Masterclass is raising new funding at a $2.5B valuation.

The platform's secret sauce: incredible SEO, which uses the power of "second order questions" to drive free traffic to its site.

Here's a breakdown

1/ The Masterclass website got ~10m visits in March w/ 61% of traffic coming via search (nearly all of it organic).

2/ The key to this organic search traffic?

Masterclass’ hundreds of high-quality articles including pieces on:

• Food
• Design
• Music
• Business
• Writing

3/ Masterclass appears at the top of Google searches for:

“what are pretzels”
“types of poems”
“how many teaspoons in a tablespoon”
“song structure”
“how to write an autobiography”

These five key search terms combine for 500k+ monthly Google searches.

4/ Let’s dig into one example:

“how many teaspoons in a tablespoon”

This one has 130k+ monthly searches.

https://masterclass.com/articles/how-many-teaspoons-in-a-tablespoon-measurement-conversion-chart

5/ This “teaspoon” article definitely answers the search query.

BUT, it is also riddled with calls-to-action for Masterclass courses related to cooking (eg Gordon Ramsay, Madison Bottura).

6/ This is where "second-order questions" come into play.

Example:

Let’s say you sell washable rugs online.

A typical FIRST ORDER question you might rank for is “best pet friendly rug”.

A SECOND ORDER question you should target is “best rug shampooer for pets”.

7/ Why do SECOND ORDER questions work?

Because you’re targeting a similar audience who is one step away from wanting your product.

And @masterclass is brilliantly building a content library around these audience-related searches!

8/ This knowledge was shared to me by @ahogan, who DEF knows the search game.

Elsewhere, if you want to know the secret behind Amazon's writing culture...check this thread: https://twitter.com/TrungTPhan/status/1361324736878313478