Building a Sustainable Organic Growth Engine via Content & SEO

There are multiple playbooks out there on how to approach organic growth. With the mix of traditional and modern marketing avenues available today, there’s a lot that marketers and demand generation teams can choose from. However, it is essential to understand what clicks within your industry, niche, and target audience.

In this blog, we unravel the thought process and machinations that went into creating the organic growth engine that not only constitutes the largest team within marketing at Hevo but also is the largest contributor to the product leads and incremental revenue we generate every month. Along the way, this blog also gives pointers on how to approach process design from the first-principles perspective for a newbie Program Manager. So, let’s get down to it.

1. Initial experiments

While we were figuring out the product-market fit, we were also looking to find a sustainable way to generate demand organically. We tried referrals, technical blogs, engaging in relevant communities, in-house online events, driving word-of-mouth, etc. Of all these, content in the form of technical blogs seemed to be the most well-received. This had taken an initial effort of setting up our WordPress instance & Rankmath plugin, getting an SEO tool subscription (SEMRush at the time), engaging with technical writers on UpWork/Fiverr, and the effort of learning content marketing and SEO from scratch (nobody in the team had done it till then). The blogs we had written revolved around the use cases that Hevo could solve (moving data from a source to a destination) and adjacent use cases like data warehouses. With basic SEO done, we were able to get our ~35 technical blogs to rank in the top 5 positions. This created a pathway for users to discover us and we started getting some (think ~40–50) consistent leads every month.

2. Decision to scale

The initial success showed us an immense promise in this channel. We did some calculations on the costs incurred till that point, leads generated, and actual revenue generated from these leads. It was a no-brainer to scale this channel for demand generation.

The next steps were far from simple. Till then, only a 1–2 member team (along with some freelance technical writers) had been working on this effort. In order to scale, we would need a dedicated team to conceptualize blog topics, write and review the blogs, optimize them for SEO, publish them and measure their performance regularly. Not to mention, we still needed to set the processes and guidelines for each of these aspects in place. Since the outcome in terms of dollar value far outweighed all this, we decided to go ahead and build out the content marketing function at Hevo.

3. Conceptualizing the elements of the engine

To gather momentum in terms of demand generation via content, we needed to define a north-star metric that this team (or engine) would chase. This is one of the most critical steps, as teams may end up chasing outcomes that are not impactful to the organization’s goals.

We finalized the “Number of product leads” generated from blog pages as the north-star metric i.e. the number of email submissions we get on our sign-up flow or lead forms after someone visits any blog page. As SEO content takes its own sweet time to mature, the target was to achieve 10X product leads in 1 year.

Once this was decided, it was easier to align all the elements towards achieving this goal.

Here’s a snapshot of the organic growth team structure at Hevo:

Now, let’s discuss the multiple elements that are needed to work in tandem to achieve the set goal.

a) Conceptualizing the blog topics

This entails two major aspects — understanding your ICP (data engineers and data analysts primarily, in our case) and understanding how your product can help them.

We started with high intent topics like specific data integration use cases and related listicles, and over time gradually moved to write about the data and analytics space in general.

We employ a scientific method in deciding the topic list for each month. This includes in-depth keyword analysis on a particular theme (say, MySQL data and replication techniques), estimating expected global traffic for each blog (based on the idea that we’ll rank in the top 3 positions), the number of website visits from each blog, and leads generated from each blog.

This in-depth conceptualization process provides us with a list of topics and an estimated number of leads that we can gather once the content is mature. When we have the list in place, we have an activity level target in terms of the number of blogs to be published. We then proceed to work on the other components to make it happen.

b) Creating & reviewing the content

This is by far the most difficult part of the process. To get blogs to rank and get consistent traffic, the content we write needs to be technically accurate, flawless, and, most importantly, should solve the query the user may have when they search for a keyword. For this, we have an internal pool as well as freelance technical writers who undergo a tough selection process and robust training to ensure we can create, at scale, content that can add value to data engineers and analysts. We also have a review process in place, wherein members of our technical team verify the technical aspects and content managers ensure linguistic, visual, and grammatical integrity of each blog. Setting up detailed guidelines, processes, and checkpoints for this component is crucial, as any shortfalls here can lead to the entire exercise falling flat.

c) Optimizing for SEO and publishing

Once we have a draft that’s ready to publish, we use detailed guidelines on how to publish these on WordPress. These guidelines take care of 3 aspects:

i) SEO: Ensuring each blog has the right title, meta, URL, length, multimedia, and other technical aspects in place that help search engines recognize that each blog is a resource of value on the corresponding topic (search query).

ii) User Experience: Ensuring that the multiple elements on a blog page don’t hamper the experience of a reader and only add value.

iii) Positioning of Hevo: Understanding the context of each blog and positioning the relevant features, products, and use cases to the reader.

These are aspects that our internal team members are trained on and we have, so far, published each blog (irrespective of who wrote it) internally to maintain quality and consistency. This also means that the number of blogs we publish becomes a bottleneck (more on this later!) for the entire engine and we need to align our targets around what we can achieve in this stage month-on-month.

d) Monitoring the numbers and corrective actions

In our experience, each blog takes 4–8 weeks from getting indexed on Google to reach a steady state of rank, traffic, and leads. We analyze the blogs in cohorts (based on the month published) to see how they perform 8 weeks later and check whether we get the results in line with our estimates or not. Depending on the actual outcomes, there can be multiple ways forward. For example, if we see results (number of leads generated) are in line or better than expected, we double down on those themes and adjacent ones. If they are not, do a root cause analysis into where the miss is happening:

i) If not leads, are we getting traffic as expected? If yes, we need to work on the positioning of Hevo and CTAs better. If no,

ii) Are we ranking at the best possible position? If yes, search volume may have changed and we try to incorporate relevant secondary keywords. If no,

iii) Are all the SEO optimization elements in place? Can we optimize better? Do we need off-page optimization (like backlinks)?

iv) Additionally, are there better authority pages or brand domains ranking better? Is there a way to outrank them (for example, optimizing for featured snippets)?

v) Lastly, is the content itself missing something that the readers would value?

Based on all of these underlying factors, the content and SEO team works to bring each blog to its best possible performing shape. Needless to say, the monitoring and further optimization are ongoing, never-ending efforts.

You can learn more specifically about our SEO efforts and process in this detailed blog.

4. Understanding the bottleneck(s)

Like any process, it is critical to identify the bottlenecks here. The bottlenecks help us plan the process in a way that we’re able to meet the set targets. In other words, bottlenecks in a process determine what the highest achievable target can be. For instance, in this case, why can’t we get to 10X in 3 months or 6 months? The reason for this is the 2 bottlenecks at play:

1. Number of blogs that can be published
2. Duration to get published blogs to mature and start giving results

Of these, the first one is dependent on the size of the team of internal writers that we have, while the second one is the nature of the project — how SEO content works.

The first one was something that we could control. Hence, after defining the initial team size of 4, we started on our plan in mid-2020 (this helped us publish ~80 blogs per month against 10–15 that was possible in the experiment stage). The idea was that if we saw the intended results, we would further scale this team and the corresponding activities and outcomes. Fast forward to today, we have a bigger team and the capacity to churn out 200–250 blogs per month.

5. Acknowledging and learning from the gaps/weaknesses

As with any process, some things can break or are not as perfect as they should be. This is where the continuous improvement philosophy comes to the rescue. The process owner needs to constantly keep analyzing the process steps critically based on the outcome data. Here, I’ll share some of the process issues/failures we identified and rectified over the last 2 years:

1. Limited SEO expertise: 6 months into the process, we realized that though we were doing everything right (as per our guidelines and playbooks), some blogs still didn’t rank in top positions. This was primarily because we didn’t have any SEO experts on the team. Most of our knowledge of SEO came from online resources and learning on the job and was primarily limited to on-page SEO. We were lacking in off-page and technical SEO skills. While the process was working to some extent, the existing team members couldn't become experts in a nuanced field like SEO overnight. To set this right, we hired 2 SEO specialists who could help us with holistic SEO efforts encompassing on-page, off-page, and technical SEO for our blogs. Fast forward to today, this team has grown to 7–8 members now.
2. Losing touch with the ICP: A year and a half into the process, we realized another folly that we committed. As the initial blogs related to data transfer use cases involving our new integrations had performed well, we started writing more and more content around the new source and destination integrations that our product team was building. These blogs were ranking well and getting the expected traffic numbers. However, we didn’t see the corresponding uptick in lead numbers. On analyzing, we found that though we were writing about the tools and applications that Hevo could service and the blogs were relevant to the users of those tools, they were necessarily not being read by data engineers and data analysts (our core ICP). While we were, in parallel, experimenting with exploring other personas (like marketers) to use Hevo, we realized that the major traction still came from DE/DAs. This led us to relook at our blog topic conceptualization process and we added a necessary condition that each blog topic should be relevant for a data engineer or data analyst.

These were a couple of major issues we identified along the way. However, looking closely at the entire process, we often come across different opportunity areas like the hiring process, training, reporting methods, etc., that helped us constantly improve the organic growth engine and cemented our learnings on the go.

Well, that was all. These are all the elements that go into creating a sustainable organic growth engine via content. We were able to hit our targets for the initial year and continue building on them today. Of course, along the way, we keep on refining the process and also align it to our central process changes as and when needed. For example, starting in 2022, we changed our marketing team’s north-star metric to “product signups” instead of product leads. Product signups are the users who fill out the details on the entire sign-up flow and reach the product dashboard.

Here’s a view (in terms of traffic) of how far we have come since we started in mid-2020.

Lastly, I’d like to give a shout-out to the team that works every day to make all of this possible — all the technical writers, freelancers, agencies, SEO managers, content managers, and team leads. All the elements in the engine work together seamlessly only when you have a team of sharp and committed A+ players.