SaaS SEO Strategy

SaaS SEO Strategy Zapier Used to Reach $35M ARR
Want to drive more search traffic to your SaaS?

In this case study, we’ll step outside the usual content marketing tactics most SaaS companies use. And look at how Zapier leverages SEO to drive millions of high intent searchers to their product every month.

This strategy has nothing to do with blogging (although we’ll take a look at how they added a blog later to enhance this approach).

We’ll also walk through…

How they created 25,000 search optimized landing pages.
How they filled these pages with unique content, without having to write it themselves.
How they launch each page to generate a bunch of high quality backlinks right out of the gate.
And how they use search marketing to create a more powerful network effect.
Zapier Company Overview
Zapier is an app integration and automation platform that lets users (primarily SMBs) set-up triggered actions and workflows between different applications. They started in 2011 and have only raised $1.3M in venture funding, primarily bootstrapping their way to $35M ARR. Currently they have over 1,000 apps on their platform.

Capturing Millions of High Intent Searchers Each Month
According to SimilarWeb, Zapier receives 7.3M visits a month.

Of total traffic, over half comes from search.

How to Make Something Invisible Stand Out
Like other middleware SaaS, Zapier faced the challenge of having an “invisible” product. Their app didn’t perform customer facing actions but instead formed connections behind the scenes to unlock new functionality and value from existing apps.

Rather than trying to pitch users on the value of integrating tools, Zapier realized early on that people were already looking for specific integrations. To capture this existing intent, Zapier decided to make the app partners in their integration ecosystem the stars of their marketing and piggyback on their success.

They did this by creating three tiers of landing pages for every app in their ecosystem:

A landing page for the app itself.
A separate landing page for every app to app integration e.g. a page all about connecting Gmail with Trello.
Separate landing pages for every single app to app triggered workflow or “zap” that exists between each app.