"As a B2B marketing agency, Brighttail depends on Semrush to enable our data-driven content marketing strategies. We use Semrush for multiple initiatives, from content to performance marketing, and beyond. Undoubtedly, the benefits that we get from the software are tremendous."
Linh Pham, Content Marketing Manager, Brighttail
About Brighttail:
Brighttail is a Marketing-as-a-Service (MaaS) agency that works with high-tech B2B businesses around the world. As an agency, Brighttail’s goal is ‘to be your growth partner for life’. Brighttail has built their business — using a combination of world-class offshore resources, agile marketing systems, and a MaaS operating model — to provide a scalable, cost-effective marketing solution for growth-hungry businesses.
Business Challenge: Gain rank against competitors and increase organic traffic
Ricksoft, Inc. is a software vendor that develops project management apps for Atlassian products. In the face of declining website traffic and evaluations, Ricksoft engaged Brighttail to overhaul the company’s marketing strategy, gain rank against its SEO-savvy competitors, and reignite app evaluations.
During the preliminary research, Brighttail identified that Ricksoft was losing organic traffic opportunities to competitors across important keywords due to a lack of SEO content. Using Semrush’s tools, the agency analyzed the content strategies of Ricksoft’s competitors to determine what they were doing effectively and where there were opportunities for Ricksoft to gain rank.
Solution: Keyword Research, Competitive Analysis, and Content Creation
Brighttail kicked off the marketing campaign with an SEO analysis. “This would widen the top of the funnel and ultimately drive more buyers to the conversion stage,” says Linh Pham, Content Marketing Manager at Brighttail.
To ensure Ricksoft had the right messaging and supporting content, Brighttail used three principles to determine the campaign direction:
1. The business value of content;
2. How the agency could help prospects solve their problems;
3. The linkable asset (lead magnet) the agency could deliver.
“Instead of pulling the top keywords directly from Keyword Planner (by Google Ads) and simply populating content around them, we looked at the
search intent and grouped keywords into relevant categories. Using a combination of Semrush features such as
Content Marketing Platform, Keyword Research, and Competitive Analysis, we could effectively capture content opportunities in three steps,” says Linh.
1. Conducting competitive analysis and claiming their space
Brighttail walked through this step with Ricksoft, their client, to make sure that they chose the right “battle”.
“We started by using the product positioning to identify the buyer personas. Then, we mapped out core SEO keywords and identified the top competitors in the market. Once that was done, we started to dig deeper into the competitors’ secrets,” says Linh.
“The Keyword Gap tool gave us a great head start, as it uncovered their best-performing keywords that our client wasn't ranking for.”
Next, Brighttail saved the chosen keywords in the Keyword Manager for content brainstorming later.
2. Researching content topics
“Now comes the fun part! And probably our most used tool of Semrush — Topic Research. This is where we narrow down the content ideas based on the keywords identified in the previous step,” says Linh.
“The Topic Research tool offers extensive insights into the content that works. We often look into the question-type content suggestions.”
“The backlinks report is another important criterion that we consider. Ideally, we want to create content that’s not only helpful to the intended audience but also serves as a linkable asset on the website,” adds Linh.
They then populated these topics into a content mood board. Based on this, the team determined the right content topics that would be substantial and unique to the target audience.
This exercise enabled Brighttail to strategize Ricksoft’s editorial calendar. The goal was to deliver more unique content, while investing their content effort in the right space, for the right audience, every time.
Combining all the steps above, Brighttail created a content roadmap for their client to support all the marketing goals:
— Gain rank for important keywords;
— Increase brand awareness (as a software vendor);
— Drive leads via the website (to Ricksoft’s app listing on the Atlassian Marketplace).
3. Content development and optimization
“Of course, the real magic happened when we sat down to write the content. SEO Content Template was a huge help with brief writing! We could count on our writers to provide SEO-friendly content thanks to this tool,” says Linh.
“Notice the backlink recommendations - we found these extremely helpful in content distribution as well.”
Results
From the beginning, Brighttail’s main goal was to help Ricksoft win with a strong presence in organic search.
“Through consistent content publishing and distribution, we managed to deliver on our promises,” says Linh.
- The average keyword position grew to 21 (up from 77) within 6 months.
“It was all about data. As we continuously monitored the performance of all topics, we were able to identify the highest-converting content and scale it to make the most of our client’s marketing spend,” says Linh.
Here's how Ricksoft's visibility for their core keywords grew over time:
- 2,191% traffic growth in 6 months
The increasing SERP ranking also translated into exponential growth in Ricksoft’s year-over-year traffic and a steady increase in app evaluation conversion rates.
