Zapier's SEO Playbook to get 2M organic monthly traffic!

Zapier uses SEO to get a stunning 2M monthly unique visitors to its website. Here's our Zapier SEO playbook that'll teach you ways to drive traffic to your own website!

9th February 2022
8 min read

In a nutshell

Zapier is a simple workflow automation tool that allows you to move information between apps & connect them to create automated workflows. It gets ~2M monthly traffic & has 50k+ automated pages! It's vastly successful, thanks to its brilliant SEO strategy.

To drive traffic to their website, Zapier created two sets of pages. The blogs on "Best Apps" & the App Integration pages.

One of the top-performing Zapier subfolders is the /apps landing page. This set of pages accounts for ~15% of Zapier's total traffic with 235K monthly visitors! The idea behind creating these pages is simple. Zapier wants to target all users who are searching for ways to connect different apps.

This set of pages forms a 4 stage hierarchy, where each stage links to the next stage. The pages are, Main Page -> App Profile Page -> App-to-App Integration -> Zaps Page.

Next, the best app blogs are basically blogs that list down top apps in the market in a particular category. For example, the best URL shorteners, the best note-taking apps, the best to-do list apps, etc. These pages get 900K monthly organic traffic, ie. 60% of traffic to their site!

Zapier ranks for really difficult keywords with these pages. It does that by writing high-quality SEO optimized content, internally linking all pages to flow the authority & acquiring high-quality backlinks.

All these pages are internally linked & are created using an automated template to reduce effort while creating new pages!


"The best place to hide a dead body is the second page of Google search!"

Ah! The endless struggle of climbing the SEO ladder! And truly it is an endless journey. You don't SEO optimise your site once and then forget about it. It's a forever moving goal post.

So today we cover a classic tale of "going where your customers are" — a story of how Zapier built an SEO powerhouse producing 1.6 million monthly visitors to its website!

Firstly, what does Zapier do?

Zapier is a simple workflow automation tool. It allows you to move information between apps & connect them to create automated workflows.

For example, you can use Zapier to integrate Google Sheets & Gmail. For every entry in your sheet that matches a particular criteria, you can send a standard mail.

With Zapier, you have the option to integrate many such applications to create simple or complex workflows.

How does Zapier drive traffic using SEO?

To drive traffic to their website Zapier created two different sets of landing pages. Let's learn more about them!

1) Targeting "App Integration" keywords

Another top-performing Zapier subfolder is the /apps landing page. This set of pages accounts for ~15% of Zapier's total traffic with 235K monthly visitors!

The idea behind creating these pages is simple. Zapier wants to target all users who are searching for ways to connect different apps.

For example, if I search "gmail google sheet integration", I'll find Zapier's "Gmail + Google Sheets" integration page (/apps/gmail/integrations/google-sheets) as the first result.

On top of that, Zapier very cleverly organises these pages, so they are internally linked (increases authority) & it's easy to navigate through them.

This set of pages forms a 4 stage hierarchy, where each stage links to the next stage. I have outlined this below with the example of Gmail.

A) The Main Page

This is the main apps page. All apps that can be automated using Zapier are present here. So it's very much like a directory of apps.

You'll find different app categories here to help your search. Clicking on any of these apps will lead you to the App profile page.

URL Structure — zapier.com/apps

Zapier SEO case study

B) General App Profile Page

This is the main app profile page. Each app present on the main page has its own profile page.

This page includes:

  1. general information about the app
  2. popular ways to create a workflow using Gmail

URL Structure — zapier.com/apps/gmail/integrations

Zapier SEO case study

C) Specific App-to-App Integrations

This set of pages talks about different app integrations. Let's take the Gmail + Google Sheets integration page as an example. Both Gmail & Google Sheet profile page links to their integration page.

This page has a list of popular Gmail + Google Sheets workflows. For example:

  1. Send email via Gmail when Google Sheet rows are updated.
  2. Add rows to Google Sheets with new emails on Gmail

URL Structure — zapier.com/apps/gmail/integrations/google-sheets

Zapier SEO case study

D) Zaps for different App combinations

Workflows are called "zaps" in the Zapier universe. These individual pages have details about different zaps possible between the 2 apps

.

URL Structure — zapier.com/apps/gmail/integrations/google-sheets/2618/save-new-gmail-emails-matching-certain-traits-to-a-google-spreadsheet

Zapier SEO case study

With the help of these pages, the /apps landing page as a whole is able to target highly relevant keywords like:

  • flock integrations
  • Gmail to Mailchimp
  • slack gmail integrations
  • onenote gmail

These pages are also internally linked, so ultimately, the authority from the main /apps page (URL rating or UR = 75) flows to the very niche "zaps for apps" page.

Zapier SEO case study

And of course, Zapier uses a similar template for each stage of the hierarchy, so these pages are definitely scalable!

2) Writing Blogs on "Best Apps"

Zapier has written blogs on the top apps in a particular category.

For example, they've written blogs on the best URL shorteners, the best note-taking apps, the best to-do list apps, etc.

Zapier SEO case study

These blogs rank for very high volume & high difficulty keywords, singularly managing to bring 900K monthly organic traffic, ie. 60% of traffic to their site!

For instance, here's how the three blogs mentioned above perform.

  1. Best URL shorteners
    • Traffic ⇒ 63K
    • Keywords ⇒ URL shortener, shorten link, shorten URL, etc.
  2. Best note-taking apps
    • Traffic ⇒ 53.8K
    • Keywords ⇒ best note-taking apps, note-taking apps, digital note-taking apps, etc…
  3. Best to-do list apps
    • Traffic ⇒ 53.7K
    • Keywords ⇒ to-do list, to-do list apps, best to-do list, etc…

Here's how Zapier must have managed to rank for such high difficulty keywords:

  1. Writing high quality, SEO optimized content (kind of a default, though)
  2. Internally linking their best app blogs to build good authority on the topic, "Best Apps". So in the future, if they write another such blog, it's bound to rank because they have high topical authority.
  3. Acquiring high-quality backlinks to increase their website/page authority (Currently, they have a Domain Rating or DR = 91 🤯)

How we created 'Best Apps' blogs at scale

At our startup, Remote Tools, we have also done something similar. We created category pages that list the best products in a specific category.

But, here's how it's different from Zapier. Our pages are scalable, that is, the contents of these pages are generated automatically. That's unlike Zapier, where they've listed the top 10 tools manually.

Confused? Well, to give you more context, Remote Tools is a repository of tools used for remote collaboration.

The makers submit their tools, to add them to Remote Tools. And, once added, these tools appear under their own product page.

The tools are also segmented into different categories. So, based on the category assigned, the particular tool will appear under the said category page. There's also a custom introduction for each category, which gives the page a more blog-like look!

For example, we have a category page called "35 Best Design Collaboration Tools". So, all the tools under the 'design collaboration' category, automatically appear under this category page.

We have also, of course, optimized these pages, so it ranks for keywords like "best design collaboration tools".

But, how do you convert these visitors to users?

Now, why would a user searching for the "best note-taking apps" or "URL shortener" end up using Zapier for automation?

Well, Zapier has a very clever reason behind creating these blogs. To understand it, let's take a look at the "Best note-taking apps" blog.

The list contains apps like 'Microsoft One Note', 'Evernote', 'Apple Notes', etc. All these apps can be integrated with other apps using Zapier. For example, I can create a workflow connecting Evernote & Google Calendar.

Basically, the idea is — if a user is using one of these apps frequently, they might want to create an automated workflow with that app in the future.

Clever, right? So now, to convince these users to try Zapier, it adds a bunch of CTAs to nudge readers to check out Zapier.

Here are some examples —

  1. CTAs with text saying "Automate your note-taking" — relevant to the content and helps to turn visitors into users.
  2. In-text prompts asking readers to check out ways to "use automation to improve how you put your notes to work..."
  3. At the end of each list item (OneNote in this case), you'll find examples showing different OneNote integrations possible with Zapier.
Zapier SEO case study

There are many more such examples. And of course, Zapier just uses a similar template across these "best apps" pages to convert users.

So, what are the key takeaways?

  1. Writing SEO-optimised blogs is one of the best ways to drive traffic to your website.
  2. Integrating CTAs within your blogs at relevant places will help nudge users to check out your product.
  3. Zapier's parent-child /apps pages are created such that the end children pages that explain possible workflows can rank for very niche & long-tail keywords. So instead of writing individual guides explaining all the existing zaps, you can create such automated pages which need less effort.
  4. Make sure your high authority pages link to other pages to flow the authority juice throughout your website.
  5. When you have automated templates, you can create pages at scale & reduce manual work. Templated pages are the key to SEO at scale.
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BankBazaar's SEO strategy to get 22.6M monthly organic traffic!

Amazon-backed BankBazaar is one of the rare startups that have stood the test of time! Founded in 2008, during the financial crisis, this fintech company now makes INR 156 crores in revenue.

One of their ACE SEO marketing strategies is a simple tool that doesn't require them to write tons of content, and still gets them millions of users!

So, what is this tool we are talking about? Well, Bank Bazaar has this /ifsc-code subfolder that brings in 1.29M traffic out of their total 22.6M monthly traffic! This simple basically tells you the IFSC code of every bank in the country. All you have to do is to select your bank details and press enter!

There are 4 input items that you can enter - bank name, state, district and the branch. The URL changes to the specific input item it changes to. This allows them to rank for a range of different keywords depending on the 4 inputs.

This is a simple programmatic SEO strategy that relies on a database and creates thousands of different pages. So, BankBazaar doesn't have to work on creating each individual page, just filling the database content. It's that simple!

SEO 101: How we scaled our startup to 1M monthly traffic!

The organic traffic on Remote Tools went up from close to 0 to 1 million in the span of a few months, all thanks to SEO

Remote Tools is our sister website, a platform that lists tools for remote collaboration

We were religiously adding tools to our website to assist remote workers. But, our reach was limited and we had next to 0 organic visitors. We also had curated newsletters and interviews, all in vain.

Soon, we realized that while using the tools on our website, people had queries around the usage. Existing results addressing them were of poor quality.

After some digging, we found out that these queries had huge SEO potential - they had a high volume and low competition. So we set out to solve these queries ourselves.

Here's what we did:
1) Keyword research - We checked for ideas online and on competitor websites. Then, we applied strict filters to the volume, difficulty and domain rating of these queries, and verified the intent.
2) Writing quality content - The key here is to write for humans. So, the team found the best solutions and wrote SEO-optimized blogs. These were scrutinized to ensure readability and ease of understanding.

Results weren't overnight, but in a couple months we had blogs in the top 10. Once we built authority around a topic, it was easy to rank for these. Now, 115 of our blogs are at the first position for at least one keyword :))