Article's Content
Article's Content
Few B2B brands are having a better year than Rubrik. The SaaS unicorn recently went public and earned a post-IPO valuation of $6.6 billion.
The cybersecurity platform, started in 2014, focuses on data security for enterprise, cloud, and SaaS companies. They offer tools across a number of different categories, including:
- Data protection
- Data threat analytics
- Security posture
- Cyber recovery
The company is still in the red after selling perpetual licenses for the first five years of operations. But the transition to a SaaS model obviously has VCs and investors excited. And it’s no wonder, considering Rubrik’s share of subscription revenue jumped from 73% to 91% over the last year.
Now, it’s about sustaining (and increasing) that level of growth.
Today, we’ll look at how Rubrik is using organic marketing to bring in potential new customers.
How Rubriks Drives 23% of Their Organic Traffic with 3% of Their Pages
Organic is a major part of Rubrik’s marketing mix, with over 25% of site traffic coming via search engine results pages (SERPs). The company also performs well with referrals and social media.
But one aspect of their SEO game is hitting a home run: The Rubrik Insights subfolder. This hub houses 70+ educational assets to help people “learn data protection terms, strategies, and best practices”. It also brings in 23% of Rubrik’s organic traffic.
Here’s the kicker: This subfolder represents a tiny 3.4% of Rubrik’s web content. Of the 2,170 pages on their website, only 75 are in the Insights subfolder.
With this type of outsized impact, it’s worth looking at what they’re doing right with these pieces (and what they can do to unlock even more organic growth).
Turning Insights Into Organic Traffic
Rubrik started investing in this subfolder around the beginning of 2021. In a little over three years, they’ve seen some eye-popping growth.
These Insights pages are responsible for 39% of the top keywords Rubrik ranks for (288 out of 742). The highest performers bring in tens of thousands of visits per month, often snagging one of the coveted ‘Top 3’ SERP positions.
Take a look at the organic metrics for their six best pages:
The leading Insights piece, What’s the Difference Between RTO and RPO, is by far the most impressive. It’s a shorter piece that describes two key components of a disaster recovery plan:
- Recovery Time Objective (RTO)
- Recovery Point Objective (RPO)
Basically, they outline how long a business can tolerate an app being down after an outage (RTO) and how much data loss they can tolerate (RPO).
The page brings in 57% of the traffic for Rubrik’s Insights — nearly 10,000 monthly visits at a value of $7,600. It sits behind only the home page in terms of overall traffic.
Let’s break it down through the lenses of EEAT, keyword placement, and internal linking.
High EEAT
At around 900 words, the RTO vs. RPO page proves you don’t need to be the word-count champ to top the SERPs. Quality and reader value trump quantity. (Granted, it does help if you’re a massive company with a high domain rating.)
Well-known brands with strong expertise, authority, and trust (E-E-A-T) signals, like Rubrik, tend to generate more organic traffic. This lends credibility to their TOFU content in the eyes of readers and search engines alike.
Keyword Frequency
This single page ranks for over 700 keywords. More than 100 of those are in the top three search results, including dozens of combinations and variations of “RTO” and “RPO”.
Speaking of, “RTO” appears 13 times in the copy, while “RPO” gets 14 mentions. Rubrik clearly did their keyword research homework.
Interlinking
The RTO vs. RPO page features six internal links in the body copy. Four are anchored in the text, while two use mini-CTA modules. This internal linking helps boost the page’s authority and guides readers to related resources.
The in-text CTAs direct readers to landing pages for specific Rubrik solutions like data archival and backup and recovery. The two CTA modules, which are formatted like digital ads, bring readers to longer-form assets with lead-capture forms.
For example, the CTA above links to an e-book on modernizing backups. It’s an interesting tactic for generating leads with valuable content.
Taking Rubrik’s Insights to the Next Level
While the Insights subfolder is certainly performing well, there’s always room for optimization (or at least some A/B testing).
Here are some opportunities for Rubrik to level up:
Content Formatting and Readability
As I mentioned earlier, the content Rubrik creates for these Insights pages is valuable.
Unfortunately, many of the pieces have large text blocks that hinder readability. Even bullet points don’t always help, as you can see in the excerpt below from the “What Is Disaster Recovery as a Service” article.
The content itself is top-notch — informative and valuable. The Rubrik team just needs to add some whitespace and bolding so readers can digest this content more easily. B2B customers are busy, and skimability is key.
If Rubrik really wants to take things to the next level, they could invest in some dynamic, interactive formatting modules like Seismic.
More Visual Content
The Insights subfolder contains mainly introductory content and some highly technical topics. To increase reader understanding of these topics — and, more importantly, the need for Rubrik solutions — visuals are a major asset.
Images like the one used below in the RTO vs. RPO piece are a great example of the visuals that Rubrik should continue to invest in.
Rubrik also has a YouTube channel with 292 videos. That’s a treasure trove of valuable video content that they can embed into Insights pages.
Interestingly, Rubrik does have embedded videos on some of their Insights pages. But they’re hosted by Vimeo, not YouTube. It would be interesting to see if this video distinction makes a difference (Google owns one of these companies, not the other), but that’s a topic for another day.
Learning From the Success of Other Assets
Sometimes, it helps to look at what competitors are doing well, but learning from your own wins is just as important. Rubrik’s solutions pages, like the one for Microsoft 365, actually incorporate a lot of the elements I suggested above:
- User-friendly text formatting
- Image and video content
- Ample internal links
Sure, these are high-priority BOFU assets that deserve all the bells and whistles. But that doesn’t mean the Rubrik team can’t apply a similar approach to the Insights subfolder to give these traffic magnets a boost.
Adopting the Investment Mindset
Organic marketing requires patience and consistency. Rubrik’s RTO vs. RPO page — published in mid-2021, by the way — didn’t break 1,000 monthly visits for nearly a year. Two years later, it’s flirting with 10,000.
The lesson: Content, like investments, can take time to pay off. Even for big industry players.
This investment is even more important considering the increasing significance of data management and security.
In fact, the International Data Corporation just announced a new Cyber-Recovery market category with Rubrik as the frontrunner. Organic marketing will be a key part of educating Rubrik’s enterprise audience about the importance of this segment.
Many people are concerned that AI is going to replace the search engines that we’ve built our industry around. But it’s actually the opposite — generative AI will make this type of keyword-driven content crucial.
Generative platforms like ChatGPT, Jasper, and Perplexity all rely on similar algorithms. Brands that understand how to create and optimize content for generative search will have an edge.
That’s just another reason to start investing.
Learn How the Top B2B Brands are Winning the Organic Game
Despite the undeniable success of organic marketing, there’s still much skepticism in tech and beyond about its prospects going forward, especially with the rise of AI and corresponding reactions by search engines and social platforms.
Still, the fact that Rubrik’s Insights subfolder is punching well above its weight class indicates that SEO content is highly valuable.
For more examples of how organic search can help unlock business growth, check out the following breakdowns:
