Improving the Whole Funnel with SEO Content Pillars (w/ Ian Marck Andrade & Voilà!)
Learn how Ian Marck Andrade helped a workforce management platform crush their acquisition goals by reorganizing (not rebuilding) their content database.
First time here? This is Product-Channel Fit, a newsletter that unveils how startups discover and scale new acquisition channels through real-world marketing case studies.
Meet Ian Marck-Andrade, Head of Growth Marketing
In 2022, Ian was serving the client-facing teams at Voilà!, a workforce management platform for hourly-paid workers. They’d just raised their Series A and were looking to scale up their user acquisition.
To hit their ambitious goals post-fundraising, the Voilà! team was charged with increasing their primary marketing objective of “Demos Booked” by 4x in under a year.
Instead of climbing onto the hamster wheel of driving paid traffic, Ian focused his strategy on optimizing conversion rate while increasing their organic traffic flow.
Voilà! offers a unique, straight-forward product: a turnkey platform to help companies manage the needs of hourly-paid workers like schedules, timesheets, work attendance, communications and benefits. Qualifying leads for this niche across many industries was complex, and nothing a standard enrichment tool could help them with.
SEO had always been a clear and consistent channel for Voilá!, so Ian decided to tackle turning it from an information-only channel into a demand-generation channel.
How Voilà! Went Back to Basics with Content Pillars
Ian tapped his SEO contact Mike Nesselbeck and went to work mining their company Hubspot.
They started by analyzing deals attributed to Paid Search, and clustering the keywords into four key groups those deals came in on. These would turn into their content “Pillars”
They built a basic Google Sheet and started matching all of their existing content pages into these four clusters
They created a bold new template for their content Pillar pages to house all their content
They started link exchanging and opening themselves up for guest posts for the first time. They were getting about two requests per week, so they started accepting under one condition: Guest posters must write a unique piece of content optimized around a word in one of their topic clusters.
Voilà!’s Content Pillars Test Results
Beyond checking their organic traffic and conversion rates, they started checking the number of sessions per month from that source.
Sessions per month increased 78%: People were returning to the website on their own much more often then they were before
Conversion pages got more visits: Through simple UTM values and HubSpot CTA click reports, there was a 32% increase in users clicking their CTA from their content pages
Demo submissions increased 10% month over month – without more leads entering the pipeline
How Voilà! Scaled Their SEO Channel
Bilingual websites can be a marketer’s dream (or nightmare). When focusing on SEO, Ian wanted to first scale across their English and French websites before other languages to find those winning search queries that would translate well and perform even better over time.
He also started segmenting their audiences by geography to track directly how the SEM campaigns were boosting organic results, which helped them build a Google Ads channel on top of this work as well.
How You Can Ramp up your current SEO
Don’t sleep on website structure: Content pillars can affect not just your blogging strategy, but your SEO, SEM, and your website root structure too
Get quality help. Take basics like SEO seriously and work with experts or peers. When you are both planning and executing, loss of focus is inevitable
Educate your team. Any efforts spent to transfer knowledge will greatly save communication and planning time in the future
Write for humans first. Making content make sense to readers is more important than optimizing it for Google’s site crawlers. Stop following out-of-the-box SEO scores from your tools and make sure the writing makes sense to your audience, and to humans more broadly. In this case, Ian worked in Google Sheets rather than mapping directly in SEMRush
Ian Marck-Andrade is currently head of Growth Marketing at Voilà! Connect with him on LinkedIn, Twitter or your favourite platform, pretty sure he’s there.