Venngage makes it incredibly easy to create professional-looking infographics. And at the time that we publish this article, they have 70 employees listed on LinkedIn and are estimated to generate between five and $10 million in revenue every single year.
In this growth marketing case study, we’re going to dig into how Venngage was able to 100X their organic monthly traffic from 5K to 500K in just five years. By the end of this article, you’re going to have four clear strategies that you can think about deploying for your own website or business.
What Does Venngage Even Do?
Venngage makes documents and boring data more interesting through infographics. While they started out by just covering infographics, they’ve quickly expanded their product to cover a variety of other use cases as well. For example, when you check out their website, you’ll see that they also covered timelines, mind maps, reports, guides, and more.
They’re designed as a helpful SaaS tool for a variety of different teams across any organization. That includes teams like the marketing and communication team, the human resources team, the executive team, as well as for employee trainings. Now that we have a general understanding of what Venngage does, let’s talk about what makes them so impressive.
What Makes Venngage Impressive?
In my opinion, Venngage is an impressive company to study because according to public knowledge, they’ve only raised one serious round of funding and that was a pre-seed round back in 2012. Back in the day, they actually interviewed for Y Combinator and they bombed their interview and didn’t get in. From the interview that I dug up, I noticed that the CEO shared that they had a 50K seed round as well as 250K from the Canadian government that was given to hire three developers.
What this means is that Venngage has largely grown organically through a bootstrapped approach, as opposed to having to find additional funding in order to hire new employees to their team. For being a company that started around 2012, I can attest that a lot of companies at that time were raising serious rounds of funding in order to get their companies off the ground. So for Venngage to take a largely bootstrapped approach to building their business is seriously impressive. What this sort of internally driven growth means for them is that they largely are still in complete control of their destiny as a company.
Whatever they want to do with their product. They can largely do with little to no oversight. Then what the CEO wants to do. Now let’s dig into four strategies that Venngage was able to use in order to 100X their monthly organic traffic.
Strategy 1: Exhaust 5Ws and How content
The first digital marketing strategy they implemented was exhausting their five W’s and how content. If you look at Venngage’s SEMRush profile, you can see some of the long tail phrases that they’re ranking for. You can see here that they are ranked really well for terms like what is an infographic, how to make an infographic, what is a marketing plan, what’s a pictogram, how to make a poster or how to make an ebook.
These are all phrases that get thousands of monthly searches. And so when Venngage is able to rank for the top one to five spots for all of these terms, all of that stacks up to getting a lot of steady organic traffic. Digging more deeply into what these posts are all about, if we were to open them up, we would notice that they are some long form content that are rich with information, as well as a nice integration to Venngage as a product.
This is really great for Venngage because it means that when somebody searches for what is an infographic, they’ll not only learn what is an infographic from fulfilling of the intent from the article but they’re also going to find immediate ways that they can start making infographics with Venngage’s tool.
In fact, if we go ahead and add the word what into our filter for the long tails, we would see that 23K worth of their monthly traffic comes from just these phrases. From here, if we go ahead and add in the house statements and take a look at how many keywords that ranks for, we would notice that that brings in another 22K worth of monthly traffic.
What should be the key takeaway that you’re thinking of? Well, it should be, that you should always aim to answer the questions that people are always asking. By doing so and fulfilling that intent, you’ll get a ton of organic traffic to your website or your business.
Strategy 2: Create prolific landing pages
The second strategy that Venngage was able to deploy that allowed them to 100X their organic monthly traffic was to create prolific landing pages. If you take a look at Venggage’s homepage, you’ll notice some interesting things in their footer and that they’ve created a variety of series that are all landing pages for their product.
For example, if we take a look at the footer here, you’ll see that there is a best-in-class series where every single URL follows the feature sub folder structure. What this signals to Google is that they are a infographic maker, a timeline maker, report maker, mind map maker, as well as a presentation maker. By doing this, it results in a ton of meaningful traffic for them because it gives Google a clear understanding of what this product actually does.
What they do on these landing pages is that they focus on the different sorts of use cases for different audiences that may be using their product. And then they fulfill the intent of the person that is looking for that particular product. For example, if we just jump into Google and search for brochure maker, we’ll see that Venngage is a top result for brochure maker.
Doing the same thing we did when we were analyzing strategy number one, if we were to go ahead and filter for just these features pages, we would see that they make up 483K worth of the monthly organic traffic of Venngage. You’ll also notice on the screen here that this effort largely started in 2019 and had an immediate big impact for their business. What’s the takeaway that you should remember from this strategy? Bucket all the different use cases for your product or your service, and then create different landing pages that fulfill the intent of those different use cases.
Strategy 3: Find overlap with search intent
Venngage was already creating tools for infographics. And so, by creating all these different subpages for infographics, they essentially showed their authority for Google and also allowed them more opportunities for people to organically find these pages. It’s clear these efforts work because 60K of their monthly organic traffic is coming from these pages.
So the takeaway for you here should be to think about how your core product efforts can integrate with search intent. Ask yourself what problems are we solving and how does that overlap with the ways that people interact with Google. For example, if you run an online jewelry shop, something that you could do is you could realize that people search for jewelry based off the different types of jewelry. And from there, you could create different landing pages for each of these different types of jewelry, and then categorize your product catalog based off the different types.
By doing this, you would allow Google to have a better understanding of how everything fits into your overall site around jewelry.
Strategy 4: Long-tail SEO over long periods of time
The fourth strategy that Venngage has deployed is playing long tail SEO over long periods of time. When you take a look at Venngage’s site map, which is their directory of all of their past published blog posts, you would notice that over the last five years or so, they have consistently published content.
So as a result of this, they have hundreds of blog posts that are really long form content, rich in what they cover, and effective. What Venngage understood here was that in order for them to build a meaningful SEO mode, they would have to invest into the strategy over a multi-year time horizon. A common mistake I see is when startups only invest a couple months into their SEO efforts, and then they don’t actually work long enough to give themselves a shot, to see the organic traffic build from their efforts.
They’re too quick to pull the plug after three months when SEO will often take six to 12 months to actually start seeing returns from. When we dig more deeply into the timelines here, we noticed that Venngage really started getting serious around 2015 as they started tinkering around with the different types of topics that people would find interesting. Then by 2020, they are largely doing the strategies that worked well for them.
For example, in 2020, you’d notice that they published a ton of content around content marketing statistics, trends, and examples. The bulk of these sorts of posts were all about really building up the authority of Venngage as an authoritative source when it came to these sorts of topics. It should come as no surprise that Venngage’s blog is a huge factor for their organic search. In fact, it accounts for 464K worth of their organic monthly traffic.
Big takeaways
There are two things that I want you to remember from how Venggage grew their organic monthly traffic:
- The first one is make sure you’re prolific in your content creation so that you can figure out what works.
- The second big takeaway is double down once you strike gold. Once you figure out what works, it’s really important for you to really go balls to the wall in terms of continuing that strategy until you exhaust it to its full extent.
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