In September of 2024, FinTech startup Airbase announced a major acquisition deal with Paylocity, one of the largest HR and Payroll software companies in the Tech world.
During the 9 months prior to this news, I had been working with the Airbase team to grow their SEO program and the results have been quite positive for such a limited time duration.
With the help of Airbase’s amazing marketing team, we reached the following milestones (pre-acquisition).
- Double (or 2X) the number of unique monthly users from Organic Non-Brand
- Increase monthly MQLs from Organic Non-Brand by 40%
- Publish 56 human-written original articles complete with briefs and strategy for bottom-of-funnel targets
- Implement a systematized process to scale and synchronize the SEO content generation program
- Boost SEO performance and MQLs through additional projects and activities such as CRO and SEO testing
Using Ahrefs as an accessible source for 3rd party data, I’ve included the following screenshots:
Overall Traffic Growth
Non-Branded Traffic Growth (vs. Branded Growth)
Organic Keyword Growth (1-3 & 4-10 positions)
How Our Success Was Generated… Getting to “Yes”
Winning the deal to work with Airbase required some convincing.
At the time that my colleague, John Martinez and I opened the discussions, Airbase was under contract with a full-service SEO agency, and we needed to build a case for the department head to give our services a shot while they continued to fulfill their contract with the agency.
Having showcased my Case Study with Tipalti, Airbase was eager to work with us and the department head advocated for budget to allow us to get started while they finished out their contract.
Redirecting Resources to Bottom-of-Funnel
Easily the biggest change we helped Airbase make during the shift from old agency to new services was redirecting their content creation efforts from top-of-funnel to bottom-of-funnel (A.k.a. “BOFU strategy”).
Not only did this strategic shift help re-orient the team’s resources in a meaningful direction, it also won the trust of Airbase’s Director of Content who had some justifiable reservations from her past experiences with SEO programs… specifically because the types of articles that they proposed in the past were not aligned with or interesting to Airbase’s core audience of highly-educated finance professionals. Yikes!
As I helped her to understand more about the type of content I was proposing, and in showcasing the BOFU content strategy, we shook off those old reservations and the Director of Content quickly became excited about the direction we were about to pursue.
Process Implementation & Education
What I love most about working with startups like Airbase is their willingness to adopt the processes that I’ve developed for scaling SEO programs. Of course, these processes require education and communication to execute effectively, so I began building the following processes and integrating/educating Airbase’s team on how to use them.
- The SEO Priority Log (backbone of the program and my spin on what some would call a “content calendar”)
- The SEO Testing Dashboard
- The Keyword TAM
- My content brief templates & processes
- And various ad-hoc processes that we used to address opportunity analysis and prioritization of efforts
Early Success & Execution
Although traffic growth didn’t take off immediately, it didn’t take long for our first articles to begin generating MQLs for Airbase.
The VP of Demand Gen, who had been stressing the need to grow quickly saw these MQLs come through and became the perfect indicators of early success that we needed to maintain focus on retaining and growing the program.
By this time, we had already built the plan.
Now we just needed to work the plan.
Each week, we would review our projects and opportunities with ruthless prioritization so that our efforts wouldn’t be wasted on non-impactful activities.
I provided all of the upfront research, analysis, and brief generation to hand off to the Director of Content, which would then go into Airbase’s publication queue. And we simply rinsed and repeated this until it became clockwork!
Concurrently, the SEO testing program and other optimization activities had already been kicking in, along with our Featured Snippet wins and optimizations.
Over a period of nine months, we created the results listed above.
Acquisition and Future Changes
At the time of this writing, I am not privvy to, nor at liberty to say what changes will come to the Airbase.com domain during and after the acquisition process with Paylocity.
I am, however, extremely pleased with the work that we’ve done and the results that we’ve generated to-date!
Big thanks to the entire Airbase Demand Gen team for working with me and believing in the program every step of the way. I can’t wait to see more exciting growth as Airbase becomes a driving force for Paylocity.
