How I brought 15-100k visitors organically within a year

Background

• I joined Animaker in December 2020 during the pandemic. Animaker is a well-known SaaS company in the DIY animation video space.

• During the pandemic, with the upsurge in video meetings, Animaker launched an asynchronous video communication tool- Vmaker.

• When I joined Animaker, I became a Product Marketing Specialist on the Vmaker team, where I led the product's acquisition funnel.

  
  

What was the challenge?

•  Vmaker had a unique positioning in the market (asynchronous video communication tool for remote communication), but the only major issue was that it did not have search intent on Google, meaning that people were still unaware of the problem.

• Another issue was that the company was bootstrapped and frugal with its budget—it didn't want to run any paid ads. So, the only option left for our team and me was to focus on the organic channel to acquire customers.

• Now, without any search intent or keywords, I had to focus on the product's lateral use to bring visitors to the site and educate them on its actual use. Fortunately, the product could also be used as a screen recorder.

• So, I focused on the audience who were searching for screen recorders on Google. The only minor caveat was that it was an extremely tough category to crack. For example, the keyword difficulty for the term "screen recorder" on Google was 100, the highest it could ever be.

• Some brands had been in this segment for over 15 to 20 years. They had a high domain authority, market share, brand voice, social media followers, and thousands of backlinks. So, what was the solution?

What was the insight and the solution?

• To provide a bit more context, Vmaker had a separate website even though it was a product of Animaker. The DA was 0, and the traffic was just 15, and that, too, was internal traffic.

  

  
  

• Conventional wisdom told us to aim for keywords with less difficulty and slowly build up the domain authority to rank on the first page of Google searches. But that would mean being patient, which was scarce.

• So, I decided to go with the keyword with the highest difficulty score: "screen recorder(KD:100)."

• To rank for this keyword, I kept the playbook simple:

  • Produce blogs around the keyword

  • Create a pillar page linking all those blogs

  • Get backlinks for that pillar page

• There was also a myth at that time that the Google algorithm also gave some weightage to links coming in from social forums. I decided to leave no chances, so getting links from forums was also included in the strategy.

• I did complete 360-degree keyword research that we could use to produce content and bucketed the keywords according to their common themes. My content team and I started producing content based on those keyword buckets.

Backlinks was my magical wand

• Even though Google's official resources suggested that backlinks were of little importance, in the end, they helped us rank on the first page (albeit for a while).

• Meanwhile, the content necessary for the pillar page was being produced. I started approaching the sites for backlinks, but the only issue was that most of them were spammy sites, and they were charging a lot of money.

• Seeing this as a risky and unsustainable option, I started searching for answers and talking to people in different organisations about how they were addressing the backlink problem.

• Parallely, I also approached some prominent sites in the tech field, like G2 Crowd, HubSpot, and more, to write guest posts, and I was successful with this.

• Finally, I came across a group of marketers who were looking for mutual backlink exchange. It was called the A-B-C link exchange method.

• After starting the A-B-C link exchange method, our domain ranking picked up. Every month, it increased by one or two points.

  
  

Just the blogs weren't enough, so we built landing pages. Every Day. For a while.

• While churning out content around the primary keyword daily, I was also building the landing pages. And one interesting thing I noticed was that landing pages were getting ranked faster than the blogs.

• So, I decided to build multiple landing pages based on different use cases of screen recorders as a product.

• As hypothesised, it actually worked. The landing pages were ranking faster than the blogs, which means Google was getting a better idea of what Vamker was all about. Now, I am building backlinks not just for the blogs but also for the landing pages.

• As you can notice from the image below, the website traffic picked up. After five months, the organic traffic rose from 15 to 18,077. At this point, we started ranking in the top five positions for our primary keyword.

  

  
  

Things weren't all fine and dandy...

• By the fifth month, we were seeing 10% week-on-week traffic, and signups were also increasing. Initially, the signup rate was almost 0%, but by the month of May, it was around 8%—an extremely good number for a conversion rate.

• But suddenly, the site's traffic started decreasing at a steep rate, and so did the conversions.

• I pulled all the stops to make sure it doesn't end up being a disaster:

  • Fixed every technical-SEO aspect that could be a possible reason

  • Made sure all the alerts that were shown on GSC were fixed

  • Made sure there wasn't any keyword stuffing on both the landing pages and blogs

  • Made sure the quality of the backlinks was extremely good

• But the drop in traffic was still consistent. Nothing was working out.

It was a Google update gone wrong

• After talking to many folks in the industry, we found that it was not just us but many others facing the same issue.

• This went on for another two months, and finally, it stabilised.

• After that, the traffic increased at a much faster rate. By the end of the year, the traffic was 1.5 times the highest we ever had.

  

  
  

To summarise

At the end of 2021, our website had 100,000 visitors. When we started, Vmaker wasn't even ranking in the top 100 Google search pages. However, within a year, we were ranking in the top 10 search results on the first page for our primary keyword. There were even days when we ranked in the first position, pushing some established players down in the rankings. After the Google algorithm update, our traffic significantly increased. By March 2022 (13 months after I joined), we reached a peak of 60,000 users, which is still the highest number to date. I left the company to pursue my master's in marketing after a while after this achievement.

P.S. I wouldn't want to take all the credit for this achievement. There was an amazing team behind me, and I would like to give them credit for supporting me throughout this adventure.