How One Startup Grew Their Organic Monthly Traffic 3,753% in Just Over a Year

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) isn’t dead. 

In fact, it’s alive, thriving, and has the power to …

• build your brand,
• generate new leads, and
• grow your business

During my tenure at Tithe.ly, we transformed SEO into a reliable acquisition channel. 

This wasn’t something that happened by accident either. 

Back in 2018,I joined the company as the first marketing hire, and my primary focus was on developing our SEO engine. 

In little over a year, we saw an incredible surge of 3,753% in organic traffic.

This significant boost also led to a substantial uptick in new leads and customers. 

Check out this screenshot: 

When taking a closer look, we went from 5,389 in monthly organic searches in January 2018 to 207,642 organic searches in May 2019. 

Though the work I’m sharing happened a few years back, broadly speaking, I’d still adhere to most of the strategies we used to boost our organic search traffic. 

With that in mind, I’m eager to share some valuable lessons we picked up along the way, including:

• why you MUST start with on-site SEO
• 5 steps to prioritize your B2B strategy
• how to create content that ranks
  

So, let’s dive in.

Why you MUST start with on-site SEO

Creating a successful B2B SEO strategy is similar to building a house. 

To build a house, you must first lay a solid foundation. If you bypass this step or cut corners, it doesn’t matter how beautiful your home is. In time, your house will shift, crack, or fall to the ground. 

In the same way, when it comes to SEO, you must take care of your site—it’s the foundation. 

In other words, your on-site SEO must be solid. 

If you’re just getting started, then you must start here. 

For this step, there are a tremendous number of factors to review and optimize, including:

• page speed
• URL structure
• internal links
• Robots.txt files
• mobile responsiveness, and
• a whole lot more … 

You want to ensure your site is ready to become an SEO generating machine for your business. 

There are some great free and paid tools out there to help you gather data, but ideally you should have an expert review your site, make recommendations, and ensure everything is implemented correctly. It will be worth the investment of hiring an expert or agency to know this work is done right. 

At Tithe.ly, we started with a robust foundation and collaborated with Victorious SEO. They offered a comprehensive technical analysis of our site, guided us in crafting the initial strategy, and supplied ongoing off-site SEO support. I honestly can't recommend them highly enough.

5 steps to prioritize your B2B SEO strategy

Focus is key to any marketing initiative—and the same is true when we’re talking B2B SEO. 

Initially, at Tithe.ly, we focused on generating leads (capturing demand) with SEO.

The primary reason we made this choice is that we believed SEO would work well for our business, our site possessed a solid domain rating, and we knew we could create the type of content we needed to earn traffic that would acquire new customers. 

If you believe SEO would also work well for your business, here are five steps you can  take to get started:

1. Set your business objective
2. Identify your target market
3. Clarify your primary keywords
4. Create content
5. Monitor results

Let’s take a look at these in detail.

#1. Set your business objective. 

First, you must set your business objective for your SEO goals. 

Treat SEO as a marketing channel or one expression of your B2B go-to-market strategy.

If done right, SEO can become a regular source of monthly traffic that will build your brand, drive new leads, and increase your revenue. 

When it comes to SEO, should you focus on …  

• increasing monthly organic traffic?
• ranking for specific keywords?
• increasing third-party reviews?

Well, yes and no. 

Let me explain. 

At Tithe.ly, we relentlessly focused on one goal: 

Acquiring new customers.  

The metrics you focus on for your business may be different. 

But at Tithe.ly, we prioritized getting new people to sign up for our software.

That’s it.

We choose to filter everything we did through this specific goal. 

Not more traffic. 

Not more blog posts and product pages.

Not an increased number of email subscribers.

But brand spanking new customers who signed up for an account. 

I understand everyone says this. But saying you’re committed to a specific goal and actually following through on your commitment to that goal is a different story. 

For example, when creating a content marketing plan that drives results, there are countless types of content you can create, including:

• blog posts
• product pages
• YouTube videos
• case studies
• podcasts
• social-viral content
• quizzes
• infographics
• white papers 
• roundups

There are pros and cons to every piece of content you can create. 

The type of content that will help you to accomplish your goals can look completely different from someone else in your industry, and what you should focus on at first will look different from what you should pursue later. 

Here’s the big idea:

Clarify your business objective, figure out what type of content will help you meet that goal, and then create it. In short, say yes to what will work for you and say no to everything else. You’ll be tempted to work on every new idea that comes your way, but resist. That ain’t goin’ to work. 

At Tithe.ly, after we set our goal, we chose to focus on the tactics we believed would most directly impact that goal—anything that would influence people to sign up. 

This meant we needed to start with identifying our target market. 

#2. Identify your target market.

There are two keys to creating SEO-fueled content:

1. Write for search engines
2. Write for people

These are not two competing principles. 

If anything, they are the bumper pads to guide you in what you create, the style and tone of the content you create, as well as how you create content for search engines. 

Below, I’m going to share tips on how to write for search engines. 

But when it comes to writing for people, focus on your reader.

To do this, you want to: 

• talk like they talk
• be yourself
• be real
• answer their questions
• meet their needs 
• solve their problems

How?

You have to know your customers. 

Not in the “I created a user persona” kind of way. But in the way where you know their problems and how your product or service solves them. 

This isn’t a one-time deal, either. 

This is an ongoing conversation where you (or your team) are in constant contact with your customer base. 

After you know who you want to reach, get to work creating content. 

For SEO, this means you have to clarify the primary keywords that will directly lead people to learn about your business.

#3. Clarify your primary keywords.

Don’t focus on keywords. 

You’ve probably heard this said before, and it may be true in certain contexts and industries. 

But this isn’t true for everyone. 

Here’s the deal:

When people search online, they use words (keywords).

What time is it?

Coffee shop near me.

Best hot chicken in Nashville.

Digital giving for churches.

Power dialer. 

Most of the words people use will have nothing to do with your business. But you best believe your target market will use words (keywords) relevant to your business when searching online at some point. 

When it comes to making a purchase, most people will search online, talk to peers, read reviews, and conduct research before they think about contacting your business or making a purchase. This is true for B2C and B2B decision-makers. 

Before you create anything, you’ll first need to specify what keywords you want to focus on. To help you narrow down your options, ask yourself these two questions:

1. What keywords best describe my products or services?
2. What relevant keywords is my target market using?

I know the first question sounds obvious. 

But hear me out:

If your primary goal isn’t to increase monthly traffic, but rather to increase your company’s revenue by acquiring new customers, then your keywords might look different than you originally thought. 

So, if you skip this first step, you’ll run the risk of building an SEO campaign that drives the wrong traffic to your website, which means you will lead the wrong people to your business and not generate leads or new customers. 

The second question is similar to the first, but asking this question will help you identify different ways your target market may talk about your products or services. This should help you narrow down your SEO keyword strategy. 

#4. Create content.

Creating content is a broad topic, but let me share what has worked well for us at Tithe.ly.

At first, and not including our homepage, we focused on creating three types of content:

1. Product Pages
2. Comparison Pages
3. Blog posts

Let’s take a closer look:

1. Product pages

For SaaS companies, like Tithe.ly, creating optimized product pages is essential. 

These pages will serve as the focal point in leading people to purchase what you’re offering. 

For the sake of simplicity, a product page is the one-stop shop a potential customer can visit to learn more about what your products do and how to do business with you. 

Here’s a list of some of Tithe.ly’s product pages: 

• Home page
• Church Giving
• Church App
• Church Events
• Church Management Software
• Church Website Builder

We kept a close eye on how well each of these pages performed. 

Here’s what we looked at:

• Primary keywords
• Keyword ranking
• Keyword volume
• Level of competition
  

Monitoring these four areas helped us to keep track of our efforts and to ensure that we’re using the right keyword and links for internal (on-site) purposes or external (off-site) opportunities, such as guest posts, interviews, and press releases. 

For our product pages, the actual volume we received wasn’t huge. 

However, the conversion rate for these pages was higher compared to the rest of the content we created, such as blog posts, which is entirely the point.

Focus your product pages on buyer intent, and use the other content—and ads and more—to drive traffic to these pages. 

2. Comparison Pages

Every day, it becomes more challenging to market your product or service.

The marketing landscape is crowded, and the buyers you’re targeting are swimming in a sea of information. 

But there’s one way you can leverage the traffic your competitors receive:

Create comparison pages to siphon away their traffic to your website. 

At Tithe.ly, we created multiple comparison pages. 

What you include on your comparison pages depends on a few factors, including your industry, whom you’re comparing yourself to, and what content you’ll need to add in order to rank your page.

Here are a few ideas of what to include to get you started:

• Pricing
• Contracts
• Buying process
• Features
• Customer support
• Integrations
• Testimonies

And, for what it’s worth, take the high road when creating comparison pages. 

Be mindful of the tone you use, how you compare yourself to others, and provide your contact information for people if they find a mistake. 

3. Blog posts

Alright, at Tithe.ly,  as we …

• focused on on-site SEO,
• created our plan,
• optimized our product pages, and
• wrote comparison pages … 

… we wrote many blog posts focused on creating awareness (top of the funnel).

True to form, this content does drive the vast majority of our monthly organic traffic, which makes sense: The keywords we targeted for this step had a higher search volume.

Before writing blog posts, we asked these four questions to ensure they meshed well with our plan: 

1. What are the keywords relevant to our business?
2. What keywords does our target market use in relation to our software? 
3. What are the problems or questions our target market has in relation to our products? 
4. What phrases do our competitors rank for that are relevant? 

At this point, we identified what we should create based on the volume, keyword difficulty, gaps in our content (e.g., do we have a need for an article on this topic?), and upcoming promotions and seasons. 

Even though we primarily focused on leading people to sign up for our software, we actually had an opportunity to create content in multiple categories for our target market since we offered multiple products that are connected to each other. 

Creating content that ranks

Creating content that ranks is a competition. 

Every month, there are only so many times a specific phrase will be searched. 

If you don’t outrank your competition, then you will not receive the monthly organic traffic you need. Said another way, to increase your monthly organic traffic, you need to outrank your competition. It’s really that simple (in theory). 

Before you create content to rank, there’s a bit of research you’ll need to do first. 

For starters, there are two things you’ll need to know about your target keywords:

1. what content currently ranks in the top 10; and
2. why search engines rank this content in the top 10

The first step in this process is straightforward, whereas the second step is more nuanced. Regardless, you’ll need to figure out the answer to these two questions before you can move forward.

Let me show you how.

Step 1: Identify what ranks in the top 10.

For this step, pick a keyword or keyword phrase you’re targeting. 

Next, open an incognito window in your browser, pick a search engine, and search for your target keyword. This simple process will let you know in real-time what content ranks in the top 10 for your target keyword, as well as other useful info, such as what Adword ads pop up.

Tools like Ahrefs offer additional insight in one place, concerning: 

• Adword ad
• featured snippets
• related questions
• backlinks
• domain authority
• top keyword
• volume 
• Facebook shares

Here’s a screenshot I found for “B2B SEO” when writing this post:

Before reading, watching, or listening to this content, hang tight. 

There are a few questions you’ll need to unearth in your research, which leads us to the next step.  

Step 2: Why is this content in the top 10?

To create content that outranks your competition, there are several things you’ll need to know:

• What type of content is ranking in the top 10 (i.e.,Video? Written? Podcast?)?
• What length is this content (i.e., What’s the word count? How long is the video?)? 
• How is the content formatted (i.e., Does the post or page include images? Are they custom or stock?)? 
• What’s the content’s tone (i.e., Is the content humorous? Scientific? Inspirational?)? 

As you think about the answer to these questions, you’ll be in a much better spot to answer the two most important questions: 

1. What makes this content rank in the top 10? 
2. Why do search engines think this content serves user intent?

The first question will help you think through optimizing your content, and you can do this until you're blue in the face. But if your content doesn’t meet the needs of people, then it won’t meet the need for search engines. 

Here’s why:

SEO optimization is all about satisfying user intent. 

Step 3: Create your content

You’ve done your homework

You have a good idea about what type of content you need to create. 

Now it’s time to get to work. 

In this step, you want to use the answers to the questions above to create your content. 

Here are several things you may have to do: 

• Write more (helpful) words
• Include up-to-date research
• Add images and screenshots
• Make your content more practical
• Make your content more scientific
• Format your content to make it easier to digest
• Add video
• Include audio

You don’t have to do everything from this list above. 

There may only be 1–3 things you’ll need to do from this list to create content that will outperform your competitors. But whatever you think will best optimize your content, make sure you take your time to make it better than what’s ranking. 

This is the process we followed at Tithe.ly to create content. 

There’s nothing fancy here.

That’s (kind of) it. 

As we created content, we also focused on executing a solid internal and external link building strategy. 

Add internal links

There are many benefits to creating internal links that woo your readers and search engines. Here are a few:

• It makes it easier for people to browse your website
• It lets search engines better understand your site
• It shares your site’s authority

For the sake of this post, I’d like to focus on the last point. 

Here’s what you need to know:

There are pages on your site that have a higher level of authority than other pages. In other words, there are pages on your site that have more juice, which you can (sort of) share with your other pages. 

Depending on the age of your website and how well you’ve executed a well-rounded content marketing strategy, you may have several pages on your site that boast a significant URL Rating (UR). (This is a phrase commonly used by Ahrefs, and it’s their way of categorizing the strength of a specific page on your site.)

What’s the point? 

To best optimize your content for SEO, it’s essential to link to new content from other pages on your site that boast a strong UR. When you do this, you’re powering up your content by passing along authority from other pages. 

At Tithe.ly, we used this list of the top-ranking pages and posts on our site to find ways to leverage our highest ranking pages when creating new content. 

Note: When internally linking, be careful not to cram too many backlinks into one page. I understand it’s tempting to link to everything from your strongest page. But keyword cramming is a big no-no for several reasons. 

Build new backlinks

I’m going to shoot you straight: 

This step merits its own post, and I’m not going to cover everything in detail here. 

But don’t lose all hope. 

I’m at least going to point you in the right direction. 

In general, the thing you need to keep in mind is that you’ll need to earn more backlinks to the page or post you’re creating than the pages you want to outrank. This process normally takes a lot of time and effort. But trust me—it’s worth it. 

Here are some of the tactics we used to build links:

• Write guest posts 
• Ask for links
• Find broken links on other sites
• Create ah-mazing content that’s linkable
• Reclaim broken links to your site

These tactics we chose to execute will get you started, and these articles will provide more ideas:

• How to Get High Quality Backlinks in 2023 (7 New Strategies) (Backlinko)
• Link Building for SEO: The Beginner’s Guide (Ahrefs)
• Link Building Tactics: The Beginner's Guide to Link Building (Moz)

After thinking through different ways to build backlinks, focus on 1–3 you can use to increase your monthly organic traffic. 

#5. Monitor results.

Like everything in marketing, plan on regularly monitoring your results. 

At Tithe.ly, we reviewed in-depth our SEO metrics every month. 

During our monthly reviews, here are the primary metrics we looked at:

• Number of new customers signed up via organic search
• Targeted keyword position growth
• Clicks and impressions
• Overall organic traffic

During the month, we’ll take a look at things as they come up. 

But that’s the thing with SEO: 

Focus on monitoring your key metrics on a monthly basis—not daily or weekly. 

Now, when it comes to your lead metrics, like, what you are creating and optimizing to improve your organic traffic, then yes, make a plan, stick to it, and keep an eye on what you’re producing. 

Finally, after you've created content for 3-6 months, it's best to review your pages and aim to republish content.

Over to you

I moved on from Tithe.ly in February of 2021.

But as I mentioned at the beginning, I’d follow a similar approach today.

Remember:

Treat B2B SEO like every other marketing channel: 

• research it,
• plan it,
• implement it,
• support it, and
• continually optimize it

This is not a magical tactic you can set and forget. 

Like everything in life and marketing, things change. 

As the marketing landscape changes—in particular, SEO—you’ll need to be prepared to change right alongside it to ensure you’re getting the results you want.