How We 10x Dovetail's Organic Growth

• Dovetail was a well-established brand with ample resources. However, before commencing work in 2023 they had never previously done SEO or growth marketing.
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• This is an incredibly unique situation to be establishing an SEO function at a $63M funded Series A SaaS which presented several distinctive undertakings;
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• - Validating that SEO can be an impactful acquisition channel
• - Educating, securing budget, and gaining internal buy-in
• - Developing a predictable, scalable, differentiated SEO strategy
• - Forecasting and attributing revenue
• - Executing domain migration
• - Reaching diverse user base and adjacent jobs to be done
• - Targeting and capturing high-intent traffic

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Validating SEO

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• To validate SEO as an impactful acquisition channel we spent time to gain an understanding of the product, business model, customer pain points, market, competitive advantages, resources, growth motions, and SEO levers.

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• We identified that Dovetail has many use cases and a mixed demographic of user personas. The focus was on targeting specific adjacent user profiles with the core insight of Dovetail being that research is much larger than just researchers.
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• Dovetail had a few very impactful competitive advantages; these were, a well-established brand, a large active community full of product evangelists, a dedicated web team, and a recent large funding round. The business model also enabled the product itself to evolve into an SEO lever in the future, the ideal acquisition growth motion for SaaS businesses.
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• We conducted research on the search environment looking to identify the topics with relevant keywords, that clearly addressed a search intent, had good relative search volume, and were lower in competition. We identified an opportunity within keywords under the umbrella terms “research”, “product development”, and “experience”.
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• We also analyzed our competitors' SEO and the brands consistently ranking in search for the keywords we’d discovered. Through this process, we were able to hypothesize that we had the opportunity to capture a significant portion of search real estate by taking a more holistic and differentiated approach aligned with the core insight that research is much larger than just researchers.
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• Through gaining this understanding we were able to estimate the cost, time, and expected impact. This gave us confidence in validating that SEO had strong potential to be an impactful revenue-generating channel (contribute 20%+ revenue).

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Strategy & Tactics

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• SaaS SEO strategy defines top-down how a business leverages its competitive advantages to solve its core challenges through SEO. This outlines the differentiated approach that we’ll take in executing specific SEO tactics to overcome these challenges.
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• The Identified Challenge was to reach everyone in the research process and not just researchers, SEO was identified as the channel to access the entire buyer journey, from problem aware to customer.
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• The Defined Approach to overcome this challenge of capturing people who do research was to leverage our competitive advantages of brand strength and resources to create content pillars under umbrella terms like “research”, “product development”, and “experience” to gain topical authority, addressing the entire buyer journey.

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• The Implemented Tactics were;
• • - Transactional SEO through solutions, use case, & jobs to be done pages
  • - Product-Led SEO via templates and tools
  • • • - Migrating domains to improve brand strength
      • - Creating 100’s of articles on the topics over 12 months
      • - Prioritizing EEAT by creating author pages to strengthen topical authority

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• It was important that the metrics we tracked and reported clearly laddered up to the GTM North Star metric and overall business goal.

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Tech stack used

• - Google Analytics, Search Console, Sheets
• - Ahrefs, ScreamingFrog
• - Contentful, Webflow
• - Simplescraper, Zapier

• - Airtable, Whalesync
• - Frase

• - Canva
• - Dovetail

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• And now, back up top for the implemented solutions....

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Results

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Transactional SEO

To attract high-intent users actively seeking solutions, we developed targeted pages focusing on:

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Solutions Pages:

Objective: Present Dovetail’s offerings as direct solutions to specific customer challenges.

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Approach: We identified key pain points such as managing customer feedback and transforming insights into actionable strategies. Each page was crafted to showcase how Dovetail addresses these issues effectively, incorporating relevant keywords to improve search visibility.

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Use Case Pages:

Objective: Demonstrate practical applications of Dovetail across various industries and roles.

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Approach: By analyzing our diverse user base, we highlighted scenarios where Dovetail added value, such as in product development teams streamlining user research or marketing departments enhancing customer experience. These pages were optimized with industry-specific terms to attract pertinent traffic.

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Jobs to Be Done (JTBD) Pages:

Objective: Align content with specific tasks or objectives potential customers aim to accomplish.

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Approach: Utilizing the JTBD framework, we created content that resonated with user intents, such as “how to centralize customer feedback” or “tools for collaborative research analysis.” This involved thorough keyword research to ensure alignment with user search behaviors and needs.

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Product-Led SEO

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Product-Led SEO via “Product Sidecars”

To further enhance user engagement and organic reach, we introduced Product Sidecars; free, standalone tools that extract a specific function from Dovetail’s core product, offering immediate value and showcasing the platform’s capabilities.

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Objective: Develop accessible tools that address immediate user needs, driving traffic and demonstrating Dovetail’s value proposition.

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Approach: We identified essential features within Dovetail that could function independently, such as a “AI content analysis generator.” This tool enables users to make sense of their research by automatically summarizing key themes with the free AI content analysis tool.

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By offering this tool for free and optimizing its landing page for relevant search terms, we attracted users seeking quick solutions, leading them to explore Dovetail’s full suite of features.

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Domain Migration

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• Whilst in the process of developing the SEO strategy we successfully executed the domain migration from dovetailapp to dovetail with minimal to no negative impact.
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• How we managed the impact:
• • - Cleaned the domain to confirm that it didn’t have any pre-existing issues
  • - Set up URL redirects so there weren’t any additional variables
  • - Crawled and compared domains in a staging environment
  • - Utilized the opportunity to optimize the sitemap
  • - Educated internally on the process and potential impact

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Topical Authority

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• The Topical Authority Content Engine
• We implemented volume-based SEO content as a key tactic, focusing on owning the topics relevant to research to build an acquisition moat.
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• By delivering value through the content funnel we make it more likely they will convert post-sign-up. Importantly, this investment in SEO content compounds over time, ensuring CAC remains low as we scale.

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• Taking a topical authority approach to SaaS SEO is establishing your site as a trusted expert on a core set of topics related to your product and covering all semantically relevant content within these topics.
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• This was effective because:
• • - Builds trust and credibility with users and search engines
  • - Shorter time to value through faster organic traffic growth
  • - Captures high-intent traffic
  • - Scalable and compounds reducing CAC over time
  • - Shorter sales cycle/PLG adoption loop through educational content
  • - Competitive differentiation

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• Content Pillars
• The content pillar topics were chosen based on product-market fit, topical relevance, and search volume:
• - Customer Research
• - Research Methods
• - UX
• - Market Research
• - Product Development
• - Surveys
• - Patient Experience
• - Employee Experience

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• Author and Reviewer Bio Pages

• We identified that the quality of search results was trending downwards in late 2022 - early 2023 and in anticipation of a major Google update to address this, we decided to heavily optimize for EEAT through author and reviewer profile pages.
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• These pages contributed substantially in our opinion to establishing topical authority so quickly. This was achieved through the pages showcasing the author or reviewers' experience and expertise working in the field along with their education and professional achievements. This helped to build that trust in the eyes of Google and readers, who would be more inclined to link to an article, thus increasing the authority of a topic.

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• ‍‍‍If you'd like to see what else we implemented to scale organic traffic over 10x and multiply MRR growth in only 18 months, get in touch below, and we can run you through the rest of the case study.

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