SaaS SEO Case Study: 10X Traffic in 1 Year
Watch this video for the next 10 seconds and
you will learn one the most basic yet effective SaaS SEO strategies. In fact, veed.io, a video editing software
company uses this SEO strategy to attract around 1.6 million monthly organic
visits from Google search. Now, what's most impressive to
me is their pace of acceleration. They've 10x'd their traffic in around a year. I mean, just look at their organic metrics. They're literally vertical. Now, if you didn't quite follow the animation,
that's ok because I'm going to walk you through a SaaS SEO case study of how Veed uses this
SEO strategy and how you can use it too. So veed.io has two main parts to their
site – their free tools and their blog. And according to Ahrefs' Site Explorer, their
tools account for around 80% of their total monthly organic traffic and their blog gets
around 11% of their total organic traffic. Let's talk about their free tools first. From a user-facing standpoint, it's clear
that Veed considers their free tools to be important as it's literally their first menu item.
Let's click on their Video Editor
tool and break it down. They have breadcrumbs which are helpful for
navigation and tell us a bit about how they've structured their tools. More on this later. Then you have the primary keyword target
as the H1, a keyword focused description and then their CTA. Now, when you click on their CTA, it takes
you right to their free tool where you can give it a spin without any kind of opt-in.
And I'm just speculating here, but I think
this would improve user experience signals which can help improve rankings. Now, let's skip over the social proof and
company blurb because it's focused more around conversion than SEO. And this leads us nicely into some of
the on-page optimizations they've done with their copy. Based on the headings, it looks like
they're trying to serve informational intent with a fairly commercial page. So they have "How to edit a video" in
their H2 here and then below that they have steps about how you can
do it with their video editor. And I think this works in their favor, at
least for this page, because the SERP for "video editor" is slightly fractured
and their page serves both intents. I won't expand on this further because we have
a full video on how you can handle and take advantage of SERPs with mixed or fractured
intents, so I'll link that up in the description.
Alright, so if we scroll down a bit further
you'll see a video with a heading that seems borderline keyword stuffing which I don't
think is necessary, and that section has some H3s where they expand on related
topics to video editors like collaborating on video projects, and their free
online video editing software. Scrolling down to the next section, you'll
see an FAQ that seems to be a mix of search-driven and product-related questions
which I'm personally a big fan of. Now, if you want to find relevant questions
to add to your landing page, you can use the People Also aAsk box for your target query
and/or use the Questions report in Ahrefs' Keywords Explorer to find bigger lists that
prospective customers may be searching for. Now, in the next section, they've made a prominent
block using a super basic internal linking strategy that many SEOs tend to neglect.
If you look at the URLs for each of
these links, you'll see that they all live in the /video-editor subfolder. And if you visit one of these pages, and scroll
down, you'll see a nearly identical section where they link to all of the same sub-tools. So what they've essentially done is
created a ‘tool hub' using internal links. And this part is actually pretty important
because a) free tools are quite easy to get links to because they're inherently valuable; and b) they're distributing PageRank
within their tool hub.
And I'll circle back to this in a minute because
I want to quickly talk about the next section with the subheading, "More from Veed." All they've done here is link to a few blog
posts which were clearly created with search engine optimization in mind. It's not something that's exactly revolutionary,
but like the internal links section above, they're able to pass PageRank to relevant
blog posts through internal links.
And that should help rank these blog
posts higher in Google search to reach larger audiences in the top or middle of
the funnel and convert some readers into customers because these posts
recommend their product as a solution. Alright, so let's go back to this whole
concept of a "tool hub" because it's important you understand why this is
an important part of their SEO strategy. When I say "tool hub," I'm referring to
the architecture that's typically used in content hubs where there's a pillar page,
cluster content or sub pages, and hyperlinks which connect the pages together. By creating a structure like this, you're
allowing PR to cycle throughout the hub. So if and when any of these pages earn
links, all pages within the hub benefit. So unlike the blog example where there
might just be a one-way internal link, there's a reciprocal relationship
between these pages. Now, if we revisit that YouTube video editor
sub page, you'll see that it's nearly identical including the destination URL for their CTA.
The things that have changed are
the breadcrumbs for navigation and obviously the main copy because
each page is targeting a different query. In this case, they're targeting "youtube video
editor," which gets 46,000 monthly global searches in Google. They've also updated the FAQ to have more
relevant questions to their query, and their internal links to their blog are pointing to
posts that are more relevant to YouTubers.
Now, to check "tightness" of this hub, I crawled
their entire website with Ahrefs' Site Audit and checked these URLs in Link Explorer. As you can see, their hub page links to 13 other
pages that include the video-editor subfolder. Now, if we switch the source URL to
the YouTube video editor URL, you'll see that there are exactly
13 internal links there too. And the same applies for
all pages in this "tool hub." Now, to give you an idea of the scale that
Veed has done this at, check out the Site structure report in Site Explorer. As you can see, they have 250 pages in their
tools subfolder which generates over a million monthly organic visits. Their create subfolder is actually a whole
new set of free tools and they have around 100 of them that generate
over 50,000 monthly organics. Then they have others like
video converters with 271 pages. And once these pages start ranking well,
I wouldn't be surprised to see their traffic spike again. If you want to learn more about how to create
content hubs, I highly recommend watching our full tutorial and just as Veed has done,
you can apply them to your tool pages too.
Now, content and structure
are only half the picture. The part we haven't talked about yet are backlinks. Now, because they're a relatively new company
with lots of competitors, it's unlikely that they're earning all of these links organically. Link building is absolutely essential
to get results like this. Over the past two years, you'll see that their
links and traffic are moving in tandem. And they're moving fast. To further support my case of manual link
building, their LinkedIn employee page shows 11 people with outreach in their title. And not everyone has a LinkedIn
profile or keeps it up to date. So I'd imagine they have way more than 11
people sending outreach emails every day. Now, if you still aren't buying it, I've
gotten two outreach emails from them.
One that pitches their tool. And another that pitches a blog post. We'll get to the blog soon. Now, based on these outreach emails, I'm pretty
sure they're doing things with a high-volume, low-conversion approach. The reason I believe this is because of
the shotgun styled emails and the fact that they're using a subdomain
to send emails. And people often use different domains or
subdomains to prevent potential damage to their main domain's sender reputation. Now, even though I'm not a fan of this outreach
approach, it doesn't mean that it doesn't work. To get a bit more granular, I exported their
monthly referring domains count in Ahrefs' Site Explorer and put together
these graphs from the data. It doesn't look like they weren't doing
any link building in 2018 and 2019. But around May 2020, it's clear
that they started building backlinks. And as their traffic continued to rocket
because of their link building efforts, they doubled down again in late 2021.
Now, looking at their link velocity on an
annual basis you'll see they got around 2,700 referring domains in 2021. And for 2022, they're more than half way
there at the time of recording this video and we're only four months into the year. It seems Veed understands the compound
effect of SEO and whoever's in charge has given the green light for more. I could talk another 30 minutes about
their tools section, but I want to briefly talk about their blog which
lives in the /learn subfolder. As you can see, they've replicated their
content and links strategy to their blog which only looks like it started in May 2021,
exactly a year from when I'm recording this video. And within that year, they've grown their blog
to around 178,000 monthly organic visits. Now, just like I did with the referring domains
data, I exported the number of organic pages they've published. And these are pages that rank in the top 100. And it's clear that they're still
in the early stages of scaling.
Now, let's review one of their blog posts. Without having read it, it looks pretty standard
with a table of contents, some clear SEO content writing, images, external
links, and internal links. Nothing fancy, which proves that
you don't need to get fancy to rank. The only thing I want to point out is that
they have a related posts section at the end of all their posts, which helps to keep link
equity flowing through their internal pages. And at the very bottom, you'll see that
they're pushing related tools as well. So I think it's safe to assume that those
free tools are helping drive new users to their platform. And if that's the case, then it's smart because
they're maximizing the dynamic duo of content marketing and SEO.
Now, I won't expand further on their blog
because during this whole scaling stage it tends to be more about volume of
production to see what sticks more than anything else. But now that we've gone through this SaaS
SEO case study, I want to make sure that you walk away from this tutorial understanding
how you can implement this strategy to your software company. So let's look back at that first
animation I showed you. At the top of your website,
you have your homepage. And to keep things basic, let's say that it
links to the two most important sections of your site: free tools, and your blog. Now, anytime the homepage gets links,
the tools and blog page will also get some value from them, increasing their authority. And because these pages are linking to other
deeper pages, they can gain value too, but to a lesser degree.
Let's zoom in on the tools section. You might have three different types of tools. Let's say a video compressor, a video
editor, and a subtitle generator. They're three different topics, hence the three
different colors, but they're all connected to the main tools page. So anytime the main tools page gets links,
it passes value to these three different tools. And because it's a two-way link, if these
three tool sub-pages get a link, then it passes value back to the tools page which
is still connected to all tools.
Now, with the video editor, there might be
3 different sub editors – a YouTube editor, a TikTok editor, and a Twitter video editor. Now, anytime these pages get links,
they pass value to the pages they link to. And some of these tool pages are also
directly connected to relevant blog posts. So they'll also get value and
build the page's link authority. Basically, PageRank is getting cycled
throughout the site so when any page on your site gets links, the whole team
is benefiting, which is why I think this SaaS SEO strategy is so
simple, yet effective. Now, strategy is going to give you the blueprint
for what you need to do but in order for it to be effective, you need to be able to execute
on all 3 components of structure, content, and links.
And we have tutorials and free courses that'll
teach you and your team how to write content for search and how you can build links to
your site so I'll link some of these resources up in the description. Give this SaaS SEO strategy a try
and I'll see you in the next tutorial..
