Two SEO strategies that killed it for us in last 365 days

Over the past 365 days we've been on a growth trip. Earlier this year, I wrote about how we grew a key section of MRR by 800%.

But because of the global pandemic, we've put a bunch of that work on ice for the time being. On the other hand, we've doubled down on content and SEO.

Luckily for us, we actually started working on content back in October and so we're now 6 months on, seeing the results of the work we put in back then.

There are loads of tactics we used, but I wanted to share the two key strategies we used to achieve results in SEO.

Generate backlinks by providing embeds to key publishers

doopoll's a survey tool with a poll like feel to it. So it is easy for us to get publishers of blogs, news sites and loads of other kinds of online publication to share their surveys as embeds.

Our embeds are fairly basic. They look like this:

But crucially, outside of every iframe embed of a survey, there's a backlink that includes Create your own survey at doopoll.co which gives us a backlink from high authority domains.

And here's what this strategy has done for our backlink profile:

We started actively pursuing embeds in about January of this year. You can notice this had an impact on the trend of backlink growth right away.

A side benefit of this is that we rank much quicker for top of funnel terms now. Our backlink profile is pretty strong and getting backlinks from these sites helps.

Key Takeaway
Think about what useful resource you can provide as an embed to build backlinks easily. Other ideas that could work: ROI calculators, interactive infographics, quizzes. Key thing as always is to provide value for the people you're asking to embed. Publishers in particular are looking to make people spend more time on their pages – it's literally the thing that enables them to have an ad business. Give them things to help them to that.

Edit: As @andreboso rightly points out, Google did this in 2016. Weirdly, they then did this in 2020. As a result we're going to nofollow the links on our embed. I'll post again in a couple of months to say whether this had an impact or not. Google's so crazy.

Capture valuable searches by writing pain point posts

In tandem with the strategy of building backlinks, we decided to try to rank for Bottom of Funnel (BOFU) terms in line with what Grow&Convert recommend.

The search traffic on a lot of these terms is not really even picked up by tools like Ahrefs – but we know that people are searching these things from doing research with customers (both at scale with surveys and also 1-to-1 research).

We then grouped together these low traffic, super-high intent search terms into collections and wrote posts that addressed them.

As you can see from the graph below, where the Pain Point pages are highlighted with a red box, they convert at a significantly higher rate than the average.

In fact, some of those pages convert at 14% higher than the average blog post on our site.

That top result took around 20 minutes to create. It is our highest converting 'landing page'.

This is the benefit of BOFU content.

Key Takeaway
It's not a sexy approach and you'll probably not see huge amounts of traffic from it, but the high converting blog posts and marketing pages on your site are ultimately a great, and not difficult, way to increase the growth of your user base.

And that's it. I hope that's helpful and has given you something to think about while the other marketing strategies in your broader strategy are paying off less.

Bonus
We liked the Grow&Convert Pain Point SEO questions so much that we made a survey template people can use to ask them to their audience. Here's a link if you're into it.