We increased our organic search traffic by 19x overnight, and it's stabilised at the new level

have you ever tried listicle outreach? more details about it here: https://ahrefs.com/blog/listicle-outreach/

Like 90+% came from our first article exploding on HN and then big domains linked to it from their own posts - trying to piggyback off what we'd written as it became a hot topic. Our article was about why we don't use a staging environment, and then newsletters, websites etc would write their own articles like 'Should you use a staging environment?' and in it, they'd mention like 'we were inspired to cover this topic after reading this article from Squeaky cofounder Lewis Monteith'. The steady stream of people that still read that article 7 months later means that other articles get discovered and shared.

The remaining 10% is mostly from writing interesting (we hope) long-form content and sharing it in the right places e.g. appropriate subreddits. If it's the right location we tend to notice that it then get's added to other people's newsletters, blogs, websites etc.

The other things we do/have tried are things like reaching out to sites and asking if they'd include us in their articles e.g. 'The best Hotjar alternatives' etc. That sometimes works, but it's not really very efficient as so many don't even reply. We also haven't paid for links, but we have advertised in 5 different newsletters and most of them have a public/crawled web page that would then contain the link - but that's a drop in the ocean.

TL;DR: We got lucky that our first post was somewhat controversial (it wasn't meant to be) and that put us on a healthy footing from day one. Naturally, some of those backlinks gradually faded away but we've stabilised and grown it after that, mostly by writing fairly considered content and sharing it with the right audiences.

Makes sense. You are passing on "link juice" from your backlinked blog post to your other blog posts. Question is if this will still help once he has more posts, because this backlinked article won't be in the carousel anymore..

No idea really, it just seemed to much of a coincidence that we made that change and then by the next day the chart had popped. What I've heard (frankly I know nothing about SEO) is that google cares about the relationship between the content on your site. So like if you have a post or page on a topic that links off to more on that subject, or goes into other tangential content, that's better than it being a shallow content bank on a topic. It's more likely a user will find that site/content useful so google gives it greater prominence.

If you google things about cornerstone content and content clusters they all sort of mention this sort of thing. But yeah, I'd be totally open to the idea that it's a complete coincidence that the spike came straight after our change 😊

Awesome, thanks for the insight Nemanja!

Yeah I like it! We've got a bunch of articles coming up soon that relate to our features/functionality, and we're thinking of highlighting them midway through product pages on the website e.g. link to a heatmaps bible on the heatmaps product page etc.

The only downside of putting other blog post links midway through an article is that it interrupts the flow reading-wise I guess, but I don't suppose that would cause that much of a problem.

I mentioned in another reply that at a later date (when we have more articles), we'll probably switch to a 'related posts' carousel instead of 'latest posts' too :)

Thanks 🙂

Right, that's super important! We're new entrants into a very established market with companies like Hotjar, who have teams of writers pumping out endless content. We actually knew there was no hope of Squeaky competing with them on 'core topics' around the domain i.e. heatmaps, session recordings etc.

With that in mind, we took a somewhat counterintuitive approach and decided to just write about topics that we're interested in. We took the view that, as a designer and a developer, we must have similar general interests as the audience for our product, so why don't we just write content for us/them, not 'for our product'. I actually mentioned it on IHers at the time.

So, we write about things related to design, engineering, product development etc. People that like those topics also need products like ours, but we're much more able to compete for keywords, and there's the added benefit of being able to discuss hot topics like text-to-image, for example. It's also way nicer for us to write about random topics we are interested in, rather than churning out generic feature-related content (though that will inevitably happen as time goes on).

We do also include product updates in the blog. This is content we'd write anyway, but rather than a separate technical/release notes type thing on a help centre, it goes in the blog. It's a nice way to add some product-specific content to the blog without selling our features -> we're instead just highlighting that we're moving incredibly fast to bring new value to our users.

This was sort of my suspicion too, when the chart popped I just sort of shrugged and thought 'that's a bit random, maybe our change was really that impactful' but it seemed so unlikely. My intuition is to side with you, but I also feel that the odds of the metric changing so drastically immediately after the change are surely quite slim?

I guess maybe we just hit some invisible threshold like 'this is clearly an active site with fresh content and overall updates are taking place, backlinks are growing too etc'

Cross-linking to other internal content is important for SEO from what I understand (I'm a n00b to be honest), I also just mentioned to someone else in another comment that it relates to other SEO concepts like cornerstone content and content clusters - I'd recommend googling those ideas a bit. I don't really understand it all but I get the general vibe of what's expected/can work after I read a bit about it. Lots more things I want to try as the blog and site mature :)

Yeah, we have been getting the other stuff right too I think - like our URLs, article structures, use of headings, blog architecture, anchors and table of contents etc...they're all deliberate efforts to start building a decent blog. It's just strangely we've seen this big jump in organic search results straight after the cross-linking to latest articles was released. It's all a bit of a mystery, but it's certainly the case that there are many ingredients that you need to pull together.

In terms of how long they take to write, or how often we post?

Our blog hasn't really been about conversion to begin with, just about increasing overall visibility of our brand and building a broad base of backlinks across the web. Late November onwards we're going to start adding much more specific and conversion focused content now that the groundwork has been layed.

So, for now I don't even know the conversion number to be honest, it's brought us around €2-3k worth of ARR, so not much, but that hasn't been the aim to date!

The most popular articles are the 'Why we don't use a staging environment' one, and the 'Designers view on Dalle-2' one 🙂

We don't use Google Search Console :)

We actually built our own mini one just for our blog, it was only a days work and gives us much more control. That said, generally I recommend WordPress to people if SEO and writing experience is important. Ghost is also pretty solid and more trendy 🙂

We wondered the same thing, though the blog is 7-8 months old. We've barely changed much structurally in that time and it was a little too coincidental - 195 days and it happened immediately after the day of that change?

As I noted when someone else said the same thing, intuitively I agree with you as I hear it's common that you get jumps out of nowhere early on. My thought is perhaps it was a combination of things i.e. we reached some critical mass in terms of content breadth and when we paired that with better internal linking it pushed the site to a new ranking level 🤷‍♂️

But yeah, search engines aren't going to just randomly boost the ranking of any old site just because of a new Latest Article section that offers internal linking - there must be other contributing factors, it's just not clear what, and it's very easy to see a correlation (and argue for causation) with that recent change :)

Not that it relates to organic search results, but yes, we do use heatmaps to monitor engagement and patterns in user behaviour 😊

Funnily enough, after some recent upgrades, Squeaky now has one of the best heatmap tools on the market - so we use our own tool to monitor our site!

My post explains what we did to get the recent bump in organic search traffic, but for non-search related traffic it's a mixture of 4 things (in this order):

1. Sharing content online ourselves (forums, social media etc), in the appropriate places for that content, and it gets picked up by others and re-shared.
2. The growing awareness of our product and company is leading to increased traffic over the past 8 months as we appear on other people's websites etc.
3. We have submitted ourselves to some comparison websites, or asked to be included in tools lists etc.
4. Lastly, though it's not responsible for very much traffic to be honest, we've also had paid advertising in 5 different newsletters.

It's in the post? We added a carousel at the bottom of each post linking to other recent articles. Check out a blog post and scroll to the bottom and you'll see 😊

Thanks! We are trying to focus on quality over quantity as much as possible, I'm not sure how sustainable it is though haha

That's literally what I've said in my post, the 'latest articles' are internal links and it was introducing those that we hoped would have a bit of an effect on SEO.