How Crowdin grew organic blog traffic by 280%
A four-part approach that included in-depth research, strategy development, high-quality content production, and building backlinks.
Crowdin is a localization and translation management platform that enables agile teams to move faster with automation and workflow transparency. When Crowdin approached MOArt, they had an amazing product and strong traction in the localization software space. They were in the process of raising their Series A funding round and were looking for ways to drive faster growth. They had already written amazing and detailed technical content, such as tutorials on Node.js internationalization and Rails internationalization. These pieces were attracting developers, one of their core personas, and also formed a solid base of traffic and conversions. Lokalise knew that with some help with aligning their content strategy, they could get even more results.
When they started working with MOArt, they were growing due to strong product/market fit and positioning despite lacking a cohesive content marketing strategy,
The Goal
Crowdin approached MOArt with a mature understanding of content marketing and a desire to invest in the long-term by building a sustainable growth channel. Strategy was top of mind to get things going, but they also wanted to attract users higher up in the funnel and build backlinks to outrank their competitors.
The Challenge
The localization software space doesn’t have a lot of search volume so Crowdin decided they needed to target a broader range of topics that were tangentially related to localization. Before working with MOArt, the Crowdin team had worked with guest writers, copywriters, and freelancers but they never achieved the quality they expected. This content required multiple rounds of feedback and edits. In some cases, they felt as if it may have been easier if they wrote the content themselves. Certainly, there was a level of expertise and quality missing from what they were getting. The Crowdin team had identified that they were behind their competitors in terms of traffic and knew what keywords they wanted to rank target. They just needed a partner who could make sure they were doing everything they could to rank for those keywords and transfer that knowledge to help build their internal content team.
That’s when the MOArt team came in.
The Solution
The MOArt team followed a four-step process to determine the right strategy to help Crowdin grow blog organic traffic:
Research
Strategy
Production
Promotion
MOArt started by researching Crowdin, understanding their product, and where they stood in comparison to their competitors. Then they analyzed their competitors’ websites and related publications for potential keyword opportunities. MOArt found that Crowdin was strong in creating technical content that spoke to developers but not much content for non-technical audiences or the person who might be evaluating localization software. From their research, MOArt gathered hundreds of potential keywords and narrowed the list down by focusing on keywords that would capture relevant top-of-funnel traffic.
This became the basis of the content roadmap report and a barbell content strategy portfolio which comprised of mostly product-led content. MOArt then produced content briefs and partnered with the dedicated writer on Crowdin’s account to produce the article. Crowdin provided a point of contact for each article whom the writer interviewed and asked questions to clarify technical or product-related questions. These briefs also included related secondary keywords the blog post should aim to rank for through the use of headers and subsections. To supplement content production and accelerate content rankings, the MOArt team also built high-quality, relevant backlinks from websites with a domain rating (DR) of 50 or higher. As MOArt proved out the viability of organic traffic growth, Crowdin decided to hire a content marketing lead in-house who would own the content function. When Mia, their new content marketing lead, was hired, MOArt worked with her, bringing her up to speed on the existing strategy and progress. Over a few months, MOArt and Crowdin reduced the scope of our work as Mia ramped up, leading up to a seamless handoff of the content program to their internal team.
Results
Crowdin more than doubled the organic traffic to their blog in seven months.
In addition to the target keywords, Crowding also began ranking for thousands of related semantic keywords. For example, by targeting the keyword “localization strategy” they also ranked for related keywords like “what is localization strategy” and localization strategy example.”
Now Crowdin’s internal team continues to build on the organic traffic growth, implementing a holistic content strategy across their blog, case studies, and ebooks