Article's Content
Article's Content
For over a decade, private stock market investments have appreciated at an average of about 5% each year, consistently beating out their public counterparts. But there’s another type of investment that blows them both out of the water — keyword investment.
At first glance, it seems like the fields of Search Engine Optimization and Private Equity may seem entirely separate, but they share a surprising number of parallels. Both require careful strategy, research, and patience to yield significant returns.
In SEO, the ‘investment’ comes in content creation, website optimization, and keyword research – all efforts to improve a website’s visibility and ranking on search engines. As for Private Equity, investments entail examining various companies and sectors to identify viable investment prospects like startups or funds. Like any type of speculative exercise, both fields involve calculated risks.
At Foundation, we take a lot of inspiration from Warren Buffet’s concept of strategic moats when we think about marketing strategy. For a SaaS brand, nothing is more important than investing in content creation to build out a strong SEO Moat.
Unlocking an SEO moat is SaaS marketing goals.
What is it?
It’s when a brand has invested so strategically into content & SEO that they captured space in the SERP for the vast majority of search terms associated with their market & ideal customers.
How do you do it? 👇
— Ross Simmonds (@TheCoolestCool) July 13, 2021
As a SaaS brand aiming to “unlock the power of equity ownership for more people,” Carta is no stranger to the concept of investing and equity management.
The San Francisco-based technology company started in 2012 as eShares, a tool to help founders administer and manage stock certificates on the cloud. It then built out its offering with tools for cap table management and 409 valuations. Fast forward a decade, and Carta is now the go-to platform for the constellation of professionals working in the growing private equity space.
The company aims to become the “stock market for private companies,” which means it needs product and service offerings for more than just founders and VCs. After all, there are plenty of financial, legal, and administrative considerations that go into private market investments.
For a company with Carta’s size and aspirations, helping different audience segments self-identify as customers is an intelligent play. As you can see on the Carta website, they’ve done just that: the Use Cases drop-down outlines how it offers support for every stage and every role of the private market investment process — from founders and investors to legal, finance, and HR teams.
One of the big reasons for Carta’s success — and, as we’ll see, the success of its SEO strategy — is the changing nature of public vs private markets over the past 15 years.
According to Morgan Stanley, companies have raised more money in private markets than in public ones since 2009. Over roughly the same period of time, the number of private equity exits via IPO has declined by around 7% each year, while the number of secondary buyouts has increased annually by 5%. And the pandemic has only exacerbated this phenomenon.
Essentially, selling private shares is more lucrative than selling public ones.
While this is unfortunate for retail investors, it’s very fortunate for Carta CEO Henry Ward and the rest of the company. As of this year, an absurd amount of money flows through Carta’s “Startup ecosystem.” Take a look for yourself:
But startup capital isn’t the only investment ecosystem that Carta is building up. The company has also built a solid SEO moat with an index of investment-related content yielding traffic returns that even the private markets can’t match.
As a Top-20 member of the Forbes’ Cloud 100, Carta is a $7.4-billion company with deep pockets and more than enough resources to throw at a diversified marketing portfolio. It also brings in a significant amount of direct traffic, signaling that it has a strong brand and lots of recognition in the market.
But today, we aren’t going to look at Carta’s brand building, strong partnership network, or roster of big-name clients — we’re going to look at the 100% increase in its organic traffic investment.
Carta’s Organic Traffic Success: SERP Dominance and Appreciating SEO Investments
Qualifying leads and converting users is a numbers game. Of the hundreds of thousands to millions of visitors that land on a B2B SaaS site, a small percentage will continue down the funnel to become a qualified lead. An even smaller percentage will convert into users via a trial or product demo. Carta’s marketing team is doing everything it can to feed that pipeline.
Take a look at this chart of Carta’s organic traffic over the last year — it’s bound to make any investor (or marketer) happy:
Over the first six months of 2023, Carta’s organic traffic has witnessed a 100% increase, jumping from around 100K in early January to 200K at the start of July. The most exciting part? That traffic bump is mainly driven by Carta’s blog subfolder.
Remember: making significant gains in organic traffic doesn’t have to be complicated. All you need to do is target relevant keywords and make sure your content provides value to readers.
Let’s look at how Carta did it.
The Key(Word)s to Carta’s SEO Dominance
Like Modern Treasury, and other SaaS brands operating in complex markets, Carta needs to do a lot of educational work with its potential clients. But to do so, these brands must capture a spot on the top SERP page for each term, ideally in the top three.
The drastic increase in both Carta’s blog and overall traffic is driven by some blue-chip terms in the equity management space. Because Carta brings its financial services to a wide range of people, including those who are outside or just entering the private market, it’s not surprising to see that most of them are high-volume, short-tail keywords.
Here are the top short-tail keywords driving Carta’s traffic jump:
This list perfectly depicts the importance of building a large SEO moat with content targeting relevant keywords. At some point, if you plan things right, those keywords will hit a spike in searches, and that traffic will come flowing in.
Now let’s look at a few of the keywords driving Carta’s biggest organic wins across three key organic metrics: traffic volume, traffic value, and SERP position.
Biggest Organic Traffic Increase — Stock Options
Carta’s most significant single-page increase in traffic since the calendar flipped to 2023 has been on its top-of-funnel blog post about stock options. At first glance, the post may appear bare-bones, but it just zeros in on the fundamentals of solid content:
- Provide immediate educational value by defining the term off-the-bat
- Make the post easy to navigate with a linked table of contents
- Link to other relevant posts for SEO strength and easy site navigation
- Add social media and email sharing links to help readers distribute content
The popularity of this post isn’t surprising. Issuing stock has been the company’s bread and butter since the eShare days, and it’s a topic that interests everyone at a startup, not just founders or investors.
Still, it’s a great depiction of the traffic-generating power a single topic can have when you target it correctly in your content: the traffic volume to the post has increased by over 10K since the start of the year.
Biggest Traffic Value Increase — Special Purpose Vehicle
While the biggest traffic spike goes to a blog post on a more common keyword, the biggest increase in traffic value goes to a post answering the question, “What is a special purpose vehicle?” (Essentially, it lets multiple parties invest in a single company by creating a legal entity to pool capital.)
The value of the organic traffic Carta brings to its special purpose vehicle blog post has increased by a whopping $21.4K during the brand’s traffic spike. So, this single blog post not only brings in thousands of visitors each month and jumped up 22 SERP positions, but it’s also saving Carta over 20 grand in PPC ads.
Biggest SERP Position Increase — Qualified Purchaser
Of Carta’s blog posts that brought in a significant increase in traffic over the first six months of the year, the blog post targeting the keyword “Qualified Purchaser” has witnessed the largest increase in SERP position. In just under three months, the blog post jumped over 70 spots in the Google SERPs, leapfrogging some big names like Thomson Reuters, The Motley Fool, and even the SEC’s own website.
Not bad for a top-of-funnel blog post, eh?
Strong Top-of-the-Funnel Content Builds a Strong SEO Moat
Yes, Carta is cashing in big-time on organic traffic thanks to great keyword selection and the fact that the private market it caters to has been on a tear for over a decade. It’s a great example of why a strategic approach to the market and great product-market fit help set the stage for SEO success.
Still, there’s no sustaining the run Carta is on without a key ingredient — content excellence. In this case, excellent top-of-the-funnel (TOFU) content. It’s a strategy used by B2B SaaS brands across industries, from Asana to NerdWallet.
Of the top 15 pages generating organic traffic for Carta from January 1st to July 1st, 13 are “What is”- style content that educates readers on specific laws, processes, and practices related to investing in private markets. Like the three blog posts above, these posts don’t have many bells and whistles. Carta isn’t trying to wow readers with a dynamic UX, flashy graphics, or verbose prose. It simply outlines everything a new founder or venture capital investor might need to know about requirements for investing in private funds or companies. These posts educate and empower Carta’s audience.
Create this type of content for your own brand to ensure that visitors will continue to reach your blog pages and move further down your funnel. It’s a simple investing strategy, but you can’t beat those returns.
