Strategy

In June 2019, GoCardless brought on its first dedicated SEO manager. Previously, SEO had been done as a bolt-on by people with a number of other responsibilities. Those contributors were savvy, and they knew what they were doing, but it was clear that three-digit percentage growth was only going to be possible via a dedicated SEO strategy.

The first key task was to command confidence that SEO could change the trajectory of traffic and serve as a growth lever. Providing ‘proof-of-concept’ was essential to secure further investment in the channel.

To grow traffic, GoCardless began by enlisting SEO agency Blue Array, and analysing their target audience. They soon found that GoCardless benefited from a product-channel fit that not all site owners or SEOs have. As their potential customers needed to solve specific queries, such as about improving payment success rates, reducing customer churn, or defining financial terminology, they had a clear online audience to reach.

So while technical SEO and link-building were not to be ignored, it was decided early on that the route to organic search success was through scaling of editorial content.

Step 1: Test and learn rapidly to kick-start traffic growth

With support from Blue Array, a series of ‘keyword universe and information architecture’ resources were produced. So often a foundation of SEO success amongst Blue Array clients, these resources sought to identify, group, and plot relationships between all query topics GoCardless could realistically hope to rank for.

With this corpus of data, it was possible to give shape to a content strategy.

Early on, the decision was made to go for a breadth of content, rather than focus on a small cluster of topics in depth. The reasons for this choice were that:

Not every piece of content or topic would work – they would need to try many angles and observe where they succeeded.

The focus was to demonstrate traffic growth – only top-of-funnel, broad keyword topics could provide the potential search volumes.

Through a lean production process, approximately 40 articles were generated per month. This number allowed the team to trial many different topic categories, article styles, and intended audiences.

By committing to a ‘test and learn’ approach, they benefited from agility and were able to hone in on successful topics and article styles increasingly each month. They found they were able to ‘fail fast, learn fast’.

Step 2: Maintain strong foundations

Along with increasing the production of articles in their most successful categories, an enabler that seemed to transform the early wins was topic-led internal linking.

As content was built out around a single topic, new items that were better internally linked seemed to reach peak performance faster than older articles that were more standalone. This sparked greater thoroughness with internal linking opportunities – both for ‘vertical’ (parent-child) linking relationships as well as ‘horizontal’ ones.

In addition, technical changes were made to the site to build strong foundations, including a CMS migration, an overhauled blog subfolder, and the launch of localised sites.

Step 3: Categorise in detail to measure and succeed

By now, GoCardless was successfully driving the necessary traffic growth. Having proved the viability of organic search as a channel to expand reach and create awareness, the task shifted to prove that SEO could also convert.

Over time, the growing SEO team at GoCardless significantly advanced their ability to map article themes to a conversion funnel. This categorisation enabled production to be balanced across the funnel, in order to hit dual targets of traffic and conversion growth. Routine evaluation of both the content pipeline and output against the funnel allowed continuous, data-based adjustments to the production process that kept everyone focussed on goal completions.

Step 4: Scale internationally

With ‘hockey-stick’ graphs attesting to the capabilities of organic growth, the justification was there to scale editorial production both in quantity and internationally.

By using the UK market as a pilot, GoCardless and Blue Array succeeded in expanding the campaign across five additional important geographies: the United States, France, Australia, Germany, and Spain.

Between November 2020 and November 2021, GoCardless has so far seen over 5x traffic growth in the US, while growth more than tripled in Australia and more than doubled in both Germany and France. [Source: GoCardless internal Google Analytics data].