How Introdus grew their inbound leads 1121% with a template-based SEO strategy

Key results from October 2021 to August 2022

• Growth in organic traffic: 2795%

• Increase in leads from organic traffic: 1121%

• Development in domain rating: 38.46%

• Growth in organic keywords: 1034.06%

• Growth in organic keywords in the top ten: 1255%

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introdus is a pre-and-onboarding platform that desires to provide the best automated employee journey to make it easier for companies and new hires. This saas case is an excellent example of how strategic and engaging content can boost highly relevant organic conversions, a must-read for every saas company across industries. But before you read about the elements of the strategy, some background information is needed.

It all started in 2019

The collaboration between Bonzer and introdus began back in 2019. At that time, introdus were on a mission to become the no. 1 onboarding platform in Denmark, where the strategy focused on dominating the #1 position on onboarding with 1.200 monthly searches.

One year later, in 2020, introdus had a new vision where they wanted to grow across the borders. This growth strategy involved entering the US market with a new brand identity and website. Therefore, we paused our collaboration while introdus migrated from introdus.dk to introdusapp.com.

introdus retook the collaboration with Bonzer in August 2021, with the main focus to accelerate the growth in the US market, which we did. But how did we do it?

A new market required a new strategy

SEO would be straightforward if everything were “plug-and-play”, but it is not. A new market in focus requires an in-depth analysis of the competitive landscape, trends, and search intent (to mention a few). SEO is also very dynamic, which requires close consideration to crawl updates, overall changes in the algorithm, and rank factor updates. Therefore, much has changed since introdus stopped the collaboration in April 2020 and retook it one year, and five months later, much has changed in the SEO landscape.

Introdus, like most other SaaS companies, understands that content is critical when competing in a competitive market where some big players dominate the SERP on a range of business-critical keywords. Especially entering the US market, they understood that they needed consulting on content strategy and keyword opportunities in order to compete with the big players.

Strategic content that targets different search intents at different user journeys

Our analysis aimed to discover keyword opportunities that could drive traffic and boost growth in organic conversions. This entailed a content strategy that consisted of three parts:

• Blog content strategy to target the high-volume keywords

• Product/category content to target the transactional keywords

• Template strategy to drive new leads and conversions

But to execute the planned content strategy, we needed to ensure they had an excellent technical performance, especially after their site migration.

The blog universe

The content strategy for the blog universe focused on optimizing existing content that did not perform well. We discovered that most blog posts had problems getting indexed, and some indexing issues were related to post-site migration fixes. Still, a surprising majority of the content was marked as ‘crawled - currently not indexed’ and ‘discovered -  currently not indexed’.

Around the same time, some Google engineers announced that Google aimed to reduce the frequency of webpage crawling in an effort to conserve computing resources and effectively prioritize indexing content that is useful to users. For introdus, this essentially meant that if an article were poorly written or didn’t bring any additional value to users, compared to the top rankings results, the blog post would not get indexed. This was the case for the majority of the blog articles on introdus. Launched in August the ‘Helpful content update’ also called for a sense of urgency to optimize all content to users rather than search engines.

When optimizing the blog articles, we discovered that many articles were cannibalizing each other, which was a potential factor as to why many were not indexed. For instance, introdus had 4-5 articles explaining one topic, whereas competitors had 1-2 blogposts. After a big sprint of analyzing, rewriting, optimizing, and merging, we managed to get all blog articles indexed.

Product/category pages

When working strategically with SEO-optimized content, we wish to match content and pages with the search intent to meet the user at the current stage of their user journey. For example, when a user searches for an “onboarding platform”, they are looking for a product page to get more information about the specific platform. These keywords are often lower in search volumes compared to more informative keywords, but they are business-critical to perform. Therefore, we ensured that all product-related pages focused product related keywords.

Effect:

Template/Checklist Strategy

Our analysis also discovered the demand for checklists and templates related to employee lifecycle management. For instance, onboarding checklist, buddy program checklist, and offboarding checklist. In addition, these findings uncovered the untapped potential of providing potential customers with checklists and templates which aimed to drive conversions.

Effect:

• Increase of 1121% in leads from organic traffic

• #2 for onboarding buddy checklist

• #1 onboarding plan template

• #1 training plan for new employee template

• #1 new hire training template

Performance metrics

For that reason, let’s look into four key performance indicators that have been the most important in this case:

1. Monthly organic traffic (users and new users)

2. Monthly organic conversions

3. Number of keywords ranking in the top 10 results

4. Monthly traffic value

Increase in monthly organic traffic

Measuring the increase in organic traffic is an obvious KPI to measure when working with SEO. Still, it is important to measure that both users and new users are increasing to ensure growth. For introdus specifically, this was an important KPI, as it reflects their growth in the US market.

Effect: In November, the estimated increase in organic traffic YoY was 4256.93%.

Effect: From October 2021 to August 2022, the organic traffic for users increased by 1532.17% and 1733.69% for new users.

Increased number of conversions from organic traffic

An essential part of the content strategy was the template/checklist strategy to drive soft conversions at introdus. It displayed whether the traffic at introdus’ website was relevant.

Effect: From October 2021 to August 2022, the leads from organic traffic increased by 1121%.

Increased number of keywords ranking in top 10 results

Now in November 2022, introdus is ranked with 698 keywords in the top 10 on Google, which means that introdus is driving a solid and continuous amount of traffic with their amount of keywords in the top 10 results continuing to increase. A year ago, introdus’ number of keywords ranking in the top ten results on Google was 300, which equals a YoY in November increase of 1711.69%.

Development in traffic value

Tracking the development of traffic value is a good performance metric to measure what the organic traffic would cost with search ads. For introdus, it illustrates the commercial value of their keyword rankings and what competitors would be willing to pay for the equivalent rankings.

The continuous increase in traffic value indicates that introdus is increasing in keyword rankings on commercial keywords with higher CPC.

Effect: In November, a YoY increase of 4794.35%.

Thank you for reading

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