How I Increased Organic Search Traffic for The Tix Blog by Over 700% in 7 Months

Lots of SaaS companies are investing in content marketing — particularly SEO right now. Why? Because organic website traffic can generate leads and eventually, conversions. I’ve always thought of SEO as an investment that will generate results in months, and even years down the line. So it’s no surprise that I went mini-viral for claiming my work on SEO for Tix in this tweet, months after I started taking it seriously.

I’ve been handling content marketing at Tix for quite a while, but I honestly only started paying lots of attention to our SEO after a few months of starting. If you know me, then you know I was very excited to take on this role. And this made the Tix blog an especially interesting project to work on and learn from.

On a random day at the end of a random month, I noticed how low our organic search traffic numbers were compared to our competition when compiling my monthly marketing report and decided to do something about it. I knew that SEO can be a great way to capture leads because people are constantly searching for things online, and we should jump at the opportunity to be in those SERPs.

At this point, our organic search traffic was low, and the third-highest traffic source for the Tix blog. This basically meant I had been moving on vibes all this while, and now was the time to be a lot more strategic.

About 7 months down the line, our organic search sessions have grown by 700% monthly, and our total SERP impressions almost doubled. Here’s an overview of some improvements we noticed in that time:

• A 700% increase in monthly organic search traffic.
• A 48% increase in SERP impressions.
• A 160% increase in organic search clicks.
• Several first-page rankings for targeted keywords.
• A few featured snippets for targeted keywords.

As I said before, I needed to be a lot more strategic. Here’s a breakdown of what I did to get these results:

Everyone knows one of the first steps to creating any good marketing strategy is research, so that’s where I started. Before this, a lot of content on the Tix blog was centred around promoting upcoming events, creator spotlights, Tix feature highlights, and a few event tips. After speaking one-on-one with a few event organisers, and our senior growth associate, I understood some of our target audience’s pain points and started to frame a new content strategy around it.

At this point, I had an idea of the kind of content I wanted to write, but I needed a more strategic approach. That’s where keyword research came in. I used a Chrome plugin called Keyword Surfer that shows related keywords you can target when you search one keyword. It also gives some insight into search volumes in our target area — Nigeria. Here’s what it looks like when you search for ‘picnic spot’.

Interestingly, I recently saw a tweet from Jasmine Jade recently about how social media can also be a great tool for keyword research. I found this interesting because I included searching keywords I wanted to write about on Twitter in my keyword research strategy.

My audience and keyword research led me to consider some fresh content ideas for the Tix blog. I quickly realised that outside the usual scope of our content at the time, another content pillar we could explore was giving our audience some information about going out in Nigeria. I figured that things like this are commonly searched for on Google, so why not experiment with an article and see if it ranks?

My first experiment of this nature ended up bringing the Tix blog tons of organic search traffic, and remained the article with the most traffic and views even months after it was published. I wrote this article to target the keyword ‘picnic venues’ and some other related keywords, and the results were incredible. It’s no wonder it got lots of traffic, because this article on great picnic venues is the featured snippet for ‘picnic venues’, ‘picnic venues in Lagos’, and ‘picnic spots in Lagos’. And while it didn’t get the featured snippet for other keywords like ‘picnic spots’, ‘picnic spots in Accra’ and ‘picnic venues in Accra’, it ranked top 5 on the SERPs.

There’s a lot of related content on the Tix blog. So honestly, linking to articles internally was never something I had to think thoroughly about. It seemed quite easy to me, but here are a few tips I got from reading articles and newsletters that I implemented:

• Link to important or related pages.
• Use anchor text that contain targeted keywords.
• Don’t use the title of the hyperlinked article as your anchor text.
• Add links from high-ranking pages to new posts (if they’re relevant).
• Don’t go overboard.

Creating articles that provide value to event organizers had always been a part of the content strategy at Tix, but in the past, this didn’t always involve insights from our audience research. So of course, while trying to move away from working on vibes to a more strategic approach, what our audience wanted to learn from us became a huge part of our blog content.

One of our goals was to make the Tix blog an all-in-one resource for everything you need to know about planning events in Nigeria and Ghana. Or at the very least, almost everything you need to know 😅 I’ve also seen lots of resources that say good and valuable content typically does well on SERPs. This led to lots of ‘how to’ content that got good results too! For instance, our article on planning a tech conference got a featured snippet on Google.

My journey writing content for the Tix Blog has been the most remarkable learning experience of my career. When I initially took SEO and content writing seriously, I never anticipated I’d grow our traffic by this much in just seven months. If there’s just one lesson I’ve learned, it’s that sometimes you need to go back to the drawing board and start all over again to succeed.

If you're on a similar journey, I hope this is helpful for your own SEO efforts. I’m confident that following some of these tips can grow your blog's organic search traffic, as it has for ours.