Mega Seating Plan is a SaaS tool that helps teachers easily create and maintain classroom seating plans across multiple classes and years. It’s the kind of admin that earns no praise but that needs doing, and that almost every teacher wishes was easier. The product is aimed squarely at school leaders and teachers, which meant the content needed to speak their language and address their struggles.
The founder, Rob, was also a teacher, which made the brief a lot more interesting: the person commissioning the work would assess my writing as an insider. I liked the challenge. By the time I was hired, he was slowly moving out of the classroom to run the business full-time and needed the blog to grow without it eating into his time.
Where I started
I knew next to nothing about teaching. I knew that it is chronically exhausting and underappreciated, but had no understanding of the vocabulary, the frustrations, the realities of classroom management or the demands on teachers’ time. I also had hardly any insight into what would encourage them to subscribe to a tool that would supposedly help them.
So I treated this brief like any brief. I started from scratch. I organised a briefing call with the founder to get a sense of the product/audience, and got answers to all the important questions before moving on to SEO research. Armed with Ahrefs access, I conducted keyword, competitor, and technical SEO research to understand what content already existed in this space, what was missing, and what the Mega Seating Plan site could realistically achieve.
What are teachers looking up on Google? What questions are asked over and over? Are there any problems they are facing on a regular, besides managing seating plans, that we can address, and by doing so introduce them to our brand? Getting the answers to these questions right is what the whole strategy rested on. I’ll be honest, though, I don’t know if I ever fully understood what it feels like to BE a teacher. I’m not sure that’s achievable from the outside. What I did appreciate were their frustrations, and I wrote from and through that appreciation, using the founder as a sounding board to check my assumptions.
How it ran
Every post was approved on the first review. The founder made minor edits at the publishing stage but nothing came back to me as a revision request.
It was the research that made this possible. Rob mentioned early on that the depth of my research had surprised him. Not what he was used to from content writers, apparently. As obvious as it sounds, I fully threw myself into the world of schools and teachers, to learn not only about their struggles but also about the studies that had been done in the field around classroom behaviour and classroom design.
In hindsight, it’s hard to imagine having done otherwise. What would the alternative have been? Writing for “teachers” or “school leaders” as a broad category? Covering the right topics? Hitting the right keywords? That’s fine, although the question is whether it would have made for an interesting read. Probably not, and in a world of pre-digested content, I think readers can still tell when they’re being fed something without substance.
What came of it
More than half the posts ranked in positions 1–10 in Google for one or more of their target keywords. For a growing EdTech product up against well-resourced competitors, this is a meaningful milestone.
Above all, Mega Seating Plan got off to a strong start with their blog with optimised posts that spoke to the right audience and didn’t require ongoing involvement to produce.
“Francesco has the rare talent of being able to embed himself in a niche that he previously knew nothing about, quickly understanding the intricacies and writing with the confidence of an insider.”
— Rob Cowen, Founder, Mega Seating Plan