The Notion AI SEO System I Use For My Templates Business 🔎

I started Landmark Labs coming from an SEO background (self-taught), and the strategy from day 1 was simple: ‘target Notion template and tutorial keywords’.

Since then, the strategy has stayed the same, but the tools and systems have changed significantly. The short version of today’s newsletter:

• I’ve just published a tutorial walking through the Notion AI SEO System I now use, today (after learning from my past mistakes);

• The full version of the system is available in Business OS if you’d like to implement it yourself; but

• I’ve also made the main content sections available as a free template in the Components library (if you’re not ready to try Business OS in full just yet).

Landmark’s SEO Story continued…

Mind you, I started the Landmark site back in October 2021. This was before ChatGPT, when AI-writing tools like Jarvis were still relatively unknown and, for the most part, you had to manually write every single word in your articles (imagine that!).

Growth in the first 12 months was steady. I was working like mad to push out 25 - 30 articles and new templates every month, and I was seeing results.

(My first sale came in November 2021, $8 for a Notion CRM template… what a happy day that was! 🤩)

But if I’m being completely honest: ChatGPT was the real game-changer.

In Dec. 2022, I decided to give ChatGPT a go with a long list of Notion how-to tutorial related keywords. These were very niche and specific searches which had answers hidden away in Reddit forums, in Notion’s documentation, etc. but were not particularly prominent in Google search.

They were also topics and questions that I had answered hundreds of times before by interacting with Landmark customers, so I could easily write a short ‘content brief’ explaining the issue and answer to ChatGPT and get a solid article output as the result.

So, I decided to just sweep up all these keywords, write a dedicated article using ChatGPT for each one, hit publish, and see what happened.

With this process, I was able to 4X my usual publishing output, and my traffic saw a similar boost. From Dec. 2022 to Feb. 2023 alone, my traffic grew 4X, from about 25,000/mo to 100,000/mo.

Sales were up 2.5X. And I felt like I had discovered a secret superpower for infinite traffic.

Of course, the competitive edge soon faded, and AI-assisted content is now the norm for most SEO content campaigns. The low-hanging fruit was not never-ending, and I eventually hit diminishing returns.

But then I made one very big error:

I became complacent and stopped publishing content altogether 💀 

The key for SEO today: Publish consistently

What I’ve learned since is that when the excitement of high volume publishing fades, the factor that matters most is consistency. Even with all of these AI-assist writing tools at my fingertips, I went for long stretches (3-4 months sometimes) without posting a single article.

Each individual article seemed so small and unimportant compared to the hundreds of already-published posts—what difference could 1 more really make?

But really, it was the friction of starting from a blank page that always stopped me.

What I’ve found to be most helpful is to simply have a system in place.

• ✅ A long list of keywords already researched;

• ✅ A shortlist of posts you want to create ready and waiting in your content pipeline; and

• ✅ A clear workflow to go from keyword → publish that takes the friction out of sitting down to create new content every week.

I think I’ve landed on a system that works for me now in Notion, with the help of Notion AI at key moments to avoid the blank page, and in this tutorial I’ve tried to capture the gist of it.

The content system that I use is the same system provided in Business OS, so if you’d like to implement it yourself, I would recommend using the full version (as well as many of the other systems I use to run my business) in Business OS.

However, I’ve also made the content components from this video available as a standalone free template in the Components library. Feel free to try that out if you don’t have / don’t need the full Business OS system just yet.

Hope you find the tutorial useful. And if any questions about how to integrate it into your existing Notion workspace, just send me a reply here :)

Best,

Gerrard
Founder @landmarklabs.co