Zapier SEO Growth Strategy - How did they grow?
Hiya 👋
Last week, it finally happened…
I always ask you which company I should research next, and I got my first response 🤩
Brittany Joiner messaged saying she wants me to look at Zapier!
I’ll be honest, I was just about to start researching Notion's growth strategies because that’s where I spend most of my time writing this newsletter. Zapier would probably never have been at the top of my list, but hey… challenge accepted!
To my surprise, Zapier's co-founder Wade Foster loves to go on podcasts.
So I spent my Saturday morning walking around Brighton's vintage shops to buy myself that perfect '90s neon-colored spring jacket while listening to different podcasts about how Zapier grew.
(This one was my favorite 👉 Building Zapier from first principles)
And I discovered Zapier has well oiled SEO and Content-driven lead acquisition machine that we can all take inspiration from...
🥕 5-second insights 🥕
No time to read the whole newsletter? Here are key takeaways 👇
Forum Outreach: Easiest way to get leads before any other marketing effort picks up.
Programmatic SEO: To create specific landing pages for each use case to capture long-tail search traffic.
Partnership Backlinking: Co-marketing leads to faster brand credibility than solo efforts → Get high-quality backlinks from your partners
Zapier was founded in 2011 by three friends - Wade Foster, Bryan Helmig, and Mike Knoop in Columbia, Missouri. The same year, they applied to Y Combinator but got rejected.
They didn't give up though. The feedback from their users was positive, so they decided to keep going. The next year, they applied to Y Combinator again, got accepted, and received a $1.4M seed round.
12 years later, Zapier is worth $5B. An impressive progress considering they only raised a seed round and chose a less conventional route on their journey to become a unicorn 🦄
So, what are Zapier's growth secrets that helped them grow from this idea? 👇
Let's dive in!
1️⃣ Outreach on Forums
When you're just starting out, with no site traffic or budget for marketing, forums are your best friends! Although the traffic from the links you share might not be as high, your leads are more likely to convert.
Zapier's co-founders would visit forums of popular SaaS products that Zapier integrated with. If they found someone asking about integrations, they would reply and explain how APIs could connect apps, introducing Zapier as a simpler alternative.
This direct engagement helped Zapier gain early traction and valuable feedback.
Why it's great:
Low-cost demand generation
Highly qualified leads
Creating connections
2️⃣ Programmatic SEO
Programmatic SEO has been part of the go-to-market strategy since day one.
The inspiration came from a bingo cards website. Targeting only the "bingo cards" keyword wouldn't be enough to sustain the business. However, by getting more specific and creating landing pages for different bingo card niches—like History bingo cards, Star Trek bingo cards, and so on—traffic significantly increases. And so does the demand.
So, how did Zapier apply the “bingo cards niche-targeting” blueprint?
By creating landing pages for specific integrations, and use cases.
Let’s take their Gmail to Trello integration. First, Zapier created a page for each platform, showcasing all the other apps you could integrate with. From there, you could explore how to integrate Gmail with Trello and discover all the possible use cases.
But it doesn’t stop there. Each use case has its own landing page, too! Interested in learning how to create Trello cards from new Gmail threads? No problem, Zapier has a page for that!
And just like that, they've created thousands of landing pages for every app integration on their platform. As a result, Zapier now ranks for many important keywords related to app integrations, capturing users who are actively looking for solutions.
Why it's great:
Targets solution-oriented keywords
Quick to create
Scalable
Structure of Zapiers App listing pages: Main page → Integration page → Use cases
3️⃣ Listicles
Zapiers Programmatic SEO pages are great for people who already know what they need. But how does Zapier capture the attention of people who aren’t yet sure of the solution or even the tool they should use? The answer is….Listicles!
Zapiers top 5 pages with the highest estimated traffic are indeed listicles. Blogs about the best tools for video editing, best AI chatbots, top photo editing apps, and so on.
Listicles aren’t only great for gaining high traffic to your site and educating your potential customers. They’re also a great backlink-building tool. When Zapier publishes an article mentioning their partners and their apps the chances are high that it’ll get shared on social media and get linked to partners’ blogs too!
Why it’s great:
Targeting high keyword traffic
Drives backlinks
Increased social media engagement
Top 5 pages from Zapier website (Ubersuggest March 2024)
4️⃣ Backlinking through partnerships
Backlinks are hard and expensive to get. Especially the higher-quality ones. But thanks to the nature of their product that wasn’t an issue for Zapier.
For example, as part of their partnership with Slack, Zapier was mentioned on Slack's official integration page, providing a backlink to Zapier. Partners like Slack, Trello, and others would often announce their integration with Zapier on their blogs, creating high-quality backlinks that improve Zapier’s SEO performance.
To make this easier for partners, Zapier prepared a partner kit with suggested promo materials that partners can share when a new integration is launched (and yes, blog posts to get backlinks are included 🔥)
Why it’s great?
High-quality backlinks
Co-marketing opportunities
Leveraging partners’ audience
5️⃣ Make your brand a verb!
If your brand name becomes a verb, you know that you made it —think 'googling' or 'ubering.' Zapier achieved this with 'zap.'
Zapier kept on pushing the word “Zap” since its launch, and as the product and its community grew, customers started using it.
But how did the founders come up with the name?
The name Zapier itself comes from API. Then they added “er” at the end which is a universal English suffix, resulting in “apier”. Finally, they were looking for something to add at the beginning to make it sound cool… Zapier.
Sounds cool, and sounds about right.
Why it’s great?
Brand building
Community building
Easy to remember
Zapier has been using the word "Zap" since they launched their website in 2012
That's it for our deep dive into Zapier's growth strategies.
Zapier proved that solid SEO and content strategy, are effective acquisition channels in the B2B SaaS space.
What do you think? What company should I research next? 👀
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