Three Strategies Rooted In Evidence For SEO Excellence [RESEARCH]

More keywords. More traffic. 

It’s really that simple. When we analyzed over 400 SaaS, Tech & Cloud companies as a part of our latest benchmarking report, it solidified something that most SEOs have been preaching for years: More keywords = More traffic. 

A lot of brands make the mistake of thinking they should exclusively focus on one or two keywords as a part of their marketing mix. The truth is. The smartest brands capturing a significant amount of organic traffic each year are doing so on the back of multiple keywords across a wide range of search queries. 

Salesforce, for example, ranks for over 1.2 million keywords and receives 9 million organic visits from SEO each year. That’s a lot of traffic, and the value of this traffic cannot be overstated. To capture the amount of organic traffic that Salesforce captures through a wide range of keywords, you would need to spend over $25 million per month. This doesn’t happen overnight. It happens through a constant commitment to investing in content and creating assets rooted in search intent. 

Here are three simple techniques that brands can leverage to begin ranking for high-value keywords at scale across a wide range of search queries: 

Glossary Driven Content

People use Google to find answers to questions, and many of those questions are simply users trying to determine the meaning of a particular word or acronym. The number of phrases and words used in technology-driven industries not found in the Webster dictionary is quite significant. As such, smart brands like Databricks are using this to their advantage and creating glossaries on their site: 

Some brands call them glossary pages. Some brands call them learning centers. 

At the end of the day, the goal is the same: 

Educate your audience on industry lingo and new words.

A learning center strategy is a great approach for brands wanting to rank for a handful of keywords and establish themselves as industry leaders. These resources and sections of your website can also become backlink gold as more brands and journalists use them to find ‘definitions’ for phrases and acronyms they’re introducing to their audiences. 

Here are a few of the best learning centers in SaaS:

Moz Learning Center:                     92,100/mos
Mailchimp Glossary:                       39,100/mos
Zapier Learning Center:                 35,700/mos
Salesforce Learning Center:          31,300/mos
Twilio Learning Center:                 12,800/mos

Scaleable Landing Pages

Want to rank for a bunch of high-value search queries? You need to start by understanding your audience’s search intent and what they’re actually looking for when they go to Google. In this research, you might identify that many people in your industry are looking for the same thing but with slight differences. 

Here’s an example of this in the wild.

The brand formerly known as Transferwise (now just Wise.com) recognized that a handful of their ideal customers were looking for currency conversion. As such, they created a series of scaleable landing pages that showcase hundreds of different conversions between Euros and Pesos along with Dollars and Pounds. 

The ability to provide this valuable resource to the world presented them with a massive SEO moat and helped them establish their brand as one of the top wire and finance companies in the software space.

What popular content do you have that you can use as a landing page template? Are you fully utilizing product data to create high-value assets for your customers? Have you identified which customer segments you can capture with long-tail variations of competitive search queries? Are you proactively challenging G2 and Capterra with comparison pages?

The opportunities here are endless if you’re willing to get creative and think about the possibilities of scale + automation within your content opportunities. 

Blogging Like A Media Engine

How many blog posts should you produce a month?

That’s often the wrong question. The right question is: 

How many good blog posts can you produce in a month? 

With the right editor, content team, and researchers – a high-velocity content marketing engine can set a brand on a rocket ship of keyword growth. Some organizations struggle to create a large amount of content each month, and the reason is simple: 

These organizations don’t think like media companies. 

Smart brands recognize that we’re all media companies now and that unlocking blog success requires keyword targeting. In this Foundation Insider exclusive video – I’m going to talk you through how this happens and can be executed well: 

How Thinking Like A Media Company Can Drive Value