not sure if I’m going to write about Zety again, so I did want to just show you a couple more things if you decide to poke around their stie on your own. 

1. They have massive category pages. 

They have gigantic category pages that essentially serve as indexes for all careers (like this). 

Aside from being great for UX, these pages also generate press, generate backlinks, support technical infrastructure, and so on. 

If you have a bunch of great content, category pages like this can be super powerful.

2. They develop and distribute free tools as a marketing tactic. 

For example, they have this resume checker tool that lets you upload your resume for a quality scan. 

It’s freel and it surely cost them a bit to develop, but it’s also a fantastic way to generate press, backlinks, and authority. 

If you have the resources, tools can be great, and this is a good one to reverse engineer.

How I’d roll out the copy/paste formula:

• Use a tool like Ahrefs to search for template-able keyword pools (over 100,000 total volume)

• Develop a single content template that makes content creation a super, super easy; make sure to include CTAs

• Hire a team of lower-cost VAs or writers to generate the content as fast as possible

• Run QA checks with your editing team

• Publish the content

• Build a simple internal linking structure so that the articles link to each other

• Link to one or two of the articles from elsewhere on the site

• Measure & repeat for other keyword pools if you can find them

As a final note: this is also how you break into programmatic SEO, which is basically templated content, but automated. It’s equally as powerful, and it’s way faster, but it’s riskier and more technically difficult to pull off. So it’s probably a bit outside the scope of this issue, but my friend Nico, who runs Failory, has a fantastic article on it here: How We Get 97,450 Users/mo with Programmatic SEO.

That’s the issue. If you missed last week’s issue, you can read it here: My recipe for outstanding content (including a take-home checklist),

Go forth & conquer.

—Perrin