SaaS Case Study: Increase in 328% organic traffic and 9% trial sign ups

In this case study, we’re going to show you how we took a client of ours in the SaaS space and increased their organic traffic by 328% and their overall trial sign up rate by 9% in the first six months.

Over 50% of their business comes from organic search and they are now outranking major brands in their industry. This company is a customer support SaaS application used by e-commerce and other SaaS companies for managing their support tickets and customer support conversations.

This SaaS client approached us with the initial goal of revamping their current content. The company already has two in-house writers that produce most of its content, but most of the content wasn’t ranking and wasn’t getting read. They wanted a better approach to content marketing so they reached out to us.

Starting off with a content/SEO audit

We always start the process off with a full audit so that we have data to work with.

They’ve been publishing blog posts for a while. We’re talking about approximately 800+ actual pages and over 4,500 that Google had picked up for various reasons.

The first thing we had to do was clean up the mess because going into each individual blog post and updating them would take too long to see results.

We had to clean this up for a few reasons:

• Google was being fed thousands of pages with either duplicate content or nothing at all on it. This is a massive resource-suck for them and they don’t like it.
• Old pages that had not been optimized for conversions and that had outdated information on them were outranking some of our most important pages.
• Going through each individual post and updating it would be too time-consuming.

As apart of the content audit process, we took a deep look at the pages and posts that were performing well. We figured out which pages drove the most traffic and leads.

Everything that wasn’t adding value was deleted and redirected to a better, more relevant page or to the homepage.

Improving site speed

While their app was great and quick, their blog was loading really slow. Our site speed audit gave them a score of 51/100 for mobile and 65/100 for desktop.

This meant that potential customers that land on their blog might leave due to the fact that some pages just weren’t loading quick enough. It’s also a major ranking factor for Google.

To fix this, we did the following:

• Replaced WordPress plugins with faster alternatives
• Started leveraging browser caching and a CDN
• Removed unnecessary redirects
• Optimized image sizes throughout the site (56% reduction)

After we implemented that, their blog was loading at approx. 2 seconds.

Content Revamping/Updating

Content creation and marketing is our bread and butter and it’s what we do best. Their in-house writers published a lot of low-quality content. Most of them were short form, short guides, and non SEO-friendly.

We had a lot of work to do in order to update all the posts.

Our approach was to:

• Take all the low word count blog post and update them.
• Merge articles together to create longer-form content.
• Implement a whole new list of targeted keywords and long-tail keywords.
• Update all “old” content with the latest research links, prices, stats, and more.
• Add more unique content based on the keyword research findings.

One of the best ways to rank better on Google is look at the top 10 results for the desired keywords and reverse engineer what they already like to see.

That’s exactly what we did.

Both for the homepage and the key services pages, we gave our clients’ copywriting team all the resources they needed to start cranking out content that ranks:

• Target word counts
• List of keywords and topics to include and their frequency
• On-page criteria (e.g. number of headings, images to use)

Most of the pages on the site were missing a meta description and this was clearly affecting click-through rates and thus rankings as well. Even some pages in first position were only getting 10-15% of the total clicks.

To attract more potential leads, we had our team rewrite attractive meta descriptions.

Not a single image on the entire site had alt text configured. We manually went through each image to fix this to improve Google image SEO.

By the end of our third month, organic traffic was up over 87% and trial sign ups increased.

The client is still with us today and we continue to produce unique high-quality content for them and write on-going ebooks, guides, and manage their entire onboarding funnel email copies.

Does your company already have a lot of content, but it’s not attracting any new visitors? Or maybe you’re looking for an entire done-for-you content marketing solution? Reach out to us and we’ll take good care of you!