In early 2020, StreamSets was looking for an SEO specialist that could “take our SEO to the next level.”

Specifically, they wanted someone to:

1. Audit their current website and tactics.
2. Review messaging, personas, and competitive research to identify keyword gaps.
3. Analyze and recommend keyword and keyword families to significantly grow their audience.

StreamSets offers an incredible SaaS product that helps eliminate many of a data engineer’s most time-consuming, low-value tasks. And this SEO push was meant to help drive awareness of their evolving product.

From Zero to 2000 Monthly Clicks with 14 Pages

After assessing StreamSets competitors, existing traffic and keywords, business priorities, and messaging, I worked with the marketing team to assemble a comprehensive keyword research document.

We used this document to prioritize and select clusters of keywords to target with educational resources, blogs, and product pages for the next 6 to 12 months.

From there, we proceeded to build out a hub-and-spoke strategy for the blog and web content.

We decided to add an evergreen section to the website that consisted of resource pages; these were the hub pages. The idea was to target broader topics in the hub and build out blogs to drill into more specific subtopics or “spokes”.

Within 8 months of publishing the first 6 pages of the new section of the website, those pages were generating 150,000 impressions and 1000 clicks per month.

A year later, the 3-month rolling average of total monthly impressions and clicks had increased by 96% and 49% respectively.

Avg. monthly impressions increase by 96%
and clicks increase by 49%

Expanding Topical Authority Pays Dividends

One of the priorities of StreamSets’ content marketing strategy was to establish their brand as an authority on the topics most relevant to their business.

This meant shifting from a mainly product-led story to a problem-led story. Guided by search data and a keen understanding of their customers, StreamSets subject matter experts and the team’s writers worked closely to create dozens of blogs. And the results were impressive.

Comparing blog traffic in January 2021 to January 2022, year-over-year monthly impressions had increased by 184% and clicks by 103%.

CM as an Extension of the Content Team

Three years after the initial project StreamSets hired me for, I’m fortunate to still call them one of my clients.

Now, working as an extension of their content team, I help guide their editorial planning and on-page optimization based on search data. In collaboration with the marketing team and various SMEs, I also help identify opportunities, create content briefs, and write some of their less technical content.