How Filestack Grew Organic Traffic by 300% with Topic
Learn how Filestack optimized their content and grew their organic search traffic.
Learn how Filestack optimized their content and grew their organic search traffic.
Filestack (previously filepicker.io) is a popular file upload and delivery service for developers used by over 100,000 applications. They realized that they would need to continue to invest in organic search in order to continue to grow and be successful. “SEO is definitely a huge part of what drives the website and business”, says Shanon Montelongo, Filestack’s VP of Marketing.
After using Topic to create new content and enhance their existing content library, they grew overall organic search traffic by 300%.
Filestack publishes developer-focused content on its blog and features a rich homepage that drives significant search traffic.
However, Shanon and her team found themselves struggling to integrate SEO into their content creation workflow.
They found that the content that they produced was hit-or-miss even with a tedious process to choose the right keywords to target.
“My old process was very manual and a ton of heavy lifting. I would do a Google search, go through the top articles, then run any keywords I found through Google Trends to check the volume, then go into Adwords keyword planner to check CPC. ”
“The problem is that great writers that create awesome content often don’t have the highly analytical gene which allows them to think in spreadsheets and numbers. But it’s important when writing content for search.”
So, Shanon began searching for a solution. She wanted to find a simple, easy way to enable her writers to create quality search-optimized content.
Before integrating Topic into her content production process, Shanon decided to try it out on a handful of existing blog posts to see if Topic's suggestions would result in real impact. Shanon chose 10 posts that she wanted to optimize and created content briefs for each.
Topic then identified a list of topics that the post should cover in order to rank well. It showed how other highly-performing articles were covering those topics and scored her content to give her writers a clear benchmark to hit. The writers then enhanced the posts with Topic’s suggestions.
For example, one of the optimized posts was "The Complete List of Video File Formats and Codecs for Developers". Originally, it ranked on the third page for the term "video formats" and did a seemingly adequate job of covering the subject.
However, Topic's analysis uncovered a number of important content gaps that would need to be filled in order for the post to rank higher:
And it found a variety of questions that the article would benefit from answering:
Shanon then used this information to revamp the post and improve the content's comprehensiveness. Using a similar technique on the other posts, we helped the Filestack team optimize their most critical content.
After 2 weeks, Filestack started to see visible improvement in search traffic. After 3 weeks, it was clear that the improvements made to these pages were leading to long-term increases. Below are the results of one such optimization:
The data also showed significant increases in high-intent keywords such as “file uploader”, “social media aggregator”, and “secure file upload”. Rankings improved by 70% in some cases, generating more traffic than competitors paying for traffic on AdWords. For the page below, the additional traffic generated was worth over $1600/mo if purchased through AdWords.
Interested in learning how Topic can help your content reach its full potential? Request a demo and we'll show you how we can do the same for you.
