For nearly 10 years, Nate Turner held various marketing roles, eventually rising to the level of VP of Marketing, at Sprout Social. Content marketing and SEO was a big part of the growth playbook during his time there––a time that also included the company going public.
Now, Turner runs his own agency, called Ten Speed, where he aims to help other companies achieve similar growth via content and SEO.
Recently, we had the opportunity to learn how Ten Speed used SEO to help a client increase their monthly organic traffic by 313% and free trial signups by 2x.
When the aforementioned client first came to Nate and the Ten Speed team, the client was a smaller SaaS company that had been growing 15% year over year. But paid ads were getting more expensive, and their Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) was getting steadily higher. (Sound familiar?)
In an effort to find less expensive options they started testing a variety of new marketing channels. But of all the channels they tested, only content marketing showed real promise for providing sustainable, repeatable growth.
Over the next 2 years, Ten Speed implemented a comprehensive strategy to provide growth in traffic, signups, and media consumption.
Updating existing content
At that point, the client had some organic search volume already so the first thing Ten Speed focused on was updating their existing content.
This included consolidating, pruning, or deleting content in order to freshen it up. Many marketers completely overlook this step or severely underestimate its impact. But the data shows, your content needs updating.
Sometimes, content has simply gotten outdated and needs a refresh. In some cases, search intent for that keyword has changed, and your content needs to change with it. Or maybe you’ve since published new content around the same topic, that’s conflicting with your older articles covering the same topic.
To illustrate how important this step can be, Nate told me that when he was at Sprout Social, their #1 revenue-generating post eventually needed to be refreshed every other month. If it wasn’t, they’d lose roughly 75k visits/mo.
"Generally, I think content decay is either completely overlooked, or in some cases underestimated... the amount of impact that has to overall growth. Sometimes it's the intent behind the search shifting a little bit, so that could be a full re-write or re-wording to fit that intent. It could be that it's dated: the sources you've cited are a bit dated. It could be completely self-inflicted, that you've since written something similar and now the search engine doesn't quite what you're trying to accomplish."
Slowly adding new content
Next, Ten Speed focused on splitting its time (about 50/50) between updating the remaining content and publishing new content.
They started with the low-hanging fruit: bottom-of-funnel content, optimized for keywords more closely related to what the product was or could do. After that, they moved to middle-of-funnel of content.
This allowed them to focus on improving the rest of the remaining content, while still getting new content crawled and indexed that had the best chance of driving signups.
Improving CTAs to improve conversion rate
After that, Ten Speed's focus was on improving the calls to action (CTAs) across all the content. Their approach here was simple:
They identified the top 25 posts driving the most traffic and added a simple text CTA to start a free trial at the beginning of the content.
This simple step drove some of the biggest impact they saw. Prior to this, the only CTAs were visual ones at the bottom of each post. This small, simple change drove significant results in signups and conversion from the blog.
After that, they played with more advanced things, like the creative and copy in an attempt to further optimize them. But nothing came close to the value of simply adding a sentence, contextually in the beginning of the article, inviting readers to try the product.
"You're just modifying the CTA based on what the offer is, essentially, to make sure it's contextually relevant to where someone is at in their journey, based on what they're reading.
Placement definitely matters. Especially when you think about longer-form content, like 2000 words in a post. There's definitely a lot of opportunities to have some pretty subtle calls to things in there. And ideally it's a mixture. Part way down, "hey, go check out this podcast episode related to this topic". And then a little bit further, maybe a free trial, or demo request, or sign up."
Fixing a loss in traffic, after a new website launch
At some point in the campaign, the Client launched a brand-new website. Unfortunately, this resulted in a 20% drop in traffic. So Nate crawled the site, and addressed all technical issues they found, one by one.
Most of the culprits were updates that unexpectedly changed the site’s “crawlability” and indexation.
In other words, when you launch a brand new site, you might be making it instantly easier for your human readers to navigate. But it might be a bit of a learning curve for the bots that crawl and index it.
Things like new site structure, menus, or layouts can impact how it can be crawled. Other common issues are the way the site is coded: loading bloated javascript, or unnecessary font files. Or maybe where before you had “infinite scroll” of all blog posts, you now have them paginated. Besides this, you can get into trouble with redirects and internal linking changes.
All this to say: launching a new site, even on the same platform, is a big deal. Nate recommends having someone crawl it before, and after, to have records of all the technical changes in case something does go wrong.
The good news is, he was able to reverse the traffic loss and get them back on track.
Doubling content output
Finally, the team doubled content output and started building high-value links to it.
Previously, the Client was publishing 4 articles per month. So Nate and the Ten Speed team helped them up that to 8 pieces of new content each month.
On top of that, they focused heavily on building links to the site.
The results
They implemented these 5 steps over the course of 2 years. By the end of that time, they increased:
- Monthly traffic by 313%
- Monthly trial sign-ups by 2x
- Video & podcast consumption by 4x (by driving more traffic to these Resources on the blog)
- LinkedIn followers by 2x
