How I Helped Waves Grow 402% in Traffic in 12 Months
”Going from a hardly known brand to Google to outranking Slack for Slack-related queries”
Waves is a B2B Slack community management tool that offers their corporate clients an all-in-one CRM and Analytics platform that allows them to increase engagement and improve member experience.
As an up-and-coming SaaS tool, they were mainly relying on getting sales from cold outreach and referrals.
At one point, their growth had stagnated and they realized that their competitors have blogs where they are getting leads organically from Google.
They knew that if they want to be competitive on the community tech market and also beef up their sales, they should be ranking for key industry terms on the search engines and establish topical authority and thought leadership.
They had two main problems:
- The website had a low domain authority
- The company operated in a highly-competitive industry which had very little demand that many companies were scrapping for
Waves had yet to start publishing consistently, optimizing their website speed and rank on Google.
In this case study, I’m going to walk you through how I undertook the task of starting a SaaS blog almost from scratch, to how I made it grow 415% in traffic. At the end, we started outranking Slack and their biggest competitors for some high-value keywords.
1. How I undertook the project
The first thing that was important for me was to get to know the complete situation. I had no idea about who they want to attract and with what product they want to attract them.
We started out on (what turned out to be quite long) conversation about their target audience and product.
The founder was kind enough to give me their detailed customer personas that their salesman was using as well as a complete rundown of their product features, main benefits and pricing model.
When getting to know their audience, it was important for me to learn their main pain points as well as learn more about the tools that they are currently using.
Here are my 6 questions that I used to learn more about their audience:
- 1. What was the problem you were looking to solve before stumbling across our product or service?
- 2. If our product/service were no longer to exist, what product/service would you use as an alternative?
- 3. What is the biggest challenge you currently face in your role?
- 4. How would you describe our product/service to a friend who knew nothing about us?
- 5. What are the top 3 benefits that you receive from our product/service?
- 6. If you were to research our product or service, what would you search for?
These are my questions that I use to identify the use cases of the product and the problem it solves for them, alternative tools, and how the customers themselves speak about the product.
Although I was hired as a content writer only, I still had a quick look at their technical SEO performance and saw areas for improvement on their Core Web Vitals (speed and user experience). After all, content speed and website performance is a vital factor for ranking.
And after doing a small content audit on their competitors, I dived into doing keyword research.
I was able to establish the following parent topics (topical clusters) and content types that we needed to focus on:
- Community Engagement (TOTF)
- Community Growth (TOTF)
- Slack Community Management (TOTF)
- Slack Analytics (TOTF)
- Community Automation (TOTF)
- Comparison posts between with other community tools (BOTF)
- Using the tool in action to solve a problem (BOTF)
TOTF = Top of the funnel content, with the idea of generating more traffic and establishing topical authority and thought leadership.
BOTF = Bottom of the funnel content, with the idea of driving revenue from searchers with commercial intent.
And all that was left was to put data tracking in place so we can evaluate the traffic and conversions.
We were able to set up Google Search Console and Google Analytics conversion (goal) tracking in place.
Now it was time to start producing and ranking, but it was no easy task. Although my research process went well and I was able to learn a lot about them, their industry did not seem to be very attractive.
It was dominated by social media tools positioning themselves as ”community tools” and Waves had no real Domain Authority to compete with them.
We had to first go after longer tail keywords before we were able to compete for the bigger keywords with a bigger keyword difficulty.
And the industry itself, B2B and up-and-coming, did not have much search demand, either. The demand was in the thousands, not in the millions.
This is why simply ranking on the first page was not enough for Waves. To produce results and increase traffic, and cater for these keywords with below 100 volume, we needed to be in the top 3 – or nothing.
2. How I approached the project
Starting with the Tech Audit, here were the issues that I was able to identify:
- Indexation issues, that were fixed with putting more internal links to said pages
- Speed issues – we made all images in SVGs and kept it as a practice to keep pictures under 100KB
- Basic On-Page Optimization such as meta descriptions, H structure and title tags
- Mobile optimizations – too big or too small text, tap targets too close, overall UX
Not much technical problems, after all, the website was relatively new.
After that, it was time to get the content machine started. The ongoing work consisted of top-of-the-funnel content targeting more organic traffic and overall visibility, paired with bottom-of-the-funnel content, targeting conversions.
The most common content types that I wrote on that seemed to work in this industry were:
- Ultimate Guides – ”The Definitive Guide to Community Engagement on Slack”
- Alternative to X – ”CommonRoom Alternative For Slack Community Tech”
- How-Tos – ”How To Reactivate Inactive Community Members”
- Listicles – ”18 Creative Online Community Engagement Ideas That Will Get Your Members Talking”
- Product-In-Use – ”How to Analyze Your Slack Community” (With Waves)
My usual approach is to focus on these bottom-of-the-funnel ”money” articles where we put our product in front as the obvious solution, but Waves needed some initial traffic, and initial Domain Authority, otherwise we would not have even ranked for our brand name.
When dealing with small websites, results are often slow to come. In order to get the content indexed in the first place, we created and submitted a sitemap, and we had to do plenty of manual indexation requests.
I was able to then interlink between our 7 main topic clusters (internal links across one-another) in order to support the indexation and rankings as well.
After 3-4 months and around after the first 40-50 published articles, results started kicking in.
The content was naturally able to secure Waves’ initial 30-40 backlinks, often referred to as ”foundation backlinks” which are the external links that Google needs to properly discover and crawl your website.
When it comes to their old content, I didn’t want to scrap it completely. I was able to update it, add more content and, after optimizing, the articles were able to rank just as fine.
3. What happened at the end (Results, Traffic increase, Revenue increase)
After around the ~60th article mark and after more than 6 months of optimising, Waves was officially competitive in a seemingly dominated industry by big players.
Around July was the time we were able to hit 150 unique visitors per month and by the end of the year, we were able to scale it up to 500 per month. And from there, to July the following year, we were able to hit 600 unique visitors.
And remember – although these numbers do not sound fancy, this is a B2B niche SaaS product.
The goal of SEO content creation in B2B blogs is to optimise for commercial intent keywords and to focus on generating leads by solving their problems and positioning the product as the obvious solution.
Each of those 600 unique visitors per month (it’s scaling as we are talking) is a potentially qualified customer with a budget to spend.
And here is Waves casually outranking Slack for a Slack-related query…
And just in passing – we were able to get more than 400 subscribers in total for the newsletter, which has managed to make revenue as well.
In fact, at a point almost weekly, our content was getting featured in famous Community newsletters and articles.
Even to the point of one of our articles being named the ”2nd best article of 2022” by one the Hubspot’s Director of Community, Evan Hamilton.
When it comes to how much they increased in revenue – I cannot disclose real numbers, but all I can say is that they increased their revenue by 4x in the meantime.
And all of the new customers have mentioned that they’ve read plenty of our content.
As for leads, Waves was able to get 248 new product sign-ups and ended up generating over 400% in revenue as a result of the content that solved their problems, answered their pain and showed them an alternative solution.
Increase your revenue with Product-Led Content & SEO
Book a free consultation with me and tell me about your product and customers. Outsource content creation to a professional B2B SaaS writer who optimises for both traffic and conversions.
Make sure to input your website and issues that you are facing currently. It’d also make sense to let me know what you are looking to achieve.
In the call, I will help you with:
- A few content frameworks that you can use
- A small keyword research before the call for reference (free content ideas)
- Content strategy going forward and how I could help you with it