How We Grew Tallyfy From 0 to 200,000 Monthly Organic Traffic in 2 Years

Hey guys! So we just published an SEO case study on how we grew Tallyfy (a SaaS company) from 0 to 200k+ organic traffic with zero link-building (purely organic links). We thought you guys would enjoy it. Here are our top 3 lessons from the experience (and a link to the full case study in the comments).

Lesson #1 – Use Content Outlines

Most writers are good at creating content. They are, however, not that good at creating SEO content.

See, there’s a couple of factors that go into creating good SEO content…

• Matching your content to the search intent. Are you writing about whatever the Googler is looking for?
• Does the content have all the RIGHT information? Meaning, do you cover all the essentials? Do you skip all the irrelevant stuff?
• Is it well-written and engaging?

So, to make sure that your writer gets the job done, you should ALWAYS use content outlines.

An outline is basically a plug-and-play for SEO content. You write down EVERYTHING you want your writer to cover:

• What are the H2 headers?
• What are the H3 headers?
• What kind of examples are they supposed to mention?
• Which LSI keywords should the writer mention?

To see what a well-written outline looks like, check the Docs link in the comments.

Lesson #2 – Interlink. Like. Hell.

Proper interlinking can have a very significant impact on your rankings.

How significant, you might ask? Well, for NinjaOutreach, interlinking upped their traffic by over 40%.

Pretty impressive for a simple, on-site fix, right?

Here’s how we did interlinking for Tallyfy:

1. Pick an article you want to interlink around your blog
2. Google its main keyword on your website. E.g. site:tallyfy.com “business process management”
3. Go through all the articles and CTRL+F your keyword. Add the link.
4. Do the same for synonyms of your keyword. E.g. site:tallyfy.com “bpm” or site:tallyfy.com  “manage processes”.

Lesson #3 – Optimize Article CTRs

Article headlines play a huge role in whether the content is going to rank or not. Here’s how that works…

Let’s say your article is ranked #4 with an average CTR of 20%.

Google benchmarks YOUR average CTR to that of your competition in the same ranking. I.e. your article ranked #4 has a 20% CTR, while your competitors (on the same ranking) would have 12%. This means that your content is more relevant, and hence, should rank higher (as long as other SEO metrics say the same).

So, we kept track of article CTRs through Google Search Console and made adjustments when needed.

Whenever the CTR for any given article was lower than the position-CTR average, we changed the headline, tracked it for 2-4 weeks, and saw whether it had an impact or not.

Finally, Ongoing Monitoring & Improvement

You’re never really “done” with SEO. You should always strive to improve your content, get more backlinks, and so on.

Here’s part of the checklist we used to make sure that all our top content ranked…

• Is the content as comprehensive as it could be? Is there anything we could add?
• Is the content matching the keyword it’s supposed to rank on?
• Is the content interlinked across the website?
• Is the article headline “clickable?”
• Does it have the right amount/quality of backlinks? If the competition has 500+ on a page, and we have 2, we’re probably not going to rank.

Liked our run-down? Check out the link in the comments to read the full SEO case study.