About Case Studies
Schedule 30-Min Call

Case Study #1: A 600% traffic increase with only 1 article per week

percent symbol on blue gradient

You don’t have to do content like anyone else.

You can do it in your way and succeed massively — by your own standards while serving your unique audience.

This is one of the many lessons Ghost taught me. I’ve had the privilege of working both on and alongside their marketing team for the better part of 2 years. During that time, we grew organic traffic to the blog by more than 600% and ballooned their newsletter subscriber count from <2,000 to 45,000+.

Here are 3 takeaways we can apply to your content strategy.

 

#1 New SEO craves quality over quantity

Most people outside of the SEO space underestimate what companies invest in their organic growth. The traditional approach requires millions of dollars and dozens of team members to reach a daily cadence of enterprise publishing. Then, of those hundreds of items published each year, only a tiny fraction will produce any meaningful results.

At Ghost, we replaced this buckshot methodology with a laser, molded our keyword research to align with where we saw the greatest potential opportunities, and built towards a weekly cadence of releasing new articles. 

Here are a few benefits of this strategy:

  • It’s resource-conscious, helping every marketing dollar go further.
  • It trains Google’s frequency and freshness algorithms to crawl, index, and rank your content in a timely fashion so that you can get results faster.
  • It gives the team space to ideate and research, both of which are essential to producing original content.
  • It prioritizes thoroughness over speed, which in turn builds trust with your customer; and trust = revenue.
  • It develops the right kind of engagement with your readers (returning, bookmarking, sharing, discussing, purchasing).

All of these factors were further solidified by Google’s 2022 Helpful Content Update. In almost every instance, if you want to grow your business — choose quality over quantity, and Google will reward you.

 

#2 Keywords are puzzle pieces

You can think of digital content as sitting on a spectrum. 

On one end, you have thought leadership which delivers powerfully-written, strongly-opinionated ideas. They drive traffic primarily through word of mouth and social sharing. SEO is an afterthought, and they may rank for a few odd terms over time out of sheer luck. 

On the other end, you have pure SEO content. It's (mostly) readable, often exhaustive, and optimized to the nth degree. Would any reasonable person want a physical copy of the article for their bookshelf? Probably not. But it gets the job done and drives traffic to the owner's site.

At Ghost, we were able to find a sweet spot between these two.

We took the ideas, questions, and product-led advantages our team and users had and aligned them with what real people were already searching for (i.e., keywords). To craft a successful people-first content strategy, you need to do both. You need to identify the overlap and offer people what you have as a solution to what they want. 

Simple, yes. Easy, not in the slightest. But finding exactly how the puzzle pieces fit is what’s required for magic to occur, and it's the struggle I love.

 

#3 It doesn’t matter if it’s been said before

A solid content strategy is not about recreating the wheel. 

You don’t need to be especially clever or have viral potential. “Original content” is often the process of taking what's been said, running it through your own experiences, beliefs, and goals, and communicating it back into the world for your target customer. 

At Ghost, we knew that the conversations happening around email newsletters, sustainable business models, and the creator economy were where we needed to be. We surveyed the content landscape and worked only to publish articles that pushed those conversations further. 

A few of our wins include: 

No keyword is too competitive; no topic is too niche. If you have something valuable to say, the right content strategy will make room for that message and leverage it to get the results you’re after.

 

This month, 12,000+ people will read the Ghost blog, many for the first time. A percentage of which will become paid users. And thanks to the compounding power of SEO, that number will only grow in the years to come.