SEO content is great for bolstering traffic to your website, but increased traffic on its own is a useless metric. The real challenge is bringing in readers who will continue to engage with your website and product, ultimately leading to more conversions.
This was the puzzle Snyk and Megawatt put their heads together to solve. Luckily, collaboration has long been the theme of Megawatt’s relationship with Snyk, a cybersecurity unicorn that delivers a world-renowned developer security platform. Writing for a DevSecOps audience is inherently challenging, so Snyk has long relied on Megawatt for our ability to dive deep into the subject matter while still producing crystal clear content.
Snyk and Megawatt work together on topical blog posts, fun engagement-focused social posts, and reports, as well as strategic SEO content — specifically, using content to leverage organic search as a traffic and customer acquisition channel.
Last year, we made a data-informed choice to dedicate a significant portion of our scope toward mid-funnel content that appeals to searchers looking into the symptoms and problems that Snyk solves. After giving these articles time to mature in the search results, the company saw significant performance gains in Q4 2023, including:
- A 20% increase in search-optimized content engagement (vs the previous quarter).
- 380 new Snyk accounts created after landing on search-optimized content.
- 30 product demos booked after landing on search-optimized content.
Here’s why Snyk and Megawatt are committed to a full-funnel SEO strategy now and in the future.
Great SEO momentum, but a need for more engagement
When conducting a content analysis in late 2022, Megawatt identified an opportunity to add another layer of performance — and funnel depth — to Snyk’s robust SEO engine. The team noted that content was doing a great job driving organic search traffic. However, because much of this content was top-of-funnel (ToFu) and educational in nature, many readers bounced from these pages without delving deeper into the website.
ToFu content casts a wide net, drives large traffic volumes, and attracts attention from folks who may or may not ever be interested in buying the product. For example, someone searching “open source license” on Google might be a developer with compliance needs (a good fit for Snyk), or it could be a lawyer who heard the term in the news and wanted to learn what it means (not a good fit for Snyk).
“We wanted to target readers who might want more than a quick answer to a question, people with deeper technical challenges that Snyk can solve.” – Adam Patton, Content Team Lead at Megawatt
In order to reach customers lower in the funnel, Megawatt developed a plan to produce SEO content geared toward their target audience’s challenges to drive readers to additional content, product pages, and, ultimately, bolster account creation or demo requests.
With Snyk, we determined that a signal of success would be a decreasing bounce rate, defined under Google Universal Analytics as the percentage of site sessions in which users viewed only a single page.*
*Following the transition to Google Analytics 4 in 2023, we shifted our goal to increasing content engagement rate, which is the inverse of bounce rate.
Expanding into MoFu content for SEO
Megawatt recommended baking middle-of-funnel (MoFu) content into Snyk’s strategy to boost content engagement while still leveraging search as a primary distribution channel. In the context of SEO, we chose to define MoFu content as articles that:
- Target long-tail keywords.
- Speak to readers who fit the ideal customer profile.
- Address specific pain points or jobs to be done.
- Promote key product value propositions.
- Link to other product-related content.
For marketers like us who use the awareness spectrum to complement the traditional funnel, MoFu content for SEO focuses heavily on problem-aware potential buyers who are searching topics and questions that indicate they may be a good fit for Snyk’s products (e.g., “how to remediate vulnerabilities” or “application security best practices”). Solution-aware content, which overlaps with the bottom-of-the-funnel (BoFu), captures queries that signal the person might be actively looking to buy (e.g., “static code analysis tools” or “cloud native security platform”).
“Refreshingly, Megawatt understands the importance of moving readers through a funnel — not just running up vanity numbers. As someone tackling big SEO projects with a small SEO team, Megawatt has been a welcomed partner in conversion strategy and execution.” – Ben Joels, SEO Lead at Snyk
To build strong inputs for the new MoFu strategy, Megawatt reviewed Snyk’s updated product messaging and identified the most valuable features for each product. Next, we reverse-engineered the customer journey to determine the symptoms, questions, and jobs-to-be-done directly or tangentially related to those features. Our team then used those topics to plan an editorial calendar aligned with Snyk’s campaigns and marketing priorities.
