0 to 119,000 Organics / Month

⚡ TL;DR

360 pages of high-quality content published
0 to 119,000+ organics/month after 16 months
1,100,000+ total traffic generated
Tens of thousands of signups
Thousands of paid subscriptions
Growing subscriptions to $135,000+ MRR
Driving $1,600,000+ projected ARR
No backlinks
No technical BS
Just great content

In this case study, will walk away with:

A complete data breakdown — traffic, conversions, and revenue
How we publish 40+ pages of content per month
How we create a simple but effective site structure
Real templates we use to scale

🤔 Context

A UK-based subscription e-commerce company reached out to us to help supercharge their growth in August 2021.

They had been running paid ads for the last year, saw success, and it proved their model, but they didn’t love being blackmailed by Google for 30% of their revenue on every sale.

Their competitors were some of the biggest brands in the industry, with revenue between £4.6m and £16.9m per year.

They didn’t really understand the opportunity space, but they knew it existed, so they reached out after following our content for the last year and asked us how we could help.

Our analysis indicated the bottom-of-the-funnel opportunity was pretty small — if we wanted to create a measurable impact on their growth, we had to go up the funnel to opportunities with higher volume and more surface area — but less intent.

We then had to drive the traffic from the middle and top of the funnel to their BOFU landing pages, containing a multi-step quiz segmenting customers into specific product lines based on their answers.

CMS: Shopify. This was our first Shopify project, but after having worked on WordPress, HubSpot, and a half-dozen platforms, we’ve learned it’s all basically the same thing.

🔎 Background

If this is your first piece of ContentDistribution.com content, here’s what you gotta know.

We’ve taken 5 projects from 0 to 100,000+ organics/month without building backlinks.

Without technical BS.

Without shortcuts.

And without hacks.

We did it by creating the highest quality, most relevant page of content Google could show for the keywords we wanted to rank for and doing that over and over again.

Basically, good content at scale.

And we’ve documented exactly how we do it:

1. 0 to 103,000 organics/month (first big win)
2. 0 to 119,000 organics/month (subscription DTC)
3. 0 to 166,000 organics/month (second big win)
4. 0 to 1,500,000 organics/month (biggest win for A16Z startup)
5. Baby fat graphs (not quite big enough for their own case study)

🚀 Learn how to scale software, processes, and people in our guide to publishing 100+ pages per month.

The #1 rule of content velocity is the content has to be good. Our goal for every page of content we publish is to make it better than any other page of content Google could show for the keywords we want to rank for.

That’s it.

This is our entire strategy.

🚀 Learn more about the #1 lever to get the fastest SEO results.

🤓 How Google Actually Works

The reason it works is that Google uses UX metrics to influence rankings.

Think about it.

Google owns the entire internet stack:

Android
Chrome
Google Analytics

They have the data.

And all of their peers.

LinkedIn
Instagram
TikTok
Facebook
Even YouTube

They all use user engagements to influence reach.

This was our theory four years ago, and we’ve proven it again and again and again.

No backlinks
No technical BS
No shortcuts.
Just great content (at scale)

🚀 Learn how Google really works.

So, the next question people ask is — what does content quality even mean?

We define content quality by asking these three questions:

Did we meet the search intent better than what’s currently ranking?
Did we provide more value than the other P1 results?
Is the content driving conversions?

The answer to all three must be Yes.

We will use the rest of this section to discuss #1 and #2, and we’ll go over #3 — conversions, when talking about CTAs and results.

You need three things to scale content velocity:

A team of people who care (this is a team sport)
Knowledge transfer to create content like you have a direct connection to your stakeholder’s brain
Documentation to hold everyone accountable for discussing the subject, like your stakeholders.
Execute knowledge transfer
Define monthly publishing budget and plan
Decide on prioritizing search intent

😃 Hiring Writers

Every single word of content is a liability to mess something up.

Spelling
Grammar
Messaging
Positioning
Internal links
External links
Media
CTAs

Literally every word is a potential landmine.

To make content velocity work, you need a team of people who are great at what they do AND care about their work.

They need to be able to scrutinize every punctuation mark, word, paragraph, and page.

Day in and day out.

For years.

We use Workello to help identify and hire these people.

Workello is like a CRM for hiring writers.

It’s super easy to get started, and you can put 300+ potential writers into your Workello account in less than 10 minutes.

Use a pre-written template from Workello’s template library.

Each template was created by an industry leader and contains a compelling job description, a well-thought-out skills test, interview questions, and candidate email notifications.

Post your job ad. Here are some hiring guides:

Now it’s time to sit back and relax while candidates find your job ad, fill out your application, and stream into your Workello hiring dashboard.

From here, everything is just 1-click.

1-click reject to send a polite rejection email.

1-click test to invite the candidate to take your pre-made writing test.

It sounds simple.

But the secret to finding great writers and editors who care is also simple.

The more writing candidates you screen…

The more surface area you have to identify and hire the best of the best.

We’ve screened over 3,000 writers to hire 22.

That’s less than a 1% application → hired rate.

Let me repeat that.

There is no magical hiring channel where all of the writers are qualified.

Getting writing candidates is the easy part.

You can get 200+ candidates in the next 72 hours with 10 minutes of work.

Filtering through those 200+ candidates to identify and hire the top 1% is where it becomes a nightmare.

Writing is the lowest barrier WFH job, and everyone with a crummy job is applying to work for you.

You can’t trust portfolio content, either.

Portfolio content is live content, and a 3rd party editor has edited live content.

And the portfolio content you receive will almost never reflect what your applicant will deliver to you.

So you need to test everyone.

To identify and hire the best of the best…

You need to automate the testing process in a way that allows you to filter through hundreds and hundreds of candidates fast, easy, and automated.

Use Workello.

🤯 Documentation

The next thing you need to make content velocity work is documentation to hold your team accountable.

And it starts with knowledge transfer.

“Knowledge transfer” sounds complex, right?

Let me make it simple.

Our team takes the initial information from discovery and pre-sales calls and starts writing all the questions we can think of while researching the industry and top competitors.

Our questionnaire includes both brand and industry-related questions, as well as some technical questions.

Here are some examples from this project:

We also capture information related to tone/voice/positioning, along with the technical BS that is important for success but is relatively little work compared to the content ops.

From a high level, here is how ContentDistribution.com’s process works:

Write down all the questions we can think of
Send to all project stakeholders
Scheduled knowledge transfer
Record the meeting
Create written documentation that covers *everything* discussed
Sent back to stakeholders for feedback
Implement changes
Write our first article and send it to stakeholders
Get feedback on voice, messaging, and positioning
Implement changes
Repeat this process until stakeholders are happy
Update documentation
Repeat for the next ten articles
Keep updating documentation as feedback rolls in
By article 11, stakeholders say: ‘looks good, nice work’

There are three key pieces of documentation:

About the Project
Language Guidelines
Content Series Template

As the project moved into the second quarter, we created documentation about site structure, landing pages, and an internal linking strategy.

@contentdistributioncom

Want to remove the guesswork from your SEO agency’s processes? SOPs are the answer! Documentation can drastically improve your team’s output. #SOPs #AgencyLife #ProductivityHacks #AgencyGrowth #seo #contentops #seoagency #contentagency

♬ original sound – NickFromSeattle

📅 Content Calendar

Decisions made at the start of the campaign impact growth rate and ROI.

These decisions are data-driven and dictated by the campaign budget and desired outcomes.

Here is the breakdown in numbers:

In the first six months of the campaign, we published 60,000 words at approximately 2,400 words per article. Starting with month seven and ending with month 13, we published between 28 and 40 pages per month at 1,600 words per article.

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Here’s what went into deciding the word count and the number of pages:

We had a fixed monthly deliverable of 60,000 words
Our initial focus was on pillar pages with a huge search volume.
Our long-form content not only answered the search intent, but we packed it with strong opinions and brand positioning to indoctrinate readers.
As we progressed through the campaign, we targeted smaller opportunities requiring fewer words to reach our rankings targets.

Let’s dive into topics and prioritization.

🔎 Search Intent and Topics

When starting a new campaign, our team will survey the entire horizon of topical opportunities.

We call it an Opportunity Analysis.

Simply put, scope all topics you’d like to rank for as if you had zero budget constraints.

Sounds complicated?

If you automate keyword research – it is really easy.

And really fast.

🚀 You can find our entire keyword intake and automation research process, with an example here: Automating Keyword Research – GET 100s of TOPICS in 1 DAY.

Let’s talk about the specifics:

While I can’t reveal exact categories, I can share that we operated in the broader verticals of:

Nutrition
Lifestyle and health

Going back to the knowledge transfer and competitive analysis we did in step #1, we had everything we needed to identify how consumers are searching for information related to our client’s products.

Here are some of the base terms that went into all keywords:

Food
Eating
Raw versus processed
Protein versus fat
Allergies

This helped us identify over 100,000 keywords, which would have been too many — unless we used ClusterAi.

ClusterAi takes huge lists of keywords and turns it into topics, containing groups of keywords that can all rank together.

Thousands and thousands of topics containing:

The main keyword
Variations of the primary keyword we’ll include in the on-page content
Total search volume the topic represents (by adding all keyword volumes together)

Here is a generic example of what this looks like:

Then we narrowed down this list of thousands of topics to the top 200 to develop our six-month content calendar.

We didn’t look at keyword difficulty at all.

If the topic is valuable, we’re creating content about it.

Because it turns out….

🚀 We outrank stronger domains for really competitive keywords, literally all the time. Learn how.

Remember.

Better content = better user engagement metrics = better rankings.

Next, we prioritized these 200 topics into a monthly content calendar by analyzing search intent based on where the topic falls in the funnel:

ToFu
MoFu
BoFu

Let’s use an example in a similar niche to clarify.

Let’s say you sell almond milk and are targeting problem-aware consumers such as vegans.

We ensured that 30% of our first 3-month content calendar were BoFu topics. For example, “almond milk for small children” or “best almond milk.”

It doesn’t matter that we can’t immediately rank for the main keyword because each of these pages can rank for hundreds and hundreds of variations of the main keywords — and they all move independently based on:

How you structure your content
Your site structure
How your competitors structure their content

When you do content velocity right, traffic will grow week over week 8 out of 10 weeks, and month over month, every single month.

This growth rate isn’t based on just this project.

We see this same growth rate across all of our projects.

Here is a B2B SaaS project we’re currently working on.

You can see that almost without fail, traffic is hitting new ATHs each and every week.

Anyways, back to this project.

By month 10 of the campaign, we were in the top 3 results for the main BoFu keywords.

And by targeting these “competitive keywords” early on in the campaign, we got there as soon as possible while still driving conversions early on for users arriving on these pages by searching for variations of the main keyword.

For 50% of the first 3-month content calendar, we focused on MoFu opportunities.

Again — we’re not sharing the niche, but here is a type of query that drove a lot of signups:

How much [product] should you eat during pregnancy?

This seems like top-of-the-funnel informational intent. We labeled it as MoFu due to the great offer / audience fit.

A lot of searches were ready to convert.

While we had “competition” that was currently ranking, the top spots weren’t held by competitors with a similar offering, AKA our offer was unique to this audience.

A better offer/audience fit means, all things being equal, our client would get more internal link clicks, more pages viewed, and more time on-site.

AKA better user engagement metrics.

AKA better rankings.

AKA more $$$.

This was our formula:

Create more value for the reader than any other page Google could show
Insert authority and thought leadership on why we’re credible
Sprinkle in CTAs for our subscription product in non-intrusive ways

Cha-ching.

Another example of MoFu intent that saw a lot of conversions was contrarian positioning, for example — “why is cashew milk bad for small children” — enabling us to position our products as the #1 solution.

Finally, 20% of our content calendar (around 8 pages) were broad ToFu pillar pages — think examples like “vegetarian diet” or “food [type] essentials.”

This type of content was helpful for several reasons:

Drive internal link clicks to increase average pages per session
Pack full of thought leadership and strong opinions only our stakeholders had
Send dozens of internal links to the revenue-generating pages

While we’re here — internal links tell Google how important a page is to your brand.

@contentdistributioncom

Internal links do what you think backlinks do! I’ve found internal links to be instrumental in improving page rankings. Learn about the strategy behind using them, their role in Cluster AI, and the art of planning content with linking in mind. #SEOTactics #seo #contentcalendar #searchengineoptimization #contentdistribution

♬ original sound – NickFromSeattle – NickFromSeattle

Think of it like a “vote.”

If you have 500 pages, and 499 of them link to a single page — Google deems that page highly important to your brand and will rank it more easily.

The flip side is also true. If you have 500 pages and none of them link to a page, that page will be impossible to rank.

It’s not important to your brand if you don’t link to it all.

🚀 Get our internal linking process.

Alright, back to the content calendar.

We continued publishing the rest of these topics for another 3 months in a similar ratio, reaching about 180 pages in the first 6 months of the campaign.

It’s time to go wider.

After nutrition, we started writing about care, health, and lifestyle. These topics covered a lot of how-tos and info topics on improving health and lifestyle — ALL contextual linking to those core nutrition topics.

This content supported our main category but still drove significant signups and conversions on its own.

More on that below in the Results section.

Finally, during months 9-12 (for a total of 40 pages per month), we focused on types of our ICP’s habits and needs.

To give an example, think of having a series of 10 pages on every variety of world cuisine — Italian, Japanese, Mediterranean, etc.

📚 Templates

About the Project Doc

The About the Project document is the single most important document that our team will create during the knowledge transfer process.

This is a living, breathing document.

It’s updated every time we receive feedback, which enables us never to make the same mistakes twice.

Regardless of how thorough we are, once pen meets the paper and we start writing publishable content — stakeholders realize they forgot things, or now that they can see it in publishable form, want to change things.

This document is updated dozens of times throughout the campaign.

Let’s break down the About doc, remembering we are discussing a physical product here.

The first section of the About the Project document talks about the brand. We explain the company and the product to our writers and editors and include the company’s mission, vision, and values.

The second section describes the product manufacturing philosophy. We explain the actual food created, the approach to doing it, specific advantages over competitors, etc. In this case, that meant science-backed documentation of the product’s superiority over the competition. Then, we explain how the subscription service works. This section is important because we really needed to communicate why this product is unlike anything else on the market.

This is also a part of the About the Project document that was revised multiple times in the first and second months of the campaign because we don’t expect our writing and editing team to understand the intricacies of chemical compounds or food nutrients right away. We don’t expect the content and marketing teams to have the knowledge that the founders have.

The How It Works section here provides details on the service step-by-step so we know how to explain the subscription services advantages to potential buyers.

Moving on to Content Guidelines.

There should be an overarching understanding of what the goal of this content is, and it’s really a breakdown of how you can drive a reader to take action and sign up. The goal here was a subscription for a trial or leaving an email to receive a helpful newsletter.

The approach refers to types of language that we can use, i.e., how our client wants to talk to their customers. Many resources come from their conversations with their customers that they relay to us. “Hey, this is what our customers really liked. We’re using this positioning successfully in our other acquisition channels,” etc.

The images section contains assets that we can use. We got access to libraries and social media profiles to borrow images from.

Additional resources. We got access to all of the assets the client has previously created, from images to testimonials to everything else. The most notable additional resource would be, let’s say, a bundle of 20 to 30 tweets or Facebook posts that were user-generated reviews of the product.

Seems like a lot of work.

Not really. This is where the magic happens.

You can’t hold a team of writers, editors, and PMs who care accountable to executing in a specific way unless you have documentation to hold them accountable to.

Almost a dozen people were involved from the client’s side and our side, and throughout the project, we had dozens and dozens of meetings.

If you want to make content velocity work, you need documentation to hold people accountable to.

Because the alternative is a lot more work.

And a worse outcome.

And a lot of fires and stress.

And remember those people who care?

You have to keep them caring.

And they won’t keep caring if their job is a nightmare.

🚀 Learn how to create a culture of documentation.

The Content Series Template

A Content Series Template is like a content brief on steroids.

A Content Series Template is not written for one article but a series of articles in a specific sub-topic.

And it’s a million times better.

When you scale content velocity, you must remove SEOs from the content production process.

And if your SEO is creating individual content briefs, well, you need a lot more SEOs.

We publish hundreds of pages a month with three SEOs.

“Mo SEOs, mo problems” – Our CEO.

Using ClusterAi to group keywords transforms the post-editing optimization process from “gut feelings from an experienced SEO” to a well-defined and structured process, enabling our editing team — without any SEO knowledge — to generate optimized content across:

URLs
Meta titles & descriptions
H1s
H2s

This means they can focus on creating the absolute best page of content Google could show for the keywords we want to rank for and sprinkle on a little SEO at the end to align the content with SEO best practices.

So the next thing you’re going to ask me is…

“But Bojan, how do I create a Content Series Template?”

Here ya go.

You want to document everything else is subject to variability between writers:

Internal links
External links
Images
Videos
Tables
Lists
Bullets
CTAs
Quotes
Thought leadership:

We also know there will be eight or more H2s. How do we know that?

Well, remember our ClusterAi opportunity analysis?

We identified reoccurring keyword variation trends in each topic and ensured each article covered them.

ClusterAi allows our editor to write a CST with a predefined heading structure. This structure is a guideline for the writer to modify during the creative writing process.

We also provide mandatory internal links from the series.

Finally, in the example provided below, we gave suggestions for the structure of the articles, such as using the keyword in the series and mentioning nutritional values in every piece. We also suggested including comparisons between different types of food and tips for selecting high-quality keyword types of food.

📋 Site structure

It’s 2023, and Shopify is still missing many of the things we love about WordPress.

But…

Turns out, it doesn’t matter.

Shopify, WooCommerce, HubSpot, WebFlow, Ghost, Custom CMS.

You can still have a fantastic outcome regardless of your CMS.

Some are just more flexible and easier to manipulate than others.

(*Ahem* WordPress.)

Here’s a quick summary:

Hub pages and navigation
2. Homepage and footer links
3. Suggested posts
4. Page speed optimization

Hub pages and navigation. We created category hub pages without pagination to reduce the number of clicks it takes for Google’s crawlers to reach any of our pages.Homepage links. It’s super simple. We create a section on the homepage that contains links to the most recent eight articles to drive faster indexing of new content.

Footer links. We added the main blog hub page, content categories, and pages with the most potential value. In the later stages, we swapped these with articles that have the most value.

Suggested posts. We will have six related posts at the end of every article, usually the most recent posts in the article’s sub-category. This speeds up how quickly Google finds and indexes the content. Note, however, this isn’t enough. You still need in-content links to relevant content.

Page speed optimization. In the beginning, technical SEO, like page speed, has a low impact because your footprint in the SERPs is relatively small. But as you scale the number of pages, investing in page speed adds incrementally more value with each page published because the work is spread across a bigger footprint.

Important: If you’re on Shopify, don’t deploy WordPress to a subdomain unless you can set up a reverse proxy to host it on the root domain. HubSpot has a subdomain and crushes it, but you’re not Hubspot.

📈Results

In September 2022, right around the time our annual contract was coming to an end, the Federal Reserve started raising interest rates for the first time in decades, the VC industry stopped making investments, and started mandating spending cuts in their portfolio companies.

The client opted to stop investing in SEO to increase runway during a tight funding market.

The beautiful thing about SEO…

It keeps working even after we stop working.

In the first 12 months of the campaign, we tracked:

232,663 visitors generated
4,904 signups
315 subscriptions purchased on 1st visitor

This doesn’t include untracked data:

Newsletter signups (Add another 16,000+ emails)
Revenue generated from re-targeting SEO traffic via email and Facebook Ads

But the results are compelling even without the untracked data.

In the following 9 months, without any additional work, the campaign would generate an additional:

908,474 new visitors
13,605 new signups
712 new subscriptions on the 1st visit
Thousands more new signups and paid subscriptions via re-targeting SEO traffic with Facebook Ads & email.

In fact, in the last 9 months the campaign has generated 3.9x more traffic, 2.77x more signups, and 2.2x more subscriptions on the 1st visit than in the first 12 months.

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This amounts to a total of $135,162 of monthly recurring revenue in the last month of the campaign with a projected $1,600,000 total in 2023.

If they didn’t receive a single new subscription purchase.

Let me repeat that.

$1,600,000 ARR with no new subscriptions.

🥇 Your Turn

Fully Managed SEO

Fully managed SEO for category leaders and future category leaders with huge goals and the budget to execute. We’ll do the heavy lifting, you sit back and take the credit.

👉 Learn what it’s like working with our consulting team.