The Magic of SEO: A Diversified Route for Growth
As a company at a crucial juncture of growth at the beginning of 2021, we at Hevo were exploring the best channels to let our audience know about what we are all about, and attract the right audience to our product. At most SaaS organizations similar to Hevo, Content and SEO form a mere side or auxiliary channel for lead generation. However, we noticed a good amount of traffic on the blogs that we had been publishing to showcase the value our product brings to the table.
This is when we decided to scale up our Search Engine Optimization efforts to make sure that the people who would benefit from the Hevo product would be exposed to it better. This would lead to a truly mutually beneficial outcome wherein we are able to reach the audience who would be interested in what we have to offer. Today, Content Marketing forms the core of our model. It is the Biggest Signups Generator, with close to 60–70% of our signups coming from this channel.
It has paid off for us to make Content and SEO robust and seamless in a very systematic way. This reflects the culture we have at Hevo, where we are always willing to explore more, move beyond the ordinary, and stand out with unique approaches to solve various challenges. We always want to do better and try new things.
Our SEO Journey
When we started in January 2021, we were publishing close to 40 articles per month. We were getting close to 115 thousand views on these, and our SEO strategy was elementary. Today, we have a dedicated 7–8 member SEO team, all of whom keep a track of various aspects of SEO. This is a team with a clear vision, a separate budget, and a dedicated hiring process. This gives a clear direction and purpose to the team, ensuring that we are striving to be the best we can be.
There are various initiatives that the SEO team undertakes to optimize our efforts. These include:
Pure Data-driven Marketing to Choose the Right Intent Keywords to Target
One of the first steps we took while embarking on our SEO journey was to refine our choice of target keywords. Targeting the right keyword plays a huge role in producing relevant SEO-optimized content. By leveraging the various tools of our Marketing Stack, such as Google Keyword Planner & SEMRush, we began identifying High Volume & Intent keywords that our ICPs would typically search for. We further correlated the same with the historical nature and keyword trends to validate our findings. Thus, following a data-driven and analytical approach became the core of our Marketing & SEO initiatives.
Creating the Charter for Each Month vis-a-vis our Goals & Achievements
We decided to devise a detailed charter to streamline and make our Content & SEO processes more robust. Having a charter in place allowed the team to move forward in a structured way and ensure visibility into the Goals and Achievements, both at an individual & team level.
Measuring Success through a Metric-driven Approach
We measure the performance of our SEO by defining and tracking metrics — Rank of pages, Traffic, Website Visits, Leads, and Product Signups. These metric cohorts are measured at various time intervals — weekly, bi-weekly and monthly. Any loss in growth can be quickly reported through our SEO metrics.
SEO Analysis for Blogs
We do in-depth on-page analysis for each of our published blogs and make it informative for the readers and also update each of the blogs on a quarterly basis. There are many factors involved in the on-page SEO analysis process, but we have a solid checklist that helps us to optimize our blogs quickly.
We ensure that we cover all aspects of SEO, including on-page, and off-page. We constantly work with the Development team to keep our technical SEO up to the mark as well. This may also include website and landing page revamps, both in content and technical aspects, to reflect our ever-evolving positioning and to increase visibility.
The SEO Team
The team at Hevo has always encouraged SEO efforts, despite the fact that it is a non-conventional engine for lead generation in a B2B company. The leadership is always ready to experiment and explore such areas, which is something that the SEO team greatly appreciates.
To ensure that all of our blogs display the same quality and are optimized to the same level, we have developed an in-depth checklist that allows each team member to have a resource that acts as a yardstick. This checklist is distributed during the time of our initial training and acts as constant support for the team.
Our main focus has been quality over quantity. Regardless of whether we publish 15 blogs a month or 150, the first thing we ensure is always that the reader receives new and relevant information when they read our blogs. These blogs are ways for us to bridge the gap between our users’ knowledge and what we offer- SEO is the wood of this bridge, forming the base as the tool to build this bridge in a robust and efficient manner. Nothing is more important to us than the quality of this wood, which helps us bring this knowledge to the people who need it.
The Results
Since Hevo started a dedicated and focused SEO effort in January 2021, we have seen a great improvement in many areas. We get 500k+ organic traffic on our website monthly, and our Domain Authority is constantly improving. We have outranked other players in the ETL space in terms of traffic, and have much higher visibility across platforms. Our website has also undergone major improvements and revamps.
Post the SEO efforts, we are able to see a much greater community engagement, with many opportunities to collaborate with external parties. Of course, the main advantage has been the development of a very effective lead generation engine for Hevo, which the SEO team is always looking to improve upon.
