Case Study: Adding 120,000+ Monthly Organic Sessions in Just 10 Months

The amount of sleep you get influences your mood, physical health, and brain function, but many people don’t get enough of it. 

A recent Growth Machine client set out to help consumers improve their sleep habits and energy levels by addressing sleep debt and circadian rhythm. The only problem? Getting it in consumers’ hands.

The sleep hygiene space is a crowded one, with dozens of products, services, apps, pills, and more, all promising a better night’s sleep and increased productivity, among other benefits. In such a highly saturated space, it’s not enough to build a better app; it is fundamental to get the brand in front of consumers early, and build trust and authority with your audience quickly. 

Partnering with Growth Machine allowed our client to pivot from a B2B strategy to a D2C one, and quickly establish a trusted reputation among target users. Here’s how we did it. 

The Business Problem: Shifting From a B2B to D2C Content Strategy

After launching a beta version of their app in 2020, the brand focused their initial content strategy in the B2B space, largely targeting sales and business teams. 

This strategy, which included blog content, paid advertisements, and email marketing, generated approximately 4,000 organic sessions per month at its peak. But the brand didn’t see consistent growth beyond the initial bump, due to inconsistent publishing and insufficient bandwidth from the in-house marketing team.

With $15.5M in seed funding secured, the brand officially launched a consumer app in June 2021, and had just signed on Growth Machine to help get their apps in front of the right audience. 

When the client began working with us in May 2021, they had three primary goals:

1. Pivot from B2B to D2C: All existing blog content was focused on the B2B space. With the upcoming launch of their consumer-focused app, they needed their blog content to address the needs of individuals, not enterprise teams.
2. Support the brand’s unique value proposition: The brand differentiates themselves from competitors by reducing sleep debt to combat sleep deprivation-related problems. Therefore, they needed a content plan (and the writers to execute it) that supported their unique solution and shared the science and research in an interesting and digestible manner.
3. Create a more well-rounded content plan: The existing blog content was too narrowly focused on sleep patterns for sales teams. This created significant gaps in their content strategy, which needed to be filled with broader-appeal sleep topics for which the everyday consumer might search.

Of course, they would also rely on Growth Machine’s finely honed article-production system to provide the high-quality, keyword-optimized content and consistent publishing cadence that they had been unable to sustain in-house.

The Solution: A Science-Backed Content Plan With D2C Appeal

Our content strategy for this brand targeted the pain points of everyday consumers as the target audience. To cater to the right audience, we executed a content + linkbuilding strategy that incorporated an aggressive keyword strategy, a carefully curated publishing cadence, and the right writers. 

The Keywords: Ranking Quickly to Build Authority

Our keyword strategy focused on striking a balance between ranking as quickly as possible and allowing space to highlight the client’s unique product.

With a round of funding and app launch on the horizon, the client wanted to see traffic growth as efficiently as possible. To rank quickly, we built a content strategy targeting keywords well within, and sometimes below, their competitiveness threshold. We went after keyword phrases that posed medium volume with low-level difficulty, giving the brand the opportunity to rank as quickly as possible. 

Once we built a foundation of rankings from low-difficulty keywords, we expanded to cover more competitive (higher traffic, but also higher difficulty) keywords. This strategy allowed the brand to establish its credibility with Google before going after the more difficult keyword topics, which provided a springboard for faster, higher rankings on the most important and most heavily saturated sleep topics. 

Simultaneously, a linkbuilding campaign supported our work by encouraging faster growth of the site’s authority, which in turn resulted in faster rankings and traffic growth. Eight months into the project, we shifted our strategy to attain only higher-authority links, further supporting the blog’s exponential traffic growth.

The Pace: Opting for Quality Over Quantity 

The project started with a publishing cadence of 10 articles per month, but quickly scaled back to eight per month, a more sustainable pace for their research-intensive article type.

The brand’s key differentiator was their focus on sleep science, so every article published had to be supported by data. In fact, the brand voice included a sort of “myth busters” style of exposition, which required quite a bit of detail and many varied sources cited. 

Given the rigorous research and writing process required per article, it became obvious that we could create more substantial articles by relaxing the publishing cadence and allowing more time per article for writing, editing, and fact-checking.

By taking a quality-over-quantity approach, we were able to send a strong signal to Google that the brand’s site published valuable content on a consistent schedule, and was a reliable resource to serve searchers.

The Writers: Publishing Data-Backed Articles in a Digestible Way

The brand’s core offering was a unique solution (reducing sleep debt) to a common problem (low energy levels). Our job was to give voice to that promise through the blog, by supporting their approach with data-rich articles that appealed to their target audience’s most critical pain points.

To carry out this strategy, we recruited writers well-versed in sleep science who had experience writing data-backed articles for consumer products and technologies.

Fortunately, we have a database of thousands of subject matter experts, which allowed us to staff the project with writers who could research and write heavily cited articles that prospective app users could easily digest.

The Results: Growing 120,000 Organic Sessions in 10 Months 

Our content and linkbuilding strategy allowed the client to see an increase in traffic almost immediately. By August 2021, after just two months of partnering with us, the brand’s blog received 8,000 organic sessions per month — double their May traffic. 

Nearly every month of our partnership, the blog reached a new all-time high for inbound traffic. By February 2022, 10 months into the partnership, the blog saw 126,719 monthly organic sessions. 

What Could You Do With 120,000+ More Sessions Per Month?

Our tailored SEO and backlink strategy doubled our client’s organic monthly sessions to their blog in just four months. In less than a year, the blog hit an all-time high of over 125,000 — more than 30 times the amount of traffic they saw just 10 months before. This provided the brand with a substantial pipeline of potential app users to nurture, many of whom were only aware of the product because of the targeted blog content that effectively addressed their questions.

To see how Growth Machine can implement a one-of-a-kind strategy to build organic traffic while positioning you as a thought leader in your space, connect with us.