Going from 0 to 200k traffic in 12 months - AIContentfy case study
AIContentfy, a simple-to-use AI-generated content tool, used AI-generated content to grow quickly from 0 to generating thousands of monthly leads. And yes, this case study is about ourselves using the products and services we're now selling as SEO is the only marketing we do and we're big fans of our own tool :) Within 12 months, AIContentfy leveraged AI-generated content to produce 6,000 articles while also building close to 600 dofollow links. In this case study, we will explore the results we achieved in depth, demonstrating the potential of AI-driven content generation and link building in supporting our Product-Led Growth model.
Background of AIContentfy
AIContentfy is a SaaS tool for companies wanting to scale their SEO content quickly so it's suitable for a very large audience of companies who want to generate more leads through their website.
aicontentfy.com - Content generation tool
As a bootstrapped startup, we didn't have any other resources other than our own tool and a small team of link builders. We wanted to invest all our efforts in SEO because it's one of the only sustainable channels for growth.
When we started out, we only had a waitlist set up to gather leads of interested marketers. That waitlist signup appeared as a call-to-action on all our pages, blog posts included. Now we have a video call-to-action that converts many of our readers.
We believe in AI-generated content and SEO so much that it's the only marketing we've used. Other companies in the market use social media and ads which makes us think they don't even use their own tool (you can quickly check it out by Googling site:aicontentfy.com to see how many pages they've published).
Our domain age is 9 months at the time of writing, which also influences the results to some extent.
What SEO strategy we used?
We have named our SEO strategy Emergent SEO - it simply means publishing AI-generated content fast, seeing what get's impressions from Google using Search Console, then building links to those articles to have them rank. When page get's 200+ monthly traffic we go in and optimize the content further by adding custom images and expert quotes.
Publishing content in clusters
We designed our tool around publishing content in clusters, meaning you can generate multiple titles from all sorts of angles to cover the topic fully and establish topic authority. For example with just the keyword "Content marketing", our tool has generated titles such as:
- Breaking the Mold: Innovative Content Marketing Strategies for Small Businesses
- 5 Surprising Benefits of Implementing a Content Marketing Strategy
- Why SEO is essential for content marketing
We generate new clusters with around 50 posts per cluster weekly and publish them directly to Hubspot CMS through our integration. Time spent on publish articles takes less than a minute per article. We have previously published thousands of posts at once and it has never had a negative influence on our rankings.
We not only publish content on topics that strictly relate to AI-generated articles, but we talk about topics such as lead generation and startups, because those are part of our value proposition and customer segments. Our philosophy on content is to talk about the problems our potential customers have and they will find us through our content. Then it's our job to convert them through great call-to-actions. A lot of marketers focus on immediate conversion rates but forget that brand awareness is still a very real thing as not everyone is looking to buy right now.
As we publish a lot of content weekly, we wanted to automate internal linking so we added that as a feature to AIContentfy. The feature tries to find 3-5 long-tail keywords in your article that matches the title of another post.
Why we won't do in-depth keyword research
Publishing content in clusters once a week and letting AI generate the topics also allows us to discover new keywords that we wouldn't have thought of.
Keyword research tools are constantly lying about the search volume so we relying on actual traffic numbers from Google. Here you can see 67k in traffic on Ahrefs while at the moment we had 200k in analytics. A lot of marketers have also noticed this issue and no business should base their marketing and sales strategy on keyword research alone.
Ahrefs showing us a measly 67k in organic traffic.
The way we do "keyword research" is:
- We publish content fast on the topics that we know relate to our business
- We check Google Search Console data after a week or two to see what keyword queries Google is sending us traffic from
- We discover new keywords that relate to our business but don't yet have a topic cluster on and publish 50 articles on it.
Building backlinks from high-authority sites
To make content perform in search, backlinks are also needed because Google uses them as trust signals to assign rank. So during the course of 9 months we also built 600 high-quality dofollow links while getting organic mentions from sites like Forbes, Entrepreneur.com and Hackernoon to our AI-generated articles.
The way we decide which pages to build links to is:
- The page has to have very direct business relevance to us (covering a topic from all long-tail keyword angles might sometimes mean titles that are a bit outside of what you're selling but still contribute to topic authority)
- It's not already ranking #1 for the main keyword the article is targeting but is showing a good amount of impressions on Search Console. Focusing on articles that have high impressions even if your rank is low means there's a lot of potential traffic there if the article just gets more backlinks. (You can always check Ahrefs on how many links an article should need but our default is 3-5 each.)
There's several ways to build high-quality links but the easiest way would be for you to hire our team to do it for you.
Key results
It's important to understand that SEO results usually keep getting better even if you stopped investing in it immediately. Therefore we expect the numbers published here to only go up.
AIContentfy's click and impression growth on Google Search Console.
We generated 6,000 articles and built 600 backlinks which resulted in:
- Going from 0 to 200k in traffic over a 12-month period.
- Our CTR has been varying depending on the trendiness of "ChatGPT" as a topic.
- Generating thousands of monthly inbound leads for our tool - SEO is now a sustainable customer acquisition channel for us.
- Ranking for 60k keywords of which 4,600 are in top 10 and we're ranking #1 on keywords such as "best article generator", "marketing and entrepreneurship" and "future of chatgpt" for which we have never built links to.
How AIContentfy's keyword rankings started trending after using AIContentfy.
- Content engagement is around 40 seconds (this is before our SERP mode feature) on average per session (it keeps improving when we iterate on our algorithm). We have a very engaging video CTA embedded in all articles right before the second sub-header so we know a lot of people read get there.
- This traffic has generated us 10k+ signups and we have bootsrapped fully to a team of 7 people.
- The built links grew our domain rating from 0 to 70 and in the future building more links is even easier because of it while making our new content rank faster.
Summary
AI-generated content is here to stay and in the future it will be indistinguishable from content written by humans. It's also a great way to cover topics that companies would never assign a writer to.
Our content is only going to get better as we're improving our algorithm so we're expecting to see even better results in the future.
Want the same results?
On top of the self-service tool, AIContentfy offers done-for-you AI-content projects and also link building as a subscription service so you get everything you need under one roof. Check out our pricing or message the team at sales@aicontentfy.com with your project.