Episode 5

I have to admit that the results Pawel and his team achieve are beyond phenomenal:

• 100% growth in organic traffic YoY
• 350% increase in direct trial signups from the blog...

It really is incredible.

Pawel was kind to share everything about how they’re doing it. And several thingsstood out in particular:

1. Their “alpha, beta, gamma” approach to prioritizing topics, which results in a strong focus on topics with high buying intent first, and only moving to producing ToFU content when all commercial pages are done.
2. The team also revisits and updates older content regularly, usually at a rate of 10 pages a month.
3. Finally, Pawel and his team moved away from typical CTAs in favor of big, bold, and often animated calls to action with custom copy for every content asset.

Pawel is the head of growth at Wisepops, an onsite marketing platform, primarily for ecommerce stores.

In short span of a couple of years, Wisepops grew from zero employees to 19, while remaining a completely bootstrapped company, and Pawel has been leading the company’sgrowth for three years now.

(A sidenote, and something you will hear about when listening to the episode anyway. I worked with Wisepops before Pawel, and together with their HoG then, Greg, launched their SEO strategy.)

Most of the company’s growth comes from SEO, and Wisepops achieve some pretty amazing results with the channel.

What’s more, Pawel achieves this with just the team of two (and that includes him!)

SEO is still the main channel and it always has been. Right. So right now regarding to the traffic from our Google organic searches is around 30%, quarter to quarter. So we are doubling our organic traffic year to year, which I think quite decent number especially we are small team because the whole team is 19 people. But in our content team there isme who is doing some kind of strategic part and there is only one contentwriter, Oleksi, who is top level content writer.

But naturally, traffic isn’t the team’s primary goal.

Our goal with my team is not to increase the traffic, but is to increase the number of paying customers with our content. The blog especially is at the top of the funnel. So right now, 25% of all sign ups of all our trial users have visited our blog before signing up. So it's quite number. And 18% of all our trial users signed up directly on the blog articles, which is also quite a number. And to give you some more context, when I take the data, how it was a year ago. So in March 2020, 14 percent of all trials had visited the blog before signup and only around 4% of all trials sign up directly from the blog. So the increase is significant.

Pawel attributes their success to two factors:

• Being conscious about the topics they cover, and
• Their blog conversion strategies.

Wisepops’ SEO and content strategy focuses on buying intent first.

Pawel and his team use a tried and tested, alpha-beta-gamma strategy to prioritize topics they write about.

We built a matrix with three main criteria. And one, the most important is the buying intent. So yeah, as I mentioned, blog is the tool to generate more signups, to generate more paying customers. So we need to be sure that we are writing for the topics that are for clients who are looking for the tool like ours and who are ready to buy. So this buying content is the most important. And the second one, the second criteria is a search volume. So we need to be sure that there are people who are looking for this keyword. And then the third one is the keyword difficulty. And I think most of other blogs or other content creators, usually they are looking mostly for the search volume, so they are writing articles for the traffic. And then they complain that traffic doesn't sell, SEO doesn't sell, pay that sell.PPC is great, SEO doesn't. So I think it's not like that because they just focus on the wrong keyword.

This approach leads to another aspect of their operations…

But I think the crucial component of SEO success isn't just writing the best articles, but one of the most important thing is the monitoring and updating articles that you already published. And every month we revise at least ten articles and we are doing some changes, evolving search intents, adding trust signals like expert quotes.

Finally, the team also puts a lot of focus on how they’re telling blog visitors about their product.

They create custom CTAs for every blog post, often with custom-written copy, and feature bold graphics and animations to ensure that these CTAs get noticed.

At the beginning we were doing exactly the same, what most blogs are doing. So we were  using the small, very subtle CTA's in the plain text, that there were just highlighted links inside of the block of text. Because I don't know, this is how most of the companies are doing maybe they don't want to be too pushy to sell their content. They think that someone will find their content, they will love the whole article without any interrupts. And then they will go to the main page, they will go to the landing pages about the product, they will visit the pricing and they will sign up. It doesn't worklike that. It really doesn't.

Another successful move Pawel and his team made that had a huge, and positive impact on performance was moving the site from Wordpress to a new CMS, and pruning more than half of the content.

This move not only gave them the ability to work quicker on the content. It also resulted in a boost in authority and rankings.

We decided to delete 140 of the articles that were WordPress. Yes. So after the migration, we had more than 50% of the pages that we had. So we migrated around 100 of all pages, articles, blog articles plus landing pages migrated from WordPress to the story block. And what happened? We lost the traffic immediately, of course. But after a month the traffic went back to normal levels. And then we noticed that our articles that we are publishing were ranking much quicker in Google.

Finally, the team has been experimenting with using AI in their writing process. This isn’t something they have fully worked out yet, however, AI is already assisting their writer with creating some parts of the content.

I'm thinking also about onemore thing that we are using since like two, three months and it looks like itcan be also a big thing for us. It's implementation of the AI. And okay, westarted of course with chat GPT. Right now we are using Jasper AI and we areusing it to create the outlines for our articles to get some ideas how we canupdate some our old articles. And right now it looks like thanks to AI we areable to save around 30% to 40% of the time. So we are able to update articlequicker to create new articles, also much faster. So it's a good thing for usand we just need to explore what else, what more we can do with the AI.