Our growth plan

We decided to build a fully bottom-funnel strategy (targeting only searchers who were shopping around and ready to buy). The plan was to piggy back off of competitor’s branded traffic and build “alternatives” SEO competitor comparison pages.

Most of the estimated search volume in Ahrefs was low:

While the estimated search volume was 10 or less for some keywords, it brought in far more traffic:

This happened because while we optimized it for a single keyword, people have many ways to search for a single search intent. That means as long as you can correctly identify the intent, you’ll end up ranking for for more keywords than the first one:

As you can see, just one of the pieces ended up ranking for 426 keywords rather than the 1 we optimized it for. Another reason our forecast was exceeded was that Ahrefs and all other keyword research tools vastly underestimate traffic and volume.

As you can see in the above image, it says that this page received 368 monthly users. But if we look at the real data in Google Search Console, we can see that we actually received far more than that:

What’s interesting about this “alternatives to” technique is that you if your brand name doesn’t have much traction yet, you can use the traffic that your competitors get from their own brand name.

Regardless of whether you choose to write about your competitor or not, the search traffic is there, and the person shopping for it will find pages comparing your competitors. When you decide to own that keyword and create the pages yourself, you’re both:

-Making sure your brand is mentioned as a part of that conversation

-Controlling the narrative of how you’re presented and benchmarked against your competitors.

How we got them to rank so fast

There were several things we did to get these pages to rank so fast:

1. Focus on the lowest volume keywords

This the most important part of the strategy. The higher the keyword volume reported on Ahrefs, the longer the pages took to rank (and the less traffic it actually brought us).

For example, “looker vs tableau” had the highest reported search volume on Ahrefs, but brought us the least amount of traffic compared to the other pages:

Reported search volume for “looker vs tableau”, according to Ahrefs

  • While it supposedly had over 1000 searches per month (which is probably true), it brought us a measly 11 clicks:

It’s not that the search volume wasn’t there—it’s just the the higher the reported volume is, the more people go for that keyword, and the harder it is to get in the top 3. This page was one of the slowest to rank, hence the disapointing keyword volume.

By focusing on the lowest-volume keywords, we ended up still getting thousands new users per month.

2. Internal linking strategy

No page published was left an orphan. As we do with every client, every time we publish a page we go back into old pages and add links back to the new page. Specifically, we find pages that are already ranking well and frequently crawled by Google, and add the links there.

3. Manually submit page to GSC

As soon as each page was published, we manually submitted the URL to Google Search Console in the hopes that it would speed up the indexing process.

4. External link building

Once a page started ranking and being picked up by Google, we built external links to it to drive growth faster.

Results

We analyze each of our client’s individual needs and situation and build custom plans to help you reach your long-term goals faster.

Are you a fast-growth B2B SaaS company looking to relieve dependence on word of mouth and paid ads, or just looking to future-proof your business by building an organic inbound pipeline?

Get in touch with us today.

402% more traffic than forecasted: Trevor.io case study

How we helped position TestGorilla as the key voice in skills-based hiring by scaling high-quality content

Know more

How we helped position TestGorilla as the key voice in skills-based hiring by scaling high-quality content

Know more

Operto Helping Operto 4X its revenue in 12 months

Know more
case study

How Programmatic SEO Increased Conversion Rates By 35%

Know more
case study

4x Revenue in 12 Months With This Inbound Strategy

Know more
case study

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

Know more