When demand for digital collaboration tools spiked in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, the companies who made these tools scrambled to ensure they were capturing their piece of the pie.

The competition was especially fierce for organic search traffic, as corporations searched frantically to assemble a suite of tools to facilitate the move to remote work, and the companies that provided these tools felt the need to strike while the proverbial iron was hot.

One such company that offers apps for sprint planning and product roadmaps turned to Growth Machine to help increase their traffic, conversions, and brand recognition, and capitalize on the increased demand to attract more enterprise customers.

The brand had an established blog before partnering with Growth Machine, but a lack of an SEO strategy stagnated its inbound traffic at just 800-850 sessions per week (approximately 3,200-3,400 organic sessions per month). 

Growth Machine increased this business’s organic traffic by more than 600%, turning the brand’s blog into one of its top sales tools. Here’s how we did it.

The Business Problem: A Struggle to Increase Organic Traffic Without In-House SEO

Before working with Growth Machine, this collaboration-focused tech brand’s blog averaged just ~825 organic sessions per week. Company leaders came to Growth Machine to find a way to ramp up organic traffic and capture their share of the sudden influx of interest in their industry.  

In addition to boosting organic traffic, the brand’s second goal was to position itself as an easy solution for enterprise teams amid the COVID-19 pandemic through blog content.

With these goals in mind, and the additional support of the client helping us identify potential content needs within the high-tech space it operates, we developed a deliberate SEO strategy to reach the brand’s goals. 

The Strategy: Start With Volume and Work Toward Conversion

In the competitive tech space, there’s a high value placed upon online visibility, so our first goal was to increase rankings to help bring in more organic traffic. The right combination of targeted keywords and great content helped this brand compete for top real estate on page 1 of the search engine results page (SERP), increasing its rankings and organic traffic. Strategic keyword research was a significant portion of our strategy. 

However, rankings and traffic can’t be the only marketing goals of a for-profit organization. With conversion and revenue top of mind, we focused roughly a quarter of the keyword strategy on lower-volume, long-tail keywords that spoke directly to customer pain points and had a higher likelihood of conversion.

The secondary goal was to establish the company as a trusted and easy solution for enterprises. With dozens of competitors offering similar solutions, the brand needed to leave their mark and show their value in each customer touchpoint. 

Our action plan to achieve these goals was: 

The Keywords: Follow the Funnel

Since driving organic traffic and top-of-funnel customers to the site was the client’s main focus, our strategy was rooted in finding high-volume keywords with moderately low keyword difficulty. This was exactly what the blog needed to increase its organic traffic quickly. 

Our team went to work scouring competitors’ websites to understand the content trends in this complex industry and performing gap analyses — finding unserved or underserved content topics consumers are searching for — on these sites. Given that our client was starting out behind high-momentum competitors, we had to be extremely creative and thorough with our keyword research, finding keywords in unusual forums, like the marketplaces where the company sold its apps.

Building organic traffic is only the first step. Once the blog began to gain momentum and we saw consistent growth in important SEO KPIs, we pivoted our content strategy toward ultra-targeted, lower-volume, long-tail keywords with greater conversion intent, since these were indicative of readers further into the funnel.

Cultivating Authority: Building Trust to Win Enterprise Clients

Beyond winning on the SERP and converting organic traffic to revenue, the brand wanted to win the trust of enterprise clients seeking a remote collaboration solution. 

To help satisfy this second goal we turned our content focus to guides that were two to three times the normal blog post length. These more informative resources established the brand as experts in their industry by sharing high-level, generalized information on a topic, coupled with specific use cases, how-tos, mistakes to avoid, and other deep insights based on the client's hands-on experience with the tools they were providing resources on. 

Not only did these guides serve customers in a tangible way, they also ranked for hundreds of related keywords that furthered the brand's goals of growing their organic rankings and driving organic traffic.

The Results: Weekly Organic Sessions Grew More Than 600% in 11 Months

Our content and SEO strategy saw near-immediate success. In December 2020, Growth Machine began publishing eight posts per month to the client’s blog. By January, we began reaching new all-time traffic highs week after week. 

In less than two months, organic traffic to the blog doubled. Four months after that, traffic doubled again. By November 2021 — 11 months after we launched our SEO strategy — organic sessions to the brand’s blog reached an all-time high of 5,483 weekly sessions, up nearly 600% from the average 825 weekly sessions they brought in November of the prior year.

In order to further support the brand's goal to increase their authority in the saturated tech space, we added a linkbuilding strategy to their content program that targeted 10 white-hat backlinks per month from relevant, reputable sites in their category. The result of our linkbuilding effort was an increase in the brand's domain authority (DA) score of six points, which allowed them to compete for keywords at or above a higher difficulty threshold. 

By the end of the first 11 months, we helped the brand grow their organic keyword rankings from 55 to 743 keywords on page 1. Of these page 1 keywords, 123 reached the coveted top three spots in the SERPs, positioning their brand as an industry leader on hundreds of relevant topics in their space.

How Would 6x Organic Traffic Change Your Business?

Our strategic approach to keyword research and organization, starting with high-volume keywords to quickly drive qualified traffic, followed by lower-volume, long-tail, conversion-focused keywords, coupled with long-form customer guides to establish brand authority, brought our client immediate and consistent growth.

Our tailored approach to content marketing brought qualified customers into our client’s sales funnel, and transformed the blog into a valuable sales and education tool, boosting readership and revenue.

If you’re ready to see how Growth Machine can customize a content strategy for your business and increase your inbound organic search traffic and revenue, reach out to us.