Case Study: Scaling from 11,000 to 65,000+ Online Sessions in 6 Months

For brides-to-be, a bachelorette party is one of many highlights leading up to the wedding. But with the excitement of party planning comes many anxieties and uncertainties around where to go, what to see, who pays for what, and so on. A recent Growth Machine client offers a complete bachelorette-party planning experience through their app, where the event planner can message all guests, book one-of-a-kind experiences, split the bill, or even launch a poll between party-goers.  

Prior to partnering with us, the brand had an established digital presence with nearly 1 million app downloads and more than 150,000 followers on social media. However, they failed to leverage SEO as an inbound marketing channel, resulting in a paltry 2,500 monthly organic sessions on their site. In March 2021, the Client employed Growth Machine to increase their inbound traffic and reach a wider audience.

The Business Problem: Relying Strictly on Digital Word-of-Mouth Marketing 

Before working with us, the brand’s customer acquisition strategy strictly relied on digital word-of-mouth marketing to acquire new users, which limited their pool of prospective customers. While they established an active following on Instagram and TikTok, they struggled to convert social media followers to website and blog engagement.

Without an SEO strategy, the brand’s website saw roughly 11,000 total sessions in January 2021. Of these hits, approximately 2,500 (~20%) stemmed from organic searches.

In other words, over three quarters of the client’s web traffic came from those who already knew about the app. By not harnessing SEO to aid their growth, the brand was missing countless opportunities to connect with potential new users, while spending their digital marketing budget effectively re-selling their product to customers who were already bought in.

The client hired us to scale their online brand awareness in order to capture that untapped audience. As part of our partnership, we were tasked with developing the brand’s library of website content, increasing organic traffic, and ultimately facilitating new app downloads.

The Solution: Capture Searchers By Getting Into the Mind of the User

Our SEO and content strategy was designed to target and capture new users with the intent of enticing them into an email sequence from which the client could nurture each prospect. We positioned the client as the go-to resource for bachelorette party planning expertise. Our messaging emphasized the benefits of the app format – such as ease of access, and the ability to access or organize lots of related information in one place – and positioned the app as the most up-to-date resource for bachelorette party tips, logistics, and inspiration.

The Keyword Research: Knowing What to Rank For

We focused the keyword research strategy on answering commonly asked questions surrounding bachelorette parties. Our content strategists planned articles that fell into three primary buckets:

1. Questions that might be awkward to ask: Who pays for a bachelorette party? Who should you invite to a bachelorette party? While party planners may avoid posing these questions in person, they would certainly type them into Google.
2. Trendy party themes: Our writers drafted content on topics like bachelorette party outfits, swimsuits, cake ideas, and coordinated t-shirts. The result was visually attractive (and highly shareable!) content to capture new users.
3. Geographically-centric content: The brand offered one-of-a-kind, bookable experiences in popular bachelorette party destinations across the United States. So content in this bucket focused on geo-centric keywords like “Nashville bachelorette party” or “Disneyland bachelorette party.” 

By diversifying the content in this way, we were able to account for the diversity of bachelorette event types, and appeal to planners at all different stages of the planning process.

The Tone and Voice: Highlighting the Client’s Brand Personality

As is common with established brands, this client came to us with an established brand personality that had been developed on their social media channels. 

our articles fit seamlessly with the rest of their written content portfolio, so we took special care to understand their brand voice and tone and ensure consistency. 

We developed a custom style guide to work from. Our editors constructed a comprehensive brand-specific document to act as a central repository for the specifics of the client’s brand voice, tone, messaging, and important calls to action. 

By taking the time to construct this detailed guide and training our writers to use it consistently, we were able to capture the brand’s vibrant, casual, and fun tone and produce content that incorporated seamlessly with the rest of their content library. 

The Cadence: Optimizing Existing Content While Publishing New Articles 

From the outset of the project, we posted eight articles per month to the brand blog. 

Those eight monthly articles included both new, keyword-optimized content, and optimizations (rewrites) of existing content. New content is an important way to diversify the site’s reach, and target new users by providing answers to a broader subset of brand-relevant questions. Simultaneously, regularly publishing new content signals to Google that the site is a well-maintained source of reliable and authoritative information, which Google can confidently serve up in search engine results pages (SERPs). In other words, new content builds authority, which builds rankings. 

At the same time, optimizing previously-published, but poorly-ranking content is an efficient way to establish new rankings without waiting for a new URL to be crawled and ranked by Google. In this case, the brand had previously published “City Guides” with a low word count on their blog, discussing attractions in a given city. By optimizing, lengthening, and improving the existing copy in these posts, we were able to provide some quick wins as we saw these articles move up in SERP rankings fairly efficiently. 

The results of this two-pronged approach were immediate, with hits from organic search traffic nearly doubling from 2,500 to 4,400 within the first month of publishing.

Two months later, traffic grew exponentially again with 7,400 organic sessions, a nearly 40% increase MoM, further reinforcing the efficacy of this two-pronged approach that alternated new and optimized content. 

The Results: Growing Inbound Traffic 6-Fold in 6 Months 

First, our SEO strategy doubled the brand’s organic traffic in a single month. Then, two months later, the brand’s organic traffic nearly doubled again. 

In August of 2021, just five months into the relationship, the client received over 15,000 sessions from organic traffic alone, outpacing the 12,000 total sessions the site received in January that year. 

By September of 2021, our SEO strategy led to an all-time high of 65,400 total monthly sessions for the brand. In half a year, inbound traffic grew six-fold, creating a wider pool of potential users for the app. 

Today, the brand ranks on the first page of Google for many coveted search phrases, including “Nashville bachelorette party” and “who pays for the bachelorette party”. We transformed the brand blog from an untapped resource into a well-oiled marketing channel to capture users who otherwise might never have discovered the brand.

What Could Your Brand Accomplish With 50,000+ Additional Monthly Sessions?

Our targeted SEO strategy succeeded in increasing the brand’s traffic six-fold in six months, tapping into a pool of potential customers the brand would not have reached without investing in keyword-optimized content. 

By tailoring our keyword research to address some of the less commonly discussed, but frequently asked, questions related to planning bachelorette parties, we were able to establish the brand as an authority in its space, thereby skyrocketing rankings and inbound organic traffic to the brand website. 

Our work created a funnel of thousands of new prospective customers, and transformed the blog into a powerful sales tool for the company.

Ultimately, we Increased brand awareness which, in turn, led to increased app downloads and positioned the brand as one of the most trusted within the bachelorette party planning space.

When you’re ready to exponentially grow your inbound organic traffic, contact us to find out how Growth Machine can create a custom SEO strategy for your brand.