As the COVID-19 pandemic forced a sudden and widespread shift to remote work, the demand for remote collaboration tools rose dramatically. Companies across industries needed solutions that could keep remote teams connected and productive outside of the office and software providers moved quickly to adapt.
The surge in demand also created a crowded digital landscape, with many organizations turning to organic search as a critical channel to reach businesses needing their support.
One SaaS company offering sprint planning and product roadmap tools partnered with MBE Group to strengthen its visibility during this time of rapid change. Together, we focused on boosting brand awareness, increasing qualified traffic to attract more enterprise customers.
The company had an established blog before partnering with MBE Group, but it lacked an SEO strategy, and inbound traffic stagnated at just 800-850 sessions per week (approximately 3,200-3,400 organic sessions per month).
After partnering with us, their organic traffic increased by more than 600%, turning the brand’s blog into one of its top sales tools. Here’s how we did it.
The Problem: Low Organic Traffic and No In-House SEO
With the brand’s blog only averaging around 825 organic sessions per week, we knew they needed an expertly crafted SEO strategy. But, to provide a customized plan, we had to understand what their ultimate goals were.
Brand Goals
The company’s leaders had two objectives they wanted to achieve:
- Ramp up organic traffic to capture their share of the market
- Position itself as an easy solution for enterprise teams amid the COVID-19 pandemic
The Strategy: Start With Volume and Work Toward Conversion
With the company’s goals in mind, we developed a two-part plan that involved strategic keyword research and trust-building content.
Part 1: Target the Right Keywords
When you create great content around strategic keywords, it leads to better search engine results page (SERP) rankings. That, in turn, provides better online visibility and increased organic traffic.
To drive top-of-funnel customers to the site, we looked for high-volume keywords with moderately low keyword difficulty. This was exactly what the blog needed to increase its organic traffic quickly.
We had to be extremely creative and thorough with our keyword research. To start, we scoured competitors’ websites to understand the content trends of the industry and performed gap analyses. This allowed us to identify unserved or underserved content topics consumers were searching for. We also went looking for keywords in unusual forums, like the marketplaces where the company sold its apps.
But more traffic was just part of their goal. As a for-profit company, conversion and revenue was top of mind. To address that, roughly a quarter of the keyword strategy focused on lower-volume, long-tail keywords that spoke directly to customer pain points and had a higher likelihood of conversion.
Part 2: Cultivate Authority and Build Trust With Enterprise Clients
To meet the company’s second goal, we needed to establish them as a trusted and easy solution for enterprises. With dozens of competitors offering similar remote collaboration apps, the brand needed to leave their mark and show their value in each customer touchpoint.
That led us to create supercharged guides. These guides were two to three times longer than a normal blog post and shared deep insights based on the client’s hands-on experience. Each guide covered high-level, generalized information on a topic then went deeper with specific use cases, how-tos and mistakes to avoid. This value-driven content established the brand as experts in their industry.
Not only did these guides serve customers in a tangible way, they also ranked for hundreds of related keywords, which served the brand’s goal of growing their rankings and driving organic traffic.
In order to further 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 Results: Weekly Organic Sessions Grew More Than 600% in 11 Months
Our content and SEO strategy saw near-immediate success. After one month of publishing, where we added eight posts to the client’s blog, we began reaching new all-time traffic highs week after week.
In less than two months, organic traffic doubled. Within the first six months, traffic had increased by 4x.
Less than a year after launching our SEO strategy — 11 months to be exact — 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 started with.
At this point in the project, the client also saw their organic rankings jump from 55 keywords on page one to 743 keywords on page one. Of these page-one 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.
Plus, our linkbuilding effort increased the brand’s domain authority (DA) score by six points, which allowed them to compete for keywords at or above a higher difficulty threshold.
How Would 6x Organic Traffic Change Your Business?
Our strategic approach to keyword research coupled with long-form customer guides to establish brand authority brought our client immediate and consistent growth.
The tailored 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 MBE Group can customize a content strategy for your business, schedule a chat with our team today.
