How I used SEO to achieve 4900% visitor growth

Search engine optimisation is a great way to get your business in front of more prospects. In fact, I posted an article on LinkedIn the other day and had this response:

I am a firm believer that organic traffic is best and organic website visitors are more likely to buy from you. Check out my blog on SEO tips for metrics relating to organic conversion rates versus paid.

Last year I worked with TerminusDB to increase its organic search engine performance and the results were great. I thought I'd detail what I did to help those managing SEO themselves (please do get in touch if you need my help).

Summary of SEO results

The results were not overnight, although they were quite speedy with >200% increase in the first couple of months. It was also a good amount of work, however the results were impressive:

• 200 visitors per month when I started
• 10,000 visitors per month when I finished
• 1,200 sign ups to their SaaS product

The beginning

When I started working with TerminusDB they had the following set up:

• Three subdomains, a static website, blog and documentation site.
• terminusdb.com, blog.terminusdb.com, docs.terminusdb.com
• Different technologies for each subdomain - JavaScript/HTML/CSS for the website, HubSpot for the blog, and GitBook for documentation.
• They did blog, but it was a scattered approach.

As a small team, the three subdomains and the different technologies made it difficult to manage and make an impact from an SEO perspective.

Manufally updating the website was slow and cumbersome, the blog was a rigid framework requiring specialist HubSpot knowledge and the documentation site had very limited SEO capabilities.

SEO and Content Strategy

Having conducted a marketing audit of TerminusDB's situation I put together and implemented an SEO and content strategy to increase its search engine performance, specifically organic growth.

The strategy involved:

• Technical SEO and web development
• Content strategy and calendar
• Online PR
• Link building
• Company involvement

Technical SEO & Web Development

To ease the burden on the small team and to simplify future activities I combined the three subdomains into a single domain. The blog became terminusdb.com/blog and docs became terminusdb.com/docs.

The reasoning behind this move was based on simplicity. One domain to monitor and one domain to link between and focus on.

To future proof the web presence for future users, whether internal marketing or other contractors, we decided to move to WordPress due to its widely adopted use and the fact that there are many people with the skills to update and maintain it should I be hit by a bus. I also focused on site performance, Google rates site performance, and more importantly, TerminusDB has a technical audience who value speed.

Another important factor, especially should you go through any website or domain change, is to not lose what you already have. The team had done a great job generating interest in their products and services and this resulted in lots of backlinks (other websites linking to their blogs and other web pages). It was vital to audit the site's backlinks before any change took place to put in place (301) redirects so existing traffic wasn't lost.

I used the following tools to help me:

• Ahrefs - to audit domains and find backlinks
• WordPress - CMS platform to host the website and blog
• Hello and Elementor - Popular and easy to use theme for WordPress
• WPRocket - A great WordPress plugin to boost a website's speed.

Content Strategy & Calendar

Via user persona workshops, talking to the TerminusDB user base, and analysing the market TerminusDB drew up a number of user personas to closely match their product and its users. The personas gave me a great head-start in terms of understanding the audience, what motivates them, their pain-points and potential obstacles.

I adopted a TOFU/MOFU/BOFU model -

• TOFU (Top of funnel): The awareness stage where potential customers are introduced to your brand, typically through educational or entertaining content.
• MOFU (Middle of funnel): The consideration stage where leads engage with more specific content that addresses their problems and showcases how your solutions can help.
• BOFU (Bottom of funnel): The decision stage where leads are ready to convert, focusing on detailed product information, demos, and offers to close the sale.

The existing content was heavily focused on the MOFU and BOFU parts of the funnel so I wanted to increase awareness with more TOFU content and supplement that with additional content to support the buying process.

Using keyword research and social listening I compiled a list of potential topics to focus on. This was in a simple spreadsheet. I used Ahrefs and Google Keyword Planner to better understand my chosen topics such as keyword volumes and how top-ranking pages were performing (how many backlinks they have, keyword focus and concentration, domain authority and various other marketing metrics).

Now that I had a solid understanding of the topics, search volumes and the requirements to get pages top (or near the top) of search engines, the document formed the basis of the content calendar. The calendar is a working document, and needs to be refreshed as time passes and markets, search habits and interests change.

I produced a range of content, optimised pages, created lots of internal links and all of that good SEO stuff. This is a topic for another blog post as it requires more than a few lines of text. It just so happens that my SEO Tips for Businesses blog goes into more detail about this subject.

Online PR and Backlinks

Online PR is essentially getting others to link to your content or write about you. Not dissimilar to traditional PR, it involves communicating to publications, bloggers and industry experts. The tech community is awash with developer generated blogging/news sites too, so they help a great deal. There is also social media to generate interest and share content with a view to others gaining an interest in your business and writing about it, hopefully providing quality backlinks too.

The reason I have grouped online PR and backlinks together is because the goal is essentially the same. You want to go where your audiences eyes are and if someone reading about a topic that interests them leads them to you, it is good for your business.

Avoid quick fixes and links from low-quality sites that look spammy. They do more harm than good. There is no quick fix, it takes time and effort.

Here are some things that worked, some of these are specific to the technology space:

• People you know: Suppliers, partners, customers, friends, you name it, get the easy wins where you can.
• HackerNews: This can be quite a toxic place, but if your content hits home it really creates web traffic and gets so much attention. Bear in mind you will be shadow banned for marketing or sales content, other than launch posts.
• PR to industry publications: Press releases are dull and do not work. Try to think of the readership of your recipient and angle your story so that it is interesting to them. TerminusDB for instance, were targeting data mesh, a new data architecture, so I contacted journalists talking about a war between the status-quo and the new. This got great traction.
• Niche industry sites: Get your product and company on niche sites, for example TerminusDB featured on DBEngines, review sites such as G2 provide good backlinks, Product Hunt for start ups is also great.
• Other blogging sites: Replicate blogs in places like Medium and Dev.to to tap into their audiences. Be sure to set the blog canonical to the original though as Google doesn't like duplicated content.
• Linked groups: LinkedIn can be hit and miss for a company, but groups are a great way to get in front of relevant people.
• Reddit: Another great resource where you can spread the word and help your audience with quality content.
• Surveys/Benchmarks: Use original data and statistics that others can use or quote. It is a great way to build quality backlinks and get lots of people talking about you. Check out Brian Dean's skyscraper technique for a really effective way to give your site a boost.

Company involvement

To say I achieve all these results by myself would be an injustice and a lie. I had help from the great people at TerminusDB. Many of those are a lot smarter than me and have specialist knowledge in their field. For me to write authentically would take weeks and months to even grasp the basics of their complex fields.

My content strategy involved technical posts written by the engineering team. I help to guide in terms of setting topics and provide ghostwriting services to fill in the blanks and ensure any content produced adhered to the principles of search engine optimisation. A good example of this was a benchmark piece against popular graph database Neo4j. This TerminusDB benchmark not only made TerminusDB look great, it also gained great traction with the company's main audience and resulted in lots of good quality backlinks.

A key focus also involved getting those engineers and in particular the CTO and CEO to use their social media profiles to engage with people and share their expertise to grow their personal brands (a term that makes me feel a bit queasy) and increase TerminusDB's exposure.

Conclusion

I've probably forgotten some of the things I undertook with TerminusDB as it was a little over a year ago, but I've included the main points. Other than software licenses (Ahrefs and WordPress theme and WPRocket), there was no expenditure on paid advertising or other associated marketing fees.

The key points are:

• Know your customer
• Plan ahead - Talk to customers and prospects, look at what the market is doing, what competitors are doing, what people are saying on social media, what keywords are popular
• Get a calendar together and research it, know your focus
• Post good and relevant content to your audience
• Optimise everything for the search engines
• Use the expertise of your team
• Be newsworthy, or at least create an angle to be so
• Spend time every week or month to increase the number of quality backlinks to your site and content
• Be consistent and do it well
• Monitor performance regularly and make amendments to your plans and continue to optimise

It takes time, but with dedication you will get results.