Summary
Whirlwind & Jobsoid - Scaling Organic User Signups Using a Content-led SEO Strategy With Jobsoid competing against VC funded established competitors in its domain, the objective was to scale user sign ups organically on a limited budget. Combining advanced SEO tactics and the Bigfoot strategy, we made content our hero and managed to generate a 158% increase in organic traffic, increase monthly signups by 45%, thereby resulting in a 41% increase in ARR.
Challenge
Jobsoid is a B2B SaaS company in the Applicant Tracking System (ATS) market, which is forecast to grow at 6.7% annually and reach $3.2 billion by 2026. With the pandemic affecting operations globally, the ATS domain gained traction with a wider adoption of remote working models. Being an upcoming player in the recruitment software industry, Jobsoid wanted to tap into this opportunity by scaling their user growth. The challenges faced were told fold: - Firstly, being a bootstrapped startup, Jobsoid wanted to achieve this growth organically with SEO as paid/inorganic channels were proving to be very costly and they were up against deep-pocketed competitors who were VC-funded or large enterprises. - Secondly, as the budget that we were operating with was low, it didn’t leave us any room for experimentation and warranted us to develop a fool-proof strategy so that our execution was on point from the word get go
Objective
Jobsoid is a B2B SaaS company empowering recruiters, hiring managers and business owners to source, engage and hire the best talent. With the onset of the global pandemic in 2020, remote hiring became the need of the hour for companies world over. In a space where Jobsoid was competing against deep-pocketed VC-funded competitors and large enterprises with substantial marketing budgets, the bootstrapped start-up quickly realised that scaling user growth using paid/inorganic channels would prove to be very difficult. As a result, Jobsoid was more focused on growing its user base organically. By the start of 2020, they were averaging 100 monthly user signups organically and wanted to grow this number by 30% without increasing the overall marketing budget. Our objective was simple - to put in place a strategy that would help Jobsoid reach its intended user signup goal organically, and that too with a limited budget.
Strategy
Jobsoid’s primary audience base is made up of hiring managers, business owners and recruitment agencies who use the platform to source and hire talent. With a value-pricing model, Jobsoid had found a niche for itself amongst small to midsize businesses, who needed recruitment marketing and automation to do more with less. Hiring managers and founders with multiple responsibilities found Jobsoid’s full feature set of sourcing, engaging and hiring very attractive. After analyzing Jobsoid’s traffic patterns and user base, we found that the bulk of their user signups came from prospects (hiring managers, business owners and recruitment agencies) looking to learn more about running an “efficient and effective recruitment process” for their company. These users were engaging with Jobsoid’s blog posts early in their buying cycle and were taking advantage of Jobsoid’s free trial offer. Our core focus was to 2X Jobsoid’s organic traffic by building out content that would attract users who wanted to understand -- “how they can recruit better and faster”. We saw potential in deploying the Bigfoot strategy and building a combination of comprehensive TOFU / MOFU content to double Jobsoid’s organic traffic and achieve the targeted user growth. The reason why we chose to implement the Bigfoot strategy was because we understood that the more we could extend the relevancy of every individual URL, the more SERP real estate we could eat up and the more organic traffic we could acquire. And so, after studying and analysing 100s of Jobsoid blogs, we worked on creating content rich pages that aligned with the Bigfoot strategy. We also realised that it was important to make the pages more consumable to deepen audience engagement, and so we embedded direct social sharing and posting capabilities on the pages and placed CTAs throughout for better conversion.
Data
Our analysis of Jobsoid’s organic traffic gave us two core insights: • 30% of the overall blog posts were bringing in 90% of the total traffic. • Google was giving natural traction to Jobsoid for “recruitment related” content. Basis these insights, we innovated by implementing the Bigfoot Strategy for Jobsoid. Our approach was to create comprehensive “Bigfoot pages” that would rank for lots of related, traffic-generating keywords. The goal was to rank for highly searched, mainstream keywords like recruitment process, recruitment strategies, internal and external recruitment, recruitment metrics, recruitment methods, etc. and their long tail versions. This allowed us to systematically expand Jobsoid’s keyword footprint, one page at a time and exponentially increase their website’s overall organic traffic using SEO. Breakdown of our core implementation: • LSI based Keyword Research – Every page had a “root keyword” and was further extended with multiple LSI modifiers to create long tail versions. • Content Gap Analysis – Using competitor analysis to discover content gaps, we finalized macro, micro and LSI topic ideas to create the most authoritative pages for readers. • Generating SEO Optimized Content -- Leveraged advanced SEO tactics like TF*IDF and Keyword Golden Ratio to create content that would rank in the top-10 • Intelligently Designed Pages for Better UX -- Clean layouts with rich content, interlinks and smart CTAs ensured low bounce rates and maximized time spent on the website. • Thematic Link Building – Built a network of thematically relevant links to increase the topical trust flow & domain authority.
Solution
Results
Our content-led SEO strategy delivered significant organic traction for Jobsoid even on a limited budget: • “Recruitment Process” keyword started ranking at #1/#2 globally on Google. • Keywords ranking in the top 3 positions of Google improved by 203%. • Overall organic traffic improved by 2.6X from 17,393 sessions in May 2020 to 44,938 sessions in March 2021, registering a strong 158% growth. The business impact of these results was outstanding: • Average organic user signups increased to 145/month (a 45% rise), significantly higher than the target set. • As a result, Jobsoid’s Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR) increased by 41%.