SaaS SEO Case Study - HR Tech Site Generates 3X Traffic

In this case study, we’re going to pull back the curtain on the exact process we used to help this up-and-coming HR Tech company generate;

5X Lift in organic traffic to content pages
11X lift in New Organic SQL’s
$15K savings in PPC costs per month

And tell you can achieve the same.

Let’s dive in..

Table of Contents

Watch the Video to See the Full Process:

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THE CHALLENGE

Workvivo.com is a collaborative web platform that combines the best of social media networking with advanced, internal employee communication tools.

An innovative solution becoming increasingly relevant in the era of remote work - when this business came to us in Q1 2021, they had already achieved product-market fit.

However, they still had two big problems;

They were not driving enough awareness through organic traffic
They were not generating enough organic leads from their existing traffic

Workvivo’s marketing team retained JourneyEngine to quickly roll out a campaign that would resolve these two issues, definitively.. And to prove the results with hard data.

THE PLAN

As always, we planned to approach Workvivo’s case using an accelerated version of our typical five phase organic growth framework, to help meet their aggressive timeline.

The initial “DISCOVERY” phase includes a website quality audit, competitor analysis, campaign target benchmarking, and an expedited 6 month campaign strategy to hit Workvivo’s ambitious goals.

SAAS Website Quality Audit

Our initial website quality audit is the basis for any campaign plan.

Part of our Agency Data Pipeline, this report pulls data points from sources including; Screaming Frog, Google Search Console, Google Analytics, and the company’s CRM (Hubspot). The report joins this data at the page level to provide the full picture of every URL on the site.

Once this data is aggregated, we categorize all pages into site sections and decide the actions we’ll take, in batches we call “sprints”.

SAAS Competitive Audit

Competitive Intelligence allows us to get a quick read on the potential addressable market and understand the tactics that close competitors are using to gain traction in the SERPS.

After analyzing the content tactics, links and organic traffic metrics of 10 close competitors it became clear that Workvivo was lagging behind the market in content production, content relevancy and link building.

Based on this data, we are able to generate an early prediction of the organic traffic we can drive over the life of the campaign. We join this competitor data with the client’s internal data to produce a final ROI projection..

SAAS SEO ROI Projection

Workvivo is a data-driven organization. As I mentioned earlier, we would need to prove results with hard data.

For this reason, we’ve built a tool that accurately projects the organic traffic, leads and topline revenue we can likely generate. Before we ever get started.

The tool uses inputs from the business’s internal traffic and conversion data, competitive analysis (see above) and our own forecasting models to predict campaign ROI.

Workvivo’s traffic projection predicted a potential 4-6X lift in organic traffic, over the long term. Based on this addressable market, we set the following targets for the first quarter of the campaign;

30% lift in organic traffic
88% lift in Sales Qualified Leads

SAAS Organic Marketing Project Plan

Based on the website quality audit and the client's internal inputs, we formed a full 12 month campaign broken into project “sprints”.

IMPROVE Sprints (Optimizing Existing Pages)
BUILD Sprints (Production of New Pages)
PROMOTION Sprints (White Hat Link Building for All pages)

Since Workvivo had an aggressive timeline to ROI, we knew we had to plan a heavy multi-sprint quarter out of the gate.

THE EXECUTION

With the plan signed-off our team went into action mode.

For our next phase of the campaign, we executed an “IMPROVE” sprint. This is the part of the campaign where we optimize the businesses existing pages and assets.

Making adjustments to a site’s existing content is a low hanging fruit. It is often the quickest road to turning around organic traffic, making it especially important for this client.

SAAS Keyword Research [Product / Feature Pages]

We started by enhancing Workvivo’s “pillar” product and feature sales pages.

These pages are intended to reach people at a later stage of the customer journey. The goal of the pages is to convert the audience that’s already in a position to BUY.

So the first step was to identify the right keywords people who are “in-market” and already searching for a solution.

SAAS On Page SEO [Product / Feature Pages]

With a full list of lower-funnel, pillar page keywords each of these 14 pages we;

Performed keyword research to identify proper lower funnel keywords
Rewrote page titles
Rewrote meta descriptions
Provided an in-depth conversion critique
Provided conversion optimized UX layouts
Rewrote body copy

SAAS Content Audit

Workvivo already had a wealth of existing content (86 blog articles and resource pages, to be exact).

These pages are intended to reach people earlier in their buyer journey. The goal of these pages is NOT sales. It’s about;

Answering the right audience’s most important questions
Positioning Workvivo as a solution
Generating top funnel leads

Our next step was to Run a full audit of all content pages, including;

Assessing their current performance by traffic and conversions

Mapping each page to the appropriate objective, audience, pillar and cluster (more on this in the next section)
Determining what action to take; Rewrite, Redirect, Merge, Remove

After this analysis we took the following actions;

Rewrote 11 pages for depth, quality and upper-funnel keywords
Merged six pages into deeper topics
Targeted 11 pages with links
Removed or left the remaining pages as-is

Once we had optimized the business’s existing assets the next phase was to build new, strategically aligned content.

SAAS Content Gap Analysis

Our strategy for developing NEW content begins with the “Keyword Gap Analysis” - a report that scrapes data from the company's top competitors to find the best keywords that are driving traffic to their best content pages.

We manually comb through the keyword and landing page data to the initial pillar / cluster framework that will help us develop an unlimited supply of new content topics.

Based on our findings we developed 18 content pillars and 28 topical clusters related to the businesses core operations.

Now we are armed with the data we need to formulate a bulletproof content strategy!

SaaS Content Marketing Strategy

After gathering internal inputs from Workvivo’s marketing and sales teams, we identified our initial target prospect - technical HR executives at globally distributed companies.

We ran an in depth discovery of this audience, in order to find out the media that they're using, the groups that they're part of the platforms that they're using, etc.

Based on our findings, we recommended a specific set of content and promotional tactics we we’d execute to reach and convert the audience at every stage of their buyer journey.

SaaS Content Marketing Operations

The hardest part of any content marketing strategy is “operationalizing” it. Seeing quality content through to execution on a regular and consistent basis.

While strategy is of paramount importance, in reality this is the area that most internal marketing teams and agencies fall short.

We executed the following operations;

Ideated 20 high-impact topics
Wrote detailed content briefs for each topic
Communicated requirements with the content creation team
Created and scheduled the content calendar
Managed and tracked each content piece through to completion

Link Building for SAAS

Once existing content is optimized and new content is published to the site, the most important component for rankings is generating high quality backlinks.

We knew that we needed to start prospecting for high impact, contextual backlinks.

Once we know the type of links to target, we began building a list of publications that were authoritative and relevant to HR executives.

Then, we reached out to those publications to pitch them unique content assets that would be valuable to their audience, in exchange for a promotion for our own content.

Using this process we gained 15 high quality promotions (ranging from DR 45 - 90), within the first month.

SAAS Data Analysis

Consistent and ongoing reporting against the ROI milestones that we set at the beginning of the campaign is absolutely critical to the success of any project.

So we’ve built a structure internally that we call the SaaS Data Pipeline.

The structure allows us to provide transparent, always on dashboards that give a clear view into how we're progressing against the targets that we set at the beginning of the project.

Communication of these results are critical, so we schedule;

Weekly project tracking updates
Monthly deep dive “objectives and key results” analysis scheduled in-person or recorded screen share
Quarterly business reviews and goal resetting

THE RESULTS

We over-delivered on ALL targets that we set in the ROI projection at the beginning of the campaign.

In terms of overall organic traffic, we generated a 138% lift in total organic traffic (over double the target).

This included a 5X lift in traffic to content pages and a 56% lift in organic traffic to pillar pages (recall from earlier that we optimized 86 existing content pages and 14 pillar pages).

Additionally, six months into the campaign the “PPC value” of organic traffic was $19K per month, compared to just $4K before the campaign began. This is attributed to better rankings for highly competitive, low funnel keywords.

Lifts in top line organic traffic are great, but the project wouldn’t be successful without proving business value off the back of those lifts.

The content we produced and optimized was successful in generating 11X more sales qualified leads (verified sales appointments) compared to the period before the campaign began.

Most importantly for us, Workvivo’s marketing team were happy with the result!

In addition to executing a campaign that helped them deliver a proven results, we were able to help the client communicate these results to their internal stakeholders and adjacent departments.