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How Wordable Grew Organic Traffic 500% in 1 Year

A four-part approach that included strategy, high-quality content, backlinks, and partnerships.

Wordable is a software tool for content marketers and agencies to quickly import blog drafts from Google Docs into WordPress while keeping all formatting and images intact.

While the value proposition of the tool is obvious (it saves many hours of tedious uploading and reformatting, a godsend if you’re a busy content marketer), the challenge here for Wordable was the industry itself.

There are hundreds of tools for content marketers and most of those companies run high powered blogs to acquire users. There is substantial noise in this space.

As a newer player, Wordable’s website authority was significantly lower than its competitors. This meant it wouldn’t be easy to rank for high traffic keywords. We’d have to rely on a diversified strategy (what we call the “Barbell Strategy”) to both lift domain rating and attract high intent visitors.

Content Marketing to Content Marketers: Wordable’s Challenge

We started working with Wordable in October 2018 and, at that time, their blog was not well-established. They had written a few blog posts and none of them were written with search in mind. There was no search engine optimization strategy and no cohesive editorial strategy. Their domain rating was 19.

We knew content marketers often learn about new tools by searching for helpful content on Google. They spend their working days reading content, researching topics, and writing, using various tools to do their job better and faster.

Content would be Wordable’s channel of choice to acquire content marketers as users. We just needed to get creative to beat out the thousands of high-powered martech companies that already had established search engine optimization strategies.

In one year,  the work with Wordable hit a stride and the results took hold:

  • We increased the domain rating from 19 to 60, making it easier to rank for new target keywords.
  • We increased weekly organic traffic 500% from 1,000 to over 5,000 page views.
  • The Wordable blog now attracts marketing qualified leads regularly through the content we produced.  

The 4 Part Approach to Growing Organic Traffic 500%

Our approach focused on accomplishing four things:

  1. Lay the groundwork with solid content research and strategy
  2. Build linkable assets and buzzworthy content by interviewing content influencers
  3. Build a targeted link building playbook
  4. Leverage the existing audience for guest writers and promotion

You’re not likely to win without good strategy.

Strategy is everything, especially in a competitive environment. If you’re the only blog in town, you might be able to get away with throwing darts into the abyss but we prefer to have a plan so our clients know exactly what we’re doing and what to expect.

Using our field guide to content strategy, we built a Content Roadmap Report (CRR) that worked in two phases:

First, we laid the groundwork with four key content categories that were product-focused and had a great chance of ranking and achieving business value by generating conversions in the form of free product signups.

Second, because we knew that Wordable’s users were content marketers and editors who live and breathe in Google Docs, we built a long term roadmap to tackle secondary topic categories such as Google Docs tutorials, WordPress tutorials, and general content marketing how-to guides.

We found these topics by interviewing the Wordable team to understand their product, their customer persona, their sales conversations, existing analytics, and previous research they’ve done.

We used that information to seed our research including content gap analyses, competitive research, customer research and interviews , creative brainstorming, and looking at our client’s analytics to find untapped content opportunities.

We ended up ranking for dozens of high-value Google Docs, WordPress, and content related topics:

Buzzworthy content makes your blog worth following (and linking to!)

A guide to the best Google Docs Add Ons is boring to most people, but you can spice up the content to make it more interesting.

Wordable had a low domain rating compared to competitors who had domain ratings of at least 70. This meant we had to acquire a lot of the hottest commodity in content marketing: backlinks.

There are many ways to acquire backlinks. Our favorite strategy is to make content that is worth linking to. With that goal in mind, we created the Content Crafters interview series.

These pieces were excellent and worth reading on their own. They also gave us a reason to reach out to content marketers, Wordable’s target customer, without being written off as a sales pitch.

These content marketers had their own audiences in the form of email subscribers and sometimes very large Twitter followings. They usually shared their Wordable interviews and our client got immediate traffic spikes. While these spikes alone aren’t valuable, repeat visits by our target audience resulted in a difficult to measure, but valuable boost in branding.

It also made it easier to build backlinks.

We ended up partnering with many of these content marketers on co-marketing campaigns and guest posts.

Link building is one of the most important and also most difficult things to do in content marketing, but it becomes significantly easier if you create content worth linking to.

Targeted link building efforts at scale

We didn’t just rely on good content and organic link acquisition though. We deployed all the commonly used tactics to acquire links: Skyscraper link building, link reclamation, unlinked brand mentions, and more.

We formed partnerships with several managing editors who we often quoted in content published on Wordable. We also successfully place Wordable on dozens of “best content marketing tools” lists.

We leveraged Wordable’s existing audience for great guest writers and partnerships

What do you do with an empty blog and a customer base full of content writers? Let them blog!

We built a guest writing program that grew to publish 1-2 guest posts per week, all adhering to our strict content guidelines. Additionally, we built relationships with our guest writers which resulted in links or guest posts on their sites as well.

Relationships and an eye for the long term are part of the core principles by which our agency operates.

The results

Wordable’s domain rating increased from 19 to 60 and the number of referring domains increased significantly.

Traffic, while stagnant for many years, started to trend upward a few months after we began working on the blog and continued to grow over a year.

These results came from a combination of sharp strategy, high-quality content production, and link building. If you’re interested in building out your content marketing acquisition channel, contact us here.

Let’s work together

We’ve helped other B2B software companies grow through content marketing. Let’s find out if we can do the same for you.

Full-service engagements start at $7,000.