For some 20,000 unique visitors a month might not seem like a lot. But for others in the B2B SaaS space, or new business owners just starting out this number might seem like a daunting one to achieve.
I am going to break down the numbers, some basics of our process and then share the results of what this brings in, in terms of revenue for the business. Now these are all private things I’m willing to share in hopes that you might find value, inspiration and affirmation that anything is possible if you just start.
“Show me the proof!”
How Many Visitors Does VerifyBee Get a Month?
verifybee users" />Now as you can see a majority of our traffic is organic, well almost 93.4% is organic. We have depended heavily on this for our growth over the past one year. As you can see our impressions trend dips a bit and comes back up every few weeks. With over 360,000 impressions we are only getting 20,000 clicks. So that means we also have a long ways to go in terms of optimizing our titles, providing better CTA’s and grabbing user attention. How do we do this? We use BacklinkSEO’s page insights feature to give us some in depth understanding of how each of our landing pages and blog posts are doing. Here is an example of how that looks:
Here I can tell which landing page is getting how many users, traffic over time. Its super nifty to get a fast glance at this data and make some CTA change decisions, A/B test and come back to see some positive results.
As you know we are not perfect, we are growing and improving.
This is all a journey we are going on together lets discuss some thoughts and questions that we have come across.
We are working on diversifying this overall traffic but at times we wonder if we even need to bother. But with new Google updates coming out every now and then many businesses fall prey to traffic drops and loss of business. So we have had people ask us how did this Dec 2020 update effect you, and how have past updates effected you?
Did The Dec 2020 Google Update Effect Your Organic Traffic?
Thankfully no, and its hasn't effected us negatively in the past either. We focus heavily on content marketing. No I didn't say outreach, I said content marketing and thats exactly what it sounds like. Tons of content, uniquely optimized and targeted to our exact audience and their needs. This is why its critical to understand your audience, build customer personas and have an understanding of what your customer problems and issues are.
Now its very easy for people to say “hey we were not effected by this update” but I want to show you how and WHY we actually benefited from it.
AGAIN where is the proof?
Okay so the above image doesn't really show our journey throughout the year and doesn't provide any insights on actual trajectory. Yes it does show that this update didn't have an impact and shows that traffic is steady. However, to get some more insights let me give you a snapshot from the start, the time when we had no traffic a year ago till where we are now. This should provide some basis for what I am about to share next about our process and method of growth.
So a total 170,000 clicks, 3 million impressions now those numbers I am totally proud of! As you might notice December has been kind to us almost doubling our clicks instantly! Did we do anything on our end? Actually we didn’t change what we were doing which was creating great content. If you have heard that content is King then lets just say there is some merit to that and Google tends to agree. Now backlinks, authority all matter but writing great content, thats focused on solving issues and targeted to your audience, we believe is the critical ingredient in generating more traffic and sales.
How Do You Write So Much Content So Fast?
You just have tons of staff.. no we don’t. Majority if not all our staff is on the development side of the business. We don’t have a dedicated sales team. All we have is devs and support. So whats the secret? We use a service called Blogwriters to handle our whole content marketing calendar. They write all the content, ensure we have the CTA’s we need, the proper internal linking structure etc.
We provide them with topics, CTA’s and when we need the content. They charge for creating an initial content mindmap which is optional but it creates something of a content journey to help you grow your business. Here is an example of what a typical mindmap might look like this is of course a small version, what you actually get from Blogwriters is almost a 4-8 month content calendar.
So what if you don’t want to pay Blogwriters for the mindmap you just want to figure out content ideas and topics and provide it to your writing team. Well thats simple here is our method.
How To Do Keyword Research For SEO ?
So this is subjective at times and many businesses have their own methods depending on access to tools and budgets. I am going to walk through a super simple way we get some ideas.
We use KeywordBin for our keyword research tool. Why is that? Well we are biased, ever since we invested in the product we loved, we tend to use it even more now. Its new, cheap and always improving. It does the job without all the crazy fluff.
So lets hit up KeywordBin and see what keywords we can incorporate in this article!
Lets start with the term “keyword research”
So this gives us some solid ideas, “keyword research seo” I used this in the header here as an H3 slightly modified “Keyword research for seo” as you might have noticed. You might have seen we have used “keyword research tool” in this paragraph as well.
Next we use the keyword miner tool from KeywordBin we entered the same term “keyword research” and this time we got hundreds of topics, phrases, questions etc
Now we isolated questions from this list and added them to our project narrowing them down to a few we thought would be great to add or might become topics for future articles. Here is that isolated list pictured below:
Now this gives you a good idea on how we choose keywords and some up with topics super fast. But these are not always customer focused keywords are they?
If you want to write content that solves problems you need to dig a bit deeper. And this is where KeywordBin needs to improve, although it does provide questions it doesn't provide critical ones listed in people also ask search results. The ones I am talking about are these:
Now some of these keywords might look familiar from our list, this is because KeywordBin might have picked up a few of these. This shows us we are on the right track!
We then go to our writers and ask them to answer these questions, ensure it covers the why, how, and how to increase sales. These are aspects customers care about. A Majority of our users are other businesses looking to clean their email lists. So the goal is to help them answer their most critical questions, tie in how our brand helps solve the problem and then offer them a reason to try us out with an offer.
Does Blog Content Need CTA’s?
Yes, absolutely it does! We ensure all our content comes riddled with CTA’s focused on solutions to critical problems faced by users. Sometimes near the end of articles we provide offers like clean 100 emails for free. These offers help ease the transition from curiosity to free plan users. We then use email marketing to convert our free users to paid customers.
What Does This Whole Content Marketing Plan Cost?
Some of the biggest questions we get are usually the most obvious. Should we hire someone in house, hire an SEO or marketing agency, hire by the article online or what?
It all depends on where your business is, but more times than you can count you will face the same issues.
- Low quality content.
- Poor grammar, punctuation and content flow.
- No real thought for conversion optimization.
- Words vs wisdom as i like to call it. Is it all just words or is the writer providing golden nuggets of wisdom as well?
- Cost.
- Loss of time and energy.
Now I’m sure there are more issues than above, and hiring a great SEO agency can solve these issues but the costs are tremendous. Hiring in house means that you have to cover salary, training, management and a ton more costs than maybe your business can handle right now. And freelancer writer for hire can be hit or miss and is usually a gamble. But you CAN find some really great gems if you go through referral and you might find your costs to be lower as well.
Now as you already know we hire a dedicated content agency Blogwriters. And we do it monthly. Our costs are actually lower than a good freelancer, almost 5x lower than an SEO agency with 3x more content. And we have access to dedicated writers or multiple writers depending on our choice. Although we require around 30,000+ words a month there are many pricing options available.
How To Get a Risk Free Content Article?
Many businesses are just starting out and they cannot afford to take risks with their budgets when testing out content writers. This becomes a catch 22, because if you do hire someone and they turn out crap then you are at a loss. Not only do you lose money but you also lose time and in most cases you loose your enthusiasm to keep trying.
Blogwriters has a risk free offer, go to their website blogwriters.io and click “Free Trial Article” they ask you a few questions and boom you submitted your request. No credit card, no creating an account nothing!
Whats the catch? Well if they write you the article and you wish to use it they will charge you either by starting one of the monthly plans or a per article rate of $80 per 2000 words. Which in my opinion is a steal for the quality of work provided.
Many people wonder if the investment is worth it or not. Well our traffic proves this really that it does.
Does Content Marketing Make Money?
Well not everyone will always be happy with the results and in most cases results take time. Lets do some math right, we spend $999 a month for content over 10 months. If this increases our business 1k MRR then we have done fantastic! We basically are getting our content for free! But what if we had this increase the whole year !
I am going to take a 20-25 days snapshot from our stripe dashboard.
So an 11x monthly return isn’t too shabby. Now you have to remember this is only from stripe, our enterprise clients are not billed through stripe neither are our local government, political and non profit clients. That additional non stripe revenue makes up almost 77% of our business. And yes we have had business come directly from marketing managers reading our articles and getting on a call with us and signing a 2 year contract for email verification services. Now that is the hidden power of content marketing.
Measuring Content Marketing Progress
So where do we go from here? Its great to keep writing but effective measurement of your impact is also critical. In our next article we will focus on how a single piece of content drives almost 30% of our stripe revenue.
In the meantime if you would like to keep up with content like this, get additional nuggets of wisdom or just follow our journey sign up for the lead magnet here.
