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At the beginning of 2021, we teamed up with a long-time business partner to do something that, when looking back, was kind of crazy.
We decided to start a brand that would be competing with organizations with millions in funding, established reputations, and armies of people working on marketing, acquisition, customer support, and everything in between.
That wasn’t the crazy part. After all, we could probably get funding and build out our small army as well.
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The part that makes us look back and shake our heads is that we wanted to bootstrap everything and only had a clear budget for the development team.
That means no budget for social media, SEO, advertising, or much of anything else.
This is the story of how we went from a brand new domain without absolutely no traffic to getting over 100,000 visitors in the space of 12 months.
UsefulPDF, the brand we worked on, started with multiple challenges due to the niche, level of authority it commanded, and the budget we had to work with. This translated into us getting much more creative and using our time as opposed to money to achieve our goals. Let’s look at a few of the challenges in more detail.
Some of the competition had been in business for more than ten years and were the obvious first choice for many people in the market. Their brands were established and their SEO efforts had already been yielding fruits for years.
We were also competing with two kinds of organizations because of the solution we were developing – document generation and electronic signatures.
I’ve said this already but we had almost no budget. Of course, we paid for the tools we needed and a portion of our content. That was it. Our competitors were throwing around $100,000 to $1 million a month. We were throwing around a few hundred.
We had to get creative, put our skills to the test, take the best of what we had, and rise to the occasion. Looking back, it may have been a bit foolhardy.
Fortunately, we were able to use what was given and build our organic traffic to enviable levels in a short amount of time. The rest of this case study will focus on the nuances of how we were able to get outsized results despite our tiny budget and limited human resources.
We all have certain assumptions about SEO. They’ll remain assumptions because Google doesn’t share the core of its algorithm with anyone.
Going into any campaign, you work off the assumptions you have and adjust course as more data comes in.
The assumptions that we worked with include:
Software exists that will produce thousands of links for you a month. If you use them, you’ll have a lot of links but you likely won’t see any SEO results. Google has long since started to prioritize the quality of your links over the quantity and all of our activities revolve around that assumption.
In practice, this may result in us getting few links but each link is much higher quality.
You can use an article spinner to create dozens or even hundreds of content pieces a month. They may start to rank over time due to the sheer volume. With that being said, the humans that visit the website won’t be impressed. If there are issues such as grammar, sentence structure, and other basic things then you’ll lose the trust of those visitors and it’s unlikely they’ll buy from you.
So, by extension, we needed to be there.
In an ideal world, every piece of content you create would generate thousands of search visitors a month, help you generate leads, produce tons of social shares, and translate to direct sales. This isn’t an ideal world.
The type of content that goes viral on social media usually doesn’t do well in search engines. The content that converts people to customers directly often has a poor showing when it comes to organic traffic. Of course, there’s an exception to every rule but I’m interested in building repeatable systems that work at scale - not looking for small loopholes.
Early on, we decided that each piece of content would have one goal. The bridge between different content pieces would be internal links and a deliberate site architecture.
After we settled on specific assumptions, we took the time to lay out clear objectives for our campaigns. We didn’t want to get into the trap of generating traffic or producing content that didn’t advance our overall goals and objectives.
Links: It’s common knowledge that links are an important aspect of SEO. We wanted to generate quality links to the website to improve rankings, search visibility, and overall domain authority (so it’ll be easier to attract links).
Traffic: A top objective was generating relevant traffic from search engines that, even if they weren’t ready to buy, would consider us a resource due to the quality of our content.
Conversions: Turn the people that visit our website into leads and send them through a nurturing campaign or turn them into users directly.
The content that would attract links: Natural link magnets come in various shapes in sizes but they’re often utilities for other websites or people in general. For example, lists of statistics, interesting case studies, free tools, etc. An example of a piece of link-generating content is the online signature tool we created.
The content that would attract traffic over time and would be evergreen: UsefulPDF is in an interesting niche because a lot of the evergreen content can also be used to convert visitors into users directly. We focused a lot of energy on those pieces. An example of this is our contract library.
Each one of those pages could be used to convert a user directly to a user. Almost every SaaS niche can take advantage of something like this. You just need to take the time to get creative and think outside the box.
Podia created a library of comparison pages.
Coschedule created a marketing glossary.
We also made conversion-focused pages - but they were a minority: The other pages would funnel visitors there.
Domain authority - This isn’t a metric from Google but is a proxy for how strong the competition is in search. Understanding it allows you to make estimates about how much time, resources, and energy you’d need to put in to compete. We used the authority score and domain rating from SemRush and Ahrefs respectively.
All keywords targeted - This includes both organic and paid keywords. We gave special attention to the paid keywords because they showed us what search terms were generating revenue for our competitors. It also lets us take a look at the pages responsible for generating conversions. Again, this helped inform our strategy.
Content quality - Yes, I know this isn’t an objective metric but we still found it important. Generally speaking, search engines will attempt to show the highest quality content available to their users. This is done by measuring ‘user signals’ like dwell time, bounce rate, CTR, and others. The better those metrics are, the better your content is thought to be.
After doing competitive analysis, we got a clear idea of the major players and what we’d need to do to win. After that, we went right into keyword research and organized our findings based on three criteria:
The content that would attract traffic over time and would be evergreen: UsefulPDF is in an interesting niche because a lot of the evergreen content can also be used to convert visitors into users directly. We focused a lot of energy on those pieces. An example of this is our contract library.
Each one of those pages could be used to convert a user directly to a user. Almost every SaaS niche can take advantage of something like this. You just need to take the time to get creative and think outside the box.
Podia created a library of comparison pages.
Coschedule created a marketing glossary.
We also made conversion-focused pages - but they were a minority: The other pages would funnel visitors there.
For some keywords, the importance is obvious. A site that sells vitamins would know that ‘buying vitamins online’ is a valuable keyword for them to target. A keyword like vitamin supplements would be more difficult to evaluate.
Are they looking for information about the types of vitamin supplements, are they researching the history of vitamin supplements, or are they trying to buy vitamins? This kind of term may or may not be valuable to your business – especially in the short term.
That’s because of search intent. Search intent is understanding what someone searching for a key term is looking to accomplish. Why are they searching for that piece of information? It can be broadly grouped into:
Informational - they want to learn more about a topic. E.G. ‘When was D Day in World War Two?’
Navigational - This is a type of search people use when looking for information on a specific website but don’t know the direct URL to the relevant page. ‘Facebook ad library’
Transactional - the person searching is ready to make a purchase. ‘Buy men's multivitamins online’
Commercial search - Someone is looking for additional info about a product or a type of product before buying. ‘Best computer for blogging’
You may want to go for the transactional and commercial search terms but that may not be ideal because:
Because of these factors, we chose a mix of informational, transactional, and commercial search terms. We scored them 1 – 10 based on our current needs and objectives, and a score based on our needs right now. 1 were irrelevant terms and 10 were essential terms. Next, we focused on ranking difficulty.
Еhe ranking difficulty isn’t a clear topic on the best of days. Many factors determine how well a page will rank which I won’t get into here. While not a perfect solution, we decided to rely on third-party tools like Ahrefs and Semrush.
We used the ready-made scores from these tools and added them to our tracking spreadsheet so it would be handy. We also did a manual analysis of the SERPs for terms we determined to be important because software can glitch at times. It’s always best to double-check. We looked at site quality, content quality, and our understanding of niche players.
On a side note, terms that we were never supposed to rank for are bringing in thousands of visitors a month for us now.
Notice that we assess traffic and business importance separately. Traffic isn’t always useful unless you’re an ad-supported website. Ahrefs and Semrush provided estimated traffic for each key term.
After organizing the information, we applied a bit of our proprietary secret sauce (it’s actually a simple formula) to decide on which content to tackle first.
This is all the preliminary work we did before ever writing a line or sending an outreach email. It took a lot of energy but it’s what’s necessary if you want to have a successful SEO campaign – especially in niches with stiff competition.
After that, it was a matter of creating said content and building quality links. I won’t get into how to create content because that’s another 10,000 words, but I will touch on a little bit of what we did to build quality links.
No matter how good your content is, you’ll need to give it a push in the right direction for it to start producing results.
We don’t believe in publish and pray.
Because of that, we were proactive in promoting it which was done through multiple strategies. The most effective was outreach.
I’ll tell you right now, a website that’s worth getting a link from has seen all the templates in the book.
They know you want a link. Don’t make them waste their time reading through the template you got from the blog post that was shared 2,000 times and published three years ago. Get creative. I won’t share our template with you because, you know, that will make it ineffective for us. Sorry.
What I will do is give you a few pointers.
- Be straight - We get a lot of outreach emails daily. Most of them end up in the trash because they try to hide their intentions behind flowery words. If you want them to link to you, let them know. If you want them to host your guest post, say that as well. Introduce yourself, mention how you came across them, then let them know why you’re in their inbox.
- Offer something in return - Every site owner is looking for something or another. It’s your job to figure out what you’re looking for. You can offer access to your software/service for a specific amount of time, exposure on social media, a mention in an upcoming guest post (avoid direct reciprocal link exchanges), or even do something for them like design a blog image. Creativity goes a long way here.
- Make it easy to give you a link - Be specific. Instead of ‘can you link to our post,’ ask them to link to your post from a specific page on their website. If they follow up with you then you can even tell them the exact anchor text. Trust me, this makes it so much easier for them to accommodate your request.
- Build partnerships - Many website owners and marketing teams are looking for reliable partners. Instead of building a single link and disappearing, it’s much more effective to develop long-term partnerships with businesses in the same niche but that doesn’t compete with your directly. For example, email marketing software providers could partners with agencies or social media management apps.
Using these tips, our outreach success rate was around 5 – 10%. The beautiful part was that we didn’t have to send out thousands of emails because we built partnerships. It’s the gift that keeps on giving.
Unfortunately, SEO isn’t a one-and-done thing. You’ll need to consistently do what you know will work. The problem is that most people who launch their SEO campaigns haphazardly don’t have the staying power required to see outsized results.
Once you have a strategy or process that you trust, continue down the road for at least six months. You should start to see results after about three months and start to gain traction after six months.
Of course, this is contingent on many factors but that’s a rough guideline to follow.
We rinsed and repeated for just under twelve months before hitting 100K visitors.
If you like what you’ve seen here, don’t hesitate to reach out to us so we can work together to create a tailored strategy to help you achieve outsized results.
Contact us today for a complimentary consultation to see if our strategy is good for your business.
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