Full Video Transcript

Today we're doing a live SEO roast of a product I generally love and respect, Cal.com. They're the open source scheduling tool that's taking on the big giant Calendly. They're killing it for developers and their brand is very strong, but my gut feeling is they're probably leaving a ton of money on the table by neglecting some blog post traffic, maybe technical SEO mistakes, maybe on-page SEO mistakes, or not using the same SEO strategies as their competitors might be doing. First, I would look at the website. Your website is really good. It's clear, I like the social proof. There's a lot of logos being shown, it's being trusted, and it has a really good positioning. It's a better way to schedule your meetings. I think that this is a good option. It uses some of the good keywords here, appointment scheduling, which could be easy, and it's clear as a way of how it works, which is a good way to structure your overall blog post. Usually you follow some guidelines, at least here. If we look at the content, the headings, it's all also correct, and here we start with appointment scheduling is easy. But of course it could be like, how can Cal be, or how does Cal.com work? If we keep going, it's more really good keyword stuff, like scheduling app, being clear. It's using a lot of the headlines, it's very easy to read and navigate. I really enjoy this. It's clear there is some AI stuff going on, it's more social proof, and finally, simpler, smarter scheduling. This is really good. I like your homepage. What I did right away is look at the domain rating, open it up in Ahrefs. The backlink profile is really good. There's a lot of backlinks. You even have some AI citations that if someone is asking Chachapiti, Perplexity, or Claude, you can see right away how they're being mentioned and how they're being talked about. Right now it's clear that you are being mentioned, which is good. Usually it correlates with just overall keywords that are competitive that people type in, so this is good. It's natural to also rank for AI if you have good SEO traffic. Yours is decent, but in the last month it's falling. If we compare it in one year, it's mostly has improved a little bit, but not that much. So it's clear that it's stalling, it's going up and down. Maybe you get some viral traffic, then it dies down. If we saw it on the organic traffic value, it is steadily increasing, which means that you're targeting more really good pages and your organic pages, the yellow one, is also increasing. This is over the last five years, so that is decent. The amount of impressions from overall your search volume is good. Paid traffic, you did it in the past, then you stopped completely. So your amount of referring domains is increasing, and I would guess this is gonna be a lot of your customers actually, because each customer probably links back to your homepage and that way you get backlinks naturally. That's why you have such a high domain rating that even has increased in the last year by four. That means in your AR, which is your ranking, you are the top 1,000 website overall in the world for such a high domain rating, which is really good. So what I would do is export your CSV of all your organic keywords. This way we know all the keywords that are used on your website. If we look at the ones that are actually showing up on Google, like in the top 10, 20, we see that it's also increasing, which is good. And your best keywords here that are giving you the most traffic, so meaning you have a really good position and your volume is high, that's Kyle. So it's like a lot of branded terms, clearly. So then once we have exported this list, I made a potential traffic value calculator, with V0, I've exported it here. And now we see that actually you could get a million dollars worth of potential SEO value, and which would be around like $2,000 per page, which is really nice. So if we zoom in on the actual best pages right now, which like if we compare, this means like the best volume overall for the best CPC. And if you calculate them both and combine them, we see that for this ranking for Calendly Login, this could give you a lot of potential SEO value. Same with Scheduling Tool, with Scheduling Software for Business, Calendar Scheduling Tool, Scheduling Website, Google Calendar Appointment Schedule, Free Booking Website, Automated Scheduling Software, Scheduling Service Software. And this is a really good way to know which keywords you should focus on, because these keywords have a lot of value, volume, and also a high cost per click. They're valuable, and if we combine both, they're the best ones. Best Interview Scheduling Software and so on. The list is quite big, but the problem is here, like your current position for most of them isn't that high right now. So it's above 20, so you're not really ranking for most of these. So if you would pick a few keywords that could be like your money keywords, I would definitely focus on some of them here. If we keep going, then looking at your other pages, not like your homepage, we see that app is ranking, so it's like your login page probably. If we open it in Incognito, we see what it is. So it's like your app store, actually. The app store for cow.com. And then, yeah, it could be ranking for Zoho login, but I doubt it, so it's not so super relevant. Then the next one is your blog posts for patient scheduling software, for medical office scheduling software. So it's really nice that it actually niches down, and this is one of the keywords that we could focus on in a bit. So it's a blog post. It's about the five great options for patient scheduling software, free and paid. And it's some nice image here. Then this, I think, is clearly like Chachapiti, like in today's fast-paced healthcare environment, patient scheduling software has become something, something. So definitely this is not great, because I think people who do visit this page, they believe the text is too small, like it's gray against gray background. The images are generic. So this is not really gonna work out that well. If we actually Google this, like the patient scheduling software, we see that there's a lot of search volume, and also a very high cost per click, because it is very specific. And the pages that are currently ranking are like some competitors, like rescheduling, what is the best appointment scheduling software, medical appointments scheduling software, and also some blog posts that actually mention a bunch of other tools. And these are the ones that you should focus on if you are link building. And if we look at the actual blog posts, that are ranking, these are the ones that can rank, because you can see that they are also on Google. So that's what Google wants to see here from all of these top 10 pages. And what your blog post should be about is, yeah, five great options. So you have them, but if you actually compare these ones, you're not really listing yourself as free, like you're listing yourself as the last one. I would always list myself first. I would have a scheduling software for patients. But here, like you see that it's not super high value, but they at least have a table. So it's like these little attributes that Google really likes, like best for ease of use, AI features, pricing. So it's very structured. There is also like a video, there is images, there is even a demo of their own software here, and a lot of screenshots, and then it explains what each one is best for. I think this is like the minimum, what can rank, and why it also might potentially prefer this blog post compared to yours, is because they have 10 options. So their blog post is automatically a little bit longer, and more in depth. They have an FAQ, and yours is just five. So that might be a reason why Google would show other ones. So if we look at the second option, this one is, I think, a little bit better. They also have an intro, but it's not like the generic chat GPT from two years ago. I think like even now, like cloud or anything else is gonna write a lot better content. So I know you probably make really good content. You are a founder, you know the whole space really well. You write on Twitter, YouTube, or LinkedIn quite often. So it shouldn't be that hard to make one good blog post that could work, especially if it's such a high value one. If we look at this example, they highlighted even like the main keyword that is visible here. They highlight other things that real humans would focus on. So like statistics, numbers. So that's a really quick fix. You can write a draft of AI, but then you kind of improve the text yourself. You can just copy it, for example, and markdown and cursor, and then ask it to rewrite some parts or add some text if you have some ideas. That's the way that I generally do it. The next part, of course, is like really making really good images. You can make a lot of these for Sora or just generating them yourself with NanoBanana or something else. So that way, people who are kind of like skimming, they scroll down and they view the content, they get at least something visible. So this one doesn't have as many videos here, but they do structure the whole content into different features. And that allows people to actually skim and read quite quickly. I would kind of combine both of them and just make one blog post that works really well. If we look at the blog posts currently for your current website, like how it is for you, you definitely, by the way, have way too long slug. This is like five great options for patient scheduling software, free paid. That kind of sucks because if you change the title later, it's really annoying that you, like now if I tell you, okay, you need to make it 10, you're gonna have a bad time because your slug just says five. So what I would generally do is make sure that the keyword that I focus on is just a slug, so patient scheduling software. You don't need anything more than that. And that allows you to also know this is the keyword that is currently being focused on this page. And you can always change the title, the whole content, anything, just as long as the slug stays the same. So if you have this right now, you can just make a redirect and go to the new slug if you would change it. But this keyword, as you can see, like free medical appointment scheduling software, it's really good because the cost per click is super high. You see that it's super valuable. If we saw it by cost per click by this keyword alone, like medical schedule software, is a cost per click of $25. So these people really need a strong scheduling solution. And which solution is better than an open source one? Almost nothing, right? So this is something that they can adapt themselves. And you don't have to worry, or they don't have to worry about time zones and all that stuff. The next blog post that is the highest potential value to focus on is booking software for small business. Let's take a look at this one. Here's a small business guide to appointment scheduling software, which is a little bit different, but here, I think you need a whole redesign on your blog. It's like, nobody's gonna read this. It's too gray, I think. And it has some sources, but they're not really linked. It's quite a bit sloppy. I would spend quite a bit of time, maybe like per article, you would probably spend like $1,000 to $2,000 to just have a professional copywriter rewrite each of them. This is generally what we kind of charge for as well. So that's in the range. And when we try to outsource or hire other content writers, that's generally the price that we hear about. So if we actually Google your top keyword here, because it has a decent volume and a decent cost per click, and you're now in position 46, by the way, and we Google this, we see what Google is showing us here. So booking software for small business, super high keyword difficulty, but you do have some potential to rank because of course, Calendly is showing up. And they are showing up because they have a lot of backlinks here. But there's some other opportunities as well. For example, here, you see that there's a Reddit post about best easy to use appointment booking software. And someone is kind of recommending Ziddy and some other ones. So generally what you would do is you open some of these up and then you write a comment here and you say like, Calendly sucks, Cal is great. Pretty simple, because right now everyone is recommending them. You can also see here, the sources that are being cited similar to the one that we saw above. So if you see a lot of these sources, you know like this is what Google likes as content. And that's why they are promoting the other tools. That's why Calendly is showing up because they have a lot of mentions everywhere. So Google associates this brand with all the results and they are being pushed up. So if you had your own solutions page, right now you're ranking for this keyword potentially via this blog post, which is kind of shitty. But what Calendly is doing here, they have a dedicated solutions page for each of these segments. So this is kind of like a programmatic SEO-ish landing page thing. If we look at Calendly solutions, we see what they're doing right now for all of them. And then you can kind of copy all of them. Their top pages for just the solutions pages on Calendly, they get 1,500 traffic and they have a decent traffic value, about 1,500 for each one of these. So the best ones are recruiting, small business, education, individuals, financial services, professional services, sales, enterprise, revenue operations, IT, customer success, technology. All of these people need some type of scheduling software just for them. Appointments software for small business, another one for recruiting or interview scheduling. That's actually something that they're missing out on their recruiting page. But all of these have some dedicated pages on their site and that allows them to actually make a unique page and improve it for each of these keywords. And that's a really good strategy that works. If we keep looking at the blog posts that you need to appear in, here, for example, there's a lot of competitors again, and you collect all of these and then you send everyone an email. So you use like Hunter.io, Apollo, or LinkedIn, where we also gather all these emails and then you do an outreach message. So you look at the best blog posts here, that's where AI is, like AI reviews is getting all these sources and also a part of Reddit. And also this simple widget here on the top, it's also using these citations as sources, as you can see here. All of these are like some information that Google collects. And if you would be mentioned more often, you would also have a specific page or like your icon here as cow.com. I think small business booking software is a really good one for you because that's a decent niche. IT, maybe SaaS as well. But small business is a good deal because it's open source. And if you would just email everyone, if you look at some of these examples, like youcanbookme.com, they have all of these competitors and like most of them just always mention Calendly. But it's definitely outdated, right? Like one way that you could try to reach out to them is just going on their contact sales page and figuring out like, probably you can book a calendar meeting and tell them like, hey, can we figure this out? Like why are you mentioning Calendly everywhere? You should probably mention cow.com. We are open source. And just keep doing that for all of these specific blog posts, listicles that you find. Your other strategy works also really well. It's like Calendly alternatives. This is probably the best keyword that you could find because people are looking for a free alternative to Calendly or they're looking for an open source scheduling platform, which also has an API in this case. So you could use this strategy that someone did. You make a real website, calendlyalternatives.org. I've seen other people in our Indie Hacker community do this quite often. So it's a really good way, not only Indie Hackers actually, but also real SaaS or big enterprise do this. This actually works because you focus on this specific keyword and then you make a random page, you pump it full of backlinks and it can actually help you rank. So ZenCal also has a blog post. There's quite a lot of these blog posts, content, listicles that you see here. You are number six right now, which is pretty good. Potentially the other ones that we saw, they're listing like five of them. So you could keep this scheduling page that you have here, this one, but also write a blog post where you compare five through different criteria. It could be like pricing, open source, make a table. You really need to invest a lot in your blog, I think, to make it really nice, high quality, add pop-ups, conversion rate optimization, CTAs and so on. Because if you would just improve your entire blog software, like make it so much better, add like a CTA on the right, add a CTA in the bottom, add like a exit pop-up widget if someone like moves away the cursor outside of the window. You can use the window on our sleeve event to just show a pop-up and say, hey, wait, you forgot to do something, you forgot to get cow. Like pop-ups in the middle, interstitial ones. You could do quite a lot. There's a lot of different tools for this. But all of these blog posts are just bleeding kind of value. You have written them, but they're just there, without any traffic at all. That's why you're stuck at 5,700 traffic over here. So let's take a look at some competitors in this case. So we saw the solutions pages, but here's like what Calendly.com themselves is doing. And compared to your little traffic value, they have 5,000 traffic volume. Probably because mostly they rank on Calendly, everyone knows Calendly. They are ranking for free scheduling app and scheduling software, which would be like your primary keywords. And if you would Google some of these ones, you have the same strategies again. So you open up these ones, you look at who else is having a listicle blog post party here, and you just email everyone. I think you have a lot of SEO potential. You should focus on the blog almost 100%. Make sure it's super high quality, make sure that it converts, make sure that it gets a lot of traffic, add internal links to each of the blog posts, add them to your resource pages. Your website is really good, decent. And if you would just do a few of these things, you would really get a lot more traffic, just like Calendly or these other websites that do get a lot of the traffic. I hope this really helps you, and I will take a look and keep looking at your website now and again and give you some tips. So thank you so much for your support, and let me know if you have any comments or any feedback.