How Pipedrive increased user sign-ups by 33% with content production and optimization

How do you increase publishing velocity while maintaining high-quality content standards? This is the challenge Pipedrive aimed to overcome in the face of ambitious organic growth goals.

Since 2016, we’ve worked with Pipedrive to scale their organic growth program, helping them produce and optimize content and run digital PR campaigns to increase brand awareness and SEO performance.

Pipedrive needed its content & SEO program to drive revenue

In the wake of achieving unicorn status, Pipedrive adopted a more aggressive approach to organic growth.

They’ve dominated the SERPs with a strong brand presence in the sales industry for years. However, organic channels must contribute to business objectives across all departments.

Pipedrive’s highest priority is capturing search traffic to achieve quarterly user and trial sign-up goals. This means targeting in-market buyers who are researching CRM solutions with purchase intent.

“We’re a small team working in a space that has a number of high-profile industry leaders, not to mention dozens of smaller companies across different markets. So, competition for Google Search traffic is fierce."

Grizzle helped Pipedrive scale their content production and SEO program

Ambitious growth goals often require an aggressive increase in editorial production. This means laying the foundation by building out efficient content operations systems and setting consistent editorial standards.

Most importantly, it requires prioritizing content and activity that attracts user sign-ups.

1. Target in-market audiences with bottom-of-funnel content

For SEO to contribute to user sign-up targets, we must first identify problems and jobs-to-be-done (JTBD) that indicate commercial intent or are relevant to product features.

However, different topics and keywords require different approaches. Sometimes, an article is needed, and other times, a landing page is more appropriate. It all comes down to search intent.

For example, writing SEO-driven landing pages is a different beast from blog articles. It means deeply embedding ourselves into the product, audience, industry verticals, and job roles Pipedrive caters to.

But the results are worth the effort. The landing pages we produce for Pipedrive not only rank in Google, but convert searchers into leads and trial sign-ups.

2. Ramping up content production while maintaining quality

When people talk of increasing “content velocity,” they usually mean publishing as many articles as possible—regardless of quality. But this leads to poorly written blog articles that fail to build trust.

By establishing high editorial standards, we can increase production cadence without harming content quality or performance.

We started with four articles a month, ramping up to 15 and 30 over the period of months. This allowed us to create high-quality blog articles at landing pages at scale while achieving Pipedrive’s ambitious user sign-up targets.

Our number one priority is producing the best content on a topic, allowing Pipedrive’s marketing team to focus on strategic activities and experimenting with new formats and channels.

3. Improve the performance of existing content

Alongside net new content, we helped Pipedrive update and refresh existing articles and landing pages. The team at Pipedrive have a clear vision of what to prioritize, and it’s our job to analyze those pages and ensure resources are used intelligently.

It starts with a content analysis. Every stage of the content journey is measured, including performance metrics and the editorial quality of each piece of content, to determine what needs to be done to improve or defend traffic and conversions.

A content credit system allows us to allocate resources based on how heavy an editorial lift each piece of content needs to improve performance. For example, some articles may require a complete rewrite, while others need some light copy editing and restructuring.

This allows us to accelerate our content optimization workflows and ensure the Pipedrive team gets more bang for their buck.

“As any SEO analyst or content creator knows, the playing field is constantly changing, so you need the agility to be able to adapt. Facing the thousands of tweaks and improvements our SEO tools recommend would be daunting if it weren’t for Grizzle’s credit system, which helps us prioritize our task list.”

Grizzle’s partnership with Pipedrive increased non-branded search by 50%

By partnering with an agency that integrates seamlessly with existing strategy and operations, Pipedrive was able to increase search non-branded traffic by 50% in 12 months.

Most importantly, by producing authoritative content that spoke to the pain points of their audience, Pipedrive also increased user sign-ups and trials from both top- and bottom-of-funnel content by 33%.

"With this system in place, we’ve been able to optimize hundreds of high-performing content pieces, achieving a 30% growth in tracked keywords ranked 1-3 in the last month alone."