Vol 7. Monday.com: From SEO to IPO

How Monday.com increased their site traffic by 2,300% in 18 months

The SaaS market is as crowded and competitive as a grocery store the day before Christmas. And all that makes it tough to stand out among the crowd. That was the challenge Monday.com faced when they brought their operating system to market.?

To grow at scale in such a competitive space, Monday.com needed to implement intentional, out-of-the-box strategies. And one of those strategies was focused on content.?

This week, Case Studied examines how their agency partner, Codeless, helped Monday.com scale their SEO to generate 1.2 million website visitors.

The Brief:

Monday.com understood the industry they were getting into. The B2B and SaaS markets are filled with brands who understand the impact that strong content can have—and it shows on their sites and in search engines.

Ranking for the right searches and cracking content markets ain’t easy for new companies on the block. Monday.com knew the only way to fight a content challenge was with more content—lots of it, at very high quality.?

So to secure SEO success, Monday.com partnered with Codeless to build their content at scale, knowing that doing that in-house wasn’t a viable option.

The Execution:

Monday.com asked Codeless for 70 articles in the first month of working together—a task so daunting, that just reading about it can cause palms to sweat.?

Despite that, Codeless accepted the challenge, and quickly implemented a tactical strategy to execute it.?

Since increasing organic site traffic was a priority, they leveraged the hub and spoke content model developed by Hubspot . It involves two types of content:

• Topic clusters
• Pillar content

Topic clusters have correlated keywords and cover topics based on keyword research. It’s an effective strategy for organizing a site’s content to create a cleaner site architecture.

Pillar content is a single piece of content that goes more in-depth—think “ultimate guide” type articles.?These act as the central node for developing expertise on a topic, which all other cluster content points to.

With the model, cluster content contains links promoting the pillar so readers can access content about similar topics from the larger article.

Together, this content helps demonstrate Monday.com’s topic authority and, by extension, domain authority (a signal search engines use to dictate how high to rank a given site).

But Codeless also had to quickly (!!) get a team of writers and editors ready for the 70 articles per month. Headcount planning is a difficult task for any business, but agencies have even bigger challenges as projects like this can start out of the blue.

They addressed the big undertaking by leveraging a few calculated steps:

?? pulling together a list of writers with experience in the topics that needed coverage

?? creating a detailed checklist that outlined internal expectations for the content being created?

?? using an operations system that allowed writers + editors to work on multiple projects at once?

?? giving writers detailed, highly specific briefs for each individual post to communicate the goals?

To do all of that successfully, Codeless had to lean on a strong editorial team. They hired two senior editors who created the briefs for writers, approved outlines, and carefully reviewed all 70 drafts. But the content didn’t stop there.

During the partnership, Codeless created over 950 articles for Monday.com.

We don’t know too many brands that can pull that off internally.

The Results:

Turns out, the 70-article month really paid off for Monday.com. Zoe Dayan, the content marketing manager at Monday.com, noted how immediate the results were.?

“Normally, SEO takes very long, but with a clear SEO and content strategy that Codeless also helped to shape, we really have seen results within a month. So that’s extremely, extremely, rare.”

Over the 18-month partnership with Codeless, Monday.com’s blog traffic increased from around 12k to over 304k—roughly a 2,300% increase. And the 950+ articles they created helped establish the company as a prominent player in their field.?

Now, Monday.com has over 25k first page rankings in the search engine results pages (SERPs) and is ranking for over 140k organic keywords. They’ve collected backlinks from 6.5k referring domains and many of their Codeless-written articles rank in the first position for their target keyword.

“The number one biggest benefit of Codeless for Monday.com is that they can help us (as a hyper growth company) scale very quickly,” Dayan noted. “They were able to become experts in every single category—from project management to construction and software development, agile or Scrum—that we asked them to write in.”?

Here’s some important context on this partnership’s timing: the Codeless partnership began in fall of 2020. Monday.com went public in June 2021. At the time, shares were priced at $155 and the market capitalization was $7.6b.?

The Takeaways:

Sure, not every company needs (or can afford) 70 articles in a month to reach their goals. But trying to stand out in a competitive or crowded market is a common hurdle, and there are plenty of learnings in Monday.com’s success story.

Here are a few takeaways from this weeks Case Studied:?

1. Understand when to Outsource?

Monday.com had a problem and a solution laid out in front of them. But to staff those needs the team had to look outward as this wasn’t the team’s area of expertise and hiring that quickly wasn’t possible. An agency was the best and most logical option.

Hiring an agency is a quick solution to testing and scaling channels effectively, bringing that thought leadership into your organization.

The challenge is finding the right partner, which fortunately services like Vendry do by shortlisting the best agency for your project for free.

1. Build Velocity

Monday.com partnered with Codeless during a period of hyper growth. Scaling quickly was a priority for Monday.com and helped fuel their eventual IPO soon after.?

While SEO is often a slower channel to grow, if you are in a competitive market like SaaS, where time is of the essence and you need that traffic growth to hit a certain goal or fundraising milestone, set those lofty expectations with your partners and ensure they are accountable to them.

1. Have a clear hypothesis for testing new channels

Not all channels work the same for every business. Some companies are better equipped to grow via Meta Ads, others SEO.

The most important piece is that your team has strong reasoning as to why they believe that channel will work, perhaps because of your industry, product or what your competitors are doing, otherwise, you’ll burn a lot of money, time, and resources looking for a silver bullet.

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