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BambooHR may be one of the biggest names in HR technology, but until recently, it struggled to grow its online traffic.
The company was asking itself how to make a leap into the next tier of thought leadership.
How do we explode growth to become industry frontrunners?
What can we do to build on our trusted brand?
A new content strategy changed all of that. BambooHR’s website traffic exploded in the first months of 2023. It grew by 31% over last year’s average. At the same time, BambooHR established itself as a thought leader.
This is how.
BambooHR Became the HR Dictionary in 3 Months
BambooHR set itself up to reach new levels of success in thought leadership with its new HR Glossary. It had an industry-leading product and strong existing marketing efforts, but the glossary brought it to a new level of content marketing.
Glossary pages let you define common industry terms. If your glossary can cover enough terms with professional quality, you could become the standard for your industry. As BambooHR discovered, the SEO benefits of becoming your industry’s dictionary are enormous.
Accelerating Growth Through Great Content
Everybody knows dictionaries have to be big. In just ten days, BambooHR published more than 300 new pages under its HR Glossary.
But how quickly did those pay off?
The HR Glossary went from a dead link with zero traffic to a primary traffic generator almost overnight.
Something made this glossary immediately successful. In almost any measure–backlinks, organic traffic generation, keywords, organic traffic value–BambooHR’s HR glossary leads its website. 13 of the site’s top 20 pages are in the glossary.
What Makes Glossary Pages Perfect for SEO?
Glossary pages are incredibly SEO-friendly. Just think about how many of your searches end in looking at a Wikipedia page or a definition. But let’s break down exactly what makes them so successful.
Search Intent Matching
One of the four types of search intent is informational: people just looking for information. That’s what glossary pages provide.
In less technical terms, glossary pages are great because they give people what they want. That means people are more likely to come back to the page for more information and trust what they learn.
For example, a small business owner hiring a contractor for the first time might not know what a Form 1099 is or who should get one. Looking the term up, they’d find all that information on the BambooHR definition of the term.
Query Matching
Beyond just matching the intent of the person making the search, glossaries also allow you to exactly match the search they’re making. Even long-tail keywords can match exactly with a glossary header.
That exact matching is great for SEO. It means that the article will appear for many different searches on the same topic. For example, the definition of a salaried employee ranks for over 2,400 keywords, even though the page itself only has around 1,000 words on it!
As you can see below, many of the top keywords this page ranks for are rephrasing similar questions. The fact that it ranks for all of them is a testament to how directly the page answers those questions.
Low Barrier to Entry
It’s also important to recognize that glossary pages are easy to put together. They don’t need to be updated very often, and the definitions should be fairly easy to find.
Of course, no individual definition is going to get the amount of attention that a free tool would, for example. But spinning up definitions is much easier than creating the idea for the tool, writing the code for it, and making it available to your audience.
While glossaries should be written by people knowledgeable in the field, glossary entries don’t require them to use their most high-level skills. That makes a glossary much faster and low-cost to put together. Once you’re certain the glossary has accurate information, you can build a near-instant SEO moat.
Wide-Ranging
By making a high volume of definitions, you can cover a wide range of topics. That lets you spread your SEO impact around.
In more concrete terms, the BambooHR HR Glossary has 153 pages ranking number one for their top keywords. An additional 103 HR Glossary pages rank in the top ten.
With a product as widely useful as BambooHR, you can imagine the marketing team could find it difficult to market every one of its uses. With the glossary, the company can show off the breadth of features available.
Backlink Bait
One of the simplest, most-passive benefits of creating a glossary is that it’s tempting for backlinks. Websites looking to add a little authority to their own content on HR topics frequently link their definitions to BambooHR’s HR Glossary.
The definitions add clarity and authority to the posts they’re linking to. If they’re well-written, they become a useful resource that lets others write more specific advice on the topic. Backlinking also creates a sense of authority and thought leadership. If everyone’s referring to the same source, you can bet that’s the most trusted voice on the topic.
Of course, backlinks can take time to build up, but the HR Glossary amassed 1,789 backlinks between February 15 and March 15, 2023, alone.
How Definitions Create Revenue
While dictionaries and sites like Wikipedia have great SEO, many aren’t very profitable. But that shouldn’t discourage you, because BambooHR created an excellent model for converting customers from definitions.
Every definition in the BambooHR HR Glossary includes a customized call to action.
This is a critical way BambooHR adds value to an already-precious resource. These custom CTAs redirect visitors to product landing pages relevant to the topic or a custom demo-booking page.
For example, the definition of a Form 1099 urges its reader to “leave paperwork in the past” and learn how to go paperless.
If you click on the link, you land on a customized demo booking page with even more copy about reducing paperwork.
The definition of payroll leads you to a landing page about simplifying payroll processes with BambooHR.
By mixing powerful, customized CTAs with useful, high-traffic definitions, BambooHR makes its definitions a revenue driver.
How Each Definition Creates Thought Leadership
BambooHR’s definition of performance review goes far in building the brand into a thought leader by itself.
It’s a trusted source for 155 backlinks. By itself, it brings in $22,700 in traffic while ranking for 1,268 keywords–not bad for a small page with only about 1,000 words on it.
Plenty of businesses put in hard work and research to create posts that perform much worse than this one. For a simple definition, these numbers are nothing short of incredible.
But the most important part to consider is that this post isn’t alone. There are over 300 others that all perform very well for high-volume search terms. That’s an entire dictionary of top-performing pages.
Of course, that’d make a great marketing effort by itself. But it wouldn’t have the authority behind it that a true, trusted industry dictionary needs. The real value of the HR Glossary comes from the thought leadership already established by BambooHR’s past marketing efforts.
That work lets the HR Glossary go from “good” to “industry-leading” marketing.
Creating Trust with Deeper Thought Leadership Examples
You and I wouldn’t trust definitions from just anyone. We look to Merriam-Webster and the OED because they’re trusted. They employ thought leaders to create what seem like basic definitions.
That’s how BambooHR’s thought leadership created the foundation for its glossary’s success. The glossary relies on the three pillars of earned media, expert trust, and usefulness that BambooHR built to position itself where it is today.
BambooHR’s Value to Other Thought Leaders
Outside of the HR Glossary, BambooHR has still been busy making valuable content. It has a wide range of resources for a variety of target audiences, and some are even cited by experts.
For example, its ebook on onboarding gets backlinks from academically-respected institutions like the Harvard Business Review. If their experts are citing your company’s resources, it’s a good sign you’re on your way to thought leadership.
That level of trust is valuable beyond just backlinks. It means that people might be willing to scroll past the top search results to find a definition from a source they’ve seen elsewhere and trust more. BambooHR is solidifying its position as a company of experts leading the field.
If you’re looking to create content that other thought leaders will cite, look at what original research you can produce. Experts love digging into primary sources of information, so the more you can make yourself a source of new data, the better.
Making Something Useful
This shouldn’t be new advice, but it’s surprising how few businesses follow it: make something actual people will use.
When you plan your content, consider what useful tools, guides, and definitions you could make for others.
What type of content is MOST LIKELY to get links?
We wanted to find out.
So we took a look at some of the top Martech websites in the world and analyzed their most frequently linked to pages to uncover what is the most linkable SEO content.
The answer was tools. pic.twitter.com/sfHinISlBz
— Ross Simmonds (@TheCoolestCool) February 4, 2023
That’s because people link to tools more than any other type of content. They appreciate when you’ve built something that makes their lives easier.
In the same way, actionable advice like what BambooHR gives in this post makes it a SERP-topping traffic driver. BambooHR even highlights snippets of fun, useful tips on top of the general topic:
Blog posts like this build trust in multiple ways. They show individual contributors that BambooHR is genuinely interested in making their lives easier. They also position the company as a team of experts who can work as advisors if you partner with them.
That’s what made blog posts like the one above a main driver for BambooHR’s inbound-only sales strategy before the HR Glossary’s launch. Even before BambooHR was building a glossary, it was still interested in providing useful content for its users.
Of course, making something useful is easier said than done. The trick comes in identifying what your audience needs. Paying attention to long-tail searches and searches with informational intent will help you identify what your audience is looking for.
BambooHR’s success with this type of content shows how it addressed the biggest problem companies like it face in SEO:
Using Earned Media to Build a Thought Leader’s Reputation
When BambooHR was already establishing itself among experts and users, it had one more audience it needed to address: the general public.
BambooHR wanted a reputation as a business full of innovative experts in human resources. That reputation would allow them to expand later marketing efforts to rest on their authority. The HR Glossary is trusted today because of the public relations efforts BambooHR made later on.
That’s when BambooHR conceptualized a great way to establish its reputation: create an innovative human resources program.
Enter the paid paid vacation. No, that’s not a typo. That’s the name of BambooHR’s policy of covering employees’ costs when they go on vacation. That means their vacations are free from financial worry, on top of the regular pay the employees still receive.
BambooHR certainly pays serious money to support this policy. But it’s hard to put a price on a two-minute segment on the Today Show.
BambooHR successfully turned its vacation policy into an earned media opportunity. But it didn’t just leave it at that. Instead, it promoted blog posts around it like this and this, and further promoted it with social media posts like this one. That kind of content repurposing serves to amplify an opportunity like earned media coverage.
In the end, BambooHR made a reputation as a savvy, caring organization that’s good at making its employees happy. That’s exactly what you’d want from a team of HR experts.
Of course, if you copied BambooHR’s vacation policy it wouldn’t make the news anymore. You need to think of your own original aspect of your company’s culture to promote. It should tie in with your industry to show your business’s expertise in that field.
BambooHR used earned media to build its reputation as a company of HR experts. It created an HR innovation that made headlines and used content marketing to capitalize on the attention to sustain its reputation.
3 Ways BambooHR Builds on the HR Glossary’s Success
Now that the HR Glossary is successful, BambooHR isn’t just resting on those laurels.
Instead, it’s building on its success by tying these pages more closely to other marketing channels, updating its old content with new internal backlinks, and continuously creating timely definitions for its users.
Referring to Gated Content
One of the best ways that BambooHR uses its definitions is by linking them to gated content. Some of the people looking at the glossary might want a more in-depth explanation of that topic, and BambooHR’s ebooks and other gated resources are a great way to provide that.
Here’s a glossary page that gets about 8,200 organic visits per month. Roughly estimated, that has a value of $4,600 by itself. But the page also includes a link to gated content for an onboarding checklist and more information.
The gated content allows BambooHR to bring the glossary’s visitors into other marketing channels more directed at revenue generation. As visitors become more informed, your content can actually move them down the SaaS marketing funnel.
If your content marketing includes multiple formats or sections of your website, be sure that your internal backlinks cross genres. Link to YouTube videos, posts, and gated content to bring more value to your readers.
Adding New Backlinks to Old Content
Some of BambooHR’s old content used to backlink out to external sites with their own HR definitions. Of course, external backlinks are perfectly fine, but it’s even better if you can create internal backlinks as well.
That means that when you publish new content, it can be useful to periodically check if you can add new internal backlinks to old articles. That’s exactly what BambooHR did with its glossary: after the glossary was published, new backlinks appeared in much older articles.
For example, this article from 2018 got a new backlink to BambooHR’s definition of a qualifying life event. While it’s unlikely that the old blog article is redirecting a lot of traffic, building a new article’s backlink profile is valuable in-and-of itself.
Updating Content with Timely Definitions
BambooHR has also built some very timely definitions into its glossary. HR has certain annual cycles that affect informational search patterns, and BambooHR capitalized on its knowledge of these patterns to create timely, useful content.
For example, healthcare open enrollment ended on January 15 in most states in the US. People who wanted to change health insurance policies needed a qualifying life event in order to do so. Just beforehand, BambooHR published this article on qualifying life events.
The result?
Traffic immediately spiked.
Creating timely content goes far. If you want to do the same, you’ll need to build business processes that allow your team the agility and independence to rapidly respond to timely issues. Once you have that, timely content will come naturally.
What BambooHR Can Do Better: Ensure the Glossary Stays Relevant
I wish BambooHR could just rest on the glossary it has built and let the traffic come in by itself. SEO and marketing would be a lot easier if that’s all it took! But instead, BambooHR needs to constantly work to make sure it stays on top.
While its initial spike in traffic was impressive, the glossary has stopped growing. In order to recapture the momentum, BambooHR will need to keep adding new glossary pages and updating the old ones.
It will help if BambooHR stays focused on its most relevant definitions. Certain parts of its glossary, such as its definition of Gen Z, might be competing in difficult searches for traffic that BambooHR is less interested in.
Wrap-Up: Become the Dictionary
Now you know why it pays to build your industry’s dictionary: you become a thought leader. Once you build that dictionary, you can keep repurposing articles for later use.
Definitions are especially great to build on because they’re simple, and you can start building them even if you’re new to the content marketing space.
Whether you’re a novice or a veteran, you can glean plenty of additional insights from the Foundation Newsletter. Sign up to get more cutting-edge research on B2B SaaS marketing.
