Cracking the Content Code with Toast’s Principal SEO: Expert Insights and Tips

Know more about SaaS growth strategies from the horse’s mouth.

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Relevant content that authoritatively connects with a niche audience and engages them at every stage of the funnel is tough. What’s tougher is creating this type of content consistently.

But then Toast caught our attention at Preceptist. The all-in-one digital platform for the restaurant community sets an example that sharing such content may be tough, but not impossible.

We spoke to Jim McCormick, the Principal, SEO at Toast who had a world of insights for us in this matter. We were thrilled to hear about his content and SEO journey and the interesting tidbits he shared on how they gained popularity in vertical software.

In this episode, we bring to you Jim’s industry lessons, insights, and advice to SaaS marketing professionals around the world.

Jim's Career Evolution with Content and SEO

Jim’s digital marketing journey started 10 years ago when he joined Lionbridge, a Web 1.0 company that provides translation and localization services. He had just graduated then and felt fortunate to be mentored by the Director of Digital Marketing who clearly envisioned how the company website would evolve.

They worked on developing the firm’s first content and SEO strategy to revamp the website. This involved redesigning the front-end design and the content and managing the CMS and hosting infrastructure.

During this 5-year journey with Lionbridge, he managed diverse digital marketing projects. He owes his content and SEO knowledge and experience to this firm.

As the SEO lead at Toast, he quickly learned that the company had robust SEO and content vision and strategies. He recollects how the then VP of Marketing, previously a Hubspot employee, had carried over the inbound marketing principles to Toast.

No wonder, in his first years, he observed that the content and SEO team at Toast was ready to scale and assume a dominant SEO presence in the restaurant point-of-sale category.

During those first years at Toast, the Content and SEO team was able to scale the strategy to achieve a dominant position in their domain. SEO was the primary and most effective channel for them. They have a strong team of seven members, supporting the US strategy and a team overseas, scaling the international strategy.

How Toast Impacts Customers

Toast has always had a clear customer-centric mission – To design products that allow restaurateurs to delight their guests.

The company was developed as a vertical SaaS POS firm serving restaurants. This differentiates them from their primary competitor, Square, which is a horizontal POS provider for various industry segments.

This targeted approach allows them to streamline their product development processes and revolve around one end user – restaurant employees. Thus, their products, features, and promotions are sharpened to resonate with this audience.

The hospitality and catering industry is notorious for low-profit margins and high competition. The margins are usually in the range of 3-5%. Hence, technology is prime to boosting efficiency and winning a competitive advantage.

Jim shares how Toast helps restaurateurs.

Toast Go® 2, their newest mobile handheld POS, helps restaurants improve their productivity. It allows them to send orders from the table directly to the kitchen, thus increasing the total number of diners in a night.
It allows contactless payments, streamlines the ordering process, and keeps service hustling even in rush hours.
Toast’s inventory management tools and xtraCHEF Cost Analytics help in eliminating waste and ensuring all the items on the menu are portioned correctly and profitably. This directly impacts the bottom line.

Jim adds that the food and restaurant industry is estimated to be 4% of the US GDP and one of the largest employers. Hence, this industry is central to people’s lives. Toast aims to deploy cutting-edge technology to improve the experience for restaurant owners and diners alike.

Unveiling Toast's Demand Generation Game

Toast’s demand gen strategy involves a top-of-funnel SEO strategy and a bottom-of-the-funnel transactional strategy, with email touchpoints in between. This strategy drives >250K users to their website through SEO and supports their brand awareness initiatives. It also drives conversions.

For instance, their blog is a main part of their top-of-the-funnel SEO content.

If you look at this page – https://pos.toasttab.com/blog/on-the-line/how-to-open-a-bar

Here, the content is designed to attract new restaurateurs who rely on Google for information. Toast created a content strategy to rank competitively for the keywords connected to this post. Their intention was purely to give the audience what they were looking for – how to open a bar. They targeted customers at this stage of the funnel with fitting content and offered a gated content asset – Open a Bar Checklist.

This page is an example of content designed to attract new restaurant owners who rely on Google to supplement what they don’t know. Toast ranks very competitively for the keywords connected with this page, and our intention at this stage in the funnel is for the users to download the gated asset “Opening a Bar Checklist”.

Such gated content positions Toast as a potential POS partner for new restaurants and gets them a solid email base that can be nurtured during the buying process.

On several occasions, users engage with the email, ask for a product demo, and ultimately subscribe to the service. If that doesn’t happen, they engage the user at the bottom of the funnel using transactional keyword searches.

For instance, terms like “restaurant POS” and “bar POS” are intent-rich and Toast capitalizes on them. They optimize their product pages to rank for these keywords, thereby ensuring top-of-the-mind recall when the user they are ready to make a decision.

Jim shares a few examples of the optimized product pages here –

https://pos.toasttab.com/restaurant-pos

https://pos.toasttab.com/restaurant-pos/bar-pos

Thus, the Toast team has ensured that they engage the user at every step of the buying process. This has helped them win several conversions. Today, Toast is being used by more than 100K restaurants.

Toast's Proven Link-Building Techniques

Jim shares that Toasts conducts several surveys to gain first-hand insights from their audience and their customers (diners). They leverage this data to create linkable content pieces. Sharing such content has helped them get several backlinks from authoritative websites in their niche.

He quotes two examples here –

Restaurant Ratings and Review Sites – this was a blind survey they conducted on adults ages 18+ who have recently dined at restaurants. It gives restaurateurs a perspective of how important it is to build and maintain a robust website for their restaurant.

What’s more? They have added a gated asset to take them to the next level – Restaurant Website Checklist

Restaurant Consumers Trends – Toast shared the survey insights from the responses of 85 Americans about their most recent dining experiences. They coupled it with a gated asset – Restaurant Operator Insights Report to guide restaurant owners.

Jim adds that the team is aware of how tough it is to build links for undifferentiated, standard-fare SEO content. Hence, they focus on differentiating themselves through proprietary and useful data like surveys that the authoritative publications and SaaS websites will want to link to and cite.

They create content pieces that answer questions while educating them about the restaurant industry.

For this, they leverage Pollfish, a market research provider, that allows them to recruit survey participants. Thus, they have created a sustainable and high-impact way to build linkable content pieces that secure links at a high rate.

He feels every SaaS firm can repurpose this tactic to create a steady stream of links to their content.

Jim's Expert Advice for SaaS Marketers

Jim’s primary advice to SaaS content and SEO teams is to channel their analytics in a way that connects their initiatives directly to business impact. Since Toast is targeting restaurants, their main KPI is closed-won deals.

He states two major reasons for this –

It helps them paint a clear picture of the ROI to their Head of Marketing and CEO. If you connect organic search traffic and MQLs to the wins, you can secure more buy-ins and scale the program. This will cost-effectively help scale the SEO efforts.
It is important to understand which content pieces or pages drive maximum wins as it helps refine strategies. If a business only tracks top-line traffic numbers and optimizes those pages, there’s a chance of driving vanity traffic that doesn’t convert eventually. This isn’t helping the business.

However, tracking the pages that drive wins, allows you to focus and optimize the ones that are truly impacting revenue.

For instance, Toast saw that content around restaurant business plans is effective in getting in front of first-time restaurateurs. This is the prime segment in which Toast has a high win rate.

Thus, they made sure their initial restaurant business plan post received high visibility for this audience. This strategy was extremely successful as new restaurant owners got curious about how to write a business plan.

Basically, they gave the audience what they were looking for.

Here are a few examples of the content they shared.

Jim advises SaaS marketers to understand the audience’s wants and tailor content to serve their search intent and help them overcome their challenges.

New Skills on Jim's Radar This Year

Jim looks at AI as a mega opportunity for his team in 2024 and beyond. They have experimented with Copy.ai to boost writer productivity, especially when creating content outlines.

Though their experience hasn’t been spectacular, they are slowly incorporating AI into their workflow.

He feels it’s an early innings for AI, but hopes to see a 10X improvement in the technology in the design and development field. He shares that if AI can handle 80% of the designer and developer responsibilities, it could unlock its potential for generating various reports and content design.

Thus, AI is one domain, he plans to invest more in the coming future.

Noteworthy Content Pieces That Jim Speaks about

Toast’s content team works closely with the PR team to pioneer new content types, released quarterly. It is called the Toast Trends Report.

In these reports, they share up-to-the-minute stories on trends and insights in the restaurant industry. They are smartly designed and include several data visualizations that speak to restaurants and consumers alike.

Every quarter this initiative is supported by traditional PR promotion, getting them the much-deserved coverage with reputed media houses.

Here’s one example he shares –

https://pos.toasttab.com/news/full-service-restaurant-reservation-booking-trends

Closing Thoughts by Jim

Jim sums up his message –

Leveraging analytics to connect content initiatives to business impact helps in getting buy-in from the C-suite while offering a clear understanding of which content pieces and forms are performing well.
To build a strong backlink profile, work on creating link-worthy content that resonates with the audience and adds value to their journey.
Every stage of the buying funnel should be flooded with enough content that helps the buyer move lower in the funnel. This way, the brand maintains high visibility when a decision is made.
To get customers back to the funnel, retargeting with BOFU content is critical. This hugely boosts the chances of conversions.

Through Jim, we learn the significance of building and implementing a sound customer-centric SEO and content strategy. This has helped them become the top choice in the restaurant industry.

Being a content marketing agency that believes in sharing targeted and link-worthy content, we couldn’t agree more with Jim’s take on sharing high-quality content. We are thankful to him for taking the time to share these insights with us.

Connect with Jim McCormick

If you want to know more about how Toast took the restaurant industry by storm, we’d recommend visiting their website. You can also connect with Jim on LinkedIn. He’d be happy to answer any questions.

Stay tuned to Preceptist’s blog to access more insight-led content in the field of content marketing and SEO. We strive to share content that adds value to content marketers and SEO professionals across industries.