The metric: Monthly Traffic

Learn how Nate Turner and his team at Ten Speed were able to help their B2B SaaS Client increase monthly traffic by 313% and double free trial signups.

How They Moved The Needle

1. They updated existing content.

This included consolidating, pruning, or deleting content in order to freshen it up. The truth is, many marketers completely overlook this step or severely underestimate its impact. But your content needs updating.

Sometimes content has gotten outdated. Other times, search intent has changed and your content needs to change with it. And sometimes, it’s conflicting with existing content around the same topic.

How important can this step be?

When Nathan was at Sprout Social, their number 1 revenue-generating post needed to be refreshed every other month. If it wasn’t, they’d lose roughly 75k~ visits/mo.

2. Next, his team focused on splitting their energy 50/50 between updating the remaining content and creating new.

They started with low-hanging fruit: bottom-of-funnel content, then moving to middle-of-funnel. This ensured they could focus on fully improving or cleaning up all the previous content, while giving them a chance to sooner create content that had a better chance of driving conversions.

3. Then he improved calls to action (CTA’s) across all the content.

They took the top 25 posts, and added a simple text CTA to start a free trial at the beginning of the content. This simple step drove some of the biggest impact they saw. Prior to this, the only CTAs were visual ones at the bottom of each post. This small, simple change drove significant results in signups and conversion from the blog. After that, they played with creative and copy on the CTAs at the bottom to further optimize those.

4. They also fixed a number of technical issues caused by a new site overhaul.

Around that time, the Client launched a brand new site. Unfortunately, this resulted in a 20% drop in traffic. So Nathan jumped to crawl the site and address all issues that caused the dip.

Most of the culprits were updates that changed “crawlability” and indexation. Things like new site structure, menus, or layouts which impacted how it could be crawled. Other common causes are new javascript, font files, pagination, redirects… and dozens of other factors.

5. Finally, the team doubled content output and started building high-value links to it.

They helped the Client go from publishing 4 articles per month to 8. And at that stage, they focused heavily on link-building.