The Phases that Led to +313% Growth in Organic Traffic

Background and overview of the Visible partnership

We joined up with the Visible team in May 2020.

At that time, their marketing team was showing YoY traffic growth of ~15%, and a stagnant, unpredictable number of trials associated with their content marketing efforts.

Their previous content execution consisted of working with contractors for short periods. They would build quality articles but reported that the traffic would stagnate and decline within only a few months of the initial traffic increase from distribution.

“We hear a good amount of feedback coming in from our customers about it [our SEO-focused content] being ‘Super helpful!’ We try to tie in our product as much as possible, so we’re hearing it from users that are doing x,y, or z, and then we’re able to give them an in-depth blog post they can use.”

^{- Matt Preuss, Marketing Manager @ Visible.vc}

Visible’s Goals

• Achieve consistent traffic to existing content
• Grow organic traffic to the website with existing AND new content
• Achieve consistent trial sign-ups from existing content
• Grow trial sign-ups with new content

Visible’s Marketing Team + Marketing Plan

• Initial Size in May 2020:
  • Marketers: 1
• Current Size as of Q3 2022:
  • Marketers: 3 to 4 total = Self-serve/founder product: 2 Investor product: 2
  • 1 of the 4 serves as the sole Content Marketer
• Integrated content marketing strategy
  • Long-form written articles (Primarily SEO-focused)
  • Podcast/video (Embedded on relevant articles + distributed via owned channels)
  • Webinars (Embedded on relevant articles + distributed via owned channels)
  • Social Channels: LinkedIn + Twitter
• TBD

Phase 1:

Rapid, Consistent Growth (Months 0-13)

Services

• Content Optimization + Updates of Existing Content
• New Content Creation Guidance
• Content Briefs

Organic Traffic

184%
increase in monthly traffic over 13 months

Organic Leads

+53%
increase in monthly leads over 13 months

Phase 1:

The start of the engagement largely focused on the improvement of existing content as a way to quickly grow traffic around topics the Visible team had identified as important to their brand. While the information was quality, our two teams worked largely on consolidation opportunities, on-page search engine optimizations, and CRO best practices.The first 13 months saw consistent, rapid growth, and we moved from ONLY updating existing content early in the engagement to updating existing AND pushing into new content categories.

What we did

1. Analyzed the data and identified content decay in some of Visible's existing content, so we started by addressing those articles first.
2. Provided in-depth guidance on consolidating and optimizing the impacted blog posts each month for the first few months, which led to strong traffic growth, increasing the total number of keywords the content ranked for.
3. Made recommendations for modifying CTAs within the blog posts to drive more conversions from the traffic Visible was already getting.
4. Expanded the engagement to continue optimizing existing content AND creating content briefs for new content each month to cover more topics on the blog, further increasing their reach and brand awareness.

“Since we started with Ten Speed, we’ve seen a nice-looking chart up and to the right for trials. Before that, it was super lumpy - We’d maybe have one post that happened to be bringing in traffic for a short period here and there. It’s pretty easy to predict now how many trials we’ll get from our organic traffic.”

^{- Matt Preuss, Marketing Manager @ Visible.vc}

Phase 2:

Stagnant + Technical Consultation (Months 14-16)

Services

• Content Optimization + Updates of Existing Content
• New Content Creation Guidance
• Expanded Number of Content Briefs (NEW)
• Technical SEO consultation (NEW)‍

Organic Traffic

22.01%
decrease in monthly traffic over 4 months

Organic Leads

Consistent but stagnant

Overview of Phase 2

Phase 2 represents a 3-4 month timeline with which Visible’s website experienced a 22% decrease in organic traffic.

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During this time, several factors came into play that required a deeper look into the technical health of Visible’s overall website. Here are the important factors:

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• Visible performed an overall website update with significant design changes
• Google made the switch to 100% mobile indexing
• Page speed/Core Web Vitals was introduced as a ranking factor in Google’s algorithms

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All 3 of these required a deeper look into technical components of the website that were underperforming. We audited and prioritized the areas that needed improvement, consulted Visible’s developer, and remedied the situation in Q4 of 2021.

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The identified areas were:

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• Improved content layouts - Addressing the Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) metric related to the above-the-fold portions of the website
  - Webpages showing slow loading times (identified 363 pages)
  - Of the webpages impacted, 296 were from the header image on the blog layout
• Addressing errors identified in Google Search Console, such as mobile page experience errors, unnecessary number of sitemaps submitted, and subfolders, subdomains, & the staging site being indexed that should not have been

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Additionally, as more content was published on the website, there was a need to improve the strength of the overall internal linking structure. We created a plan that allowed for intuitive navigation between related content and increase Google’s understanding of Visible’s topical authority.

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What we did

1. Identified key areas of technical SEO that were holding the overall website back from performing competitively and providing the best user experience for Visible’s users. This included core web vital metrics and mobile indexing.
2. Practiced good hygiene of the overall website by cleaning up duplicate sitemaps and prioritizing only the necessary subfolders and subdomains for indexing.
3. Built an internal linking plan with the Visible team to strengthen the content clusters for improved rankings and navigation.
4. Continued to produce and publish content consistently, eventually expanding the amount of content created per month.

"When you’re growing things are fun. When you’re doubling previous highs, things are awesome.‍The entire Visible team has rallied around the marketing efforts led by Ten Speed as we watch new metric highs roll in every month.‍Personally, it has made me a better overall marketer. Working with Ten Speed truly feels like we have organic (and overall marketing) experts on our team that we can lean on and learn from."

^{- Matt Preuss, Marketing Manager @ Visible.vc}

Phase 3:

Recovery + New Growth (Months 17-24)

Services

• Content Optimization + Updates of Existing Content
• New Content Creation Guidance
• Second Expansion of Content Briefs (NEW)
• Link Building (NEW)

Organic Traffic

+61%
increase in monthly traffic over 8 months

+47%
increase in monthly leads over 8 months

Overview of Phase 3

Phase 3 represents the most recent completed quarters, regaining the traffic loss experienced in Phase 2 and back into new growth milestones.

At the start of the new year, we increased production efforts with Visible again.

During this phase, we continued to identify decay on important pieces that would need to be updated and introduced link building as part of our efforts with Visible.

A big part of the return to updating existing content regularly and more intentionally building links to that content stemmed from how the competitive landscape had changed over 2 years of working together.

The number of companies in the industry had expanded, and we noticed increased competition from serious competitors on the SERPs for our most valuable content topics.

What we did

1. Re-evaluated content performance and identified existing content that was seeing decay due to time and increased competition on page 1 for pieces that were created early on in the engagement
2. Introduced an intentional link-building effort to expand the reach of our content and establish more authority for the Visible website. This was also meant to defend against the increasing competition in this space.
3. Expanded the overall production (doubling it) to cover more of the topics that are meaningful to Visible and their ICP, faster.

Overall results of the marketing partnership so far

The following sections represent the significant impact of both teams' efforts over the last two years as a result of consistent publishing, content updates, and technical updates for the website:

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• The consistent publishing of new content, regular content updates of existing content, and monitoring of technical specs of the website have resulted in a 313% increase in monthly traffic
• Increased organic traffic, the modification of CTAs, and the integrated content strategy approach have resulted in an average of 2x in monthly trial sign-ups
• Increased organic traffic plus distribution of the content has resulted in ~3x revenue associated with the content

Content results associated with the SEO-focused articles that are worth highlighting

An SEO strategy and roadmap aligned with a well-integrated content marketing strategy’s broader goals will achieve greater success than traffic and sign-up metrics. Visible has also seen the following throughout this engagement:

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• Embedding the podcast and webinar videos to relevant blog posts has resulted in 4x video views/podcast downloads, exposing organic visitors to even more of Visible’s content, brand, and expertise
• The SEO-focused articles act as a main source of messaging and content distribution that has resulted in 2x the number of LinkedIn followers
• The value associated with the growing number of keywords on page 1 has grown 403%. That means if Visible were running paid ads for these queries, the spend amount per month would cost them 403.39% more, according to Ahrefs’ cost-per-click data.
• The quality and subject matter expertise infused into Visible’s content caught the eye of a significant, high-level employment prospect, who was inspired to apply and ultimately became an employee because their viewpoints aligned with the brand’s.