Every founder in the SaaS world desires organic word of mouth marketing. It has been proven time and again that nothing works better than someone coming to buy on your storefront with the intent to purchase. Let’s acknowledge though, “Organic growth is tough, and organic growth is slow.”
Naturally, the questions arise, “Is there a way to expedite this growth?” and more importantly, “Is there a framework that we can use to set a website for organic success?”
To this, I can say, there can be a number of strategies that can be used to build an organic growth pathway. For our purpose, we will use the strategy of building content hubs supplemented with product features and solution pages. The idea comes from the fact that for most B2B startups with a constraint on capital, the non-branded keyword is a faster and cheaper way of acquiring new visitors while branding improves their brand search.
Finding opportunities for website traffic growth: Keyword research
People can have various misconceptions in the organic sphere and one of the most common ones is — ranking. You’ll hear folks saying — “How are our rankings?”, “What is our rank for this keyword?”, or even worse “Can you get us to rank for XYZ?”
Now, don’t get me wrong these are absolutely valid questions but not when you are trying to build a roadmap for organic growth. Websites or firms which are dealing in traffic of the order 100s or 1000s don’t have the maturity to ask such questions.
One needs to understand that Google rankings are fluid and the metrics presented are an average. For example, say your website ranked for a keyword “ABC”. Now, this keyword might have been searched for let’s say 1000 times all across the world on Google. You need to understand that Google Search itself is an optimizing algorithm that is trying to present the best possible results for its users.
This implies that in the 1000 searches that were made across the world for the keyword ABC, you probably appeared 500 times(impressions). In those 500 impressions, you were allotted various ranks, say for once it was the 10th position, 50 times you were allotted the 3rd position, and so on. Your average rank is a weighted mean of all these positions.
Conducting the keyword research
In this section, I elaborate on how to conduct our keyword research. The assumption here is that you are still in the growing phase and have monthly website traffic of less than ten thousand. Here is the step-by-step process that I follow -
- Export all keywords from the Queries section in the Google Search Console section of Google Analytics.
- If you haven’t set up the integration between Google Search Console and Analytics, please do so because you are missing out on a lot. For such users, you can instead try to uncover what you’ve been ranking for using a tool like SEMRush or Ahref.
- Import the dump into a Google sheet. Excel also works but since you’d be simultaneously researching on your browser, I suggest google sheets.
- Go to a text frequency analyzer website and perform a frequency analysis on the exported keyword set.
- Find the most frequent single word, two words, and three words combinations. This will give you a quick glance of what are the core topics around which you are currently ranking. This map is also an indication of what topics does Google see you relevant for.
- With the core topics identified, find additional topics that might be relevant and loosely related to your core topics. This will help you get a lot of top of the funnel traffic.
- Since there will be a few topics that are more or less similar, try to combine such topics into one bucket rather than multiple ones.
- Get a qualitative understanding of the total search volume and the average difficulty of the topic that you are trying to rank for using SEMRush. This will help you evaluate which topics to focus on first and which ones to ignore.
- Then populate all the relevant keywords you’d like to target under your identified topics.
- Next, find gaps between your keyword universe and the competitor’s using a research tool. Note that it doesn’t mean that you have to start outranking for all your competitor’s keywords. The idea is to find weak spots where you can win and also keywords that are business-critical. For example, if you are an invoice reconciliation software and aren’t ranking for your core business offering you need to fix things.
Updating or redesigning your site structure
Once you have identified your core topics, you need to organize the website structure to reflect your offerings. You will also need to list down a few topics which you might feel are relevant but were missing from your research. This can be especially true for low search volume and low-frequency keyword sets where the analysis might end up filtering them out.
Think of yourself as a content publisher instead of a product when you are designing a website sitemap.
When you are designing your sitemap remember your objective is to create a content hub around a particular topic. The increase in traffic for related keywords within the topic will be a consequence of you creating a content hub.
Generally, it is advisable to use a structure that reflects a version of the following -
www.xyz.com/core-topic/sub-topic.
You can also use a variant of the keyword for the core-topic in the slug but it is useful to retain the target keyword. You also have the choice to nest all blog articles under relevant core topics or sub-topics. Say, for example, you have 5 different blogs about various aspects of “mileage reimbursement”. You can create a structure like this —
www.xyz.com/mileage-reimbursement/article-1
www.xyz.com/mileage-reimbursement/article-2
www.xyz.com/mileage-reimbursement/article-3
and so on.
Diverting your content resources across two different subdomains won’t help you in creating an exhaustive content repository around a topic.
Should I go for a subdomain or a sub-directory?
Another question that comes for the blog often is whether to opt for a subdomain or a subdirectory? The answer to this question depends on a couple of factors — 1) your website’s domain age, 2) the current domain authority and 3)the existing content repository.
Since we are dealing with websites lesser than 10K visits in a month, we can assume that the DA isn’t exceptionally high and the content repository wouldn’t match a growth-stage startup. Though this can’t be true for all cases we will assume this for the sake of simplicity.
Now because we are trying to build a content cluster around a particular topic sub-directories help. This is because a sub-directory stays under the root and all your internal links are relevant and point between each other. Diverting your content resources across two different subdomains won’t help you in creating an exhaustive content repository around a topic.
Need for creating content hubs or content clusters for a post BERT world
Content hubs or clusters is the logical conclusion of the various updates that the Google Search algorithm has undergone. Today search algorithms frown upon keyword stuffing, unnatural link profiles, and other black hat techniques. With the latest BERT update, this becomes even important since BERT allows for contextual discovery.
So you can’t expect to rank for a keyword without producing useful and information-rich content. Moreover, when preparing content calendars you have to plan for an entire topic and the keywords within the topic. Thus if mileage reimbursement were a topic that you are going to write about. You will have to write different blogs for “mileage reimbursement policies”, “mileage reimbursement laws in California”, “calculating mileage reimbursements”. The search volume helps you prioritize keywords within the topic.
In fact, the content topic or content cluster model is so important that I should have introduced it much earlier in the article. For a deep dive, you should check out this wonderful article by HubSpot on content clusters. Here’s another one from G2’s playbook on how they reached 1M organic visitors.
In short, if you are an early stage B2B startup you have no other option but to leverage the content cluster model for non-branded growth
Tracking your success
The key part of measuring success for all your plans is often ignored in SEO and often you’ll also hear something like “SEO takes time so we will have to wait for the results for around a month or two”. This is actually true and is best explained in Tom Tunguz’s article on compounding effects of content marketing.
What people don’t often tell and which is important for startups is that you can still measure some leading metrics. That one leading metric is “impressions” on Search Console. You will see that almost after 5–7 days of publishing a new page or a blog it will start registering impressions. Now, you will not get clicks initially probably because “search” is competitive by design.
After a couple of weeks, you will be able to see clicks as well, and the lagging metric from then on will be the traffic that the page brings to your website. Thus, whenever you go after a particular content-topic, measure the % increase(WoW or MoM)in all the articles written for the particular content-topic. This way in a couple of weeks you will know whether your efforts in the content-topic are worth it or not.
I hope this does help you in getting some clarity on how you can strategize and execute your next big jump in traffic. If you have any questions, you can always reach out to me on LinkedIn or drop your comments here.
