[Where Growth = Non-Branded Organic Traffic & SQLs]
Credit for this project goes to my teammates and colleagues who believed in and facilitated this strategy. B2B SEO isn’t a solo sport, and we wouldn’t have achieved this without the collective pull.
At the tail-end of 2019, I took on an SEO role with Tipalti, a budding B2B SaaS company in the San Francisco Bay Area. This was three months before COVID and I was new to the Bay Area, new to SaaS (didn’t know my MQLs from my SQLs.), and I was badly burned from a poorly-executed entrepreneurship venture.
SEO has been my game for the better part of a decade, so that piece wasn’t new. Still, my past roles and companies were like the JV leagues by comparison to Tipalti. This was a serious FinTech company firing on all cylinders. The big leagues.
Despite any past experiences and skills I had accumulated, I still didn’t know if I could actually execute success with a company of Tipalti’s caliber.
Wait, let’s reframe that.
It wasn’t that dramatic (even though I was definitely feeling the pressure)! I also had confidence about the potential to build SEO success at Tipalti.
- I connected very well with my Senior Manager during the recruitment process.
- Tipalti was already on a very strong growth trajectory.
- They were investing in their brand.
- Everyone on the marketing team played well together.
- They understood that SEO was going to need a good-sized budget, and they made room for it.
- Having WordPress as the CMS meant that I wouldn’t be beholden to a lengthy dev queue for content publication. (I cannot understate how important this one is. Getting to work with WordPress as performance SEO is the only thing I want at this point in my career, and the CMS choice probably accounts for 70% of our success.)
Nervous as I was, I was also excited for an environment that was better-primed for SEO growth than my past experiences. I knew that getting our SEO program off the ground was going to depend on a lot more than just my work, but on the collaborative alignment and execution of our team.
What follows is a timeline of strategies that allowed our team to achieve 15X growth to our non-branded organic traffic & leads over the course of 2020. In a nutshell, the campaign matured through the following phases. Plus, I’ll add one final phase that I like to think of as our “SEO Secret Combo,” so stick around for that tidbit.
1. Small Wins
2. Groundwork
3. Goals & Processes
4. Conversion Optimization
5. Link Acquisition
6. BOFU-Focused Content Hubs
7. Our Secret Combo
Our end-result for the year looks like this (data points omitted for privacy).
And although this Ahrefs image is delayed (Ahrefs time filters don’t allow me to filter 2020 only), it gives a good view of the keyword growth throughout 2020, and through to today.
Small Wins, ASAP
They say that we’re defined by our first 90 days on the job, but I think the first 30 days are even more defining.
That meant that I needed to get some SEO wins under my belt as a top priority, and getting those early wins would set the tone for the program, which we would need in order to establish credibility for the program’s success.
My favorite way to get fast wins? Some good old-fashioned title tag optimization.
There’s a conversation that my Sr. Manager and I had when when I mentioned title tag optimization.
“Is that to try and get us better click-through-rates?” he asked with a tone of genuine curiosity.
“Sort of.” I replied, “But really the objective is to get our keyword rankings to improve.”
“Really?” Now his tone sounded more dubious than curious. “I’ve never heard of anyone optimizing titles to increase keyword rankings. I’d be surprised if it makes a difference, but you can test it out.”
A couple of days later when I showed him the GSC data, he was genuinely surprised.
“Wow, I’ve never seen keywords go up like that,” he said. “I was expecting SEO to take a few months. That’s really cool!”
We showed the data to a few others on the team and each one had the same, positive reaction.
I’m recounting this story because I really think these conversations and early wins were the best way to set the tone for acquiring my leaders’ trust as the new, unproven SEO hire. When they hired me, they placed a sizable bet on my skills and on the SEO channel. It was my turn to validate their decision.
I also needed to nurture their faith in me for the next time I made a recommendation, or a budget request.
This was my momentum.
Groundwork
I’ll keep this section brief because groundwork is pretty boring, but necessary as a standard practice. Here’s what this groundwork mostly consisted of for Tipalti:
1) SEO auditing and shoring up a few things on the technical side (easy to do with a WordPress site).
2) Diving into our data to figure out what was working, as well as what wasn’t working in the company’s current content and link acquisition strategies.
3) Building out our keyword universe with keyword mapping (topic clusters).
4) Setting goals.
5) Building processes for regular content creation, site enhancements, reports, & SEO experiments.
Getting Resources
No matter how skilled an SEO hire is, we all have limits to our time and energy. To build a truly successful program, SEO professionals need help well beyond the one-man-band approach.
Powerful SEO is backed by a team.
The problem for most SEOs stepping into a company as the SEO hire is that they aren’t given a supporting cast. I couldn’t convince the company to hire someone else right out of the gate, so I had to get more resourceful.
I had a plan, albeit, not an easy plan to pull off.
If my leaders had been too traditional or risk-averse in their ways of thinking, it wouldn’t have worked.
I was going to contract with a VA in the Philippines, and train him up from no experience.
My leader happened to be all in on the idea and he said I could have the green light, as long as we create the projects via Upwork.
This approval was so clutch! (You’ll see why as we get further in)
That was exciting, but I still couldn’t produce much SEO content without a writer.
Turns out, this was the easy part because Tipalti had recently started working with a freelance writer who had produced a few well-written pieces.
That meant, all I had to do was check out her work, spruce up the SEO angles, and then train her up for more SEO projects.
The one thing I made absolutely sure of, was to prioritize good communications, respect, and overall treatment with my writer’s relationship so that we could continue to build onto more ongoing projects together.
Goals and Processes
Now, armed with a rag-tag freelance machine, we were ready to scale.
I set a goal for us to publish one article per week, and I built a shareable content backlog in Google Sheets (or, what many others affectionately would call a “content calendar”).
The content backlog is what our team used to organize our content projects, prioritize them according to opportunity size and impact, manage the status and stages of each piece, and link to project briefs.
The basic flow was:
1. I prioritized our opportunities and added content briefs to the backlog.
2. Our writer produced each article.
3. Our SEO VA helped by adding each article into WordPress and formatting the SEO elements (metadata, schemas, & CTAs).
It took four months of ruthless prioritization to double Tipalti’s non-branded organic traffic, a pace that easily exceeded all my expectations.
Wouldn’t you know it? The program was working!
But with all of this new traffic coming in, we still had to *engage* and *convert* visitors.
Conversion Optimization
Since this was my first foray into B2B SaaS, admittedly, I had a lot more to learn about conversion rate optimization. Specifically, I needed to discover which conversion optimization initiatives would have a strong probability of creating successful outcomes.
My teammates helped educate me on the applications and components that make up our conversion process. These are our Marketo forms, Salesforce routing, and lead nurturing programs.
In simple terms: our website uses gated assets and form conversions as the primary entry points for capturing leads.
When I joined the team, we had been using one gated eBook with a CTA, and that eBook was only present on some (but not all) of our posts.
Looking into the data on where our conversions were coming from, it was pretty clear that the pieces with the gated eBook were generating some leads, while the pieces without the asset were not generating leads (surprise, surprise).
I also learned that the company had a whole roledex of these types of assets, which they had been using in other marketing channels, but only one of those was being used in our SEO channel. Some of the unused assets lined up nicely with our SEO topics and themes, which we had organized into content hubs.
The solution?
Pair up a downloadable asset with each content hub and add CTAs that link each post with a relevant asset’s landing page.
The idea sounds easy, but it did take our team a few weeks to pull off and it resulted in a 90% lift to conversion rates.
Granted, this was a very low-hanging fruit opportunity, and it really didn’t take any advanced CRO expertise to pull off. More importantly though, it brought our non-branded SQL growth rates up to a pace that was closer to par with our organic traffic growth.
Link Acquisition
By now you might have wondered, “in all of this SEO strategy, where is the link building?”
Yes, link acquisition was part of the mix.
Before I arrived at Tipalti, the marketing team had been engaging with various guest posting services, and although guest posting can be a great method for link acquisition, we determined that a couple of those services were not always filtering the guest posts for the level of quality that we needed.
Having spotted that, we decided to phase away from guest posting in favor of a Digital PR link acquisition strategy.
This was a much larger undertaking than I would have been capable of on my own, because running a content team and a full-scale digital PR campaign by myself would take a lot more superhuman powers than I could possibly muster.
Knowing that I wasn’t going to be able to do it all, I needed to get agency help in this area.
This was another challenge.
Hiring a Digital PR agency was going to be ~3X what we were paying for guest posts.
I needed a larger budget.
So, after a few months of building up our content-driven traffic and wins, I convinced my Senior Manager to carve out enough budget to hire a Digital PR agency to help us with the heavy-lifting while our team stayed locked in on the content machine.
When we finally got our Digital PR agency going, it worked amazingly! They helped us earn some very impressive links, along with press coverage and they built pieces that continued to earn residual backlinks by ranking #1 for terms like, “profits per employee,” and “trillion dollar companies.”
Perhaps more impactful than all of these amazing links, our leadership team loved the campaigns! This, in turn encouraged more support again for the SEO program’s growth and validated the budget increase.
BOFU-Focused Content Hubs
Something that I wish I had put more focus into early on in our strategy was prioritizing BOFU keywords, over traffic generation. In the end, it still worked out very well for us to get traffic first, but we might have seen a little more success if we had aimed at bottom-of-funnel keywords with high conversion potential.
Of course, BOFU keywords were still in the mix when we started, but it wasn’t until mid-way through the year that we made the pivot from volume-based keywords to BOFU keywords as our main prioritization filter.
In this approach, we looked for keyword modifiers that indicated some sort of transactional-intent. A few examples:
- global payments software
- global payments solutions
- global payments technology
- Etc.
This pivot boosted our traffic quality significantly!
This lift was verifiable because we were able to see the increased growth trend in our website form fills and leads throughout Q3, an even higher growth rate into Q4.
I dug in further to see the sources for our leads growth, and found that many of them were coming through the BOFU post URLs that we were building in those final two quarters of the year.
SEO Experiments (with a twist)
You’ve made it this far, which means you’ve at last earned the right to hear me out on our secret combo.
Throughout most of the year, we had also employed a twist on SEO testing that helped us squeeze even more ranking potential from the content that we had been publishing.
The twist?
VA-driven SEO experimentation
Remember the VA I mentioned at the beginning of this article? Turns out, utilizing a trained virtual assistant to scale SEO experiments is an effective combination.
Training a virtual assistant allowed me to do more of the things that I really needed extra time for, but had no other way to muster up.
Our most powerful VA-based efforts came in the form of SEO testing and features-implementation.
My VA was instrumental in helping scale up our efforts with
- Title tag tests
- Answer box tests
- Schema implementations
- Jump links implementations
Those first two, title & answer box tests, resulted in some of the clearest, most measurable improvements to rankings and traffic *after the initial publications of our content*.
We found that if a page or post was struggling to reach the top 5 (or even if it was in the top 5), then testing out a new title was the best way to move the piece up to a more competitive SERP location.
Then, any piece of content that happened to rank in the top 5 for a high-value keyword presented opportunities for us to take the Answer Box (top keyword position) if we could sharpen our answer to the search query at hand.
We built a process for testing both titles and answers, which the SEO VA could analyze, hypothesize, implement, and measure independent of my time limitations.
Plus, the VA’s detached schedule allowed far more time for execution because he wasn’t bound to company meetings, questions, communications, and alignment efforts. The only alignment needed was process and SEO training, which gave our VA a solid 8 hours of sheer execution time.
To Wrap
By the end of Q4 2020, we achieved 5x growth in our SEO program’s traffic and SQL performance. I definitely had no idea from the onset that we would reach the levels that we did. Hell, I would have been stoked with 2X growth!
Moving beyond year 1 growth, Tipalti has since surpassed 15X our starting positions and continues to climb, thanks to everyone involved.
By building on best-practices, following a tiered growth plan, refining our processes, and putting a few twists on VA-based SEO, we turned out a surprisingly successful (and fun) year of SEO work.
