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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.
We’ve worked with Pipedrive to produce and distribute content since 2016. This case study covers activities conducted between 2021 and 2022, which led to a 50% increase in organic traffic in English markets.
About Pipedrive
Pipedrive is a CRM and marketing automation platform that helps over 100,000 sales teams and small businesses scale their sales activity and generate revenue. Customers have generated more than $85b using Pipedrive (at time of writing).
Highlights
- Search traffic in English markets increased by 50% within 12 months
- Ranked keywords up by 30% within 12 months
- Post-pandemic sign-up record reached in the final quarter of 2022
The challenge
In the wake of achieving unicorn status, Pipedrive adopted a more aggressive approach to organic growth and SEO. They’ve dominated the SERPs with a strong brand presence in the sales industry for years, but they needed to capture more search traffic with high purchase intent to hit their quarterly user sign-up goals.
This meant producing blog articles and landing pages to educate customers who are actively researching or looking to invest in a CRM, as well as optimizing and refreshing existing content to improve performance across the board.
As William Sigsworth, Pipedrive’s Head of Content, puts it:
“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 positions is fierce. Thankfully, Pipedrive’s culture has always nurtured innovation and hard work—the two characteristics that have helped us carve out a portion of the traffic."
- William Sigsworth, Head of Content
The solution
We’ve worked with Pipedrive since 2016 to produce high-quality content that grows brand awareness and converts leads. In 2021, they asked us to ramp up their content marketing program to reach new organic growth goals.
Luckily, we already had the editorial systems in place to further scale content production quantity.
Here’s how we helped Pipedrive get it done:
1. Scaling content production while maintaining quality standards
“Content velocity” is usually associated with publishing as many articles as possible—regardless of editorial standards. The problem with this approach is that it leads to average or poorly written blog articles.
By establishing high editorial standards first, we can increase production cadence without hurting content quality.
We helped Pipedrive do this by starting slow, publishing four articles a month. Eventually, we ramped up to 15 blog articles and landing pages a month, allowing us to maintain our mutual bar for quality while reaching Pipedrive’s ambitious goals.
Our goal is always to deliver exceptional content, allowing Pipedrive’s content and SEO teams to focus on steering the ship and executing on other strategic activities. According to William, it worked:
“We knew we’d never be able to produce the number of content pieces required to hit our goals without support. Thankfully, we already had a pre-existing relationship with Grizzle, a company that rightfully prides itself on reaching high levels of quality.
"Our partnership with Grizzle has enabled us to hone our own quality assurance standards, as well as a process and writing guidelines that kept our high-production content engine running."
- William Sigsworth, Head of Content
2. Refreshing existing content to improve search performance
We also helped Pipedrive update and refresh existing articles and landing pages. The team at Pipedrive have a clear vision on what to prioritize, and it’s our job to analyze those pages.
This is done using a credit system, allowing us to allocate resources based on what each piece of content needs to improve performance. Some assets may require a complete rewrite, while others need a light “editorial touch.”
This allows us to accelerate our content optimization workflows and ensure Pipedrive gets more bang for their buck.
3. Capturing high-intent search traffic with BOFU content and SEO-driven landing pages
Achieving user sign-up goals means going where the money is. In SEO, that traditionally means keywords that indicate commercial intent.
However, different keywords require different approaches. Sometimes an article is needed, but other times a landing page is more appropriate. It all comes down to search intent.
Writing SEO-driven landing pages is a different beast to creating blog articles. To help Pipedrive create landing pages that rank and convert, we deeply embed ourselves into their product, audience, and the industry verticals and job roles they cater to:
“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 Tom and the team’s credit system, which helps us prioritize our task list.
"With this system in place, we’ve been able to optimize hundreds of high-performing content pieces, achieving a 33% growth in tracked keywords ranked 1-3 in the last month alone."
- William Sigsworth, Head of Content
Results
In the last year, Pipedrive’s organic sessions have increased by 50% in English markets, ranked keywords are up by 30%, and the content team hit a post-pandemic sign-up record in the final quarter of 2022.
