Growing Together Software's traffic by 5X

In April 2021 I joined the marketing team at Together Software as their Content Marketing Specialist.

Together is a SaaS company that’s built a mentorship platform where large enterprise companies can build and launch scalable mentoring programs. HR managers can quickly invite employees to register, complete a profile, and then start pairing participants using a pairing algorithm. The algorithm considers each employee, goals, strengths, experience, and preferences to find the most relevant mentor for them to learn from.

There were just two of us and we had big goals. My chief goal was to improve our largest acquisition channel, organic search, to drive more website visitors to book demos with our sales team.

My responsibilities were to:

• Define the company’s content strategy and communicate it with the rest of our team.
• Manage a fast-moving content production calendar and grow our freelance writer team.
• Monitor our organic performance and find areas to improve it.
• Turn our site into a conversion engine.

This was my first opportunity to champion an entire content strategy. It was thrilling and incredibly motivating. I was ready to dive in.

Shortly after joining the team, I dug into the data. I saw that since the start of 2021, our organic performance was declining. We experienced a predictable slump over the holidays, but we didn’t fully recover.

We had lost a foothold, and our organic traffic was slipping. I needed to know why and how to fix it.

After digging into the details, I found that:

1. Our high traffic content was getting older
2. New content was taking their place

In short, we used to have critical keywords in positions 1-3, but now we were losing them.

Any good SEO or content marketer knows that to get content to rank you need to get backlinks and make sure that it’s up to date with the most engaging and useful information. 

But in addition to cleaning up the content you have, you need to produce more content. Google tells us that it wants to show fresh content so searches have the most relevant content for every search. Likewise, it’s logical to think that Google would favour a site that’s regularly publishing content over one that hasn’t been updated in long periods of time. 

With that, our strategy for bringing traffic back up was simple: build links to our content, publish new content, and refresh the 100+ blogs already on the site.

We executed this strategy over the rest of Q2 2021 and Q3. The results speak for themselves:

We increased the traffic from 11k visitors a month to 31k visitors. 

Likewise, we’ve continued to follow this strategy for almost a year and the results have continued to compound.

A key characteristic of our growth to note is that, back in 2021, our traffic continued to decline after the holidays. In 2022, we more than recovered from our predictable dip.

Now, our strategy of links, new content, and refreshing content is a simplification. We also overhauled our entire website and began investing in conversion rate optimization. 

These two strategies capitalized on our site’s strong growth in traffic. With a more compelling brand on our website and strong calls to action, more visitors wanted to learn about Together’s mentorship software.

• We added several new landing pages covering different use cases for our mentorship platform.
• We produced compelling white papers and e-books that visitors could download.
• Our product team released a freemium model of our product. 
• We tested different messaging across our site to find the highest converting copy.
• We grew our team of freelance writers from only one to 6.

As our site began to grow we also passed competitors who had been in the mentorship software space longer than us.

Wrapping up

We learned a ton executing on this strategy for just over a year. Upon reflection, the key things I learned included:

• It’s easy to get distracted when producing high volumes of content each week. A detailed strategy and content calendar are key to prioritizing what gets published. 
• Listen to sales calls to get ideas for content. SEO tools are great for keyword research, but questions will come up in sales calls again and again. It’s a great idea to answer these with a blog.
• Volume doesn’t always mean conversions. It’s easy to focus on the articles that get thousands of views each month, but crunch the numbers: what do people read before they convert? That content is arguably more valuable. 
• Experiment. If you have an idea, test it, but make sure you compare results to benchmarks. Doing so can quickly reveal what’s working or not. Then you can capitalize on successes, not wasting time on other low-impact initiatives.

There’s still more work to be done at Together, but we’re off to a great start.