Sonja wants to put up big numbers to help the growth stage startup, Weaveworks, that she works for.
Unfortunately, she has a number of problems standing in her way.
For a challenger company like Weaveworks, rising fast through the
organic results on Google (SEO) will require a lot of work. Why is that?
1. Incumbent brands in the micro services and containers space have a
huge head start on Weaveworks from a digital marketing as well as
product maturity standpoint.
2. It’s tough to differentiate yourself when your position in the
marketplace isn’t entirely clear and you are a new player in the space
like Weaveworks.
As Weaveworks started to clarify their position, they realized that within
the world of micro services their product(s) were really interesting to
DevOps professionals who used the Go programming language as well
as Git, distributed version-control system for tracking changes in source code
during software development.
Philosophical question that Sonja had - Would DevOps professionals
even want to look at-Git specific Operations as GitOps?
As MKG began discussing their approach to SEO and content strategy,
we realized what Weaveworks feared -
1. Their team was producing a large volume of content in the form of
guides, blog posts, and videos on a number of different topics.
2. Unfortunately that large assembly line of content creation was not
producing the traffic, web or sales conversion gains that Weaveworks
needed to see.
3. They weren’t being seen as an absolute authority in the space of
Microservices and GitOps.
Why not? What could MKG do to help them?
SEO traffic increased by 98% (year-over-year)
~ Sonja Schweigert, Weaveworks
Sonja and the Weaveworks team needed a plan that would quickly integrated with their content assembly line, not slow their content creation down, and allow the content to gain ranking, traffic, and ultimately leads. What they needed was simply a little SEO direction.
Along with temporal content updates, such as the announcement of speaking engagements at industry conferences, MKG focused Weaveworks’ SEO efforts.
Instead of producing tons of content we focused on an evergreen content strategy.
That included the production of one (only 1!) evergreen piece of content each quarter ... but to select an up-and-coming topic that Weaveworks could quickly rank for to eat up SERP real estate for traditional and Universal search results.
"MKG really moved the SEO needle for Weaveworks over the past few years."
~ Sonja Schweigert, VP of Marketing
The data was there: Google Search Trends indicated that the GitOps
term was going to be on the rise.
Sonja had the resources to produce long form content on the topic.
Even the CEO got on board and began mentioning GitOps during his
keynote speeches on the speaking circuit at industry events,
conferences and networking happy hours.
From the initial keyword insight from our team - “GitOps could be huge
for our business” - to executing up and down the chain of command,
Weaveworks slowly began to take over the GitOps world online.
And it was all because our hero - Sonja - had the information she
needed from her guide - MKG - to make an informed decision to tackle
the GitOps market online.
After stagnant SEO growth for multiple quarters in a row, the Evergreen
content strategy produced an explosion of SEO traffic:
1. SEO traffic increased by 98% (year-over-year)
2. This nearly doubled SEO traffic during the 90 days of the
program in market. For a channel (SEO) that is not normally a fast
growth channel, this was a huge amount of traction in a short amount of
time!
This growth continued in the every single quarter that followed as
Weaveworks and MKG produced one key Evergreen piece of content
for up-and-coming topics in the Containers, Microservices and (now
emerging) GitOps conversations online
