The SEO Strategy That Took G2’s Blog From Zero to 1 Million (In One Year!)

In one year, G2 took its traffic from zero to hero — 1 million organic sessions.

Yep, you read that right. Not zero to 100. Zero to 1 MILLION.

Amongst the highs and the (many) lows, there were key takeaways on our road to 1 million — one being our scalable SEO strategy.

So what strategy did we use to attract 1 million monthly organic sessions to our blog in one year?

We did our research

Before beginning our content marketing journey, we needed to understand who we were writing for and who we were competing against for those readers. And with that, we dove into some preliminary research.

Understanding our audience

We started with a few key questions. Who are we writing for? What are they searching for? How can we best deliver the information they want?

In addition to understanding our users, understanding user intent and experience was also critical to our success. Most users coming to our site were merely seeking information on a given topic. They were not there for a story. They didn’t want to be entertained by our bad jokes. They wanted answers.

Keeping that in mind, we focused on writing content that ranged anywhere from 300–2,000 words per article — no unnecessarily long, drawn-out articles; only short and to-the-point content. We also made navigating our articles easier by adding jump links, table of contents, and relevant internal links to other content that would enhance the reader’s understanding of the topic being covered.

Combined, these create a better experience for our audience overall.

Understanding our competitors

One thing to note here: Your company competitors and your content competitors are not always the same.

So who are our competitors? And what are they writing?

This started with a quick Google search. Any results coming up for a given search we wanted to rank for — yeah, those were our competitors.

We noticed a lot of the same companies popping up in search results when doing some research on our audience. And because of that, we could assume they were doing something right.

From there, we took a deep dive into their content. Among other things, we studied the way they were organizing their content, their headlines, their interlinking strategy, and how in-depth they were going on a topic. Looking at these things helped us identify how we could make our content better than our competitors.

After all, engagement does influence SEO and consequently, traffic. Essentially, it comes down to this: Who is providing a better resource? If it’s our competitors, they’re going to get the traffic. If it’s us, we will get the traffic.

So we needed to do it better.

We did our keyword research

Once we understood who we were writing for, we focused on what they were searching for and how they were searching for it.

That’s where keywords come in. With our go-to seo tool, Ahrefs, we dove into finding keywords that we wanted to target to start building our content strategy.

Instead of focusing on the highest-searched keywords that our competitors were already ranking for, we found that going after low-difficulty, long-tail and semantic keywords proved to be most successful when building our traffic from scratch.

Once we saw a significant return from our efforts on the long-tail and semantic keywords that were easier to rank for, we took it to the next level: the topic cluster model.

Instead of writing articles designed to rank for specific, long-tail keywords, we started organizing our posts into specific topics — anchored together by one ‘pillar’ piece that provided a broad overview of the topic, which then interlinked out to more specific, in-depth articles making up a topic cluster.

This model is favored by Google as it helps to establish the site as an authority on a given topic.

So, we started building out multiple clusters and Google started to recognize G2 as an authority on a variety of topics. The result? A huge traffic boost.

The importance of on-page seo

This is an area where we knew so little when we started, but it became a crucial part of our SEO strategy. After studying many different article types and reading up on best practices, we realized that things like headers, alt text, and URL structure all matter, but the most important thing we learned?

Do everything with the reader in mind. At the end of the day, Google is pulling the results that it feels answers the search query in the most concise, yet detailed way. We never sacrifice the quality of our content to adhere to the guidelines we created if it was at the expense of the reader.

Don’t get stuck in traffic

Let me just make it known that this is an ongoing initiative. SEO is ever-changing, and with any strategy, reevaluating and refining is crucial to its success.

That said, we continually work to improve our efforts daily. And quite honestly, we are still figuring a lot of it out.

Building traffic to a brand new domain is no easy feat. In fact, starting from scratch was daunting and, frankly, a bit defeating at times.

BUT, what felt seemingly impossible was made possible. And you can do it, too.

Want to learn more about how we took over Google search results in one year, and how you can, too? Check out our road to one million.

Jordan Wahl is a Senior Content Marketing and SEO Specialist at G2. Find her on LinkedIn here.