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CloudEagle is a SaaS management and procurement platform that helps organizations optimize their SaaS apps, save on spend, and streamline procurement. SaaS management is a relatively new niche, consisting of low-volume keywords that only a limited number of people look up. 

Despite this, CloudEagle grew its website’s organic traffic by a whopping 252%, and improved total ranking keywords from 40 to 1300 over the span of one year. 

This playbook highlights the simple, yet powerful strategies CloudEagle’s marketing team adopted to supercharge their organic traffic, revisited by CloudEagle’s very own, Joel Platini.

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The Problem 

The primary challenge for us was that our website wasn’t receiving enough traffic. Without organic traffic, our ABM team found it challenging to target and convert the right people.

We quickly realized the severity of the issues and started analyzing the website to improve our metrics. 

First, we noticed that our website lacked proper structure, and little to no effort was made on SEO. At the time, our Moz spam score was 21%, along with failed core web vitals. 

At this stage, our website attracted barely 1,000 visitors per month. 

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Here’s a quick rundown of pitfalls we noticed on our website:

• Landing pages didn’t have any headings (no H1, H2, or H3)
• Lack of a proper XML sitemap and schema.
• Blogs were a big pile of paragraphs without headings or internal or external links.
• No prior keyword research was done before creating the content
• WordPress to Webflow migration was plagued with issues, resulting in missed data, duplications, etc. 
• Metadata was non-existent
• Poor page speed insights are due to unoptimized content and images.
• Robots.txt issues. 
• Lack of analytics or console data to measure the performance. 

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Looking at these pitfalls, we realized that an entire SEO overhaul was needed to enhance the website and improve inbound organic traffic. 

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The Solution

We started off by investing our efforts in making our website user-friendly and SEO-friendly: 

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1. Technical SEO

We conducted a comprehensive technical analysis of our website to enhance technical aspects and make it easier for search engineers to crawl and index our content. 

• Page spend: We noticed that the low page speed was due to unoptimized content and a large image file size. We fixed this. We incorporated lazy loading and browser caching to reduce the loading time for new and returning visitors.
• XML sitemap and schema: We used an XML sitemap generator to create an XML sitemap and submitted it to help search engines efficiently crawl and index our website's pages. Additionally, we implemented schema markup to provide richer information to search engines, potentially leading to richer search results.
• Robots.txt and Crawling Issues: We meticulously analyzed and fixed the errors in our robots.txt file, ensuring that the search engines could crawl our website effectively, and improve indexation. 
• Toxic backlinks: We used Semrush for SEO optimization and noticed our backlink toxicity score was above 80, which isn’t ideal. With the help of Semrush, we identified all the toxic backlinks, moved them to a sheet, and uploaded them to the Google Disavow tool to reduce the toxicity and spam score. 

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2. On-page SEO

Once the technical SEO aspects were fixed, we moved on to the grueling, repetitive process of on-page SEO. Almost 30 landing pages and 40 blogs required optimization. 

• Web page structure: We started restructuring the content on both web pages and blogs. We removed the deadlinks from the pages and added internal links in each blog to ensure the pages are interconnected and increase the dwell time of our visitors. 
• Metadata: We made sure each page on the website went through thorough metadata optimization. Title tags, meta descriptions, and header tags were updated with relevant keywords to improve the website's visibility in search engine results.

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3. Content Optimization

Then, we stepped into the long process of optimizing the outdated content using relevant keywords and audience personas. 

• Keyword research: We used Semrush to analyze the keyword gap to see where our competitors rank. We identified potential keywords and optimized our existing content with them. Additionally, we used Surfer SEO to optimize our existing blogs based on the primary keyword. It helped us optimize the content with relevant NLP words, phrases, and LSI keywords. Our content is now both user-friendly and SEO-friendly. 
• Topic cluster: We followed the skyscraper technique for blogs, where we identified a high-volume keyword and created a comprehensive blog for it. And we used that blog as pillar content and created multiple cluster blogs that link back to it.

This approach helped us establish a robust content architecture, providing our audience with in-depth insights and interlinked resources for an insightful reading experience. 

By strategically interconnecting our content clusters, we aimed to amplify our online presence and provide users with a cohesive and valuable content journey.

• Content ideas: Based on our product features, we created new landing pages with proper structure, following the right SEO practices to ensure enhanced discoverability. Through keyword gap analysis and competitor research, we identified the resource gap and began filling it with relevant blogs. We use tools like Semrush, Usetopic, etc. to ensure our articles are optimized for the right keywords and continue to see significant results. 

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4. Performance measurement

Understanding the importance of data-driven decision-making, we configured analytics and console tracking.

We configured Google Analytics to comprehensively track our website's performance, setting up goals, tracking conversions, and gaining insights into user behavior.

Furthermore, we integrated with Google Search Console, obtaining valuable information about search queries, click-through rates, and website indexing status. This data helped us enhance our ongoing SEO strategy.

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The Impact

Upon successfully implementing technical and on-page SEO practices, we saw a significant increase in our organic traffic and many other aspects.

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1. Organic traffic: From 23k users in 2022 to 82k in 2023, an incredible 252.52% increase resulting from optimizing our website and streamlining our content creation process. This led to enhanced ABM efforts, where we initiated email campaigns targeting the prospects visiting our website and converting them to potential leads for our SDRs. A combined, synchronous team effort from marketing to ABM to sales resulted in enhanced sales. 

2. Domain Authority: Even though it's not a Google metric, our initial backlink campaigns failed due to a low DA of 12. We improved our brand awareness and blog ranking by optimizing our content, publishing op-eds in various publications, and improving our internal linking and keyword optimization.Consequently, we obtained fewer but high-quality backlinks, leading to a significant DA increase to 25 in 2023. Also, based on Semrush’s suggestions, we disavowed toxic backlinks, which in turn minimized our Moz Spam Score from 18% to 5%. We are further optimizing our website to lower it to 1%. 

3. Ranking keywords: What used to be just 30 ranking keywords in 2022 increased to 1300 in 2023. Our content strategy of targeting the right keywords and writing educational, high-quality content helped us outrank blogs from prominent brands, increasing CTRs and traffic. 

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After the recent Google algorithm update, we lost a few keywords and realized that most of our blogs were published in early 2023. 

We are currently focused on revamping our old blogs with fresh content and links to reclaim lost keywords and improve our rankings further, which we’ll be happy to share in our next playbook.

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