Thread by @searchbrat

SEO is the magic ingredient behind billion-dollar companies.

Companies like Genius.com, Pinterest, Canva, Wise took creative SEO approaches to win on Google.

These 6 SEO strategies were worth +500 million monthly visits in traffic.

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1. RapGenius (USG)

RapGenius wasn't the first site to start offering song lyrics.

When they launched, Google was a very competitive place for lyric sites.

RapGenius had the clever idea of allowing people to leave comments on what each song lyric meant.

Making user-generated content, a core part of their product, helped them outrank all competitors.

But, it also helped make their product better, giving users better information about each song.

A win-win

2. Pinterest (Topic/Clusters)

Originally a lot of Pinterest's growth came from people sharing content on Facebook.

When Google changed its algorithm, the Pinterest team pivoted their time and resources to Google.

Pinterest started to gain a lot in organic traffic.

The growth team at Pinterest dominated Google by bundling up thematically related content into topic clusters.

Better yet, all this content was user-generated, so very scalable.

3. Canva (Templates)

Canva has set the blueprint for how to scale organic traffic through extending your product.

The company, recently valued at $15 billion, used to acquire most of its users through word of mouth.

Today they generate > 30 million organic visits every month

Canva created hundreds of thousands of templates you can use to get started with their product.

Those templates helped rapidly grow organic traffic.

Better still, templates are great for user activation, helping Canva to improve theirs by 40%.

4. PandaDoc (SEO Sidedoors)

What happens if people aren't searching for what your product does?

PandaDoc offers document management software, which gets a measly 3500 searches every month.

So, they created a library of things you can do with their product.

That library helped PandaDoc turn their product into an organic growth engine, ranking for uses cases people could use their product for.

Other companies like Airtable, Miro, Figma, Coda.io have used this tactic.

5. Wise (SEO Products for indirect monetization)

Wise has one of the best growth teams in the business, and it shows in their results.

Like PandaDoc, few people directly search for what Wise offers, money transfer.

So, they extended their product to grow search traffic.

Wise launched

- A website to help people search for Swift/BIC codes.
- A website to help people search for exchange rates between countries.

Helping the company acquire over 50 million visits a month and monetize that traffic onto their main product.

6. HubSpot (Content SEO)

HubSpot's marketing strategy centers around educational content for business builders.

That marketing strategy recently helped the business to a billion dollars in ARR.

And helped it acquire more web traffic than most online business publications.

HubSpot's Content SEO success is down to

- building a search-first editorial calendar,
-optimizing historical content,
- organizing content into topic clusters,

and is obsessed with delivering value for business builders.

I spend a lot of time on Twitter breaking down why fast-growth companies are successful.

Hit the follow @searchbrat if you like the content.

Summary

1. RapGenius - user-generated content
2. Pinterest - topic/clusters
3. Canva - extending your product via templates
4. PandaDoc - creating side doors for search
5. Wise - building new products for SEO
6. HubSpot - search-first content approach

Go forth and grow!