Full-service SEO

How ActiveCampaign Got 83k More Clicks and 4.1M More Impressions In 8 Months

ActiveCampaign is a global company offering marketing automation, CRM, and ecommerce marketing software to businesses. Their products are offered in 5+ languages, and they have a dedicated team to support their customers in each language.

by Mila Di Bella – November 8, 2023

83,000+
Non-branded clicks increase

4.1M+
Increase in impressions

“Our primary goal was to focus on content that met the needs of searchers in our primary markets.Within two quarters, we were able to drive an additional 80k visits to our website. Despite some headwinds in Q1, we saw significant gains after Q2. Flying Cat provided high-quality content that met the needs of our SEO strategy and market goals”

Joe Baugnet Global SEO, ActiveCampaign

Challenges we faced

ActiveCampaign had a sophisticated product and CS strategy for FIGS users. It just needed a sophisticated SEO strategy to match: helping capture users and grow in their local markets.

The existing FIGS sites were pretty sparse in terms of content, and the majority of traffic came from branded clicks. The team wanted to increase non-branded clicks to help users in those segments discover ActiveCampaign as a solution.

An international SEO strategy is tricky—you can’t exactly translate all of your content for it to be effective. There are multiple factors at play:

-Different countries generally have different buying journeys, especially in B2B and email marketing. For example, Italian users need more education before being convinced to buy, and German users are far more focused on data privacy, which would affect the content strategy.

-Each local version of the website has a different starting point, which means some might be able to rank faster than others for certain keywords.

-The competitive landscape is different for each language, both in terms of the actual product and in terms of competing to rank on the results pages (SERPs).

-A large part of the content itself couldn’t be directly translated and would have to be specifically localized to match the level of buy-in per region for a product like ActiveCampaign.

On top of that, including automatic redirects to English pages from a language-specific link would hurt the user’s experience and index bloat and broken links would prevent smooth communication with Google.

All these factors meant that each language would require its own, individual strategy. And each of those individual strategies would need to align with the overall marketing strategy. But bringing it all together would need a well-oiled and organized machine.

Opportunities we seized

With ambitious goals to get from almost 0 to over 100k users, ActiveCampaign had a lot of content to publish. It also needed four unique strategies that aligned with different kinds of buyers, a different competitive landscape, and different SEO challenges for each language.

To make it happen, Flying Cat Marketing compiled a strong team of SEO specialists and content writers that were proficient in each language and got them working cohesively with our SaaS localization partner, Moving Words Translation.

Of course, we needed to communicate the ActiveCampaign brand consistently across all content, so we also had dedicated editors who were responsible for harmonizing the language and tone of voice across a large team.

We embarked on two important missions:

1. Localizing the highest-performing English language pages

2. Creating SEO content from scratch

Localizing the highest-performing and most relevant English language pages into FIGS

ActiveCampaign already had a solid global SEO strategy, and we wanted to make use of that. But first, we had to ensure the existing pages would fit into the FIGS strategies.

There were 9 topics, closely related to ActiveCampaign’s core product, that the team wanted to build traffic around. While its English website receives 1.6M in monthly traffic according to Ahrefs, a lot of that is from top-funnel pieces. It’s been publishing in English for nearly a decade, so it had already covered most of the important bottom- and mid-funnel keywords.

Since we were starting almost from scratch for the other languages, we needed to focus on bottom- and mid-funnel keywords first. So we mapped out the core topics and identified the highest-performing pages existing in English. Then, Moving Words Translation began localization.

Localization isn’t just about translating the text on the page. The localization team analyzed the English text, identified which areas might need to be rewritten due to cultural differences, and optimized all the links and images to match the region.

For example, in a blog post about CTAs, it wasn’t enough just to translate the words on the page. The localization team also swapped the images and examples…

Of course, we couldn’t use an English example of a CTA for the Spanish audience.

… and the blog titles themselves (to account for different search intents).

English audiences wanted to know the different types of CTAs to use.

The Spanish audience for this blog post on calls to action was more focused on examples of CTAs, so we added 20 examples in total.

This attention to detail was the only way to create a truly local experience for users in the FIGS market.

Creating missing key SEO content to cover the core topics

Working with four different SEO specialists, each proficient in either French, Italian, German, or Spanish, we created a long-term SEO plan that aligned with ActiveCampaign’s global strategy. There were many keywords we identified that were specific to the FIGS market that did not yet have existing content in English.

With the help of ActiveCampaign’s skilled team, we launched our most ambitious content project to date—around 20 pages per language, per month,

Meanwhile, our SEO technicians collaborated with ActiveCampaign’s dev team to fix site-wide and language-specific technical issues, like UX-unfriendly redirects and index bloat, that might prevent our labor from bearing fruit.

Results

In the end, we published 392 pages across the four languages. These were the results:

-83,000 more clicks to the FIGS pages for non-branded keywords in the last 8 months than in the prior period

-4.1 million more impressions to the FIGS pages in the last 8 months than in the prior period

Thanks to this project, organic traffic from FIGS users is a significant source of ARR for ActiveCampaign, and there’s still a huge opportunity to re-optimize existing content to boost those figures. And, on top of all that, ActiveCampaign’s FIGS users now have a place to learn more about email marketing and marketing automation, which means even greater value added for the end-user.