Saber Feedback's SEO progress

[SteveMcLeod]

If you’ve been following along with my progress on Saber Feedback, you’ll know that I’m focusing my marketing efforts on SEO.

Progress is slow, and as I mentioned in the latest episode of the Bootstrapped podcast, this has been frustrating and causing me some self-doubt.

But there are some positive signs. Here I’ll show my SEO progress via Google Analytics screenshots. All screenshots here are for organic traffic only, that is, traffic from search engine results pages.

Here’s our organic traffic since 1st April, 2020, when I took over Saber Feedback. There’s an immediate large jump as soon as we started fixing SEO basics, such as adding an sitemap.xml file, ensuring there was one canonical version of each page, and adding internal links to all pages.

After the initial jump, things seemed to stay steady, right? Well, that’s hiding some strong movements on specific pages.

We took down most of the blog pages whose content wasn’t relevant to our product, so the blog sub-directory had a steady decline in traffic. In the last couple of months we started adding new blog posts; so far they’ve not attracted any organic traffic.

Conversely, our new SEO-optimised landing pages have been steadily gaining traffic. This is organic traffic for all pages excluding the blog.

In particular, the “feedback widgets” page we added in May has started doing well after some disappointing months:

We’ve always had a “/feedback-button/” page, but in September we published a rewritten version that was far more comprehensive. Results came quickly, partly thanks to the help of @tooltester in this podcast episode.

You can see how we’ve reconfigured our traffic by comparing our top 10 organic landing pages in April to the results for November.

April 2020:

November 2020:

In April, none of the top 10 landing pages (other than the home page) were about feedback buttons or widgets. In November, 3 of of the top 4 were specifically about feedback buttons and widgets, and the fourth is our home page.

The slow progress has been frustrating. But it is a relief to see the results start to show.

So what’s next?

• More months of aiming for steady, slow progress with our SEO strategy. This stuff takes a long time.
• Rewriting existing pages that are not performing
• Adding more pages targeting relevant keywords,
• Continuing to learn, and applying the advice I’ve been getting to improve our overall SEO.

[spek]

Hey Steve,

Thanks for this. Interesting to read. I was wondering, have you set clear goals? I mean both in terms of achievements such “x landing pages about feedback widgets” and outcome (traffic, signups, leads, etc.)?

Peter

[SteveMcLeod]

@spek

I was wondering, have you set clear goals?

Good question. I don’t really have clear goals, other than to have gradual steady growth in signups from organic traffic.

Vaguely speaking, I’d like to increase monthly trial signups from 20/month (current level) to 100/month. Whether it takes 6 months or two years - or longer - is okay with me.

[spek]

Yeah, it’s hard to define goals if growth is kinda unlimited. Keep us updated!

[gravelld]

Yep - I think what you’re getting at @SteveMcLeod is that not all content and visitors are equal. I have certain pages on my blog which are visited by people that are interested in the content, but the content is educational content only tangentially related to my business. I’ve always found this audience hard to convert, and frankly at that point the visitor count is just a vanity metric.

Far better to have content that converts and is positioned to be the top of the funnel toward an eventual sale.

[robinwarren]

Great write up, thanks for this Steve