Here’s How We Helped Wisesheets Get to 15k+ Downloads With A 1886.21% Traffic Increase.
You are about to learn how Wisesheets became one of the most popular DIY investing tools in the market by, in part, dominating search engine results where cold traffic turned into paying customers for their tool.
For context, they’re a software that allows stock data, company financials, and historical statements to be easily dumped onto Sheets or Excel for investors to make data-driven investment decisions.
Our strategy, which led to a 1800%+ increase in traffic, required no backlinks. No technical work. Only content.
But it wasn’t as easy as pumping 50 blog posts by ChatGPT. That won’t work for you either.
Here’s everything we did right, and how you can apply the same to your own product.
Ready? Let’s grow.
The Problem: Poor Keyword Targeting, Content Wasn’t Product-led, & Irregular Posting.
They were creating content. Which is a good start. But, it wasn’t driving enough traffic and more importantly, relevant traffic.
Usually when this happens, it’s one of three things (or all of them):
You are targeting high difficulty keywords.
You are targeting keywords that have little to do with your product.
You are not posting content regularly enough.
As a result, they were creating content that a) had no chance of ranking on the first page and b) couldn’t effectively tie back to their solution. So, their impressions and clicks were scarily low.
It can be difficult deciphering which keywords return the kind of results that our customers are looking for. It’s not always immediately obvious.
Road to 9k+ Downloads: A User-Centric, Product-led SEO Content Strategy.
Here’s exactly how we were able to do a complete 180º on their content efforts to actually generate leads, helping Wisesheets get to 9k+ downloads.
Part I: Customer Research First, Keyword Research Tools Second.
Before opening up a keyword research tool, we brought out the drawing board and hopped on a call with the Founder with one purpose:
To ask a shit ton of questions about their ICP (ideal customer profile).
Stuff like (you can rewrap these for your own customer):
What are the primary goals and objectives of your typical customer when it comes to investing?
Can you describe the demographic profile of your average user (age, profession, income level)?
Remember, you should be writing all of this down.
What are the common challenges or pain points your customers face in their investment journey?
How tech-savvy are your customers? Do they prefer simple interfaces or detailed, customizable tools?
What other tools or services do your customers commonly use in conjunction with Wisesheets?
How do your customers typically find out about investment tools like yours? (e.g., social media, word of mouth, online forums)
What features of Wisesheets are most valued by your customers?
Are there specific types of investments (stocks, bonds, ETFs, etc.) that your customers are most interested in?
How much time do your customers usually spend on investment research and analysis?
What feedback or suggestions have you received from customers that has shaped the development of Wisesheets?
These questions aim to deeply understand the customer's behavior, preferences, and challenges, which is crucial for effective keyword targeting and content creation.
Most agencies are too lazy to do all this. And that’s why they fail at keyword targeting – there’s way too much focus on “search volume” and “keyword difficulty” nowadays without any focus on whether the keyword is actually useful to your customer.
SCREW TRAFFIC. SEO IS NOT TRAFFIC. IT IS A CUSTOMER ACQUISTION CHANNEL.
Don’t forget that. Ever.
Part II: Strategic Topic Selection, Centered Around Product Features (ONLY).
👏 Say it with me 👏
You have no business writing on a topic that you can’t tie back to at least one feature of your product.
Otherwise there is no business value. You need to prioritize.
Content serves two purposes:
Branding and awareness (statistics articles, writing on trendy topics, etc.)
Drive inbound leads
If you want your SEO to move your bottom line, focus on #2 first.
Take a look at the marketing funnel below that I pulled from our info deck at TalktheTalk. You’ll notice we flipped the funnel on its head entirely.
Why did we do that? Because we want to prioritize content for the people who already know there are solutions out there, and we just need to make a strong enough case to go with us instead of the competition.
Whereas, people at the top of the funnel (or at the bottom according to our flipped funnel) are looking to learn more, identify problems they have, before they’re ready to explore actual solutions.
In this section, you’ll see how we targeted both for Wisesheets. Because make no mistake: you need both. One will drive conversions, the other will drive topical authority, rankings, and overall brand credibility.
An example of a “bottom-funnel keyword” for our client would be “Best Stock Analysis Spreadsheets for Stock investing”.
That page alone generated almost 800 clicks in the last 3 months alone.
OK. Now let’s talk about moving down the funnel (to more top-funnel keywords, so education and informational style content)
AKA the second trapezoid of the funnel in the image above.
So we know one of Wisesheet’s core product offerings is a live stock data tool. This is important for users to make important investment decisions, by looking at numbers like current market price, historical performance, dividend yields, and earnings per share.
So what did we do? We created listicles on the “best X stocks”, with the product angle being, investors looking to buy these stocks are also looking to study and track these stocks overtime.
For instance, the keyword “best stocks for the wheel strategy” is bringing us around 200 monthly visitors alone.
The way we’d present Wisesheets’ here is by suggesting the live stock data dump feature to users to track these stocks. We would only mention this, however, after we’ve given the user what they wanted, which were the stocks.
When it comes to SEO content, you want to feed the search intent first always, and Google will reward you for it. But that’s not to say you can’t add a short product CTA in the intro bit.
☝️ Important SEO tip: Make sure you are internally linking to related articles. This is the only way for Google’s crawlers to understand how your content is related to one another. For example our client has a guide on “The Wheel Investing Strategy”. So, we would want to internally link that guide in our listicle of the 5 best stocks for the wheel strategy.
“Best X stocks” keywords are just one theme of keywords. There’s room for more themes as well - which moves us down the the third and fourth trapezoids of the funnel.
For example, we know that Wisesheets’ customers are looking to become smarter investors in general. So, we also created content around providing helpful resources to help them better their craft.
To throw a couple of examples, that looked like:
best investors to follow
best investment magazines
best way to invest 20k for one year
The product angle here being, as you follow these resources, a complimentary tool that can help you make smarter investment decisions is Wisesheets, “for this and that reason…”.
See what we’re doing here?
It won’t always be obvious how to integrate your product into the topic. Sometimes, this will require some creativity, practice, and experience.
—
Pro tip: If you’re unsure on whether a topic is a good fit for your product, open a doc and write 3-4 lines on what your software does. Then write out a master list of features. Then, you want to create a ChatGPT prompt with something along the lines of:
For ChatGPT:
“Pretend you’re an SEO content strategist. Download the following information about my product and features. I’m going to share some keywords with you, and I want you to tell me if it’s a relevant keyword to target. And if it is, please list all the possible angles through which you can connect this topic back to our solution. So I know how to introduce our solution into the content.”
—
With all the data Wisesheets arms customers with, they need to learn how to sufficiently read it and take action. And since our software directly serves DIY investors, wouldn’t it also make sense to demonstrate subject matter expertise on stock analysis itself?
The purpose being to help our customer get better at their craft. Why? Because if they’re better at stock analysis, our tool is all the more valuable to them. And bam, we’d have lifelong customers.
That’s why we also targeted keywords like:
Keyword: types of stock analysis
Product angle: “Leverage these types of analysis to make profitable investment decisions using data from Wisesheets.”
Keyword: stock market psychology
Product angle: "Get a better grip on market moods and your own investment reactions with Wisesheets."
Keyword: investment risk mitigation strategies
Product angle: "Play it smart and safe. Use Wisesheets to cut through investment risks and make data-driven investment decisions."
Keyword: how to assess a company's financial health
Quickly size up a company’s financial fitness with Wisesheets in your toolkit (using the statement dump feature).
and more…
All in all, by targeting highly-relevant keywords across the board, and then creating helpful content that outclassed the competition, we were able to boost traffic to Wisesheets by over 1800%.
Key Takeaways
Before an SEO expert, you need to be an expert on the customer.
Then an expert on the product and its features
THEN an expert on keyword research and search intent
Every piece of content you create in the beginning should in one way or another tie back to at least one product feature/area.
Your content should focus on solving real problems in your customers day-to-day.
Connecting your product back to the content won’t always be immediately obvious. You need some creativity here. Refer back to our ChatGPT prompt included in this guide if you need help (or hire us).
Make sure you are internally linking to related articles.
Psst. Want us to get you the same results with a money-back guarantee (and NO monthly retainers)?
So, if it wasn’t obvious already, we kind of do this for a living. TalktheTalk Creative is the #1 SEM agency for B2B SaaS companies worldwide.
Our organic scaling system is probably unlike anything you’ve ever seen before. And that’s because we our system shifts the focus away from a monthly retainer service to a sprint-based model with one-time fees.
Here’s how it works:
First we find all the things your customers are looking for on Google.
Then we create helpful content to meet and convert those people to our solution.
Then we get you attention on other news sites or publications to build trust signals in front of Google. Ultimately this increases your qualified organic traffic, month over month, steadily increasing your inbound leads
All done in 4-6 week sprints with a clear scope of work and one-time payments.
If you need more convincing, check out our other B2B SaaS SEO case studies, or if you’ve seen enough would like to consult with us about doing something similar, book a call below.