How my lunch with Zapier turned into billion dollar SEO
6 Lessons from Zapier's 10-year Product-Led SEO journey
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In 2013, a SurveyMonkey colleague introduced me to Wade Foster, the co-founder of Zapier, to discuss SEO growth ideas. This meeting helped kick off a pivot on Zapier’s SEO approach and subsequently became what I think is one of the best examples of how product-led SEO can drive tens of millions of dollars in SEO value.
At the time, Zapier was very focused on building what is now considered typical content marketing. They were writing blog posts about top B2B tools and using the traffic generated by that content to drive users to their integration product offering. I recall they even had a blog post about the top survey tools to use and outranked SurveyMonkey on some terms we cared about.
Pivot from content-led to product-led
When Wade and I met, he was very interested in coming up with a way to inflect SEO traffic in a big way. He was maximizing budget and effort with their content-led efforts and couldn’t see how he could ever scalably grow traffic with just content.
I had similar thoughts at SurveyMonkey, where I knew I would never hit my lofty revenue targets if I just worked with the content team to write more “bloggy” content.
To that end, I had been experimenting with using product pages at scale to drive more traffic. From a traffic standpoint, it’s counterintuitive because the traffic potential for each one of these pages was low, but that also meant the competition was low.
Creating thousands of pages targeted at low-competition keywords would potentially create significant traffic in aggregate. At SurveyMonkey, that meant focusing on survey templates created at scale as a solution for various search intents. (Read my book for more on this.)
[SPONSORED by Search Intelligence]
How we landed top-tier Digital PR links in the pet niche:
▪ We analysed 568 million Instagram posts containing hashtags for 281 dog breeds
↳ The results showed that the French Bulldog is the most ‘Instagrammable’ dog breed
▪ We wrote up a 600 words report on our findings, with tables and clear content layout
I shared what I was doing at SurveyMonkey with Wade and suggested that Zapier should shift its SEO efforts to product pages rather than focus on content pages. As Wade and I discussed what that might look like together, we hit on the epiphany of what ended up becoming the traffic juggernaut that is/was/and will always be the key to their success.
At the time, Zapier’s product pages were structured like e-commerce pages with categories and a list of each software that fit within each category.
I suggested that instead of just focusing on what they currently offer as an integration, with each one functioning as a landing page, they should build out pages for every integration that could ever be possible. Whereas the current site was capped at a few hundred to maybe a few thousand pages, building a page for all possible products and pairing them with other tools could easily take them into the millions. While the traffic potential for many of these pages/terms was low, the aggregate of all these low-volume pages was massive.
Creating a page for integrations and even tools they didn’t have yet on the platform had additional upside beyond traffic because it would trigger interest in the integration if/when someone landed on it. (Spoiler alert: SurveyMonkey created integrations precisely because of this.)
Programmatic as a driver for product
To anyone who has built programmatic SEO efforts over the last few years, this might not seem very novel, but ten years ago, it certainly was. Zapier ran with the ideas we had developed, and it was eye-opening in so many ways to watch it work out, just like we had discussed. Seeing how effective this was up close was the early seeds of my frameworks and thinking that became my book: Product-Led SEO.
However, as the chart below of all of Zapier’s search traffic shows, there was no overnight success, and anyone looking to build a product-led SEO effort can learn several lessons from Zapier.
I connected with Matt Bowers, the architect of Zapier’s monumental SEO success, to get an inside view of what really happened in the last decade and learn the secrets of this success.
These are lessons that apply to anyone building a long-term SEO growth engine.
Patience. Zapier did start to build these pages, AND it didn’t work. In fact, it didn’t work for a very long time. I checked in with Wade several times over that year, and while they built the pages, traffic wasn’t meaningful. Nevertheless, Zapier bought into the idea; they built it anyway and didn’t quit.
Value first, content second. Once Zapier started to build, they could have scaled infinitely into a spam hellscape, but they didn’t. This specific quote from Matt says everything you need to know about how deliberate they were in this strategy.
“There's an advantage to finding something where, if you add a single database entry, it doesn't just give you 1 new page, it gives you 1 * N new pages. In the case of Zapier, we found a huge opportunity to do that. Our options for pages like this are N^2. If you want (and we did) you can go to combinations of three, and get N^3. for Zapier today, that's 216,000,000,000 possible combinations. Taking the top combos from each group gives you a lot of templated pages that meet a very specific user need.
With a website like this, there's some complexity to deciding which of those 216B pages to reveal to google. That's very site specific, but getting maniacal about the logic behind your indexed website is key to success.”
Product first, traffic second. Zapier didn’t just build for traffic; they built a product that matched user intent for their business. Zapier didn’t build programmatic SEO because they could; they built a product using programmatic SEO tactics that enabled a helpful product.
Think long-term. In the process of building a product, they also created a category. In my occasional conversations with Zapier’s leadership over the years I had been in contact with them, they always took a long view of what they were building in SEO. They didn’t think about what they could win vs a competitor today but instead focused on what they could own forever. The outcome of that is an entire category of search domination.
"Build technology to support the SEO effort. Many companies slot SEO into their existing architecture, especially when they are just content efforts. I can't count the times I've seen it happen where the engineering team thinks they're "done" only to have 1,000 more requests for ongoing database updates. This slows you down and can be demoralizing.
Matt told me, "Zapier built a pretty impressive custom CMS to manage the app directory so that we didn't need an engineer whenever we wanted to add an app, change a title tag, or whatever. The SEO and partnership teams can move quickly without product prioritization meetings."Hire the right people at the right time. Too often, companies want to hire someone to “drive SEO” as soon they incorporate a business. Matt was the first Head of SEO hired at Zapier, and he didn’t join until 2019, eight years after they were founded. Before Zapier, Matt was at Zillow, which made him the exact kind of SEO thinker Zapier needed. His success at Zapier speaks for itself.
Like every company I have seen successfully execute product-led SEO, Zapier now has a moat AND a brand in search. When a company achieves this, it becomes nearly impossible for others to shake them from this perch, even if they built the same SEO strategy.
I believe the ingredients to that success are in the strengths outlined above, which, more than SEO tactics, are nearly impossible to copy.
Over the years, I have met many companies who cite Zapier as the company they want to replicate. They aspire to have the moat and SEO brand of Zapier, but very few of them have the SEO DNA of a Zapier.
If you want to be the next Zapier, don’t just build a keyword list and content roadmap. Build a product, connect with Matt on LinkedIn, and email me if I can help you develop a product-led SEO strategy.
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