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How Wiza generated 1M in traffic with SEO

Brooklin Nash started a blog from scratch for a sales lead prospecting tool that soon became the primary growth channel.

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SEOContent Marketing

Table of Contents

Publish Date
Mar 1, 2022
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What does the company do?

Wiza.co is a lead generation tool that works as a Chrome extension + LinkedIn prospector tool. It competes with other prospecting tools like Hunter.io. They’ll also be rolling out an email sequence tool to compete with Apollo.io.
Brooklin joined as the first Content Marketing hire as a freelancer over 2 years ago.

👨‍👨‍👦‍👦 Target Audiences

  1. Sales teams
    1. individual reps looking for help prospecting.
  1. Solopreneurs that can’t afford expensive sales tools
  1. Recruiters (smaller use case)

📝 Briefly describe the growth project

Brooklin decided to apply SEO concepts to SaaS with a simple tactic: target highly specific niche keywords. He does this through the Wiz.co blog.
screenshot from the Wiza blog
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The blog was started from scratch when Brooklin joined. There were just a handful of articles that got some traction for a DIY attempt previously. The monthly traffic was about 2-3k a month when he joined. Brooklin wanted to take what was there and optimize it. He focused on two main pillars to cover over the course of the year to create in-depth content on:
  1. LinkedIn Sales Navigator
  1. Cold Sales Email
Hubspot talks about this pillar + cluster approach more here.
Next, Brooklin created a bunch of individual articles for niche audiences around long tail keywords. He did a deep dive on ALL the potential topics they could do within those tools. Most SEO strategies focus on either a) high volume traffic or b) high intent keywords. Brooklin decided to do a 50/50 split of these. (how did they find these topics?)

📈 How has it gone so far?

Traffic started at 2k in January of 2020. 1 year later, it reached 16k in organic traffic and now is at 1M as of January in 2022, mostly due to a new directory they built.
wiza.co/directory
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😍 Why is SEO a good growth channel for SaaS?

SaaS companies benefit from highly targeted search results. Usually, SaaS products have a very high purchase value. This means that a single sale is significant. A search term may only have several dozen searches a month. But if almost all of those are almost guaranteed to convert, this is a scalable strategy.
SEO of course has many standard benefits, in that it’s solution driven, long term and an authentic way of growing your company and brand.

🤔 Downsides to SEO

SEO takes time and effort. It’s a process, not a tap that you can turn on overnight like paid ads. This can make it difficult to invest in early on, especially if you have to convince someone else.

🏗 How to build your own

→ SEMRush to find High intent keywords.
If building from scratch WordPress is still kind for no-code SEO pages. Complicated to get your mind around, but works great as a CMS and has lots of great plugins. Makes embedding rich media easy.
  1. Create a blog
      • If you are doing no-code from scratch, WordPress is still king for SEO.
      • Complicated to get your mind around, but works great as a CME and has lots of great plugins (like Yoast).
  1. Conduct keyword research
      • Consider the What, Why, how of search results
      • Use SEMRush to find high intent keywords, and keywords your competitors are using
      • Balance high intent keywords with high volume keywords
  1. Write your content with keywords included
    1. For high intent ones, try to make content as specific and condensed as possible
        • ex. “How to export leads” - not a long post, but gives several options with screenshots. Keyword itself showed volume of 90, but got over 1k in organic traffic. Conversion was 30-40%
    2. Use lots of images, record videos (embedded YouTube video) to go along with your content.
    3. ⚠️ SEO Checklist
        • Keyword exact match in title
        • Keyword in first 100 words
        • Keyword in 1-2 of the headers
        • Consider keyword density, but not quite as relevant as it used to be
        • Make sure is in meta description/alt description
  1. Keep writing - aim for 4 short articles and one long form piece a month
  1. Get some Backlinks
      • As Brooklin puts out content, he drives new linking traffic to existing content.
      • He looks for contributing platforms and posting programs. Reach out to other sites who would benefit from linking to your content.
      • Brooklin didn’t find many good backlink tools, so would just run manual searches to find ones that would be a good match. Sometimes they have set systems for people doing guest posts, sometimes you just have to find the people and reach out manually.
  1. Track the critical results
      • Mainly pays attention to volume of organic traffic, and conversion rate from traffic.

You can follow Brooklin and his work on Twitter!

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