How SEMrush Scales Customer Education With AI and Humans (Full Transcript)

[00:00:00] Speaker 1: Hello everyone who is joining us today for this webinar where we are going to be speaking about creating educational content. And when I'm speaking usually about Riverside, we're talking about long form video, we're talking about podcasts or marketing videos, or we're talking about YouTube channels. But today we're talking about what might not be the most exciting content tend to come on your screen the flashiest, but it's actually usually one of the most important building blocks for a brand to be creating because you could spend all of the time in the world bringing people onto your platform, bringing people over to your product or your business, but to be able to nurture those leads, to be able to make sure that they're using your product or being able to get the most out of the services that you're offering, educational content is up there as one of the most important pieces of content be making. So when I was speaking a few weeks ago to my friends over at SEMrush and heard that SEMrush is using Riverside to record their educational content, I was like, we got to get you on. So that's the lead up to this webinar today. And so from the chat, I see a bunch of you are already in here. So as people are kind of filing in, we'd love to hear an intro of who you are, but also let us know what kind of content that you're making, what kind of educational content that you're creating. And while you're doing that, I'll just do a quick intro for anyone who doesn't know Riverside. We're an end-to-end content creation platform. So from recording, transcribing, editing, clipping, publishing your content, scheduling on social media, all of that can be done right in Riverside. So we're used by podcasters, video content creators, marketers, and you'll see today, people that are creating that video, educational content. So coaches, marketers, all run in the gamut. So with that, I do want to, before we're starting, because we're talking about educational content, and then Rita, I'm gonna have you introduce yourself, I'm just doing a wind-up, because you never know how long to, maybe you'll speak about this, how long to make the intro when it's live, because you want people to like to come in. But while we're doing that, because we're talking about educational content, I do just want to make a quick announcement. And that is that we have just announced on our end, our new Riverside University. And so in there, you can get a full guide into everything you can do with Riverside. So from walkthrough demos of the full platform to understanding different use cases, and being able to see how to do things like live streaming, webinars like we're doing today, all of that. So I'm really coming fresh off of this educational content kick with making this university. So it was very timely to have you on, Rita. And with that, we have Rita here today from SEMrush. So I'd love for you to take a moment to introduce yourself.

[00:03:10] Speaker 2: Yes, I'm so happy to be here. Thank you for inviting me. I checked out your university recently and sent a bunch of screenshots to my team. So, the admiration is mutual. I really love what you guys are doing. So, very cool. Yes, I am Rita. I hail from San Juan, Puerto Rico. I see a bunch of people from Vancouver, BC. I used to live in part of the world, that part of the world. So, hello, Philippines, Tennessee. Anyone from the Caribbean here? I always ask that question just in case, and I seriously almost never get a positive answer. But just in case. of crickets. Yes, I live from San Juan, Puerto Rico originally. I live in Vienna, Austria. My background is in marketing. I've started my career really wanting to be a journalist and I think that's very much core of who I am today. I genuinely am just interested in people and what makes them tick, what might make them interested in like following a brand, buying a product, investing in a cause, become interested in an idea. That's what I like, why I wanted to be a journalist and then I found that those skills were so transferable to marketing. So I spent the great part of 20 years building a marketing career. I would consider myself a full-stack marketer at this point. Then when my kids were born, I have two small kids, I started teaching on the side, just for fun. And that has evolved into a, honestly, a quite magical career that's a mix of both like marketing strategy and education. And so what I do at SEMrush right now is I build curriculum to help our customers be successful with our product. And given that our product has evolved immensely from being like mainly an SEO platform to now covering a lot of areas in AI search, which I find to be the most interesting part of marketing right now, it's just made my job a lot more interesting. I feel like we're very much at the forefront of trying to figure out what does AI search mean, how do we best explain it, and education plays a really big role in that. So I'm very excited to share with you today like some key things that I've learned as we have really pivoted SEMrush Academy in the past, like I've been at SEMrush almost three years. It's taken three years to really pivot it in the direction that it is right now. Isabel, Natalia, Yeah, hello, from Columbia in Costa Rica, placer. Very nice to have you here and thank you everyone for being here.

[00:05:38] Speaker 1: That's amazing. I actually, I have so much to follow up with that just because I actually used to be a journalist also and it channeled into marketing. Yeah, so I was a political journalist and I always say that I ended up thinking like, oh, I'll be a marketing writer and what ended up being a community because what I really love is just hearing people's stories and like, what's the headline and all of the different stories and what brings people together. So, yeah, it's very cool to have that connection. And also because it really is what led us to this webinar today, because when I heard, first of all, that SEMrush is using Riverside, I was like, I wanna hear the story behind that. But also, I think that when it comes to any content creation, there's a story behind it. And part of that, I think with educational content, for a lot of people, they feel comfortable coming in front of a mic and riffing. But when it comes to educating people, There is such a story you need to tell, a plan you need to have in place to be able to make it something that really helps people and is valuable. So I'm really excited to hear about your whole, the whole system that you guys have going on there.

[00:06:43] Speaker 2: Yeah, and I think even if you work for a smaller brand that might not have an academy or where you haven't invested in a formal sort of education program, I'll just say that I think most of content strategy is education. A brand will sort of identify topics that they want to be closely associated with. For SEMrush, it's marketing. For a brand like Riverside, it could be podcasting. And ultimately, whether or not you have a university or an academy, you're probably gonna end up building educational content. So I'm hoping that some of the things that I shared today help you create that content, whether it's actual courses, short-form videos, or even blog posts.

[00:07:21] Speaker 1: Yeah, exactly. I know a lot of creators on Riverside are using Riverside to create courses, not just maybe they'll have a channel on the side, but then they also have their full business where they're creating courses. So, yeah, I think this can really apply, no matter team size. And I'm, yeah, with that, I'll give you the mic. I'll still be here, but, you know.

[00:07:38] Speaker 2: Yeah, please ask me questions, and I'll be also checking the chat. I most prefer we make this interactive, so definitely ask questions throughout, and I'll be checking, and I'll make sure to address those as we go. Okay, I'm just gonna quickly share my screen.

[00:07:54] Speaker 1: Yeah, and as you do that, I always forget to say this in the beginning, but because we're Riverside, this is being recorded in high quality on separate tracks. But so because of that, you can just sit back and watch the recording or watch the live stream and we'll be sending you the recording afterwards. And also as we're going through, drop your questions in the live chat. I'll be monitoring it and asking them throughout. And we'll also leave some time at the end for a Q&A session.

[00:08:19] Speaker 2: Cool. Okay. So I already introduced myself. Like I think this is basically what I said. I hail from the Caribbean. I live in a very cold city of Vienna, thanks to my husband. I'm a journalist at heart. It really sort of like paints everything that I do. These are some of the wonderful brands and places that I have the pleasure of working at as a marketer. And the reason why I think I could do a good job building educational content, because I love explaining things to people, but also because I've been in the trenches of marketing. So I feel like I've learned like some very hard lessons in my career and I love being able to clarify those things for marketers that are coming to SEMrush to learn more about marketing. So in addition to building courses for SEMrush, I actually have written extensive curriculum around marketing that is taught in these universities and many more. So if you ever stumble upon my content, like definitely give me a shout on LinkedIn. I always love to hear people who find my courses and my content helpful. This is just a link to SEMrush Academy. course, we'll be talking more about how SEMrush builds content, but if you ever want to explore free marketing curriculum, build those skills, feel free to do that. You can go to SEMrush.com slash Academy or scan this QR code. Okay, so what we're going to do today. So I will do a quick introduction to SEMrush Academy, then I'll share what is our approach to creating courses, and then I'll talk about three like game changers and I try to sort of identify things that I think would be relevant for most of you on the call like really things that could be quick wins for all of you whether or not you have like an actual academy or university or not and then I'm hoping to leave time in the end for Q&A. I am actually a terrible timekeeper so Kendall if I am going way too long We're way too short and I end in five minutes. I won't. Like, please keep me honest. Please let me know. I don't mind being interrupted.

[00:10:19] Speaker 1: That's what I'm here for. That and jumping in with questions, so let's do it.

[00:10:24] Speaker 2: Okay, great. So I love, and every team that I've ever been in, I love setting a mission, because I think it sort of gets everyone on the same page about what we are trying to do as a team. And so my team is in SEMrush, the Customer Education and Community Team is really focused on unlocking the full power and value of SEMrush for our current and also future customers. This is a screenshot from one of the academies that my team manages but actually my team at SEMrush has three pillars when it comes to customer education. Some of you might or might not know this and this is not super relevant so I'll breeze through this but we have actually two different platforms at SEMrush. One that is for smaller and medium-sized businesses and an enterprise platform. So my team actually manages two separate academies and two separate knowledge bases. And then we also have two community programs that we manage. One is a SEMrush ambassador program and that's a program for customers that love our product and want to provide feedback to our product teams or participate in different events. And we also manage a SEMrush Rush for Education Partner Program, where we partner with universities all around the world to teach SEMrush within undergraduate institutions. So in this session, I'm going to ignore knowledge base and community for the most part and really focus on Academy and how we create content for Academy. So where does the Academy fit into our learning landscape? This is probably the case for most of you, and even in small companies, education is is really not owned by one team. My team certainly doesn't own all of education, like the social media team is educating, the YouTube team is educating. But I think it's important to define where the different sort of like portals of education fit into a journey. So for the ones that my team manages or is mostly involved in, this is how I think about it, using the metaphor of like a car. So our knowledge base is basically like the manual that you have inside the car it gives you like very precise information about specific functions. Like, how do I turn on the car? You put the key in and you turn it like this, or I guess that's really old school these days, you just press a button. But that's what the KB is. It's like very functional, very step-by-step when it comes to like the actual features of our products. Academy is actually meant to give you more of a destination. So I think about it like a GPS. So it tells you how to get from point A to point B with very clear outcomes. and very clear instructions. But of course, like even with AI, like we struggle to be very, very personalized. And if you work in marketing or have ever worked in marketing, you know that there's just no one size fits all solution or strategy for marketing. There's a lot of customization and a lot of like, yes, but, or yeah, but what if? And so this is where our customer success team comes in and they provide much more customized guidance. I put in here customer success slash AI because increasingly we're using AI to provide a lot more customized guidance for how to use our products. Okay, so just in terms of the size of what we do, like our academy is actually quite big. I can't share all the actual raw numbers for everything, but just know that our enrollments and certificates completed are in the hundreds of thousands every year. And we create a lot of content, Just in, this is 2025 data. Just in 2025, we created 214 videos and we saw a almost 200% increase in enrollments to our courses from customers. This kind of shows you like what that growth trajectory looked like. So in Q1, 2025, like I again, like remove the actual numbers from here, but this bar chart just shows how many paid customers were completing courses on our platform. We were down here, and then we had an average NPS for our courses of 59. And implementing the changes that I'll talk about in the rest of this presentation, this is the growth that we saw. And I think the metric that I care most about, honestly, we were able to move our NPS from 59 to 72. So the completion of certificates, there are many things that could drive an increase in conversion rate for courses or a landing page. It could also be, you just made the courses a lot shorter, or you made the quizzes a lot easier. So completion of courses alone is not a good enough metric to show me and the team that we're doing a good job from a content quality standpoint. That's why I love pairing that number with the NPS number that really shows that our customers increasingly are recommending our courses to their peers and they find a lot of value in them.

[00:15:20] Speaker 1: I was just gonna jump in, because we do have a question of what is NPS?

[00:15:24] Speaker 2: Ah, NPS is Net Promoter Score. That's a great question, Levin, sorry. I really try not to do acronym soup in my slides, and so I failed you all. I promise not to do that again, or will try not to.

[00:15:35] Speaker 1: You're doing amazing. Now we're gonna talk about KPIs.

[00:15:39] Speaker 2: Yeah, exactly, exactly. Oh my goodness, marketing is just acronym soup. It's really hard to get away from it. Okay, so what led to this growth? What were the changes that we made in our approach to course creation that really helped us improve the quality of our educational content. So I'll outline three things that we were doing before 2025, or like issues that we had, and then how, and then things that we changed or fixed. So the first, and this is gonna sound very basic, but honestly, the more like marketers I engage with and talk to, and honestly, I've worked for enough companies to know that this is usually a persistent problem in marketing, and it's the most basic thing, which is who are you building content for? We were building content for basically all marketers, and you could see this still in the navigation of SEMrush Academy, that we had a lot of different categories of courses. We were trying to do both beginner and intermediate and advanced. It was a lot, and so what that led to was a course offering that didn't feel relevant to the learner, because people just went to our site and really struggled to find content that matched both their interest in what they were looking for, but also the level of expertise. The second sort of challenge that we had is that we had very, very inconsistent guidelines and structure for our courses. I put in here two screenshots of courses that were developed prior to 2025, and you'll see here we have advanced content marketing with Brian Dean, it's 21 lessons and it's four hours long. And then you had a social media marketing crash course that was seven lessons and one hour long. And if you go into each of those courses, you'll notice that the way the videos are recorded were very different, the way that everything looks is very different, the writing is very different. And so there's no problem with variety, by the way, like that's not an issue. It just makes it very, very difficult to scale because we couldn't just like say, this is a really successful content format and now let's figure out how to provide that in more topics, in a more personalized way to more people. It felt like every single time we were creating a new course, we were starting completely from scratch, like with fresh ingredients, like completely blank slate. And so it made our process like quite slow and a little bit frustrating. The other place where we were prior to 2025 is that we had almost 100% reliance on experts for content creation. And by experts, I mean external folks. It was great to work with them. These are some of the best folks in our industry, and actually we still work with them, but we've changed the way that we work with experts. In the past, we basically had them write the courses completely from scratch, and that just created a lot of bottlenecks, because it turns out that some of the best experts, meaning the people that are actually doing the work day in, day out, and know a lot about SEO or marketing are also really busy people. And so asking them to create a full course from scratch was exciting for them and exciting for us too, but also made the process very cumbersome, cumbersome at times. Okay, so what did we change? So the first thing that we did is that we completely clarified who our learners are and what our KPIs are. So my team initially used to sit in the marketing organization and we were before 2025 very focused on building content that would drive organic search traffic into SEMrush Academy. My team moved into customer success and we became very aligned with our customer. So our goal right now with SEMrush Academy is very clear, it's to help our customers be successful. That's why I shared the mission in the beginning, we really anchor on that mission and we're very focused on within our our customer segment really focused on two types of customers, in-house marketers that are practitioners using our product, and then agencies and consultants that are using our product to serve other customers or other clients. Our KPIs are very aligned to retention and expansion, which means that when we are creating courses, we're thinking about who is, like, what do our customers need? And then also, like, what are the moments that where customers are either needing more education in order to be successful with the product or really struggling. Those two things are the same thing actually. So you'll see here that, I mean, if you look at our new roster of courses, you'll see a lot more sort of like getting started courses, onboarding courses, and that is because our learner is much more clear and we are very tied to ensuring that our customers can successfully use our product. Um, the second thing that we did is that we, we like spent invested a lot of time in developing core content types, and then building out a sort of structure around their educational content. So I mentioned before that sort of courses were being built different lengths different structures like everything was built from scratch like now we have editorial guidelines that are very make it like very clear increasingly clear because editorial guidelines are like a living document like we're not perfect. Like we're much better than where we were, but we're always improving the way that we build our courses to make it easier for us to do it and deliver consistently like great content to our customers. And so we sort of aligned to what many educational professionals use, a system of like basically three layers. So yeah, so we developed like very core content types. And these are very common actually when you talk to a lot of folks at managed academies or universities. we have courses that are made up of lessons and then learning paths that are made up of courses. And so we have very clear guidelines for what a learning path is versus a course, versus a lesson. And like, this has made it a lot easier for our team and also like external freelancers and experts that we work with to develop content for us. And then the third piece is like, I mean, it's amazing how important operations are to any content team, but processes and documentation are huge. And like we have very like much better and more streamlined ways that we create our courses, which include backwards design, which basically I'll talk about in a second. We have syllabus templates and different types of lessons that we use as opposed to creating everything from scratch. Okay, so a quick note, and you'll see this if you go to SEMrush Academy, we already put up our disclaimer, like SEMrush Academy is gonna look very different shortly. So a lot of the things that, like the structure of the things that I'm talking about is still very relevant, but we're making a lot of changes to what our content looks like to align to a lot of the strategy that I just like discussed. So just as an FYI. Okay, so these are quick wins, like things that are, I think, really important. The first is like to really, when you're creating educational content, to really start with objectives. And as I talked about, like objectives are twofold. there's the objective of the company. Like we want to make sure that our customers are successful so that they stick around. Like we don't want them to leave. So that's like an internal objective. But the objective of the customer is usually a learning objective that they have. Like, so we spend quite a lot of time early on in the course creation process, defining what our objectives are for the course. Oftentimes we start defining the objectives and realize actually this is not a course, this is a KB article. Or actually, this needs to be a learning path. There's too many learning objectives. This is not one singular course. So going through that exercise is really important. So here, I share some examples of sharing settings is not an objective. Watch the sharing walkthrough is not an objective. It's something like choose the right access level for each person the file is shared with. If you use Google Drive as an example, this is a much better, stronger objective that you can use to develop educational content. Right, like layered right underneath objectives are knowledge and skills. So for every single objective, we identify like what is the, what are the information, the concept, the terminology that a learner needs to know. And then conversely, what learners need to be able to do within the platform or the skills that they need to have in order to be successful. As we define knowledge and skills, it's important to keep in mind that you might be building a course for a learner or a video for a learner that is way more advanced and already knows a lot of this stuff and so you need to adjust the knowledge and skills to the person or the actual target learner, the person that is going to be engaging with this content. I'm going to share an example from one of our courses, And this is sort of how we think about basically creating syllabi. We have templates that we use. And I mentioned we really start with target learners. So for example, this is a getting started for agencies course. So we're specifically targeting agency professionals. This isn't just an operational thing that has been helpful, which is to make sure that all the copy that we have in the landing page. And by the landing page, I mean this. This is SEMrush Academy. And if you go into like all courses here, so getting started with SEMrush for Agencies, this is like the landing page copy. And we have that as part of our syllabus. So later when we are like, you know, implementing this page and like making sure that it goes live, like the documentation is also then aligned with what is on the website. It sounds really silly and stupid, but it really saves a lot of time. So this is just more of that, like what you will learn, the curriculum team. So all of our courses are built, we have like several people involved. We have a writer, we have also SMEs, and the SMEs are typically a mix of internal SMEs, like people who know the SEMrush product really, really well and we have marketing SMEs that are either myself, other people in the team, or we also work with customers that sit in our customer community and help us review our content and provide feedback. And then we have post-production and graphic design. Okay, so this is what I had mentioned earlier about developing learning objectives. So I don't know, have any of you heard of Bloom's Taxonomy? Raise your hand if you have. Yeah, Vijay, I hope I pronounced your name well. I'll send it, I can definitely send this as a template. So yes, so some of you have. So we use Bloom's Taxonomy, which is basically this table of action verbs to define what it is that we want our learners to be able to do after completing this course. And this is always, after we fill out the top piece of this, which is our target learner, very important, and an overview of what we want the course to do, the next step is always to develop these learning objectives, and we develop them by using Bloom's Taxonomy. Like, we focus on using those verbs. I find that very helpful actually.

[00:27:15] Speaker 1: It's one of the things about learning. Yes, I was gonna say the same.

[00:27:17] Speaker 2: Yeah, it's very helpful. And then after we develop the course objectives and we think about what's the knowledge and what are the skills that for each of these objectives our learners would need to have in order to successfully complete that objective. And so this is probably where we spent the majority of the planning and the strategy time. And it's because really the success of the course is determined by these objectives. So when we go to the next step, which is defining an outline, and going through what is this course actually gonna look like, we review it as a group, like the curriculum team that is building the course, we review all of this, and whether or not we go through with the outline and it's approved goes back to whether these learning objectives are being fulfilled, yes or no. So it's really like the most important part, in my opinion, of this entire process. Okay, so that's step number one. The second thing that I find very, very helpful is that I mentioned earlier that in the past, like, we just built courses. It felt like every course had its own, it was its own plan. And so what we've done is that we've defined very specific types of lessons that we build consistently in all of our courses. And so these are some of the lessons here, like in our editorial guidelines, we have very specific guidelines for each of these lessons as well as like details of how they're created. So actually each of these lessons has a completely different process, including like a different tool for recording the video, if there's a video involved, a different way to write it and different stakeholders reviewing. Obviously, like, you know, a strategy like lesson that is defining an evergreen marketing concept does not have to be reviewed by a SEMrush expert versus like a SEMrush walkthrough, yes. So the other thing you'll notice here is that we have two different types of walkthroughs. First of all, note that walkthroughs live in a separate lesson. I find that to be very important because if you are in the business of creating product walkthroughs or product content, you are in the world of pain of having to constantly update the content. And so if you create videos that have studio quality components to them and are sort of cutting back and forth into the product, you end up in a world where you have to constantly update those videos and it can get very costly and very complicated. And so we actually have different budgets for different types of lessons. So we spend, these are more expensive to develop, and I'll show you some examples in a second, like these evergreen strategy sessions are almost like a branded element of all of our courses, versus like we keep the budget quite low for the walkthroughs, as low as we possibly can, because we know that we're gonna have to replace them.

[00:30:19] Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean, oh, if I, just to jump in, I mean, at Riverside, when we're recording tutorials, we have a studio in our office, And I mean, it's not like a crazy studio by any means. We just have a light and a camera and I built this bookshelf from Ikea. But it means that when those things change, I just hop on Riverside, share my screen, show the tutorial, and then we have new content out there. So yeah, the walkthroughs, while they're upkeep, when things change, I agree, when you set it so that it's like, okay, here's the room that I record and I'm using Riverside to record it to share my screen, then it becomes really easy to update that kind of content.

[00:30:59] Speaker 2: Exactly. Exactly. And because we create so many product walkthroughs, it's so central to our goal in SEMrush Academy. We have two types, mainly. So we have certain types of product walkthroughs that require or we believe we need an editorialized voice because it's not something navigational. requires an explanation of why you chose certain keywords to go into your keyword list or why is it that these like errors on your website are so critical to fix immediately. So you want like an expert to be like talking through those things and then you have other product walkthroughs that are purely navigational that people just want to know like how the hell do I add a keyword to a list. I don't want to know why I add the keyword or necessarily what keywords should be in there, just how to do it. And so splitting those allows us to, again, it's all a matter of like operations and efficiency and budget. It's, you know, we spend less money on navigational ones and those we create very quickly versus like the editorialized like walkthrough S is a bit, like we spend a little bit more on post-production. And then finally, like experts, like we are really focused on featuring experts in our courses and a lot like we actually record all of those both like Walkthrough S and Experts in Riverside and that's really sped up our process like in the past we would do a lot of like in-studio recordings with experts and now it's just so easy for us to send a link and have an expert join the studio and we do a sort of long-form interview with an expert that we then cut into smaller segments that we include in our courses but also offer to other channels like our YouTube channel or like social if they wanted to use it. So um yeah like defining the the types of lessons and then in addition to to defining those like just knowing that the the process and the resources required for developing each are going to be different and then outlining those very clearly is like important for for like scaling, and scaling and maintaining quality standards of the content. I was going to share, we have some time, I was going to share what some of these look like. So here, here's just some examples, like this is the Getting Started for Agencies course that that I shared a piece of like our syllabus. So this is an example of a strategy video.

[00:33:38] Speaker 3: Welcome to SEMrush. Let's take a really...

[00:33:42] Speaker 2: Sorry, no, this is navigational S. So you see that this is the voice of one of our experts. Her name is Mariah, and she is like basically walking through the software.

[00:33:52] Speaker 4: So we know where everything is, so.

[00:33:55] Speaker 2: Okay, so she's editorializing that. And that was a decision that we made as a team of like, we want the SEMrush platform walkthrough to be editorialized. We felt that that human voice was important. Um, to see like, which one is not. So this, that would be like walkthrough S that's by the way, recorded in Riverside. If we're an agency or this is walkthrough N.

[00:34:16] Speaker 5: So this is like, like managing SEO across multiple clients or markets folders, help us keep everything organized.

[00:34:24] Speaker 2: Okay. So it's like an AI generated voice. It's like super easy for us to update and like change. And then, let's see, this is, this is, I think this is a strategy video. Your client's websites have problems they don't know about yet.

[00:34:45] Speaker 3: Broken links, missing tags, pages search engines can't crawl.

[00:34:50] Speaker 2: Okay, that's really weird to look at myself. I hate looking at myself, so I hate it.

[00:34:54] Speaker 1: So I'm gonna stop when I see people in the office play play videos that I'm in well Sometimes I'll be like, what are you watching? But sometimes I'm like get it off. I'm like claw my face out

[00:35:05] Speaker 2: But yeah, so anyway So you can imagine just from this example of these types of like less video lessons like it's very different process to to create Those and so like outlining that having it be super clear and documented has really helped us And then I think the last tip I have here has to do with humans versus AI. I think probably everyone in this call is trying to figure out how do we best use AI to speed up our processes, to improve quality, for sure. We are doing the same at SEMrush, trying to figure that out. Right now, it's like a hybrid process. our syllabus creation is mostly human, like we really sit down and think through like who is our customer, we talk about it, that's the most important part, we really sit down for every syllabus and talk about it. What learning objectives should be there, what should be removed, like what should be a KB, like so that we spend a lot, we spend probably most time there at this point. And then we use AI. And so, in order, and this is what we have found, and I'm sure it's the same for most people in this call, it's like, especially for courses that are, where you're trying to explain your product, if you want to use AI, you need a one source of truth about how your product works. So this is where, like, having the knowledge base within our broader team has been very helpful. For us, that is the knowledge base and so we try to invest a lot in making sure that the knowledge base is really really accurate because if the knowledge base is accurate that basically makes like script writing for our courses a lot faster. Sometimes like there are like if we're doing a SEMrush like walkthrough S where there's like editorializing like some of the people that do more editorialized walkthroughs they don't they're not using like a play-by-play script but we still will provide them with bullet points like these are the things that we want you to hit on when you're like walking through the product and AI can do that for us and like send briefs and do all of that work but like again like the KB being up to date and the blog too for like strategy uh content is super important and then everything is reviewed by a human so it's sort of like human clawed human um like we have I mentioned we have different types of SMEs and so different types of like lessons are reviewed by different stakeholders. I wanted to end in this topic of humans and AI. I think the other thing that we are very, very focused on that I think has made SEMrush Academy so successful is that ultimately we genuinely really care about the people that are using our product and that are participating in with our educational content. So we have, like if you go to the SEMrush Academy homepage, I'll share this now, at the very bottom we have our email, like this is our team's email address. Like we all, everyone in the team has access to that email and so we respond to 100% of emails that come into that address and there's incredible variety of like questions from customers that come in to that email address. But I think the team, we all have quite a service mentality around what we do. We're there to serve our customers, and that's one way that we do that, just making ourselves very available via email. All of our courses have a feedback form, every single one, and we are very, very, very, I mentioned the Net Promoter Score is a very core KPI. That's how we calculate it through those feedback forms. We read the feedback every single month as a team. We act on the feedback. We reach out to people who send feedback that we're like, oh, that's interesting, why? We follow up. So we're very focused on ensuring that we hear from customers that are engaging with our content. And then for people who actually share certificates online, both myself, but also the SEMrush team, we reply to 100% of certificate shares. And SEMrush will do that, like the SEMrush ORM team, like the Online Reputation Management team will do that. And I think that that's a standout thing. I think there's a personal value of mine, I think in this world of AI, talking to a human being or feeling like there's an actual human on the other side of this that is like trying to do a good job in like helping others, I think that really is worth something. And it's a reason why we keep investing in videos with like human faces on them, like experts, like SEMrush community members, customers, because ultimately I think that that's what a lot of us are craving, just like advice and like honest opinions and guidance from other humans doing similar work. I mean, similar to what you do, Kendall at Riverside Communities, it's in some ways like, this is why we also have the community team within the broader like education team, and that's how this sort of two functions kind of come together. And then finally, I mean, this is not the case right now, but we have a goal for next year and ongoing that we have community voices in all of our courses, that we feature our customers, that we talk to more people, even if the videos are not super high production, even if it's not even videos, but just quotes, just bringing more humanity into our curriculum and more real examples from practitioners is a really important goal for us. And I think something that will set STEMrush Academy apart from other places where you can learn about AI search, SEO, and marketing.

[00:40:54] Speaker 1: Absolutely, really, as you keep talking about community and having your customer's voice so ingrained in your product and your education, I very much relate to that. That's how we operate here at Riverside, too, because I think that that's how you make the most impactful learning paths and programs, is by being really connected. And also, how you really create community, especially in this day and age, to have real human connections online when you're sharing, having all of that is, yeah, agreed, so important.

[00:41:23] Speaker 2: Yeah, very important. I ended with this, like, I feel like it sounds very corny now, but staying curious and flexible. I mean, I feel like I just presented what my team does, and it makes it sound like, oh, my God, this people have it, like, super together. I just want to reassure everyone that we absolutely do not. And there's, we have processes. We've got, we have better, like, editorial guidelines. the team has worked so hard to really build a really solid foundation from which to really scale really high quality educational content. But there is fire drills all the time and changes in priorities. And sometimes you just have to throw the entire process out the window and be like, we need to create this video by tomorrow. And so there's no sitting down and thinking through learning objectives. It's just doing. But I think that's part of the job for any of you that work in marketing or are creator. I think most jobs these days are like that. And so we also try to focus on having really solid foundations and processes, but staying very flexible. Because there's honestly, there's no other way to survive.

[00:42:28] Speaker 1: Absolutely, yeah, relatable.

[00:42:31] Speaker 2: Yeah.

[00:42:31] Speaker 1: Awesome.

[00:42:32] Speaker 2: Okay, that's it, that's all I have.

[00:42:34] Speaker 1: Yeah, well, we have a few questions in the chat. First of all, thank you. This was really, it was really interesting to see your process. And I know, I mean, at least for my team, I already have a ton of things that I wanna take away and report back to our team. But let's go through a few of these questions. First is not a question, it's just Michael from the chat, and I thought this was really interesting, saying, as a college professor, when I write my syllabi for my courses, I write them and use Claude to help me streamline them so that I make my thoughts more concise and correct for errors in grading. I just wanted to point that out because I think that there's such a conversation about AI and keeping things human, but you can also just really use it to really check your own human processes, but not have it be something that takes the driver's seat.

[00:43:22] Speaker 2: Totally, yeah, I think we would do that more. Our syllabi are actually internal-facing documents. We never publish them anywhere. And so there's less of a need to have them be absolutely perfect. So I think that's why we don't use it at that stage. But for sure, I think that we've experimented with having AI also draft up like syllabi. Say we want to create a course for this, like with this is the template, like add learning objectives and you know, it does a pretty good job. Like then you have a starting point. So I think it's so debatable where you insert AI. Like I feel like it's my personal preference, maybe because I'm a millennial, I don't know, that I like to be the person to put pen to paper first and then have AI help me. But I think if you are someone who definitely has a preference for editing over writing, I think that starting with AI and then editing that is probably a better process.

[00:44:19] Speaker 1: Yeah, or even if you're recording and then want to use different AI to create those edits for you. It depends on what part of the process you feel comfortable being able to have that step in. And just because you have that step in does not mean that you lose the humanity of it. Because, for example, with Riverside, if you're using some of these AI editing tools that you're still reviewing it every step of the way.

[00:44:44] Speaker 2: Yeah, I would say that probably the most important part, whether AI creates a syllabus or you create it, for me the most important part is that meeting. Not to add more meetings to people's calendars, but it's that point in time where the people that are gonna write the curriculum sit down to think about whether these are the right objectives for this course. Absolutely. Because that's just a way to get everyone on the same page. Otherwise, I think that there could be a lot of confusion about what it is that we're actually trying to do with these walkthroughs or with the strategy lessons. And Semrush being so complex with like, it's a very robust product with many, many different things that we can like demo and show in a course. Like that's what really helps us streamline and try to be more concise for people in each course, yeah.

[00:45:33] Speaker 1: Our next question is Isabelle saying, how do you keep branding consistency with experts recording at their own environment and background in Riverside?

[00:45:46] Speaker 2: We actually don't care. We don't, I would say. In the past, we were much more intense about that, of keeping consistency with experts and ultimately the feedback from customers was like, we don't care. customers want is the information and the knowledge. And so we've really loosened up our guidelines and it's made us, it's helped us really like, you know, I think elevate the quality of the content, feature more voices in our content, and also move a lot faster. So yeah. We also,

[00:46:22] Speaker 1: well, Andy had written, I just wanted to make sure that you see this. I saw that, Andy, thank you. Actually, you just said, Rush, I like the training videos. Go, Andy. Thank you, Andy. And OK, so Jeff had also asked, how do you keep track of all of the courses you have? What needs updating, and what level of effort they require?

[00:46:45] Speaker 2: Yeah, that's a great question, and it's certainly a work in progress. We have a, like, the team keeps a live content database. And we have, like, numbers for every single course, and also lessons that are part of each course. And so those are all included in our database. And so the database has links to every single script, links to the actual video files, all of this stuff. And we are in the process of figuring out how to best use AI to identify what needs to be updated when things change in the product. I would say we're definitely way down that path. And there's a lot of people in the team and just across the company that are working on that problem. It's just not an easy problem to solve. But for sure, we felt that the first step was document very clear inventory of what we have and what the scripts are that's somewhere that an AI could easily access and eventually tell us when things change, like, these are the videos that need to be changed, or these are the lessons that need to be changed, and facilitate that. But man, it's probably the messiest problem in like customer education.

[00:47:58] Speaker 1: Oh, for sure. And then even if it doesn't identify that video needs to be changed, then maybe you showed it for a second, another video, and then the UI changed there.

[00:48:07] Speaker 2: That's it.

[00:48:08] Speaker 1: Yes.

[00:48:09] Speaker 2: Yeah, that's it. And there's so many different types of changes. Like, you know, you could change, you could like have a very small change in a product that suddenly breaks a workflow completely. And like, it's really hard for AI to necessarily detect that right now. So anyway, yeah, it's a hairy problem, but I'm hopeful. Like if AI does something for us in this field, I hope it's that.

[00:48:35] Speaker 1: Yeah, with that, I just wanna say, Rita, thank you so much for really taking us behind the scenes of your process. It's really impressive and just really cool to see what other teams are doing, especially as I myself was creating some educational content, even just before we got on this call.

[00:48:53] Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, I'm happy to be here and thank you for the invitation. Yeah, of course. You can connect with me, anyone on LinkedIn, if you, like, want to learn more about what SEMrush Academy is up to or just, like, trade notes on anything related to content and education.

[00:49:07] Speaker 1: Perfect. Well, with that, thank you to everyone who tuned in live, everyone who's watching the replay. You'll all get the replay very soon if you're watching live, and I'm really excited to see what you create. tag me, tag Rita, tag us in your educational content when you're putting it out, because I would really love to see what you're creating from this and see where this all took you. Awesome, well have a great rest of your day, and see you later, everyone.

[00:49:38] Speaker 2: Bye, everyone.

[00:49:39] Speaker 1: Bye.