
SEO case study: 8k to 200k monthly organic traffic - noelceta
https://apollodigital.io/blog/seo-case-study
======
tilolebo
> The main issue was that the writers weren’t SEO specialists: they knew how
> to write good content, but good content is NOT always the same as SEO
> content.

> The main difference between SEO content and generic content is that the
> first is written with user search intent in mind. You need to keep in mind
> what the Googler is looking for when they search for any given keyword.
> Then, you create content based on that intent.

Isn't it sad that nowadays you don't create content for the users but for a
search engine crawler...

~~~
noelceta
That's not the case, actually. Your content should be based on the intent of
the search. For example, if someone's Googling "how to improve a process,"
they're looking for practical advice on improving processes. They're NOT
looking for "benefits of process improvement," "why you should improve your
processes," etc.

Sure, you can write the BEST article on one of these topics, but it's not
going to rank because that's not actually what the user is looking for. Hope
that makes sense :)

Edit: and the above is a very common writer mistake. They write interesting
content, but it's just not that relevant as a search result.

~~~
AlchemistCamp
Some of the best content isn't searched for by anyone at all before it was
written, though. In the extreme case, consider the Harry Potter
series—fantastic content, but it would have been horrible SEO content when it
was written.

~~~
noelceta
True, but in most cases, you won't write Harry Potter - you just want to drive
leads from people searching for process management solutions, haha.

What you did mention IS an actual strategy though. The idea is, you coin a new
term or strategy, and if you PR the content enough, the term will have a ton
of searches (and you'll rank #1). More often than not, though, you have to be
a big fish to really pull this off

~~~
AlchemistCamp
Yes... thanks to books and subsequent fan fic, all kinds of Harry Potter
characters and terms are both all over the web and heavily searched!

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sixhobbits
Why do these SEO people write so dramatically? Why do they use such short
sentences and short paragraphs?

Want to know?

It's simple.

They fall fowl of Goodhart's law!

But what's that? I'll tell you!

Goodhart's law states 'When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good
measure.'

That's a lot of words, and it's really complicated, so let's simplify!

Stay with me -- I'll teach you. We can learn together.

You're still reading this, but you're not learning anything.

And yet I'm being measured by you reading. To. The. End.

So I do anything to make you do that.

Anything.

It doesn't matter if I'm not adding value for you any more.

You've probably figured it out already and are skipping to the end. Thanks for
getting this far.

Basically, if you aim to game metrics, you can do it. Easy.

But why were you aiming for organic searches in the first place?

You wanted your visitors to like you. To trust you.

And to meet that goal the 'writers who weren't SEO specialists' were actually
your friend.

They were (if they were good) _reader_ specialists. They created what people
wanted to read. Not what would make your KPIs go up.

And ironically, now your KPIs look great. But your content is bad, and not
useful.

Don't aim for your measurement. Aim for your goals, and use your measurements
to see how close you got.

~~~
CM30
For the short sentences and paragraphs thing, I think it's about readability
more than anything. People tend to scan content when they read online, not go
through word by word, and it's probably easier to do that with short sentences
and paragraphs.

It's also likely in part down to them optimising for readability tests. Stuff
like Yoast grades your content based on the results of a Flesch-Kincaid
readability test, which marks it as easier to read if there are less words and
syllables per sentence, with the recommended score being roughly equivalent to
a grade 8 reading level. Hence these SEO writers are basically writing for
13-14 year olds.

------
codingdave
Keep in mind that this is posted on the site of an organization that provides
SEO services.

In my experience, the SEO game is a waste of time if you are looking for long-
term traffic. Not that it doesn't work in the short-term - it does. And there
are good practices in how to structure your pages, and making sure they
perform well on multiple devices.

But all of my personal and work-related sites have gotten their long-term
traffic by delivering a good product, and having our customers speak well of
us. Then people search for us, and when they find and go to our page, our
rankings go up. You end up in a positive feedback loop due to the quality of
your content and your product.

~~~
alvah
Your last paragraph doesn't negate the value of SEO. IMO you still need good
product / good content / some reason for people to visit your site for long-
term success, but if 10 others have an offering (of any quality) in the same
category & they all make at least some attempt to optimise their websites, how
is anyone going to find your site at the top of page 2?

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dhruvkar
>> Tallyfy, a SaaS startup based in St. Louis

Ironically, I'm based in St. Louis, looking for business automation software
for my company based in St. Louis and the only reason I know Tallyfy exists is
because of this HN article.

~~~
a13n
Check out Pipefy instead [https://www.pipefy.com/](https://www.pipefy.com/)

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finger
Small nitpick but title says 0 to 200k, and 3 paragrafs down from the headline
it says ~8.000 to 200.000:

> which is why we created this guide - a complete step-by-step SEO case study
> on how we took Tallyfy, a SaaS process management software, from ~8,000
> monthly traffic to about 200,000 in less than 2 years.

I imagine there is a big difference between starting from 0 and from an
already established baseline.

~~~
dang
Ok, we've added 8k to the lower bound in the title above. Thanks!

------
superasn
From the little experience I have of this domain for me SEO still was all
mostly about building backlinks, not your shitty $5 links but making something
to which people want to link to naturally.

One of my sites was mentioned on Techcrunch which led to lot of other blogs
linking to it and within 2 or 3 months we were dominating the first page of
Google (happened around 2010 so a lot must have changed too). So yeah getting
big sites to link to you is the 80% part. The rest of the SEO stuff like tags,
etc is probably the 20%.

------
diminish
> done right, SEO can be a game-changer...

SEO is still one of the few free ways to get customers. Any ideas how to best
leverage it for startups?

~~~
lxcfan
I do SEO work for a large (DJIA component) tech company, so I'm pretty far
removed from startup-land, but I'll still share the number one piece of advice
I give out internally:

Write high-quality content about topics that people are searching for.

Simple? Yes. But it still seems so hard to get people to do it. Everyone would
rather talk about page load time and HTML markup and structure and meta tags
and exactly how many characters their headline or URL should be. Yes, you
should make common-sense decisions about those things. But no amount of
technical optimization is going to make people start Googling something that
they couldn't care less about to begin with. Find out where demand exists for
answering questions, and give the user a good experience as you answer those
questions, and the search traffic will follow.

~~~
alvah
Absolutely. SEO is content & links. Good (valuable to the searcher) content
earns links (over time), low quality content needs various tactics of
increasing dodginess to gain links.

------
kehphin
Felt very meta reading this article about SEO while the article itself was
employing all the SEO strategies - backlinks, infoboxes, etc :P

It was great that the company had already started its SEO pipeline, but what
about for companies with no strategy at all? Are there any good tools to help
decide which keywords to focus on?

~~~
noelceta
yeah, haha. It's super meta - we're trying to get this article to rank on "SEO
case study." It will probably take a while since the domain is pretty new, but
we'll get there.

As for which keywords to focus on, our rule of thumb is, find one of your
competitors that's winning with their SEO, and borrow their ideas. In most
industries, if you combine the keywords from your top 3-5 competitors, your
keyword strategy is gonna be pretty comprehensive. As for the "how," just run
your competitor's website through SEMrush or Ahrefs, and voila!

------
tailsdog
Good results.

SEO is not only content there are other factors such as performance,
accessibility and structure. Looking at a lighthouse audit on the landing page
([https://tallyfy.com/](https://tallyfy.com/)) it looks like there can be a
lot of improvement there.

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jonobird1
Worth noting also that "ApolloDigital" cofounder and writer of the article is
also the Head of Content & SEO for "Tallyfy". So not sure that constitutes as
a client, nor take full ownership of this growth. Not saying they couldn't do
it, but seems misleading.

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markosaric
Nice post! I would add "per month" to the original headline as "200k per
month" sounds much more impressive than "200k in 2 years" which the current
headline says.

~~~
noelceta
Thanks! And a very fair point. Fix'd!

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philfrasty
Would be great to see how this translates into actual $ for the business. Is
this mentioned somewhere else? The high CPCs indicate that there IS some
value. But in general some people/businesses can make a living with an
audience of 100 and others not with an audience of 100k.

~~~
noelceta
That's super situational and really depends on the keyword you rank on. Can't
give you the numbers, but yeah, the high CPC keywords are usually the bread-
winners.

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wackget
Are they really trying to say that SEO was the sole reason that the organic
traffic grew so much? That is ludicrous. It couldn't have anything to do with
the fact that the service itself grew in popularity, or relevancy, or
reputation, etc.?

I'm convinced SEO is modern-day snake oil. If you have a useful
website/service with well-written content then the traffic will come to you.
The idea of trying to "SEO" a useless/poorly-built website is like an obese
person taking herbal pills because the bottle says they help weight loss.

~~~
noelceta
Most of the organic traffic is content SEO, yes. Around ~2k of monthly
searches is branded search (people looking for the company). And, well, it IS
pretty reasonable - the company IS ranking for most BPM / workflow keywords.

I do get why you'd think SEO is snake oil. Yeah, useful website, service +
good content is the way to go. You can't just "SEO" a mediocre website and
expect anything to happen.

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Alir3z4
I hate any SEO case study and companies that want to make it happen for you.

Just write content that help people and solve people problem.

Have you seen how Digital Ocean has lots of useful tutorials and articles,
they get tons of visits and lost of customers and exposures, they solve people
problem.

How about StackOverflow ? is the content written with SEO in mind ? No, they
solve people problem, problem that people seek an answer for;

[https://alireza.gonevis.com/how-to-write-for-
seo/](https://alireza.gonevis.com/how-to-write-for-seo/)

~~~
rchaud
You are using 2 examples that couldn't be more different.

Digital Ocean's tutorials are often written by third party contributors, not
DO staff. Those third parties are doing their own SEO by linking to their own
websites, if you haven't noticed. It's a win-win for both DO and the writers.

Having set up a few DO droplets, I'll say that the documentation around their
own services is less than great, and I often find myself Googling how to do
this or that in DO and finding help on third party sites.

StackOverflow is like Facebook or Reddit; it's all user-generated content. SO
staff don't contribute besides moderating the discussions. SO does well on SEO
because it's been around for a long time, and the content is set up in a
question and answer form, which is tailor made for search engines.

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usr42
Traffic is of course nice but in the end not the goal, just a tool. Traffic by
itself even increases costs. In the end, you usually want to have customers,
not traffic. To be even more precise, you want HAPPY customers, because then
they will remain customers and also bring new ones.

That means you still need good content and a good product more than a lot of
traffic.

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geocar
What effect on sales did this have?

I have a hard time believing those keyword terms are used by people in pipe.

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iudqnolq
Does anyone know why the screenshot of a keyword spreadsheet is all about
prescription drugs? It doesn't seem to match the business described. Could
they have uploaded the wrong image?

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claudsaille
I invite you to see this site :
[https://www.apprentus.fr/](https://www.apprentus.fr/) you can find SEO
specialists

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monkin
I have a question to author: What is your avg. session duration and bounce
rate on those 200k visitors a month?

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reactking
Interesting read. I recently experienced something very similar and wrote
about it here: [https://upmostly.com/specials/2019-year-in-
review](https://upmostly.com/specials/2019-year-in-review)

I went from 0 to nearly 600,000 page views in just under 12 months.

