How Zapier Growth Hacked SEO

The strategies used to grow from 0-600K users in 3 years

Zapier, founded in 2011 by CEO Wade Foster, lets you connect different web applications to perform certain actions without the need of a human (with automation)

Strategy 1: Observe Customer Hangouts

Foster interacted in product forums. Companies like Dropbox, Evernote, all had forums where customers could make product requests. Foster joined forums and found posts like “I love Evernote, but it would be great if it worked with Dropbox”

He would respond with solutions through available API’s or inform them that he’s working on a project to make integrations for their feedback, sending a link to find out more. He got about 20 visitors per link, but had a 50% conversion rate saying they wanted his product.

When he had a functioning prototype, Foster Skyped with people, asked what products they wanted to integrate, and he would do it for them. He provided the desired result (what people cared about) while also realizing people were looking for specific integrations

Strategy 2: Landing Page Hack

Rather than pitching users on the value of integration tools, they decided to leverage their app partners in their integration ecosystem, piggybacking their brands. This became the focal point of their marketing success

They did this by creating 3 tiers of landing pages for every app they integrated:

1. A landing page for the app itself

2. A separate landing page for each app to app integration (ex: how gmail connected with Trello)

3. A landing page for the workflow from each app to another

If the user was looking for information on the app itself, how to integrate 2 specific apps, or learn more about each app to app use case, Zapier had a landing page ready to capture their intent. This led to a TON of landing pages. 25K pages ranking in the top 100 on Google

This formed an SEO machine that was the biggest lever for their early organic growth. Today these landing pages account for half of all search traffic to their main website. They leveraged existing brands and executed a massive SEO strategy at scale

Strategy 3: Scaling Content

Instead of writing all landing page content themselves, Zapier created a playbook for onboarding and launching new app partners. Part of this process was getting their partner apps to write the landing page content for them.

The pages had a template, but the description and summaries of each integration were all unique. Zapier knew each page having unique content would benefit SEO rankings. They created a general template but needed unique content for SEO to work as well as possible

This freed up time (heaviest SEO investment) and generated the best content from people who have the best understanding of each apps use case (the creators). Part of the playbook involved app partners writing a post on their blog which helped build backlinks, optimizing SEO

Strategy 4: Content Marketing

2 years later, they prioritized content marketing. Partnerships/SEO strategy were working, but Zapier was still fairly unknown. To gain brand awareness they created content around apps, tools, productivity (what their audience was interested in)

The first 6 months showed littles results, the next 6 months were a bit better, and a year later great results showed Once the effects of content marketing begin to compound the rewards will be worth it Content marketing was a worthy investment for Zapier

Zapier Today:

- $5bn valuation

- 100k customers

- $140M revenue in 2021

Key to Growth Success:

- One to one customer relationships

- Solid understanding of SEO

- Smart systems thinking

- Understanding of high leverage

If you enjoyed this thread:

1. Subscribe to my SubStack for a more in depth breakdown of Zapiers growth strategy https://thegrowthplaybook.substack.com/welcome

2. Follow me @growth_student for a new growth thread like this every week!