In this interview, we sit down with Nik Vujic, an accomplished SEO consultant and founder of White Label Agency. Nik shares his journey of balancing agency work with personal projects, the challenges of staying on top in the ever-changing world of SEO, and how leveraging innovation has driven his success.
He also provides invaluable insights on the impact of recent Google updates, the use of AI in SEO, and his preference for Webflow over WordPress. Dive in to learn how passion and dedication fuel his remarkable career!
1. I saw in your LinkedIn that you combine work in the agency and work on your own projects. When do you find time for your projects?
Hey Ivan, yes that is right! I have been working as an early member of Veza and have been handling their whole SEO and search from day 1!
We can say that we are doing something good as we have been, for the past 4 years, the top organic result for Webflow agency, Webflow development agency, and Webflow design agency keywords so I would say that from a value perspective, we are dominating organic results!
To answer your question (I recently published one post that covers this) I think that everyone with the ultimate passion for a profession can’t resist the urge to work on the craft not looking at the clock!
Keeping that in mind, besides the only truth in SEO which is that tests matter the most, I needed to find a way to work on side projects besides my clients, as in that way I have my experimental environment to master my craft!
Did I do that in a balanced way – I would say not as even today I am not considering SEO as my job, only passion so weekends are regularly committed to the same!
2. Can you share which sites you promote in your free time and why you chose these niches?
This is super hard to decide on. I am blessed enough that I am working with some of the leaders in the niches so I would choose:
- Veza Digital – the best webflow agency organically in the past 4 years;
- Nagish – one of the leaders in App space for the deaf and HOH community – recently raised 16 million USD;
- Advokati na dlanu (Serbian website) – my project and the biggest informative law website in Serbia.
3. For several years, you have grown from a specialist to a marketing director in the agency. What do specialists need to do to grow as quickly? Is this possible in every company?
I would be completely honest here with the answer – I am still considering myself a consultant and specialist in the SEO sphere but my role in Veza was directly correlated with my joining time (one of the first members) and the success that I achieved regarding my department and that is search!
I would say for that transition you need to have a bit of luck too as I wouldn’t consider that possible in every company! But again if you are super good at what you are doing it is possible that you can grow a lot within the same agency/company!
Handling the marketing director role is for sure nice and allowed me to develop more as a marketing person and respect other channels too!
Never look at your favorite channel as its own because, in the end, you will need to collaborate with the rest of the departments and take a bigger picture in the count to benefit the most to your clients/company!
4. How have the latest Google updates affected the success of your clients and the work of your agency?
Amazing question Ivan! I would say that I was always cherry-picking my clients and picked the ones I had the best probability of reaching success with so I can thank that strategy for my portfolio of successful projects that you can find on my LinkedIn showcased.
I would say because of that I always avoided websites that were hit with some of the updates or penalties but that changed last year when I took a US based client that was wrecked by HCU (September 2023) and he went from 100k+ traffic to less than 10k per month.
We did a complete overhaul of the content and changed the intent (as the website was affiliate) and waited for over 10 months for something to happen while we were executing our strategy piece by piece and with the latest Google update (August 2024) we reached over 700% of improvement!!!
I guess I will take on more of the same projects in the future as this was one of the most exciting ones and anticipation was crazy, but the most important thing was we achieved success and helped the client to recover!
In conclusion, we are not scared of Google updates haha 🙂
5. In your agency, you only serve B2B SaaS companies. Have you had experience with B2C SaaS? How does SEO differ for these two types of companies?
In my career, I worked with both B2B and B2C clients.
I would put differences in this way:
- For B2B – content is more serious and oriented toward professionalism and expertise where the volume is not that important – way less interesting niche than B2C I need to say that;
- For B2C – content is more oriented towards the user and more personalized with messaging, in the end here is the volume way more important than for B2B if we take into account AOV and similar for B2C clients compared to B2B.
6. What has changed in SEO for B2B SaaS sites for the last few years?
Oh, one more interesting question.
I would say content as AI took over so you had these crazy success stories that ended more than sad for the majority of those companies. I would say mass production of low-quality AI content not counting the intent and needs of users led us to a massive decrease in the quality of the majority of B2B websites that I can see online nowadays.
For every one of my clients, we are crafting 100% human-written content and testing it via a few AI checkers just to be sure that our references are good.
If you ask me do I use AI – yes I do and in a large amount but you need to make a clear separation between where AI usage is applicable and where is a legitimate worse thing that you can do for yourself and your clients.
Research and gathering and organization of information and data is our appliance of AI while for putting articles together and similar we are always taking care to execute that keeping the end user plus intent in mind and that is not doable still with AI (at least that is my conclusion).
In conclusion, the majority of B2B companies before used SEO as a primary channel so I would say the wrong appliance of AI is the biggest change that we can find in the last couple of years where the quality of content and SEO overall drastically fell off for those companies.
7. What are the most common mistakes B2B SaaS companies make in their SEO strategy?
I think I covered the answer to this question in the one above.
Wrong appliance of AI. They need to learn how to apply it without ruining the quality of their website and with that their chances to succeed in an already super-competitive market!
That is the most common mistake nowadays.
I will need to add one more here as I can see compliance on a bigger scale nowadays and that is choosing the right agencies for help. Please for all B2B personnel out there choose your partners for success wisely and check if their words and blabbering are supported with facts – at least nowadays that is easy to do when information is more accessible than ever before!
8. You said that 4 years ago you started to prefer way more Webflow than WordPress. What changes in the market lead you to this decision?
The answer is simple – innovation and capability.
Webflow is the first no-code or better said low-code tool that made mainstream success, I love and respect innovations and new things so I jumped on the train regarding the SEO part of the story, and to this day I am one of the first people who did SEO on the Webflow with major success with the projects hosted and built on the Webflow!
9. Could you describe how the SEO process for Webflow differs from SEO for WordPress?
Actually for every platform (website builder) and website SEO process is the same if you know what you need to do.
But to this day the answer to this question stays the same – WordPress is way more beginner-friendly with all the fancy plugins that are there for SEO where you can just apply plug and play system, especially with Yoast or Rank Math or w/e is popular now.
For Webflow you don’t have any plugins that can come close to those on WordPress so everything that you need to do you need to do manually and within the code of the website, in that part, Webflow is more complex or challenging for someone who likes to play around with tech SEO and HTML and CSS (I am one of those guys).
On the contrary capabilities of animations, UX and overall design are advantages of Webflow plus its amazing CMS and simplicity of navigation within those things on the side of the builder (this is maybe more related to designers and developers but I wanted to pinpoint it here).
10. What are the pitfalls in Webflow? What types of sites is it not suitable for?
I also in the past appearances on interviews and podcasts covered this part fully transparently!
I don’t think that Webflow is the best site builder ever or the best for all websites and niches – even contrary to that I was pretty vocal about disadvantages and offered the Webflow team my knowledge and experience to help them improve SEO setup and some other things on their builder – unfortunately they still didn’t reach out, but who knows haha 🙂
To cut the story short because of those things I would mark a few website types that can’t utilize Webflow to the fullest:
- E-commerce websites – there is no way that their setup and complexity of SEO implementation can come close to Shopify or even WooCommerce for handling e-commerce websites and large stores.
- Multilingual websites – they recently added a Localisation option – I am still having some problems with it as geo-location redirects can be horrible not only from an SEO perspective but even from a logical perspective (you can turn that off so it is not that bad but still it is worthy of mentioning).
- Websites with a huge amount of pages – here we need to point price of the Webflow and be fair to say that big companies with huge websites can decide just because of the price of it to stay on different platforms – also complexity of SEO setup similar to the e-commerce website can be problematic here.
In the end, I need to thank you Ivan for having me as your guest and allowing me to share my insights and knowledge with your audience. I hope that I successfully pass some interesting insights and bits of knowledge to the readers! Thank you again!
