Shopify App SEO: 4x Increase in Organic Traffic in 5 Months

Upscribe is a subscription management app that offers a quick, painless way for Shopify business owners to set up a subscription service in their name. The platform  gives merchants powerful tools to grow and maintain their subscriber base.

Being a SaaS, the best way for the app to pick up steam and start to generate revenue is to have a good SEO strategy. But like most fledging startups, Upscribe didn’t have a clear direction regarding SEO.

Out of the hundreds of SEO agencies on the market, Upscribe chose Embarque to help them lay the foundations for their SEO strategy. Working closely with Upscribe’s management, we created and implemented an SEO plan that yielded remarkable results for the service. Besides a new content strategy, our link-building teams also succeeded in creating an action plan to set up back-links for Upscribe, as well.

With those plans in place, organic traffic to Upscribe’s money-making pages quadrupled in less than half a year!

In this case study, we’ll show you how we:

  • Drafted a brand-new SEO strategy for Upscribe
  • Helped the service quadruple its organic traffic from 450 searches monthly to over 1,800

"They also know the craft very well and seem to have found a nice niche of working with smaller software companies." - Marketing Lead, Upscribe

The Problem - Zero SEO Strategy

When Upscribe first reached out to us, they were experiencing very slow growth regarding their site’s traffic. Although the service received great reviews from its small pool of subscribers, new subscribers were hard to come by.

Organic traffic consistently hovered at around 400-500 between 2021 and 2022.

Traffic growth was nowhere to be found.

Recognizing the seriousness of the problem, Upscribe’s management started searching for marketing agencies to help them fix it. Ultimately, they opted to go with Embarque for our proven track record and reputation in the SEO industry.

One meeting was all it took for our team to find the reason for Upscribe’s stagnant traffic growth: the company had no SEO strategy in place.

With the problem identified, we realized we couldn't deliver SEO-optimized content immediately. The first order of business would be to collaborate with Upscribe to develop a fully-fleshed SEO strategy.

The Solution - A Tailored SEO Strategy, Built Completely from Scratch

Upscribe needed a comprehensive SEO strategy, and Embarque delivered. Here are the steps we took to develop one from the ground up:

  • Compiling suitable topics: The first and most important step is picking the right topics for Upscribe’s content. In Upscribe’s case, the topics that we focused on are those that relate to the client’s niche, such as “e-commerce,” “Shopify,” “subscription,” etc.
  • Find high-performing keywords based on the topics: Once the topics are chosen, our team works on making lists of exact match keywords and secondary keywords to help Upscribe rank better among their target audience’s search queries.
  • Determine the target audience: Finding the correct audience to target is crucial. That way, we can maximize clicks, conversions, and, ultimately, revenue growth for the client. The primary audience of Upscribe is SMB Shopify business owners; secondary audiences are marketing managers, e-commerce managers, and directors of large enterprises and brands.
  • Do competitor research: By knowing who the competitors of Upscribe are and analyzing their SEO strategy, we can help Upscribe stay ahead of the pack. We do that by looking into what kind of content they’re using and how effective they are. Their top keywords are also dissected in detail and grafted into our strategy when needed. Lastly, we can see how they aren’t performing well and exploit that to pull ahead.
  • Set up the styling guideline: Our team worked with Upscribe to create conventions around styling, such as the language, tone, and complexity of the content. Even smaller details, like what kind of casing to use for headings and titles, are discussed. This helps us create a regular framework, in terms of language and structure, which remains consistent throughout their content and reinforces their brand.
  • Create a link-building plan: High-quality and topically-relevant internal and external links are crucial for fast ranking. So, we set up guidelines that our SEO specialists now use to link up internal articles to help share value and authority ranking between the pages (link equity). Good internal links also help Upscribe’s pages rank better in Google’s algorithm. We also use this plan for our backlinking, employing methods like guest-posting and link-swapping to redirect searchers to Upscribe from domains relating to ecommerce and Shopify subscriptions.
  • Set up a content calendar: Our writers supplied Upscribe with five 1,500-word blog posts and 8 backlinks every month. Each one tackles the core topics prescribed in the strategy (“e-commerce,” “Shopify subscriptions,” etc.)

“Since working with Embarque, organic traffic has doubled. The client is satisfied with the team's work so far and has no complaints about the quality of work and the level of service they provide. They are responsive and always available to answer queries.” - Marketing Lead, Upscribe

The Results - 4x Increase in Organic Traffic in 5 Months

Embarque began to roll out new articles based on the newly minted SEO strategy in the summer of 2022.

From a trough of 400-500 monthly organic searches, Upscribe hit the 700 organic searches milestone in October 2022.

Upscribe hit the 1,000 monthly organic searches milestone just a month after that in November 2022.

Today, the company’s organic traffic is as high as ever, at 1,779 organic searches per month in January 2023.

Looking at the chart, you can pinpoint the exact moment when Embarque began to roll the new SEO strategy and content for Upscribe!

Takeaways

  1. A detailed and effective SEO strategy is a must-have for any business to stay competitive. Before Embarque’s intervention, Upscribe’s growth had stalled for almost an entire year. With a new SEO strategy, Upscribe sees substantial growth in traffic in just about 5 months.
  2. Always know your niche and target audience. The first step to developing Upscribe’s SEO strategy was determining their niche and who made up their target audience. By focusing on these two areas, we were able to identify what topics to target and what keywords to use. They also helped to inform our backlinking strategy, regarding what websites we would leverage for links.
  3. A consistent content schedule is key. Every month, without fail, we deliver five 1,500-word blog posts and 8 backlinks to Upscribe. Consistency helps Upscribe stay visible in its highly competitive market and foster interest among readers. This ultimately improves conversion and revenue growth.

Reboot Your SEO Strategy with Embarque

Upscribe remains our client to this day, and we’re still delivering regular content for them. As you can see in the chart above, as of now, traffic to their site is the highest it’s ever been, and we’re striving to keep the momentum going for as long as possible with better content, newer keywords, and more quality backlinks.

Want to see the same growth rate for your own website and brand? Send an email to our founder, julian@embarque.io, and begin your SEO optimization journey today!

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