Creating Cascade's Category Through Product-Led SEO

Challenges

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• Cascade faced several unique goals and challenges as they prepared to secure Series A funding. At the organizational level, they aimed to showcase significant, scalable product-led revenue growth and leverage higher growth multiples to raise a larger Series A.

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• In addition, they faced the task of creating a category, addressing the previously unmet problem of strategy execution solutions. To achieve these objectives, Cascade wanted to establish an SEO function to shift to a product-led growth acquisition model.
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• By connecting end-user adoption with enterprise-level deals, they aimed to scale growth and their valuation for funding.

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Pain Points

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• - Awareness of Solutions: Cascade’s target users were unaware that strategy execution solutions existed, relying on makeshift tools like PowerPoint and Excel.
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• - Sales Cycle Complexity: The long sales cycles and intricate buyer journeys posed a challenge, especially given Cascade’s reliance on a sales-led motion.
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• - Desire for Product-Led Growth: Cascade needed to pivot toward a product-led growth approach to attract users without heavy reliance on sales outreach.
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• - Competitive Differentiation in a New Market: With no direct competitors but only adjacent solutions, establishing Cascade as the preferred choice in a “blue ocean” market required targeted messaging and differentiation.
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- Organic Revenue Growth for Funding: Demonstrating scalable, organic revenue growth was essential for securing further funding and maintaining investor interest.

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Validating SEO

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• Knowing the priorities and goals of the business we needed to gain an understanding of the product, business model, existing growth motions, market, customer pain points, resources, competitive advantages, SEO levers, and search environment to be able to address the main challenge and validate SEO as a predictable, scalable, and defensible revenue generating acquisition channel.

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• The main challenge for us was that potential customers were unaware that there was a solution to their problem of strategy execution.
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• We found that our ideal customer profiles (ICPs) were using makeshift solutions of project management tools, Microsoft Powerpoint, or Excel to track and execute their organizational strategy. This was a key insight into starting to shape an approach to this business challenge.
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• Being an Enterprise B2B SaaS product, we faced the barriers of long sales cycles and complex buyer journeys; this meant that there was a heavy reliance on the sales-led motion to get ICPs to see the product.
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• We did recognize the potential for a product-led SEO motion as the product facilitated templatization. This would be executed internally as the SEO levers were internal content creation because of the business model and product.
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• We discovered that the market was a blue ocean as there were no direct competitors, only adjacent solutions through using outdated approaches and generalized software.
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• The customer pain points we hypothesized were relatively obvious and confirmed through market research that executing, tracking, gaining buy-in, and adopting the strategy was incredibly difficult and impacted business performance.
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• There were many competitive advantages that we were going to leverage, these being; a differentiated product, first-mover advantage, team talent, topic expertise, and historical search context.
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• Taking this context we dived into our historical search data and started researching the search environment and made the discovery that the umbrella topic of strategy had significant search volume and opportunity.
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• We analyzed our search competitors' SEO and identified that they had targeted template keywords incorrectly and completely missed toolkits and strategic case studies.
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• Through this, we were able to hypothesize that by taking the differentiated approach of targeting templates, creating strategic toolkits, and case studies we’d win in search.
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• By the end of this process, we gathered the data and evidence needed to confidently forecast the impact of a well-structured SEO function.
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• This validation demonstrated SEO as a predictable, scalable, and defensible acquisition channel that drives revenue and facilitates the overarching business goals by addressing the main challenge identified.

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Strategic Approach

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• SaaS SEO strategy defines top-down how a business leverages its competitive advantages to solve its core challenges through SEO. This outlines the differentiated approach that we’ll take in executing specific SEO tactics to overcome these challenges.
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• The identified challenge was to reach and educate our ICPs that there was a solution to their problem of strategy execution. SEO was identified as the channel to access the entire buyer journey, from problem aware to customer.
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• The defined approach to overcome this challenge was to create differentiated content under the topic of strategy to address the entire buyer journey through leveraging our competitive advantages of a differentiated product, first mover advantage, team talent, topic expertise, and historical search context.

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• It was important that the metrics we tracked and reported clearly laddered up to the GTM North Star metric and overall business goals. Forecasting and attributing these metrics upwards to overall revenue contributed significantly to the process of securing internal buy-in.

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Cascade Results

monthly organic traffic: 670% increase

Referring domains: 16x increase over 24 months

top 3 keyword rankings: 700+ New to templates

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• ‍‍‍If you'd like to learn how we leveraged Lead Generation Content and Resources & Toolkits as tactics in our SEO strategy, along with the impact they had in scaling organic traffic 10x and multiplying MRR, get in touch below, and we can run you through the rest of the case study.
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Key Solutions Implemented

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• • - Programmatic product template library targeting different industries, verticals, and functions to implement a Product-Led SEO Motion.
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• - Transactional SEO landing pages for solutions and use cases.
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  • - 100+ strategy studies to showcase our topical expertise through case studies of top company strategies.
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  • - Full-funnel content focusing on all components of strategy to build awareness around Cascade and the fact there is a solution along with educating and driving conversion.
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  • - Downloadable resources & toolkits to educate on and facilitate strategy development, execution, and tracking.
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  • - Lead generation content such as eBooks, reports, and guides to facilitate conversion on content.

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Templates

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• Programmatic Product Templates

• The main PLG SEO tactic we executed was the creation of a programmatic product template library. We discovered through research a significant cumulative search volume for strategy templates and no product in search solving these problems.
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• We hypothesized that creating product templates targeting specific strategic plans based on industry, vertical, business function, etc would drive acquisition and that users would activate at a higher rate than the standard free trial.
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• To test this hypothesis we created a few template pages manually and utilized paid search to validate this tactic. Through this we noticed that these pages were driving conversions to the templates but the users weren't converting, we stepped back and developed a tailored onboarding experience and retested. These changes resulted in a higher activation rate than the standard free trials.
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• With our hypothesis validated and a significant search volume to capture in a relatively low-competition higher intent search environment, we created the templates and built the programmatic process to scale.
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• This enabled us to target high-intent long-tail keywords at scale with consistent page structure and content quality. This also facilitated topical authority giving us an advantage in visibility across varied segments of the market. The templates were also very effective CTAs for relevant middle-of-funnel and bottom-of-funnel content.
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• These programmatic product templates were a successful scalable, high-ROI SEO tactic that enabled us to address the varied challenges of our audience efficiently, all while increasing our organic visibility and becoming a foundational driver of growth for us, being a touch point for the majority of deals won.
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• This also played a major part in securing funding as it enabled us to showcase a successful PLG acquisition motion.

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Transactional SEO

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Programmatic money pages

We recognized the necessity of implementing Transactional SEO pages to effectively reach and convert high-intent users. This approach focused on creating dedicated pages that addressed specific solutions and use cases, aligning closely with the pain points of customer profiles.

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Solutions Pages:

‍Objective: Develop pages that directly present Cascade’s offerings as solutions to distinct strategic challenges.

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Approach: We identified common pain points among our target audience, such as difficulties in aligning team objectives and tracking strategic initiatives. Each solutions page was crafted to demonstrate how Cascade effectively addresses these issues, incorporating relevant keywords to enhance search visibility.

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Use Case Pages:

Objective: Showcase practical applications of Cascade across various industries and organizational contexts.

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Approach: By analyzing our existing customer base, we highlighted diverse scenarios where Cascade was instrumental, such as in medical organizations aiming to streamline their strategic planning or commercial goods conglomerates focusing on expansion growth management. These pages were optimized for industry-specific search terms to attract relevant traffic.

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Strategy Studies

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• We identified a gap in the market within strategic analysis and created a library for strategy studies. These studies were an excellent top-of-funnel tactic because they captured the attention of a broad audience interested in learning from successful, high-profile companies.
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• The studies positioned the platform as an expert in understanding and building successful strategies, directly aligning with our target audience and product, reinforcing brand positioning and trust.

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• Specifically from an SEO perspective, the Strategy studies focused on well-known brands that were keyword-rich, allowing us to capture organic traffic from users searching for these companies' strategies, all while generating awareness for users who might not have heard of Cascade.
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• The studies also provided sales with a company-specific content piece to utilize for outreach, or as part of the sales cycle.

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Full-Funnel Content

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• Due to the nature of the problem space and lacking awareness around the solution, we knew as part of our SEO strategy we needed to create full-funnel content to target our users at every stage of the customer journey and assist in facilitating conversion of other tactics.

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• We developed top-of-funnel content that focused on foundational topics like “What Makes an Effective Organizational Strategy?” and “Strategy vs. Tactics: What’s the Difference?” to build awareness around Cascade and the fact there is a solution.
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• Middle-of-funnel content provided practical insights with articles on topics like “How to Write a Strategic Plan” and “KPI Examples for X,” meeting educational needs while subtly showcasing how Cascade supports effective strategic planning and facilitates strategy execution.
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• Our bottom-of-funnel content addressed decision-making criteria, with pieces comparing processes and solutions whilst emphasizing Cascade’s unique benefits.
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• This full-funnel approach to content was instrumental in building the foundation of the SEO function and consistently generated quality leads. By aligning content with each stage of the customer journey, we built awareness, nurtured users’ intent, increased their engagement with our resources, and ultimately created a scalable, repeatable pipeline of well-informed prospects ready to leverage Cascade as their solution.
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• Through this content, we were able to;
• • - Address the varied search intents of users
  • - Meet the specific needs of our ICPs
  • - Grow SEO foundations by establishing targeted content clusters
  • - Build trust and authority in the eyes of users and Google
  • - Position Cascade as the leading strategy solution
  • - Drive leads with defined customer profiles
  • - Facilitate conversion for other tactics through targeted CTA