9x Traffic in 9 Months

Achieving a hockey stick growth curve—one in which traffic growth rapidly shoots upward after a protracted period of normalcy—is no small feat. But that’s precisely what Mergify was able to do with expert assistance from SaaSpirin.

When Mergify entrusted our team at SaaSpirin with alleviating their blogging pain, we set about producing the kind of high-quality articles that wouldn’t only perform well in search engines, but land them new leads as well.

The results

Mergify and SaaSpirin worked together to achieve impressive growth in their website's traffic over a relatively short period of time. Traffic growth ballooned more than nine times in just under two years—an exciting development for Mergify given their previous challenges getting their blog off the ground.

Achievements include:

• Topping 90k unique visitors so far in 2022
• 9xing traffic in 9 months
• Ranking for more than 2,500 keywords in 2022

Challenges Mergify faced

Without SaaSpirin's help, Mergify faced a lot of difficulty moving the traffic needle for their website.

Creating the kind of content that gets great results—genuinely useful and SEO-optimized content—was a struggle for their team as they already had a lot on their plate. Attempting to outsource directly also proved to be a challenge: The time investment needed to find and manage new technical writers represented only a marginal improvement over writing content themselves.

Continuously pushing out new content for their website is tangential to Mergify’s business goals. They needed to attract new website visitors, but their attention was best kept on the quality of the service they offer.

How SaaSpirin cured Mergify’s content problem

Our team took charge of handling all the content creation details that Mergify needed to get their website noticed in more searches. SaaSpirin was a low-risk solution for Mergify's team to try out, as there was no need to commit to a long-term contract.

Instead of having to devote valuable time to coming up with their own optimized articles, the team at Mergify was able to leave the heavy lifting to us. Our writers and editors shaped the ideas that they had into content that could reel in new leads.

Communicating with our team proved easy enough for Mergify to keep SaaSpirin's services essentially running in the background while they focused on delivering value to new leads and loyal customers.

Thanks to the consistent delivery of optimized articles from SaaSpirin, Mergify has experienced a dramatic uptick in traffic to their website in less than a year.

Since January 2021, the SaaSpirin team has helped create and publish more than 43 articles for Mergify's website. These articles have formed a solid foundation for the site's continued growth and are performing exceptionally well in search engines. All of Mergify's top sources of organic traffic are articles we created for them.

The top 10 articles we’ve written for Mergify's blog have netted them a whopping 58.4 thousand pageviews so far. Results like this are achievable only through careful optimization of the content itself for better search engine positioning. 

"The problem when you start with content creation is that it takes a lot of time, and you don't have a lot of time early on—especially when you have to wear multiple hats doing all kinds of stuff." – Julien Danjou, Mergify CEO

The content we’ve crafted is rising in popularity with website visitors as well. Mergify’s articles now collectively boast 180 backlinks despite zero outreach having been done to land any of them. Only truly valuable content gets backlinks en masse, proving visitors to Mergify's blog are genuinely appreciative of what they find there.

The growth rate

Mergify's pageview count breached 5,000 in February 2022. The 5k mark is one of the hardest thresholds to hit and represents a breakthrough milestone for Mergify's online presence. Just three months later, in May, yet another milestone would be met with more than 10,000 pageviews per month registered that month.

Mergify's website traffic growth rate has accelerated since May, with August 2022 marking the first month in which they have received more than 22.6 thousand pageviews! That's just two months after surpassing 10k—a great achievement for Mergify and an excellent example of hockey stick traffic growth.

What is hockey stick traffic growth?

This kind of traffic growth occurs when a website experiences a sudden uptick in traffic after having been relatively stable for a comparatively long period of time. This sudden change is not temporary—it sticks around and continues to ramp upward over the long term, gaining momentum as it goes.

Hockey stick traffic growth takes its name from the way the chart of a website's traffic, plotted over time, looks like the implement used to play hockey, with a “paddle” at the right end where traffic suddenly experiences dramatic growth. There are three main stages to this kind of traffic growth:

• Stage 1: At first, traffic is largely flat and no significant changes are recorded. This is completely normal for most new websites as they lack the web presence to make an impact on search results. Luckily, with consistent effort, this stage does not last forever.
• Stage 2: This is the point at which traffic jumps and a website's traffic chart shows a nearly vertical move upward.
• Stage 3: After the initial jump, traffic often continues to ascend more slowly. Of course, it can also jump repeatedly as a website continues to gain prominence among other existing search results.

Hockey stick traffic growth proves just how important a long-term content strategy can be to the success of your website's growth. This is especially noticeable in particularly saturated industries, where there’s already an ocean of content from competitors that you will need to cut through to gain visibility.

How we craft technically challenging content

Our writers know how to handle the challenging technical content that Mergify depends on to sway tech-savvy leads. 

Our research is guided by a basic outline that includes:

• A title: Keyword inclusion in titles is key, as is achieving the right word count to match search engine limitations.
• Keywords: Writers use these words and phrases carefully to help signal to search engines what your content is all about as well as what it should rank for.
• Target audience: Here, we specify the type of reader the content should be written for. Whoever you intend to serve with this content becomes its target audience and the writer's approach is adjusted accordingly.
• Objectives: Whether you want readers to click through to a sales page or continue exploring your blog, the objectives you have in mind are incorporated throughout the content.

This approach makes it easier to communicate all of the most important details for each piece of content to the writer. They can then get on with writing without mistaking the context or audience for anything other than what was intended.

Guided by preliminary research, the initial outline SaaSpirin provides is fleshed out by the writer to address key points and cover the topic in appropriate detail. Writers do their research in a modular way, investigating each point of the outline independently to ensure they touch on all important facts and tips. As a writer draws up the first draft, calls to action and links to sources of additional information on the topic are worked in organically to further enrich the content.

Getting SEO results

The search engine optimization process includes:

• Internal links: Creating a winning link profile in each piece of content can make a major difference in its performance. More specifically, we ask our writers to search out the most relevant articles on a client's blog to link to in every article so it ties together all of a client's content on related topics for Google.
• Keyword research: We help with keyword discovery and alignment with the company's mission. This makes hitting traffic targets much easier as keywords with limited potential are discarded early on. We can also identify the keywords that are less competitive but can bring impact.
• Keyword usage: Keywords are carefully placed in the most important parts of each piece of content to ensure search engine crawlers can understand its purpose and assign it a favorable position. We make sure to align keyword intent with the article topic. This has enabled us to create rich informational content for our client, because we can see where a reader's searches are not being served well by other articles on a topic.

Mergify's role

Taking action on your side can also help your traffic grow. Mergify gets involved by:

• Creating header images
• Contributing images to include in each finalized piece of content
• Adding and modifying links within newly produced pieces to better support their business objectives
• Supplying our team with topics to build content around on top of those we suggest—this especially helpful given the highly technical nature of their service and niche. They have loads of excellent ideas for new content that they would like to see produced for their site
• Developing their own opinion pieces on occasion, helping provide a fuller brand perspective to anyone who finds them through the high-ranking content we’ve crafted

Make more of your blog with SaaSpirin

With SaaSpirin, you can outsource the tedium of hiring writers, editing, researching, optimizing, and more, increasing the hands-on time available for core business concerns (instead of spending 24 hours a day writing content on your own). We also take an active role in helping brainstorm new topics.

Mergify was able to benefit immensely from a cost-effective rate of only $250 for 43 articles—about $10k over a couple of years. This is minimal compared to the amount they would have needed to invest with a growth agency to achieve similar results over that same period of time. Growth agency costs are commonly $10k per month and can put a financial strain on even established businesses.

Plus, our team's expertise guarantees you will see real results in minimal time. Learn more about our processes and additional services today.

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