SEO Case Studies

1/ How monday.com Wrote 1,000 SEO Articles in 12 Months

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The project management software, monday.com, is infamous for their intrusive, yet intriguing advertising campaigns.

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But, did you know they’re also HOT in the SEO game, too? 

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Back in 2020, they were new kids on the block. They had an SEO manager but hadn’t built any kind of strategic SEO plan. But that all changed in Q4 2020.

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Rotem Shay, monday’s Head of Acquisition of 8 years, was looking to diversify. And in true monday.com style their attitude was to go big, or go home.

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‍“The head of acquisitions mindset was to just go big or go home. And that's really what you saw.”—Zoe Averbuch, Senior SEO Manager, on the How the F*ck SEO Podcast

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In the 12 months that followed, monday.com:

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• Produced 1,000 articles
• Scaled up to over 1 million monthly visitors

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In the How the F*ck SEO community, I was lucky enough to interview multiple people involved in the scaleup.

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In part one, we learned the lessons of scale. Brad Smith, from the content production company Codeless, taught the community the critical components of an content operation that can produce 100+ articles in a month.

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In part two, monday.com insiders, Eliana Atia and Zoe Averbuch, shared their perspective. We learned how their 8 years of PPC helped prioritization of keywords, and we found out what mistakes, improvements, and best practices they learned on their journey.

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“If all this relied on us just being brilliant, that would be bad. I’d probably still be broke.”-Brad Smith on the How the F*ck SEO Podcast

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Key Takeaways:

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1. ⚡ Moving forward: What were their biggest learnings and how are they continuously maintaining their enormous content library?
2. ⚡Documentation: What foundational guides are fundamental to scaling content creation? And the ones you must not miss.
3. ⚡Keywords: How to choose those that rank in a short space of time. So you see results now, not in 12 months.
4. ⚡Writer acquisition: How to find enough great writers for 125 articles per month. And filter out the rubbish ones.
5. ⚡Quality: How to write good enough quality for Monday, even on technical topics.
6. ⚡ Return on investment: Was the experiment worth it? How has Monday's SEO strategy iterated from their learnings?
7. ⚡ Why prioritization is everything in SEO. And why this means it's important to ship new content before it's fully edited.

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Read the Case Studies:

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• monday.com’s SEO content operation scale up [part 1]
• monday.com’s traffic scale up strategy [part 2]

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Listen to the Interview:

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2/ How Typeform Built SEO into a $3M Annual Lifetime Revenue Channel

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Typeform felt like they came out of nowhere. SurveyMonkey dominated the space, but Typeform’s slick and intuitive UI put them on the map.

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Jake Stainer, Typeform’s Head of Growth throughout their scaleup, was new to SEO when he joined, but built out one of the most profitable SaaS SEO strategies I’ve seen.

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Typeform’s trick?

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Embedding their product in their content strategy. I shared this in the How the F*ck newsletter in April 2023 which summarizes this part of their SEO strategy well:

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“I guess the trick is how can you relate your SEO to your product as closely as possible and not start creating like just educational content"—Jake Stainer, Co-Founder of Skale, Ex-Typeform Head of Growth on the How the F*ck SEO Podcast

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And that’s just the tip of the iceberg of what we learn in this case study. From growth modelling to rank-boosting experiments, Typeform gave us a masterclass in SEO strategy.

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Key Takeaways:

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1. ⚡How Typeform selected and prioritized keywords to drive the most revenue growth (an example of product-led SEO in action)
2. ⚡How Typeform built out their template library, ranking for 1,000s of bottom-of-funnel keywords.
3. ⚡Typeforms unique backlink building technique that scaled them to 2.3M backlinks (and 93 domain rating)
4. ⚡How to build an SEO growth model that makes sure your strategy prioritizes revenue (with template)

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Read the Case Study here.

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Listen to the Interview:

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3/ How UserPilot Used Programmatic SEO to Scale to 100,000 Monthly Traffic in 10 Months

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Emilia Korczyńska, UserPilot’s whip-smart Head of Marketing, built up UserPilot content operation to output 40 blog posts a month. 

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But the potential output capability was, at one point, 29 long-form blog posts per hour.

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You may be thinking, huh?! 🤨

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But, yeah, that’s right. That’s the power of systems-based thinking and programmatic content compiling.

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“Programmatic SEO is essentially building content at scale from templates. Typically it’s content that follows certain patterns, for example, a formulaic keyword with an interchangeable variable.”—Emilia Korczyńska on the How the F*ck SEO Podcast

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In the case study, we learn how Emilia extracted product pain points and turned them into a customer-focused keyword strategy.

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They tackled the bottom-of-funnel keyword patterns in priority:

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• Use case (ie. Customer segment + pain point)
• Industry (ie. X + industry)
• Role (ie. X + job titles)
• Business Type (ie. X + for business type)
• Solution (ie. tool, software, platform, solution)
• Competitors (ie. X vs Y or X alternatives)

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They leveraged a system of database of tools → templates → automation → human editing to write these keyword patterns rapidly.

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Here’s an example of some content created:

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Key Takeaways:

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1. ⚡ How to build systems that overcome your reliance on any one individual, so your content production never slows.
2. ⚡ How to leverage keyword patterns across content types to exponentially scale production.
3. ⚡ The templates and databases required to do programmatic SEO yourself (Spoiler: It's not that hard, even I have done it using Webflow + Sheets alone)

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Read the Case Study: Programmatic SEO case study

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Listen to the Interview:

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4/ How Webflow Uses Programmatic SEO to Generate 100,000 Monthly Search Visitors—and Drive Customer Retention

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I recently documented a clever strategy by the team at Webflow.

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They’ve turned their user-generated template library into an internal search engine.

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If you search for:

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• Text animation’s Webflow
• Forms Webflow
• Scroller examples Webflow
• Essential ANY component you might want to see/steal examples from

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Then they likely have a page for it, filled with examples and copiable components.

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The best thing?

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As a Webflow user, these genuinely really help get more value from the product. So by tapping into what their users are searching Google for, they’re aiding customer activation and retention.

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Read the case study here.