Those are the questions I’ve been always asked by marketing leaders, company executives, founders and investors all the time. Like it or not, the search engines and especially Google are now very important in so many aspects of our lives and when we are looking for products and services we always google it. The study from Google reveals that 89% of B2B researchers use the internet during the B2B research process and 71% of them start with a generic search on Google. Only the companies on the first page of Google will be able to drive those prospects to their websites and generate leads and sales. I recently listened to Liam Martin’s interview with Eric Siu on the Growth Everywhere podcast where he reveals some of the numbers that prove the study from Google and show that properly executed SEO can become your number one lead and revenue generation channel.

Here are some numbers that Liam Martin shared on the interview:

Time Doctor’s Revenue, Growth and Marketing Numbers

• Model: Self-serve SaaS company
• Revenue: high seven-figure Anual Recurring Revenue
• Serves clients in 32 countries
• Customer Acquisition: 20,000 trials/month, 7000 customers/month
• Main customer acquisition channel: Content Marketing and SEO
• Content and SEO spend: $50,000/month
• Time Doctor growth: 10% month-over-month
• SEO timeline:  6 – 18 months if you are an established brand and a few years if you are just starting

SEO and Content Marketing Are the Only Lead Generation Channels for Time Doctor

Liam Martin is a co-founder of Time Doctor, Staff.com and Running Remote – successful, bootstrapped and profitable companies.  These tools are helping to get the best results from employees, even if they’re working with people who live on the other side of the globe. Time Doctor offers time tracking, web usage, reports, payroll and other services.

Liam and Eric discussed how SEO and content marketing are the only lead generation channels for them and why any founder and CEO would invest in ranking their website on Google. Liam also shared some revenue and growth numbers they achieved with SEO and content marketing.

You can listen to the full interview here:

Here is what Liam says about the importance of SEO and why every founder and CEO should make it a priority and commit to it:

Eric: We talked about this last night so basically, Liam is really good at– he not only understands how to run a business, but he understands SEO too. We’re talking about this beforehand how every single founder I know that understands SEO, they have a leg up versus everyone else, right?

Liam: Yes.

Eric: What are you guys doing to run SEO and content right now to continue to grow? That’s where the majority of your stuff’s coming from, right?

Liam: Yes, so, I defined it as industrial SEO, a lot of people poke at it as an idea, but you can’t just poke at SEO, you have to commit because it’s going to be a six to 18-month investment. If you really start to see a return, and it’s cool now, like, if we post something about remote work, or outsourcing or any of those types of generalized keywords, Google gives us the benefit of the doubt. When I go and talk to people and say, “Oh, SEO is awesome.” Yes, it’s awesome, but you got to invest a couple of years and actually building up your domain and getting the power that you need to be able to then get people to just literally give you that benefit of the doubt so, that’s a lot of backlinks.

Eric: What are you going doing exactly to run SEO, just so people have some takeaway value here?

Liam: Fundamentally, what we’ve run is, we’ve compartmentalized it, we divide lead generation, basically, our linkers from our research team. We’ve got a content team that has an entire funnel connected to it as well, and literally every quarter, we go in, we identify all of our keywords, we throw it through ahrefs.com, that’s the tool that we use for all of our SEO.

Eric: Great tool.

Liam: Fantastic tool. The Keyword Difficulty variable is just like that identifier is so easy for us. It used to take us 15 minutes to really figure out, can we rank for it? Now with KD, it’s a two-minute conversation, we can rank for this.

Eric: Cool, so what are you doing exactly? Is it Keyword Difficulty is on a scale of one to 100 and then what do you guys do?

Liam: Anything that’s below a 30, that’s outside of our realm, we can probably rank for our success rates, but 60% top 10 SERPs. Anything that’s above 30 that’s out of our realm we probably won’t really go after but if it’s outsourcing, remote work, that kind of stuff, we’re currently number one for virtual assistant, I found out just today that we’ve got number one spot for that.

Eric: Great. I need one.

Liam: Yes, there we go. You can go to our blog post and check it out.

Eric: I will do that.

Liam: Those ones have a higher Keyword Difficulty, but you’ve got to invest more time, that’s a six-month investment to really start to get all that free track. I think that’s $100,000 in traffic value, just that one keyword, which is nuts.

Eric: Cool, and traffic value is basically what you would pay Google if you’re buying the traffic?

Liam: Correct, so if you bought all those clicks from Google, we’d literally have to pay $100,000 for that ranking.

Eric: Right, got it. How much do you think you’re spending per month on content and SEO right now?

Liam: I’d say probably 50,000 a month.

Eric: That’s a 600 grand a year.

Liam: Yes, the returns are insane, because if your domain rating goes up, we’re doing about 500,000 in traffic value per month. When you look at it in that context, if we had to buy that traffic from Google– I think basically if you’re buying traffic, you’re renting traffic, so, once Google shuts you down-

Eric: You’re done.

Liam: -or Facebook shuts you down, the algorithm changes, it’s over. We talked about this beforehand, there are some things that Google does that are going to change things, but fundamentally, if you’re going to own a business for more than 10 years, SEO is your number one funnel. That’s what’s going to actually allow you to run a really solid, sustainable business over the long term. If you’re a bootstrap founder like me, SEO should be your number one concern, because, in the next three to four years, you’re going to have a nice funnel of let’s say, for us, it was 6,000, 7000 customers that are coming in every single month, that are literally coming through our content funnel. Outside of anything else that we’re doing, we know that that’s our solid base.

Eric: Plus, you don’t just get organic traffic, you also get to pixel them, and you also have an e-mail list. How big is your e-mail list?

Liam: We talked about that too, but it’s over half a million right now, which we have not activated which we’re freaking out over.

Eric: I just think too many people forget about SEO, anybody that comes to us so, ad agency side, anyone that comes, “Hey, we need help.” It’s always we raised a bunch of money and we want to use our VC money to use paid ads. That’s the addicting drug, but too many people are not patient enough to go with SEO, it stands the test of time, and then from there, you can diversify, which is exactly what you’ve done.

Liam: Yes, I think about it like a big T traffic, just get the traffic, lock it in now, and then figure out what to do with it later. Optimization, all those other things can be done later if you can get the traffic now. Just get it, yes, it’s not converting so well right now. Don’t worry about it, get the traffic, you’re at least going to get the referring domains that is actually going to raise your entire domain.

Eric: Those are links.

Liam: Yes, so basically, backlinks that are coming to your website.

Learn how Time Doctor Improved Their Organic Traffic and Ranking with Content Marketing and SEO

Being an SEO expert and loving analytics and data myself, I was curious to see what SEO strategies and tactics Liam and his team used to achieve such amazing results and revenue. I used the same tool they use at Time Doctor – ahrefs.com, to look at the website performance, backlinks, ranking on Google, organic traffic, paid campaigns and Conversion Rate Optimization and recorded a short video with the analysis and actionable tips that you can use for your business.

Notes and highlights from the video:

• Out of Timedoctor.com and staff.com Time Doctor is the main lead generation site with 130K monthly organic visitors comparing to 2k from staff.com
• Both sites didn’t have a solid SEO strategy and big investments in SEO and content until Oct 2016 when Time Doctor started to actively publish blog posts and build backlinks.
• Over the course of 3 years they created backlinks from 3,200 new domains and publish around 500 blog posts.
• That helped them to rank for 80,000 new keywords (an increase from 26K to 106K). The number of keywords on the first page of Google had increased from 220 to 4600.
• For the same period of time, organic traffic from Google increased from 7,000 to 130,000 visitors per month.
• Assuming the average conversion rate from visitor to trial is 8% that’s an increase from 560 to 10,400 trials per month. It’s hard to say what conversion rate they actually have without looking at their Google Analytics data but it can range from 6% to 20%.
• The remaining trials are coming from paid campaigns, staff.com marketing campaigns and other channels.
• Their content marketing strategy for the blog post includes keyword research and writing long-form blog posts. They’ve written over 500 blog posts and created on average 5 – 50 backlinks for each post.
• Each post targets specific keywords that their prospects would search online and most likely to convert to a free trial. Here are a few examples:
• They rank in top 3 worldwide for keyword “virtual assistant services” with 7100 searches per month just in the US as well as other 147 similar keywords and driving 1000 monthly visitors. With an average conversion rate of 8% from visitor to trial (since they don’t ask for a credit card) that’s 80 trails from that single blog post.
• They also rank top 1 worldwide for keyword “collaboration tools” with 3200 searches per month in the US only as well as 2,300 similar keywords and driving 2,600 monthly visitors to that page. With an average conversion rate of 8% (since they don’t ask for a credit card) that’s 208 trails from that single blog post.
• The home page only generates 13,500 monthly visitors which is just 10% of all organic traffic. Other visitors are coming to blog posts and content pages on the site.

There are 4 components to successful blog posts that generate traffic and leads:

1. Keywords research and writing outstanding and engaging content
2. Building links to the blog posts as you would do for the home page
3. Internal links to that content from other blog post and pages on the site
4. Conversion rate optimization for blog posts. Adding exit intent pop-ups, live chats, floating bar with Call To Action

Takeaways and Next Step

As Liam advised you need to commit to SEO and content on your website if you are looking to build a solid, sustainable and profitable business over the long term. The success won’t come overnight and you need at least 1-2 years to start getting a good amount of leads and sales. I hope that his insights along with my review of their SEO and content strategy will help you get a better understanding of how SEO works, how long it takes, how much investment it will require and what results it can deliver in terms of traffic and revenue.

To make SEO work for your business and reach your revenue targets make sure you follow the 4 step process:

1. Perform keywords research to find what your prospects are searching for on Google.
2. Create SEO optimized pages (home page, internal service/product pages, blog posts, case studies) targeting those keywords.
3. Build quality, relevant contextual links to your home, internal and blog post pages
4. Track your rankings, metrics, conversion rate and continuously optimize performance and CRO

My 60-second commercial

I’m an SEO expert and digital marketing consultant who helps companies like Time Doctor to grow their traffic, leads and revenue. I specialize in performance and inbound marketing, SEO, Google Ads, content marketing and also consult on web design, CRO, social media and email marketing.

Do you want me to review your or your competitors’ business and website? Drop me an email at hi@mikekhorev.com

To discover more about how I can help you and what it’s like working with me, check my SEO Growth Program and B2B SEO offerings today. You can also book a call to review your project and see if we might be a good fit for working together.

The post How SEO Helped Time Doctor Become a 7 Figure SaaS Company and Generate 20,000 Trials Per Month appeared first on Mike Khorev - SEO Consultant.

Ian shared impressive SEO and content marketing results that they were able to achieve since they launched in 2015.

BuildFire Revenue, Customers and Marketing Numbers

• Revenue: Seven Figure Company
• Customers: 1000, Powering over 10,000+ apps in the App Store
• Main customer acquisition channel: Content Marketing and SEO
• Publishing 2 blog posts/week
• Content team: 5 writers
• Organic Traffic: 140,000 visitors/month

You can listen to the full interview where Ian Blair reveals the numbers and discusses how content marketing and SEO helped with initial exposure and became their #1 customer acquisition channel.

Ian: I think first it starts off with just finding effective channels to grow. It’s always a daunting task when you’re first starting your company because no one knows about you. You have zero revenue in the door and it’s just like a behemoth task. Like how on earth am I going to get there? It just first starts off with like bite size chunks and you’ve got to let the world know that you’re out there. For us, we chose content marketing as our initial growth channel and it’s been phenomenal for us. It’s really propelled us to where we’re at today. We also started off with a little bit of PR in the beginning. I’d say every company gets a bit lucky when you first get started and that was definitely the case for us. We did a PR release I think with like business like News Wire, one of those. We actually got featured on Business News Daily and what was awesome was there was people would search for like best mobile app builders out there. Since obviously you know Business News Daily has been around for a long time, they have great domain authority and we were at the top of the article. Basically we were pretty much dominating the search results because anyone would click on that, we’d be right at the top and we’d be just driving so much traffic to our site. That was just huge for our initial growth and initial traction and that was able, we were able to catch up with our own organic rate things and building our own domain authority so sometimes you get lucky and that was definitely the case for us in the beginning a little bit. But it’s just a lot of hard work and determination trying to figure out what are the most efficient levers for you.

 

Eric: Yeah so PR, obviously PR can be a huge spike kind of a boom or bust type of thing and I think what I want to focus on a little more is the content marketing aspect because that’s what a lot of people are talking about and obviously we know it’s the consistency that gets you there. When you’re starting from, I guess I should start first by asking, what’s working well for you in terms of content marketing right now and how are you promoting the content?

 

Ian: I think content marketing really starts off with having efficient and smart keyword research. You want to know what you want to go after and where is it realistic for you to rank. There’s so many tools out there for doing keyword research. You know Moz just came out with a great new keyword tool where you can see what the opportunity is, what the relevancy is. For us, it really just started off as what are great terms that we might able to rank for that are relevant to our audience? One of our highest performing articles has been a free app promotion so I think we have like … I don’t know, at this point we’ve just been growing and growing. It’s probably like over fifty creative ways to promote your app and that’s like we rank number one for app promotion, that’s been like an example of like an article that early on there wasn’t much competition for. We saw that we could rank for it and we just wrote an amazing piece of content and it’s been a consistent driver of traffic for us. We have lots of those examples where we find and it’s almost kind of like Brian Dean’s method of building skyscraper content. You go out there, you find the keyword you want and then what’s ranking at the top and then just absolutely crush that piece of content and you know, you’re bringing a lot of value to people, that’s going to rank. It’s just kind of like a methodical, if you kind of take like the approach of like paid advertising for example. Where you get data really quick and you iterate, kind of take that same methodology and bring it to content marketing. I think a lot of people, they just put stuff out and they’re like okay maybe like what’s the actual results on it. I think having like a methodology to be able to track progress and success is hugely important. For content marketing, that’s been one of our main approaches to it.

 

Eric: What are the main I guess KPI’s for your content marketing efforts?

 

Ian: Really we’re looking at, I mean at the end of the day, we want people to sign up for free trials for app builder so we’re tracking how many people are coming into our site, how many of those are converting to free trials and also like how many people are signing up for our email list because we want to have an audience. As you get bigger and having an audience it’s really helpful for putting out a lot more content. It’s really like just a matter of building your audience and how many free trials are we signing up.

 

Eric: Right. I think something, you know I think those metrics are perfect. Right? A lot of people are like oh you know let’s get more visitors, let’s get more page views but I think going with emails on free trials, that ties a lot closer to the bottom line at the end of the day.

 

Ian: Yeah.

 

Eric: But just rewinding a second I should say, I think a lot of people, you talk about people producing content just for the sake of producing content because everybody is talking about content marketing right? But a lot of people tend to forget about the research portion. Like you actually have to do the keyword research, you have to actually look at what the market is doing at the same time, maybe even look at Google Trends. I think that’s a forgotten piece of the puzzle and I think the fact that you guys are covering that aspect and you guys are succeeding just adds more validation to that.

 

Ian: Yeah. The whole keyword research process isn’t easy. It takes time and it takes a lot of brainstorming but I think with the wealth of information and tools out there, it’s been made easier. I think everything in business requires planning, right? If you want to be successful, you’ve got to have a plan, a strategy and like the ability to measure if it’s working or not working. I think if you just take those fundamental principles, like it can be massively successful. If there’s any information gap, like okay I don’t know how to plan content really well or I don’t know how to write great content or where ever you have a deficiency, there’s other people who have you know closed that knowledge gap. I think it’s really important in the whole online marketing space just to like stay super relevant, see what you know people who are really successful, like what are they doing, how can we take some of their methodologies and bring them into our own company? Right? Yeah I mean everything just fundamentally starts from that initial planning phase.

 

Eric: Right. You mentioned Brian Dean. You talked about the skyscraper technique. I think that’s something everyone can pick up from, right? You just look at what’s already preforming out there and then you just kind of ten x it.
Ian: Yeah.

 

Eric: Yeah I mean there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that and it certainly works. But I guess another question for you would be, since content marketing is working well for you, why aren’t you driving or are you driving I should ask, are you driving paid advertising to that content if it’s converting well?

 

Ian: Yeah that’s a good question. We’ve experimented a little bit with paid advertising on some of our posts. You know doing like promoted posts on Facebook. I’d say as a start up we have limited bandwidth and I think as we grow more and I think like just have the ability to focus on more channels, we’ll probably look into something like that and I know some people have been super super successful with that. Like the whole paid Facebook advertising, you know posts might do well or you could be attracting people through a lead magnet. I’ve seen some other companies doing like really really well with that and I think that’s exciting to see the potential of Facebook. I’d say the difference between Facebook advertising and Google Ad Words is that Google Ad Words is fulfillment. Right? People are going if you’re going to try and rank for something or you know have ads for something, people are already searching for it. People already kind of know what they’re looking for where like Facebook is really unique because there’s demand generation. Right? Products you might not have ever heard about and you know we can target people who might be interested in it. I think the mobile app building space is a very early market and not too many know that you can actually go online and build a sweet app for your business or if you have an idea, turn that into app right? I think it’s going to be really cool once we start to fire on all cylinders in that space but we just haven’t gotten to the point where we’re like all right, let’s go full bored and have a huge effort towards that.

 

Eric: Right. Okay. Now, I think you know a question people might have also, because content marketing is such a big channel for you guys right now, how is your content marketing team organized first of all?

 

Ian: Yeah so we actually started using a really cool tool lately and I think it’s helped a lot with our organization. We use CoSchedule and basically it allows us to have our whole content marketing calendar, right? Basically the way we start is we have like okay, what’s the keyword we’re going to go after. Right so kind of back to that initial finding like what’s the opportunity for it and how are we going to measure success for that and we plan those out on the calendar and it makes it pretty easy to get like a big picture, a quick picture of like you know what’s the next month going to look like in terms of content. We basically manage and schedule all of our content marketing efforts through there, with the research and planning. Then we have a whole team of writers that we hired that will work on the particular piece that they’re most qualified to write about.

 

Eric: Got it. How many writers did you say you had again?

 

Ian: We have about five right now but we worked with probably fifteen writers. I think you’ve got to test along the way. You can see like past results and what they’ve done. They might be a good fit for your organization but you might want to test them out for three to five articles and see how it performs and one thing we’ve always tried to do is just weed out the lowest common denominator and work with just writers who have been really successful with us.

 

Eric: Great. These are contractors?
Ian: They’re all contractors correct.

Learn What SEO and Content Marketing Strategies BuildFire Use to Drive Traffic and Revenue

To complete the overview of BuildFire content marketing and SEO I recorded a short video with a deep dive in their rankings, traffic, blog posts and Conversion Rate Optimization. Watch it to learn more about their content marketing and SEO strategy that helped them grow to a seven-figure company. You can apply the same strategies to your brand and accelerate your traffic growth, leads, sales and revenue.

Notes and highlights from the video:

• BuildFire started link-building mid-2014 and their backlink profile has been steadily growing over time.
• Organic traffic chart has the same trajectory as backlinks charts. That proves that backlinks are an important ranking factor and BuildFire has been focusing on quality, not quantity.
• Over the course of the last 5 years, they created backlinks from 3,200 new domains and published over 300 blog posts.
• That helped them to rank for 90,000 new keywords (an increase from 1.6K to 92K ranked keywords). The number of keywords that rank on the first page of Google had increased from 220 to 15000.
• Over the last 5 years, organic traffic from Google increased from 2,300 to 140,000 visitors per month. An average traffic increase is 100% year over year.
• Since they offer 30-day trial with no credit card required we can assume they have a pretty high conversion rate of around 8%.
• Their content marketing strategy for the blog post includes keyword research and writing long-form blog posts. They’ve written over 300 blog posts and some of the best performing posts have backlinks from over 100 domains.
• Each post targets specific keywords that their prospects would search online and most likely to convert to a client. Here are a few examples:
• They rank in the top 4 worldwide for the keyword “how to make an app” with 27,000 searches per month just in the US as well as other 1532 similar keywords and driving 19,000 monthly visitors. To achieve that they’ve built links to that post from 113 domains. With an average conversion rate of 8% (they don’t ask for a credit card) that’s 1520 trials/month from that single blog post.
• They also rank top 3 worldwide for keyword “mobile app development” with 7700 searches per month in the US only as well as 238 similar keywords and driving 2300 monthly visitors to that page. To achieve that they’ve created links to that post on 54 sites. With an average conversion rate of 8% (since they don’t ask for a credit card) that’s 184 trails/month from that single blog post.
• Overall they have first-page ranking for almost everything related to app development, app statistics, mobile trends and mobile marketing

Takeaways and Next Step

SEO and content marketing worked well for BuildFire and helped them to grow to a seven-figure company. Their marketing team executed a well-planned content strategy that helped them attract 140,000 monthly targeted visitors and convert them into trials and clients with effective conversion rate optimization techniques. You can use their strategy and my teardown as an example to build your own SEO campaign as SEO works the same way for any industry, keywords, type of product whenever it’s B2B, B2C or SaaS.

To make SEO work for your business and reach your revenue targets make sure you follow the 4 step process:

1. Perform keyword analysis to find what your prospects are searching for on Google.
2. Create SEO optimized pages (home page, internal service/product pages, blog posts, case studies) targeting those keywords.
3. Build quality, relevant contextual links to your home, internal and blog post pages
4. Track your rankings, metrics, conversion rate and continuously optimize performance and CRO

My 60-second commercial

I’m an SEO expert and marketing consultant who helps SaaS, Technology and B2B companies like BuildFire to grow traffic, leads and revenue with SEO, content marketing, CRO and other marketing techniques and channels.

Do you want me to review your or your competitors’ business and website to learn how you should use SEO to grow leads and revenue? Drop me an email at hi@mikekhorev.com

To discover more about my approach to SEO for SaaS and learn what it’s like working with me, check my SEO Growth Program. You can also book a call to review your website and project 1 on 1 and see if we might be a good fit working together.

The post How Content Marketing and SEO Helped BuildFire Become a 7-Figure ARR SaaS Company appeared first on Mike Khorev - SEO Consultant.

Tim emphasized the importance of SEO and content marketing in their customer acquisition strategy and shared some numbers they were able to achieve:

• Market Capitalization: $1.5 billion
• Protects: 5,000,000+ websites
• Number #1 customer acquisition channel: Content Marketing and SEO
• Year over year growth: 100%
• Content team: Cheif Editor and 10 – 12 external writers
• Cost to produce one blog post: $400 – $600

Here is the part of the interview when Tim and Eric discuss content marketing SEO and Conversion Rate Optimization and what role they play in the overall strategy.

Tim: Part of our problem is that we sell to everybody, which maybe sounds good to people when they’re given their investment pitches, but it poses a real go-to-market problem. How do you service such different buyers as a free blogger versus a big Fortune 50 company, multi-national? The way we do it is we have a premium-free plan, like I mentioned. Then we have the pro and business plans, which are self-service trials where you pay with a credit card, so there’s very little to no sales interaction with those customers unless they have issues getting set up. Then we have a sales team that services the enterprise plans, which could be mid-size companies with a lot of online Tim Matthews Page 3 of 9 traffic, or those very large companies that I mentioned before. We’ve got those 4 distinct pricing plans with very different feature capabilities, and also a different way we acquire the customers.

Eric: Great. Talk about customer acquisition right here, it’s a great segue. What’s working for you? What’s super effective in terms of customer acquisition for you guys?

Tim: Number 1 for us is the combination of SEO and quality content. If you think about what we do, there’s a lot of information that people want to know about how sites get attacked, how they can prevent attacks or how they can make their sites faster, and people are searching for this every day. We spend probably the most money and manpower combined on really quality content and making sure that we’re constantly showing up on that number 1, the first Google results page. That’s probably a really big area for us. We also spend a lot of money on CRO, so conversion rate optimization. It dawned on us that we’ve got a very large number of people coming to our site every day and we were leaky. People were not converting or they were bouncing very quickly, and so I am a real big fan of optimizing, and we do probably 5 experiments a week to try and really keep people on the site and convert. I can give you a couple of examples of successful tests that were really simple, but very effective.

Eric: Yeah.

Tim: My favorite is … Like a lot of SaaS companies, our call to action on the buttons was start free trial. We thought everyone else does that, it seems like a reasonable call to action. We actually changed that for our enterprise plan only to get quotes, because it turns out a lot of enterprise customers don’t want a trial. In some cases they can’t run a trial. On IBM.com for example, you can’t just run a trial for a big site like that. They actually want to talk to a sales person and get a quote. Changing those start trial to get quote, changing those 2 words resulted in a 280% increase in conversions, a huge, huge impact. I think a lot of people make the mistake of not focusing on optimization to website. You’re never done, but it can yield great results.

Eric: Just to give a little context to that INC, you guys are running 5 tests per week. How much traffic do you need to be running at that level?

Tim: You typically need … I’m not a CR expert, but you need probably 50,000 uniques a week to be really able to see some good quality results, or you run a small number of tests and you just wait longer to get the significance you need to prove out the results.

Eric: Right. I think one thing a lot of companies forget about is not only just testing, but having that testing framework where you’re constantly tracking these over time, or else these tests just kind of get lost in translation. Is that something you guys do?

Tim: We do. We actually work with an agency because it’s a lot of work and we don’t have somebody in house who’s dedicated. We have a methodology where we meet every week, we have a series of tests, and we have in some cases brain dead obvious results, not a case of any judgment calls, and we are constantly yanking out one that didn’t work or accepting one that did. Then of course you have to remember to actually hard code it on your site. Some people forget to actually take the test and actually code it into their website. I think it’s a regular cadence. We have some metrics that we want to see more conversions to free trials or form fills to talk to sales people. Right now we’re working on keeping people on our micro-sites longer, so reducing the bounce rate to keep them around. You have to have the goals in mind. You have to have the cadence. You have to have the team, because if you don’t have the team to really manage CRO, it can get very complicated very quickly, and if you’re not watching your results you can spend a lot of money and get nothing for it.

Eric: Okay. Backing up a second, you just talked about quality content. What exactly does quality content look like to you?

Tim: Quality content is something that our buyer would actually want to read. It sounds really obvious to say, but many people make the mistake of not talking to their perspective buyers and asking them questions like what do you read? What do you search for? What kind of content would you like to see from us? I like to think of quality content as something you can write that somebody can learn something from and apply to their job that day. Data sheets wouldn’t cut it, or high-level overviews that are available elsewhere wouldn’t cut it. Something unique to you that somebody can read and learn something from … I read a lot of great marketing blogs and I’ve never bought some of those products, but I’m thinking about them and I think I probably learned a lot about AB testing from optimizing the quality content. I think people make the mistake of just dashing stuff out and they get caught up in that fallacy or maybe misnomer about you’ve got to post every day, every day, every day. I’d rather think about creating a quality piece that can be longstanding. We have blog posts from 5 years ago that are still in our top 10 because they’re so useful and they’re of course highly linked to. That’s what I mean by quality content.

Incapsula’s SEO and Content Marketing Review

With this high-level overview, we can move into the detailed analysis of their content marketing and SEO strategy to get a better understanding of how they achieved those amazing results and growth. I recorded a short video where I analyzed their content marketing efforts, traffic growth, link building activities, CRO tactics and provided few actionable tips that you can apply to your business and sites.

Notes and highlights from the video:

• Incapsula.com merged with Impreva.com in 2019 and done a good job at mapping old domain to new domain and setting up 301 redirects. All Incapsula.com blog posts, content pages, traffic and rankings have moved to Impreva.com
• They started link-building mid-2013 and their backlink profile has been growing over time.
• There are few spikes in the number of referred domains and that usually happens when you acquire or buy links from PBN (private blog networks) that belong to one owner and webmaster. Overtime those domains and sites go offline at the same time and it causing the number of referred domains to go up and down significantly. Those tactics were working back in 2013 but can get you a penalty now.
• Since Sept 2016 they’ve been working on building quality links and the chart was steadily growing without spikes or declines.
• Over the course of 3 years they created backlinks from 2,500 new domains and published a large number of 500 blog posts which they later migrated to Impreva.com in 2019.
• Before the migration, they ranked for 69,000 keywords (11,000 keywords ranking on the first page).
• Over the last 5 years, organic traffic from Google increased from 20,000 to 151,000 visitors per month. An average traffic increase of 100% year over year.
• Incapsula and now Imperva offer a wide range of IT and security services and use live chat and book a demo form as a lead capturing tool. They should have an average 2%-4% conversion rate from organic traffic.
• Their content marketing strategy for the blog posts includes keyword research and writing long-form blog posts. They’ve moved over 500 posts from Incapsula and keep writing new ones. Blog posts and some of the best performing posts have backlinks from over 100 domains.
• Each post targets specific keywords that their prospects would search online and most likely to convert to a client. Here are a few examples:
• They rank in the top 7 worldwide for the keyword “phishing” with 74,000 searches per month just in the US as well as other 1102 similar keywords and driving 3,973 monthly visitors. To achieve that they’ve built links to that post from 169 domains. With an average conversion rate of 2-4%, that’s 80-100 leads/month from that single blog post.
• They also rank top 3 worldwide for keyword “DDOS” with 75,000 searches per month in the US only as well as 438 similar keywords and driving 2,572 monthly visitors to that page. To achieve that they’ve created backlinks to that post on 222 sites. With an average conversion rate of 2-4%, that’s 50-100 leads/month from that single blog post.
• Overall they have first-page ranking for almost everything related to IT security, phishing, servers, firewalls, disaster recovery and other 3000 IT related topics and keywords.

Takeaways and Next Step

SEO and content marketing were #1 customer acquisition channels for Incapusla and helped them reach $1.5 billion market capitalization. Tim and his content team executed a well-planned content strategy that helped them drive 151,000 monthly targeted visitors to incapsula.com and 188,000 monthly visitors to imperva.com and convert them into clients with effective conversion rate optimization techniques. You can use their content strategy and my teardown to build your SEO campaign as SEO works the same way for any industry, keywords and product whenever it’s B2B, B2C or SaaS.

To make SEO work for your business and reach your revenue targets make sure you follow the 5 step process Tim used for Incapsula:

1. Perform keyword analysis to find what your prospects are searching for on Google.
2. Create SEO optimized pages (home page, internal service/product pages, blog posts, case studies) targeting those keywords.
3. Build quality, relevant contextual links to your home, internal and blog post pages.
4. Track your rankings, metrics, conversion rate and continuously optimize performance and CRO
5. Be consistent and persistent. You need to build links and optimize your website for a few years until SEO will deliver real value and make your thought leader in the industry. 30 backlinks per month and the weekly blog posts on your site would be a good start.

My 60-second commercial

I’m an SEO expert and marketing consultant who helps SaaS, Technology and B2B companies like Incapsula and Imperva to grow traffic, leads and revenue with SEO, content marketing, CRO and other marketing techniques and channels.

Do you want me to review your or your competitors’ business and website to learn how you should use SEO to grow leads and revenue? Drop me an email at hi@mikekhorev.com

To discover more about my approach to SEO and growing organic traffic and what it’s like working with me, check my SEO Growth Program. You can also book a call to review your website and project 1 on 1 and see if we might be a good fit working together.

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