How parentune grew organically at 130X

This was the summer of 2018, and we could feel the heat listening to some of the early stories of what the new FB algorithm had done. This was the time, which witnessed some of the most sought after Experts, who spoke about making viral content & making content viral. Even they were struggling to make it work for their own portals. We had preempted this low tide in advance, and had done 7 big and small experiments; & though we gave it our best, they mostly failed. I am playing back one of those growth huddle conversations between two teammates from the same summer here.

Are we missing something? 

I don’t know, what are we missing! we have implemented most of the best practices. You know, my friend was sharing that, it may take 2-3 months before we see an uptick. 

It's already 45-50 days. There must be something! Our content is valued by parents, and it’s fresh and User generated. Then why are we not seeing an uptick? I think we are missing something.    

But what!

I don’t know, May be we are chasing an unreachable goal. 

Come on! we don’t like goals which are easily reachable, that's not us. I think, we may not be looking at the right areas. 

We had entered 2018 with this being one of the most shared and spoken failures in the team. We think it's a good think to talk freely about failures and learn from them as a group. The best part at parentune is perhaps that, the team is always ready to sprint uphill and looks forward to such challenges. We always had a strong belief in network effects at parentune and somehow had the hunch that it will also empower us in cracking SEO. Just didn’t know how exactly.  

This was a daunting task. We hustled hard to craft a success plan. This was almost an exploration spree. We found a lot of useful resources over the internet and some meaningful conversations with folks who had done well with SEO growth. Each of these highlighted the SEO best practices. In-depth keyword research, link building and reach enhancement were some areas, which had multiple viewpoints. While, all this research gave us a perspective, we learnt over a period of time that we had to build our strategy basis our context, our strengths and on the basis of our product play. We continued to get more clarity on this with every passing day.  

By next summer, June of 2019, we were able to generate significant growth in our organic traffic.We surpassed the elusive milestone of 1 million sessions per month. Here’s what has been most interesting. We are still growing! In hindsight, it took us some time to gain momentum, but once we gained traction, it just kept getting better. 

In this article I will take you through the phases of this journey taken by the parentune team. I would also try to highlight so as to how did our strategy play out. The idea is to share our key learnings, which may help you in your own journey to cracking organic (SEO) growth.

Hustle Hard, Deep Dive & Craft The Structure

It did not take us much time to realize that we needed a structured plan. This was the time that we did several deep dives on what parents’ reading behavior was, especially what they were reading from each other. We understood what was valuable to them and how were they discovering it. We got some key insights leading us to crafting a structure, which became the cornerstone to our success later on. Here are those five learnings in hindsight :

1. Content coverage in line with what’s most valuable for your consumer : We focused on the core and must-have for a parent. 
2. High impact topical content : Our Data analytics and prediction IP, HOTSPOT gave us a big advantage here as we could predict the topical content ahead in time.
3.  Leverage your strength: We leveraged our sticky parents’ network and HOTSPOT. We extended these strengths to our social handles too. It all adds up! 
4. Strengthen your website’s domain authority: Iterate on an ongoing basis to climb up the ladder in SERP with keywords and quality backlinks.
5. Learn from your consumers: We Keep a close watch on the challenges faced by the parents on a day-to-day basis and that helps us in surfacing solution-focused content.

With these five key insights, we crafted a growth path, which was essentially an effective way to marry SEO and User generated Content (UGC). 

Hygiene first

We started first base first, We optimized the robots.txt, enhanced metadata, utilized proper tags, and constructed a strategic sitemap. 

These on page interventions took a lot of changing, and eventually meant changing a major part of our site structure. It helped us to be SEO ready. There is one watch out I would like to highlight from this stage; “legacy”. We dealt with legacy by completely overlooking it during this phase. We just asked one question while making any change; “Will this increase the discovery of our content?”

If the answer was ‘Yes’; we ensured those changes were done.

Think of it more like a demand and supply equilibrium. We had a supply of content ready and we were trying to figure out how to meet the demand, in line with the SEO guidelines. Just highlighting that, many a times the core stress is on the way the content is curated, its density, keywords and so on. This wasn't the big challenge in our case, but if you are starting from scratch, you may want to make sure that you are following the SEO content guidelines. What our SEO overhaul did for us was that it set up our content to that demand! 

On-page optimization improved our content’s search visibility and we started climbing the SERPs. From our learning, it’s better to track impressions closely at this stage, it’s not so much about the CTRs in the beginning .

So now, we had the SEO demand. 

By August 2018, some of our content pieces gained strong momentum on the impressions-front and we started surfacing in the first few results. The whole exercise set the wheels in motion. 

We clocked our 10X by August’18. Though on a smaller base, this was our earliest significant win in hindsight. We got some wheels, we were rolling.

The Strategy

We are a network and have a thriving UGC. We learnt that fresh content can get us more value in terms of SERPs. Google loves fresh content!

We had our end goal in sigh, but there was a long way to go still. And to get there we now found something we could leverage from our strengths. User generated Fresh content.

But the key question was to find what content should we leverage? This is when we created a game changing structure, we called it the Content Hive. It had 3 prime objectives derived from the key insights we started this journey with: 

•  High impact content, 
• Social traction and 
• Domain authority

Our main takeaway from the Content Hive huddles in the initial weeks was that, not every content piece will be in sync with all 3 objectives. So, we segregated each content in line with 1 or 2 objectives. Most of the content actually had one single predefined objective out of these 3. We avoided keeping multiple objectives for the same content.At the same time, we ensured that each hive had enough saliency in our overall approach.  

CONTENT HIVE

The first hive worked on content for core support to parents. These were addressed in line with our pre-existing personalization and were more informative in nature.

Second hive worked for content that could serve as a strong piece for establishing backlinks. These were the content types which got us the links and eventually helped us in maximizing the reach amongst the parents. 

Third hive focussed on content that was best suited for gaining social traction. These content pieces were identified to create buzz and capture mindshare on our social handles.

Content Hive structure was a focused strategy that helped us in getting the most out of each content piece in line with their respective objectives. However when we see the bigger picture in hindsight, these hives gave us great results as they were inter-connected and almost synergistic. 

Though not very often, but every once in a while we did get a few content pieces which did justice to all the 3 objectives. We called them Rockstars.  

One such rockstar was polio vaccination.This piece was highly valuable to our consumers, it was viral on our social handles and we saw a surge in our "do follow" links. We also saw big success in topical events, for e.g. see black fever below. Content Hive Strategy started working, giving us a good momentum and early signs of the big uptick. 

Ramp up to 130X

It was Feb 2019, the valentine month, which saw us get to a 50X growth in just 14 months. We celebrated, with high 5s all round. But then, we also knew that we had more to do. The team was keen to take this a notch higher and so, it was a very short discussion from what I remember. It started with high 5s, went on to “Ye dil maange more” (my heart demands for more) from one of the teammates, and ended with a note of “Let’s celebrate at 100X next!” 

SEO is not something that we do once. The effect that comes with a few content pieces is likely to slow down to match the same pace down, it went up with . 

If I was to share one important learning alone with you from our journey, it would be, to iterate non-stop to keep the momentum high. 

We did just that, we looked at more best practices especially around discovery and demand for content and surfaced fresh content powered by our Content hive strategy meeting that demand. Our CTRs and page ranks were going up with speed. We were starting to see a high uptick in other languages too.   

Another learning, which I would like to highlight is that you need to keep a close eye on consumer’s behaviour around the content you have chosen to optimize. We realized the true value of HOTSPOT at this stage as we tracked the best performing content pieces in line with parent’s behaviour around them. For e.g. we found that parents were asking questions to the author of the content. We made sure that the parents who had authored the content were receiving alerts and were active over a sustained period on that content piece. One of the big reasons why our strategy worked was that, we were strong at UGC content and had a sticky parents’ network. HOTSPOT gave us a very good understanding of what parents were looking for, what were their pain points, what did they appreciate and what did they miss. This gave us inputs on areas which seemed like a “gap”. Our content strategy focused on surfacing solutions to these gaps. We did several experiments around these on an ongoing basis. 

We launched consumer centered content tools like ovulation calendar, due date calculator, diet plan generator to name a few. Not all experiments worked out equally well, but we did get it right with most of them, especially when we had this synced up with the Content Hive strategy.

We could see ourselves riding up in the SERPs each week. Our SEO metrics started showing significant cardio peaks by early 2019. We started getting peaks more frequently in March.   

We knew our strategy was a game changer. We were now on a 6 lane expressway, cruising! We continued with the Content Hive strategy with more confidence now and tried more experiments in April and May. By Jun 2019, We hit a monthly organic of 1.35 million. Somebody in the team did a quick back of the hand calculation and said, “Guys, we have done 100X !” Came in another voice, “Ye dil maange more!”

Recap for Fellow Hustlers 

Here’s a crisp version of our key learnings. Don’t look for secrets, there are none! Start with Hygiene, follow it with a structure, which plays to your strengths, curate high quality content relevant to your consumers, have a focussed approach for each content, and iterate continuously, especially when you gain momentum. 

Some additional points for you, which I could not cover in the article  

1. Plan ahead: Have a long term plan, it’s going to be a journey.
2. Have a thought through content strategy in place: Create your own as per your platform’s strengths.
3. Consumer eye : If any content seems to lack resonance with your consumer, it has no place on your platform.
4. Keep a benchmark: E.g. Grow 5% every week. Keep monitoring your efforts and outcomes to adjust tactically
5. Momentum is the key, Iteration is the Key maker!