and used seo to get acquired how sales hacker grew 426%€¦ · and used seo to get acquired...

How Sales Hacker Grew 426% and Used SEO to Get Acquired

GAETANO DINARDI & ALINA BENNY

#INBOUND19

2Gaetano DiNardi

Director, Demand Generation @ Nextiva

● Transformed Sales Hacker’s entire business and marketing strategy which led to an acquisition in less than 18 months.

● Grew Nextiva’s organic traffic by over 1000% in less than 1 year.

● Past clients: Major League Baseball, Complex.com, Pipedrive, Outreach.

@gaetano_nyc

3

@alinacbenny

Alina BennyGrowth Marketing Manager @ Nextiva

● Bumped up Nextiva’s organic traffic by

~1000% since 2018

● Drove on-site SEO for Sales Hacker until

the Outreach acquisition

● Led the Freshworks 2017 rebrand inside

Brand Marketing

So, let’s talk about Google’s Q2 Earnings Call...

● Paid clicks on Google properties grew +28% YoY

● Total visits to brand sites from organic search fell by 6% YoY in Q2 2019

↓6%

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@gaetano_nyc | @alinacbenny

On-page optimization still the highest ROI SEO activity

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Technical SEO is the most successful strategy for Enterprise websites

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Key Ranking Factors That

Mattered Most

Topical Authority - Source: Backlinko

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Content Comprehensiveness - Source: Backlinko

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URL Length - Source: Backlinko

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Strategic Research&

Search Intent

We grew from 19k monthly organic sessions to over 100k monthly organic sessions in approx. 14 months leading to an acquisition by Outreach.io

January 2017 - June 2018

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SEMrush Organic Traffic Trend - All-Time

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SEMrush Organic Keyword Growth - All-Time

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SEMrush Organic Traffic Growth - All-Time

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Context behind Sales Hacker’s growth

AGENDA

The exact SEO strategy we used to grow traffic

Audience research

SEO site audit — Key findings

Homepage — Before and after

Updating and optimizing existing content

New content opportunities

Featured snippets (How we targeted them and snagged them)

Sales Hacker’s blog is 100% Community Generated

Unique Considerations — Context Behind Sales Hacker’s

Growth

Aggressive publishing cadence (4-5x per week)

We had to “reverse engineer” SEO

Almost all content was evergreen and highly tactical

We did VERY little manual link building

Our social media and brand firepower helped us to naturally acquire links

Outranking the “big guys”

Updating stale content was the lowest hanging fruit

Email list growth was the “north star” metric

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Email list growth was the “north star” metric

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Webinars were by far the biggest driver of list growth

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Step 1) Audience Research

Here’s what we set out to learn

Goal 1 — Find one major brand messaging insight.

Goal 2 — Find one major audience development insight.

Goal 3 — Find one major content strategy insight.

Goal 4 — Find one major UX / website navigation insight.

Goal 5 — Find one major email marketing insight.

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@gaetano_nyc | @alinacbenny

@gaetano_nyc | @alinacbenny

● Sales prospecting● Building partnerships

and referral programs● Outbound sales● Sales management● Sales leadership● Sales training● Sales ops

Topical “buckets” to focus on

Based on these outcomes, we determined the following:

62 percent of site visitors said they kept coming back purely for thought

leadership

Thought leadership

● Step by step guides

● Checklists● Templates

Content Types

76 percent of respondents said they would listen

to the Sales Hacker Podcast (if

it existed)

Sales Hacker

Podcast

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Step 2) SEO Site Audit — Key Findings

Lack of referring domain growth

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Lack of organic keyword growth

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Non-optimized URLs

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Poor internal linking structure

Poor taxonomy, site structure and navigationNew Taxonomy Goals:

● Increase engagement from natural site visitor exploration.

● Allow users to navigate to the most important content on the site.

● Improve landing page visibility by bumping up relevant links pointing to them.

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@gaetano_nyc | @alinacbenny

Category pages eliminated with redirects and disallowed in robots.txt

Trailing slash vs. non-trailing slash duplicate content with canonical errorsMultiple pages for the same exact intent — failing to specify the canonical version.

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Branded search problems — “Sales Hacker Webinar”For example, a search for “Sales Hacker Webinar” returns irrelevant results in Google because there isn’t an optimized indexable hub page for webinar content

@gaetano_nyc | @alinacbenny

Step 3) Homepage — Before and After

Homepage from 2017Sooooo, this beauty right here (screenshot below) was the homepage I inherited in early 2017 when I took over the site.

Fast forward 6 months later, and this was the new homepageWe built this after extensive audience and customer research.

New Homepage

Goals

Tell people EXACTLY what Sales Hacker is and what we do.

Make it stupidly simple to sign up for the email list.

Allow visitors to easily and quickly find the content they want.

Add social proof.

Improve internal linking.

@gaetano_nyc | @alinacbenny

@gaetano_nyc | @alinacbenny

Step 4) Updating and Optimizing Existing

Content

Special note: We enforced “Ditch the pitch”

What Can Abraham Lincoln Teach Us About SEO?

● In 2007: 9,000 Words

● In 2011: 14,000 Words

● In 2015: 17,000 Words

● In 2019: 20,000 Words

Before and After: “Best Sales Books”This is what the post originally looked like (and it didn’t rank well for “Best Sales Books”).

And then...after

And the result…

@gaetano_nyc | @alinacbenny

Before and After: “Sales Operations”What we noticed here was a crappy article attempting to explain the role of sales operations.

Here are the steps we took to rank #1

for “Sales Operations”

Built a super optimized mega guide on the topic.

301 redirect it to the new mega guide.

Promote it on social, email and normal channels.

@gaetano_nyc | @alinacbenny

Here’s what the new guide on Sales Ops looks like

Readers really like a structured table of contents

And the result...

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SUPER ACTIONABLE TIP!

FIND YOUR TOP TRAFFIC ORGANIC POSTS

AND INSERT RELEVANT CONTENT UPGRADES

Step 4) New Content Opportunities

“Cold Calling”We knew we could win this SERP by creating content that was super actionable and tactical with examples.

@gaetano_nyc | @alinacbenny

“BestSales Tools”

Because Sales Hacker is an aggregator website, we had the advantage of easily out-ranking vendor websites for best and top queries.

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“Channel Sales”Notice how Sales Hacker’s article is from 2017 still beats HubSpot’s 2019 version. Why? Because we probably satisfied user intent better than them.

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“Sales Excel Templates”Not only did we build a better content experience, but we used numbers, lists and power words that salespeople like to see, such as FAST and Pipeline Growth.

@gaetano_nyc | @alinacbenny

Special Note: We Never Used

Long Intros

Our content gets RIGHT TO THE POINT

Sets context and goes into an overview

Uses jump links to skip right to relevant sections

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Step 5) Featured Snippets

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So..Why did Sales Hacker

get acquired?

Top 2 learningsfrom the acquisition

It may be worth acquiring a niche media brand in your space.

It may be worth starting your own niche media brand in your space

@gaetano_nyc | @alinacbenny

@gaetano_nyc | @alinacbennySales Hacker vs. Salesloft vs Outreach — Total Organic Keywords

@gaetano_nyc | @alinacbennySales Hacker vs. Salesloft vs Outreach — Estimated Traffic Cost

@gaetano_nyc | @alinacbennySales Hacker vs. Salesloft vs Outreach — Rank Zone Distributions

@gaetano_nyc | @alinacbennySales Hacker vs. Salesloft vs Outreach — Support vs Acquisition Keywords

Start with audience research

More organic traffic is 6 steps away —

Gather top insights from your SEO site audit

Make sure your homepage is conversion rate optimized

Update and optimize existing content

Find new content opportunities

Target opportunities for featured snippets

@gaetano_nyc | @alinacbenny

REACH OUT ANYTIME!

GAETANO@NEXTIVA.COM

ALINA.BENNY@NEXTIVA.COM