SEO
A 6-Step Guide on How to Get SEO Clients
Whether you’re an established SEO agency or a freelancer just starting out, leads are the lifeblood of your business.
To generate new, relevant leads and clients, you need a system that you can implement and improve over time. And we’ll help you do exactly that.
In this article, you’ll learn the definition of an SEO lead and the six steps to getting great leads.
An SEO lead is a potential client who has expressed an interest in your SEO services. They either find you first and get in touch, or you proactively reach out to them and offer your services.
And here’s how you get them.
The first step is creating or providing a tailored SEO service for particular industries. These services can range from offering SEO consultations with a minimal monthly retainer to serving a specific niche (e.g., lawyers).
When I first pivoted from web design to SEO, I made the mistake of trying to offer a full SEO service.
Then at the time, Ryan Stewart said in a podcast to be great at keyword research and sell it to agencies.
So I did.
Looking around the SEO industry, you’ll find people and agencies doing well by specializing in a particular service or niche.
Look at Rankings.io, which specializes in law firm SEO. Or check out Full Stadium, which specializes in the accounting firm sector.
You can go even narrower. For example, Haro SEO builds links for clients from the Help A Reporter Out website. In other words, it caters to a niche within a niche (link building/digital PR).
Hence, you can consider niche SEO services such as keyword research, SEO strategy, on-page, off-page, technical SEO, content, YouTube SEO, or local SEO.
Once you’ve defined your target industry and services, there are two ways to find prospects: inbound and outbound marketing.
Inbound
Inbound is where prospects come to you instead of you reaching out to them. Let’s run through the most popular inbound marketing channels that generate leads.
Website
Provided you have a website, you can use it to generate leads if you make people aware of your SEO services and encourage them to take action by either calling you, sending you an email, or downloading an incentive.
Look at this landing page that explains and communicates the growth benefits of the company’s SEO services. The page also includes a strong call to action: get an SEO quote today.
SEO
You already know that organic traffic is the main traffic source for many websites.
Use Ahrefs’ Keywords Explorer to identify the relevant keywords your prospects are searching for and assess the potential of that traffic.
- Type “SEO” and select your country
- Use the Include filter to enter the industry or niche you are targeting, e.g., accountants, contractors
You can see the Keyword Difficulty (KD), search volume, global volume, and Traffic Potential (TP) metrics.
Now select the “SERP” button to view the traffic to the top pages.
Next, create a landing page targeting this topic, outlining what you offer and how to get in touch.
PPC
You can drive traffic quickly if you need leads urgently using Google Ads.
You can see this agency’s Google Ad campaigns and the keywords they target using the new paid search feature within Ahrefs’ Site Explorer.
Groups and communities
My path into SEO was via traditional marketing and web design.
As a member of an Adobe web design forum, I generated leads from other web design agencies that didn’t have an interest in or resources for SEO.
Also, the Ahrefs Insider group regularly runs SEO Speed Dating, where members are free to post jobs or projects they need help with—great for lead generation.
And agencies that use Ahrefs can apply to be featured on our SEO directory and generate interest in their services.
Building your reputation
You can build a reputation for your services by blogging, using social media, or appearing on podcasts.
With some hard work, I grew my organic traffic to several thousand monthly visits. I then used email marketing to offer my services and training courses for opted-in subscribers.
Email marketing
I’m fortunate enough to have built up an email list of opted-in subscribers and prospects. But before that, I simply went through my email account and found the email address of every contact I knew.
I added them to ConvertKit as a segment and emailed them regularly with useful SEO guides.
Social media
Samuel Schmitt builds his social reputation using Twitter and LinkedIn.
On LinkedIn, Samuel posts various resources, such as article links and videos, as well as comments and likes content from people in his network.
Podcasts and videos
George Chasiotis is the managing director of Minuttia, a SaaS SEO agency. He has built up his reputation as an expert in semantic SEO and topical authority.
I first listened to George on the SEO Rant Podcast and heard him again talking about topical authority with a partner on YouTube.
Events and conferences
You can attend many SEO conferences to network with others in the industry and build connections and potential business.
But do events and conferences exist if you want to connect with clients directly?
The SEO Works in Sheffield joined its Chamber of Commerce as a patron member (like a sponsor).
For £10K, it gets:
- Featured in fortnightly newsletters to other Chamber members.
- Advertising space in Chamber magazine.
- Dedicated email to the business database four times per year.
- Displayed on the Chamber website.
- Promoted socially.
- Invited to networking events.
- To host its workshops for Chamber members.
If this type of membership is beyond your budget, you can identify web design meetups in your area.
For example, there are various web design meetups in my area.
If I attend these meetups, I’ll casually drop into conversations I do SEO; perhaps, I’ll find a few connections.
Word of mouth and referrals
Word of mouth refers to recommendations from friends and family, and it can be powerful when it comes to increasing sales.
For instance, I get most of my referrals from my accountant, who referred every one of his clients to me after lockdown.
I gave them a simple audit that compared their website with a competitor’s to “open a dialogue” with them.
Then I scheduled phone calls to discuss ways to prioritize revenue opportunities from SEO-related work.
Now onto outbound.
Outbound
Outbound is when companies send messages to potential customers rather than wait for them to come looking for their services. This can be through email, direct mail, telephone, etc.
Sidenote.
Check legislation in your state or country before doing cold email outreach.
You can find prospects to target using Ahrefs’ Content Explorer.
Let’s say I want to target insolvency practitioners in the U.K.
- Enter
insolvency practitioner site:co.ukand select “In title” - Filter “One page per domain” and “no subdomains”
And now, I have around 249 unique websites.
You can change “insolvency practitioner” to the type of company you are targeting.
Do also change site:co.uk to the country you wish to target, e.g., site:ca for Canada.
If you’re targeting prospects in the U.S., enter the business type and location into Content Explorer, e.g., Certified Public Accountant OR CPA AND Houston.
Now that you have found prospects to target, the next step is to qualify prospects or leads.
Lead qualification is the process of determining which leads are most likely to become great customers and focus on them first.
Inbound and outbound leads are qualified differently.
Inbound qualification
Your website will be the primary channel to get qualified leads, and you can do this by including an inquiry form to sort the wheat from the chaff.
Include a form on your website that collects the following prospect information:
- What you are looking for
- What you are investing
- When you’re looking to start
- Name, email, URL, and telephone
In this example, here are the three questions a visitor is asked.
Question 1. What help do you need?
Question 2. What is your budget?
Question 3. When are you looking to start?
If the prospect is a highly qualified lead, they are invited to book a call.
A less-qualified lead can sign up for a newsletter.
If you’re using SEO or PPC, a form or call to action should ideally be located above the fold of the browser on your landing pages. The following examples are from the website of another Ahrefs blog contributor, Sam Underwood:
Outbound qualification
You must gather information beyond their niche and company name to qualify an outbound prospect.
A Content Explorer report contains metrics such as Domain Rating (DR), referring domains, website traffic, and website traffic value. That’s valuable data to include in your outreach.
1. Export list from Content Explorer into Google Sheets
Following on from step #2 above, here’s an example of the report exported from Content Explorer into Google Sheets:
2. Clean up the spreadsheet
Remove irrelevant websites and all the columns, except for the content title, URL, referring domains, and website traffic.
3. Export CSV and import into Hunter or Mailshake
Now select File > Download > CSV.
4. Find and verify contact
I’ll use Hunter in this example, but you can use any email outreach software.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GE0YFMZknTM
Set up custom attributes to import the Website Traffic and Referring Domains data from your spreadsheet.
Go to Bulks > Bulk Domain Search > New Bulk.
Select Domain Search > New Bulk > Name your list and follow the screenshot for setup instructions.
Preview your list, press “Launch,” and Hunter will find and verify the email addresses of prospects.
5. Create a campaign with two outreach emails
Now go to Campaigns and create a new campaign.
Below is an example of a sales outreach email. Also, try to follow these four email outreach guidelines:
- Write a subject line to encourage the prospect to open the email
- Personalize the email with their first name
- Offer something of value, e.g., the email below contains a quick comparison of their website traffic with a competitor’s
- Include a call to action
Then write a follow-up email:
You can use Calendly or Google Calendar to allow prospects to book a discovery call with you.
Here’s a video outlining how to schedule appointments on Google Calendar:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7AsmRNiveGc
- Now add your recipients
- Select “From Leads”
- Select the list you created from the left menu and add the recipients to your campaign
- Press “Next,” and you’ll see a preview of every email
- Press “Launch” when you’re ready to start your outreach campaign
The purpose of the scheduled appointment is to see if there is a fit between you and your potential customer.
During the call, they’ll want to learn more about your experience, track record, processes, and team.
If they are an inbound lead, you already know they want a rough idea of the budget and start date from the form they filled in.
If they are an outbound lead, you already know their organic traffic and how it stacks up with a competitor’s.
You’ll want to discuss the service they want, budget, and timing. Also, it’s important to determine their future state.
You’ll discuss how you measure success.
You’ll provide pricing guidance, i.e., how you work and charge.
Subsequent meetings and dialogues revolve around the same topics.
Tell me more about your situation
I called a lead, Sam, at the appointed time and asked about his business.
He told me he was paying for leads from others, but he had an excellent offline network and social profile.
I told him a story about an ex-client who had purchased non-exclusive leads. The ex-client then called up prospects who had already received 10 calls from other contractors. Apparently, those contractors had been sold the same leads.
He asked about me.
I explained my business model and provided my traffic and conversion rates.
I proceeded to tell him he would want his own leads rather than purchasing third-party leads.
The bridge
Then to bridge the connection between his business and my business, I said:
“If a competing website gets 1,000 visits—let’s say they convert 2% into inquiries. That’s 20 inquiries a month. How many inquiries do you typically convert into a paid project?”
“10%,” he said.
“So two jobs at £20K are £40K a month or £480K a year,” I said.
“Yes, broadly speaking,” Sam replied.
Where do we go from here?
I sensed the call was nearing an end, so I asked, “Where do you want to go from here?”
P.S. This is my favorite call to action at the end of a call or email.
Sam said he would email me the plans for his business as we advance, and we should speak soon.
He texted me that evening.
One of the biggest mistakes I’ve made is to invest my time writing up a proposal and price only for the prospect to say no or, worse, not return my email or call.
So when asked, you should say a price before writing a proposal.
If they insist on a written proposal, try to resist and provide them with a price range.
Here’s an example: Bill, this project will range from $3,000 to $5,000 to start with, then a few $$$$ per month. Is that in alignment with your budget?
Unpaid proposals you send should fit on one page and include:
- Where they are now versus their future state.
- Pricing options anchored against each other.
When you give a client one pricing option, there are only two outcomes: yes or no. And a “no” outcome results in the prospect comparing your price with a competitor’s.
But when you provide pricing options, the client is now faced with Option A, Option B, or no.
For example, my goal is for the client to buy Option A. When I position the higher anchor price (Option B) alongside it, the client can now compare both my options.
According to Blair Enns, when offered two pricing options, a client will choose Option B 50% of the time.
Here’s a pricing example of a one-off project:
| Option A | Option B |
|---|---|
| – Keyword research – Produce 10 content briefs |
– Keyword research – Produce 10 content briefs – Professional copywriting for 10 pages – Publish 10 optimized pages |
| $1,999 | $7,999 |
Here’s a pricing example of an SEO monthly retainer:
| SEO Option A | SEO Option B |
|---|---|
| – Keyword research – Produce 10 content briefs per month – Copywriting for 10 pages – Publish 10 optimized pages – 1x outreach campaign per month |
– Keyword research – Produce 10 content briefs per month – Copywriting for 10 pages – Publish 10 optimized pages – 1x outreach campaign per month |
| $5,000 per month | $50,000 per annum paid in two installments |
Once they’ve verbally confirmed they want to go ahead, you can send them a copy created from our free SEO contract template.
This template includes 13 essential sections that help you protect yourself and set clear client expectations.
You can customize it however you want. Just change the names, edit the price and service descriptions, and adjust the sample terms and conditions to suit your needs.
Final thoughts
When you’re starting out, focus on outbound activity to generate sales leads. Those with an established SEO track record have a different problem: They need to filter inbound leads to maximize their revenues and margins.
Tailor your SEO service for your target industry, find prospects, qualify them, set up a discovery phone call, and give them a price before committing to writing a proposal.
Finally, use our SEO contract template to close the deal.
Got questions? Ping me on Twitter.
SEO
7 Strategies to Lower Cost-Per-Lead
SEO for personal injury law firms is notorious for how expensive and competitive it can be. Even with paid ads, it’s common for every click from the ad to your website to cost hundreds of dollars:
When spending this kind of money per click, the cost of gaining new cases can quickly skyrocket. Since SEO focuses on improving your visibility in the unpaid areas of search engines, you can cut costs and get more leads if you’re savvy enough.
Here are the strategies I’ve used to help new and boutique injury and accident law firms compete with the big guns for a fraction of the cost.
Recommendation
Unlike many other local service businesses, personal injury law firms need to work harder to earn trust and credibility online.
This applies to earning trust from humans and search engines alike. Google has a 170-page document called the Search Quality Rater Guidelines. This document contains two frameworks law firms can use to help Google and website visitors trust them more.
The first is “your money or your life,” or YMYL. Google uses this term to describe topics that may present a high risk of harm to searchers. Generally, any health, finances, safety, or welfare information falls into this category. Legal information is also a YMYL topic since acting on the wrong information could cause serious damage or harm to searchers.
The second framework is EEAT, which stands for experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness.
This framework applies more broadly to all industries and is about sharing genuine information written by experts and authorities for a given topic. Both YMYL and EEAT consider the extent to which content is accurate, honest, safe, and reliable, with the ultimate goal of delivering trustworthy information.
Here are the things I implement for my personal injury clients as a priority to improve the trustworthiness of their online presence:
- Prominently display star ratings from third-party platforms, like Google or FaceBook reviews.
- Show your accreditations, certifications, awards, and the stats on cases you’ve won.
- If government-issued ratings or licenses apply to your practice areas, show those too.
- Add contact information like your phone number and address in the footer of every page.
- Share details of every member of your firm, highlighting their expertise and cases they’ve won.
- Add links to your professional profiles online, including social media and law-related listings.
- Include photos of your team and offices, results, case studies, and success stories.
Generally speaking, your Google Business listing can account for over 50% of the leads you get from search engines. That’s because it can display prominently in the maps pack, like so: 
Without a Google Business listing, your firm will not show up here or within Google Maps since it is managed completely separately from your website. Think of your Google listing like a social profile, but optimize it like a website. Make sure you create one of these for each location where you have an on-the-ground presence, ideally an established office.
Take the time to fill out all the details it asks for, especially:
- Your firm’s name, address, and phone number
- Your services with a description of each
- Images of your premises, inside and outside the office
And anything else you see in these sections: 
Also, make it a regular habit to ask your clients for reviews.
Reviews are crucial for law firms. They are the number one deciding factor when someone is ready to choose a law firm to work with. While you can send automated text messages with a link to your Google profile, you’ll likely have a higher success rate if you ask clients in person while they’re in your office or by calling them.
I’ve also seen success when adding a request for a review on thank you pages.
For instance, if you ever send an electronic contract or invoice out to clients, once they’ve signed or paid, you can send them to a thank you page that also asks for a review. Here’s my favorite example of this from a local accountant. You can emulate this concept for your own website too:
Recommendation
The most common way that people search for legal services is by searching for things like “personal injury lawyer near me” or “car accident lawyer new york”.
For instance, take a look at the monthly search volume on these “near me” keywords for an injury and accident lawyer:
People also commonly search at a state, city, and even suburb level for many legal services, especially if it’s an area of law that differs based on someone’s location. To optimize your website architecture for location keywords like these, it’s best practice to create dedicated pages for each location and then add sub-pages for each of your practice areas in that location.
For example, here’s what that would look like:
The corresponding URL structure would look like this:
- /new-york
- /new-york/car-accident-lawyer
- /new-york/personal-injury-lawyer
- /new-york/work-injury-lawyer
Pro Tip:
Check out my guide on franchise SEO for local and national growth strategies if you have many offices nationwide.
A topic hub is a way to organize and link between related articles on a website. It’s sometimes referred to as a topic cluster because it groups together pages that are related to the same subject matter.
If you run a small firm or your marketing budget is tight, I recommend focusing on a single area of law and turning your website into a topical hub. You can do this by publishing different types of content, such as how-to guides, answering common questions, and creating landing pages for each of your services.
For example, if you currently offer services for immigration law, criminal defense, and personal injury compensation, each appeals to very different audience segments. They’re also very competitive when it comes to marketing, so focusing your efforts on one of these is ideal to make your budget go further.
Most areas of law are naturally suited to building out topic clusters. Every practice area tends to follow a similar pattern in how people search at different stages in their journey.
- Top-of-funnel: When people are very early in their journey, and unaware of what type of lawyer they need, they ask a lot of high-level questions like “what is a car accident attorney”.
- Mid-funnel: When people are in the middle of their journey, they tend to ask more nuanced questions or look for more detailed information, like “average settlement for neck injury”.
- Bottom-of-funnel: When people are ready to hire an attorney, they search for the practice area + “attorney” or “lawyer”. Sometimes they include a location but nothing else. For example, “personal injury lawyer”.
This pattern applies to most areas of law. To apply it to your website, enter your main practice area and a few variations into Keywords Explorer:
Make sure to include a few different variations like how I’ve added different ways people search for lawyers (lawyer, attorney, solicitor) and also for other related terms (compensation, personal injury, settlement).
If you check the Matching terms report, you’ll generally get a big list that you’ll need to filter to make it more manageable when turning it into a content plan.
For example, there are 164,636 different keyword variations of how people search for personal injury lawyers. These generate over 2.4 million searches per month in the US.
You can make the list more manageable by removing keywords with no search volume. Just set the minimum volume to 1:
You can also use the include filter to only see keywords containing your location for your location landing pages:
There are also a number of distinct sub-themes relevant to your area of law. To isolate these, you can use the Cluster by Terms side panel. For instance, looking at our list of injury-related keywords, you can easily spot specific body parts that emerge as sub-themes:
Other sub-themes include:
- How the accident happened (at work, in a car)
- How much compensation someone can get (compensation, average, settlement)
- How severe the injury was (traumatic)
Each of these sub-themes can be turned into a cluster. Here’s what it might look like for the topic of neck injuries:
People tend to ask a lot of questions related to most areas of law. As you go through the exercise of planning out your topic clusters, you should also consider building out a knowledge hub where people can more easily navigate your FAQs and find the answers they’re looking for.
Use the knowledge base exclusively for question-related content. You can find the most popular questions people ask after an accident or injury in the Matching terms > Questions tab:
You can also easily see clusters of keywords for the top-of-funnel and mid-funnel questions people ask by checking the Clusters by Parent Topic report. It groups these keywords into similar themes and each group can likely be covered in a single article.
Here’s an example of how Smith’s Lawyers has created a knowledge base with a search feature and broad categories to allow people to find answers to all their questions more easily.
The easier you make it for people to find answers on your website, the less inclined they are to go back to Google and potentially visit a competitor’s website instead. It also increases their interaction time with your brand, giving you a higher chance of being front-of-mind when they are ready to speak to a lawyer about their case.
Some areas of law lend themselves to certain types of interactive content. An obvious example is a compensation calculator for injury and accident claims. Doing a very quick search, there are over 1,500 keywords on this topic searched over 44,000 times a month in the US.
The best part is how insanely low the competition is on these keywords:
Keyword difficulty is graded on a 100-point scale, so single-digit figures mean there’s virtually no competition to contend with. It’s not all that hard to create a calculator either.
There are many low-cost, no-code tools on the market, like Outgrow, that allow you to create a simple calculator in no time. Other types of interactive content you could consider are:
- Quiz-style questionnaires: great for helping people decide if they need a lawyer for their case.
- Chatbots: to answer people’s questions in real-time.
- Assessments: to pre-qualify leads before they book a meeting with you.
- Calendar or countdown clock: to help people keep track of imminent deadlines.
Backlinks are like the internet’s version of citations. They are typically dark blue, underlined text that connects you to a different page on the internet. In SEO, links play a very important role for a few different reasons:
- Links are how search engines discover new content. Your content may not be discovered if you have no links pointing to it.
- Links are like votes in a popularity contest. The more you have from authoritative websites in your industry, the more they elevate your brand.
- Links also help search engines understand what different websites are about. Getting links from other law-related websites will help build relevancy to your brand.
Think of link building as a scaled-down version of PR. It’s often easier and cheaper to implement. However, it is very time-intensive in most cases. If you’re doing your own SEO, hats off to you!
However, I’d recommend you consider partnering with an agency that specializes in law firm SEO and can handle link building for you. Typically, agencies like these will have existing relationships with law-related websites where they can feature your brand, which will be completely hands-off for you.
For instance, Webris has a database of thousands of legal websites on which they have been able to feature their clients. If you don’t have an existing database to work with and you’re doing SEO yourself, here are some alternative tactics to consider.
Expert quotes
Many journalists and writers benefit from quoting subject-matter experts in their content. You could be such an expert, and every time someone quotes you, ask for a link back to your website. Check out platforms like Muck Rack or SourceBottle, where reporters post callouts for specific experts they’re looking to get quotes from or feature in their articles.
Guest posting
If you like writing content, you can alternatively create content for other people’s websites and include links back to your site. This approach is more time intensive. To make the effort worth it, reach out to websites with an established audience so you get some additional brand exposure too.
Updating outdated content
If you’re checking out other people’s legal content and you ever notice a mistake or outdated information, you could reach out and offer to help them correct it in exchange for a link to your website.
Naturally, you’ll need to recommend updates for sections of content that relate to your practice areas for this to work and for the link to make sense in the context of the content.
Final thoughts
SEO for personal injury lawyers is one of the most competitive niches. High advertising costs and high competition levels make it difficult for new or small firms to compete against industry giants.
As a new or emerging firm, you can take a more nimble approach and outrank the big firms for low competition keywords they haven’t optimized their websites for. It’s all about doing thorough research to uncover these opportunities in your practice area.
Want to know more? Reach out on LinkedIn.
SEO
Google Ads To Phase Out Enhanced CPC Bidding Strategy
Google has announced plans to discontinue its Enhanced Cost-Per-Click (eCPC) bidding strategy for search and display ad campaigns.
This change, set to roll out in stages over the coming months, marks the end of an era for one of Google’s earliest smart bidding options.
Dates & Changes
Starting October 2024, new search and display ad campaigns will no longer be able to select Enhanced CPC as a bidding strategy.
However, existing eCPC campaigns will continue to function normally until March 2025.
From March 2025, all remaining search and display ad campaigns using Enhanced CPC will be automatically migrated to manual CPC bidding.
Advertisers who prefer not to change their campaigns before this date will see their bidding strategy default to manual CPC.
Impact On Display Campaigns
No immediate action is required for advertisers running display campaigns with the Maximize Clicks strategy and Enhanced CPC enabled.
These campaigns will automatically transition to the Maximize Clicks bidding strategy in March 2025.
Rationale Behind The Change
Google introduced Enhanced CPC over a decade ago as its first Smart Bidding strategy. The company has since developed more advanced machine learning-driven bidding options, such as Maximize Conversions with an optional target CPA and Maximize Conversion Value with an optional target ROAS.
In an email to affected advertisers, Google stated:
“These strategies have the potential to deliver comparable or superior outcomes. As we transition to these improved strategies, search and display ads campaigns will phase out Enhanced CPC.”
What This Means for Advertisers
This update signals Google’s continued push towards more sophisticated, AI-driven bidding strategies.
In the coming months, advertisers currently relying on Enhanced CPC will need to evaluate their options and potentially adapt their campaign management approaches.
While the change may require some initial adjustments, it also allows advertisers to explore and leverage Google’s more advanced bidding strategies, potentially improving campaign performance and efficiency.
FAQ
What change is Google implementing for Enhanced CPC bidding?
Google will discontinue the Enhanced Cost-Per-Click (eCPC) bidding strategy for search and display ad campaigns.
- New search and display ad campaigns can’t select eCPC starting October 2024.
- Existing campaigns will function with eCPC until March 2025.
- From March 2025, remaining eCPC campaigns will switch to manual CPC bidding.
How will this update impact existing campaigns using Enhanced CPC?
Campaigns using Enhanced CPC will continue as usual until March 2025. After that:
- Search and display ad campaigns employing eCPC will automatically migrate to manual CPC bidding.
- Display campaigns with Maximize Clicks and eCPC enabled will transition to the Maximize Clicks strategy in March 2025.
What are the recommended alternatives to Enhanced CPC?
Google suggests using its more advanced, AI-driven bidding strategies:
- Maximize Conversions – Can include an optional target CPA (Cost Per Acquisition).
- Maximize Conversion Value – Can include an optional target ROAS (Return on Ad Spend).
These strategies are expected to deliver comparable or superior outcomes compared to Enhanced CPC.
What should advertisers do in preparation for this change?
Advertisers need to evaluate their current reliance on Enhanced CPC and explore alternatives:
- Assess how newer AI-driven bidding strategies can be integrated into their campaigns.
- Consider transitioning some campaigns earlier to adapt to the new strategies gradually.
- Leverage tools and resources provided by Google to maximize performance and efficiency.
This proactive approach will help manage changes smoothly and explore potential performance improvements.
Featured Image: Vladimka production/Shutterstock
SEO
The 25 Biggest Traffic Losers in SaaS
We analyzed the organic traffic growth of 1,600 SaaS companies to discover the SEO strategies that work best in 2024…
…and those that work the worst.
In this article, we’re looking at the companies that lost the greatest amount of estimated organic traffic, year over year.
- We analyzed 1,600 SaaS companies and used the Ahrefs API to pull estimated monthly organic traffic data for August 2023 and August 2024.
- Companies were ranked by estimated monthly organic traffic loss as a percentage of their starting traffic.
- We’ve filtered out traffic loss caused by website migrations and URL redirects and set a minimum starting traffic threshold of 10,000 monthly organic pageviews.
This is a list of the SaaS companies that had the greatest estimated monthly organic traffic loss from August 2023 to August 2024.
Sidenote.
Our organic traffic metrics are estimates, and not necessarily reflective of the company’s actual traffic (only they know that). Traffic loss is not always bad, and there are plenty of reasons why companies may choose to delete pages and sacrifice keyword rankings.
| Rank | Company | Change | Monthly Organic Traffic 2023 | Monthly Organic Traffic 2024 | Traffic Loss |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Causal | -99.52% | 307,158 | 1,485 | -305,673 |
| 2 | Contently | -97.16% | 276,885 | 7,866 | -269,019 |
| 3 | Datanyze | -95.46% | 486,626 | 22,077 | -464,549 |
| 4 | BetterCloud | -94.14% | 42,468 | 2,489 | -39,979 |
| 5 | Ricotta Trivia | -91.46% | 193,713 | 16,551 | -177,162 |
| 6 | Colourbox | -85.43% | 67,883 | 9,888 | -57,995 |
| 7 | Tabnine | -84.32% | 160,328 | 25,142 | -135,186 |
| 8 | AppFollow | -83.72% | 35,329 | 5,753 | -29,576 |
| 9 | Serverless | -80.61% | 37,896 | 7,348 | -30,548 |
| 10 | UserGuiding | -80.50% | 115,067 | 22,435 | -92,632 |
| 11 | Hopin | -79.25% | 19,581 | 4,064 | -15,517 |
| 12 | Writer | -78.32% | 2,460,359 | 533,288 | -1,927,071 |
| 13 | NeverBounce by ZoomInfo | -77.91% | 552,780 | 122,082 | -430,698 |
| 14 | ZoomInfo | -76.11% | 5,192,624 | 1,240,481 | -3,952,143 |
| 15 | Sakari | -73.76% | 27,084 | 7,106 | -19,978 |
| 16 | Frase | -71.39% | 83,569 | 23,907 | -59,662 |
| 17 | LiveAgent | -70.03% | 322,613 | 96,700 | -225,913 |
| 18 | Scoro | -70.01% | 51,701 | 15,505 | -36,196 |
| 19 | accessiBe | -69.45% | 111,877 | 34,177 | -77,700 |
| 20 | Olist | -67.51% | 204,298 | 66,386 | -137,912 |
| 21 | Hevo Data | -66.96% | 235,427 | 77,781 | -157,646 |
| 22 | TextGears | -66.68% | 19,679 | 6,558 | -13,121 |
| 23 | Unbabel | -66.40% | 45,987 | 15,450 | -30,537 |
| 24 | Courier | -66.03% | 35,300 | 11,992 | -23,308 |
| 25 | G2 | -65.74% | 4,397,226 | 1,506,545 | -2,890,681 |
For each of the top five companies, I ran a five-minute analysis using Ahrefs Site Explorer to understand what may have caused their traffic decline.
Possible explanations include Google penalties, programmatic SEO, and AI content.
| Causal | 2023 | 2024 | Absolute change | Percent change |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Organic traffic | 307,158 | 1,485 | -305,673 | -99.52% |
| Organic pages | 5,868 | 547 | -5,321 | -90.68% |
| Organic keywords | 222,777 | 4,023 | -218,754 | -98.19% |
| Keywords in top 3 | 8,969 | 26 | -8943 | -99.71% |
Causal is a finance platform for startups. They lost an estimated 99.52% of their organic traffic as a result of a Google manual penalty:
This story might sound familiar. Causal became internet-famous for an “SEO heist” that saw them clone a competitor’s sitemap and use generative AI to publish 1,800 low-quality articles like this:
Google caught wind and promptly issued a manual penalty. Causal lost hundreds of rankings and hundreds of thousands of pageviews, virtually overnight:
As the Ahrefs SEO Toolbar shows, the offending blog posts are now 301 redirected to the company’s (now much better, much more human-looking) blog homepage:
| Contently | 2023 | 2024 | Absolute change | Percent change |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Organic traffic | 276,885 | 7,866 | -269,019 | -97.16% |
| Organic pages | 32,752 | 1,121 | -31,631 | -96.58% |
| Organic keywords | 94,706 | 12,000 | -82,706 | -87.33% |
| Keywords in top 3 | 1,874 | 68 | -1,806 | -96.37% |
Contently is a content marketing platform. They lost 97% of their estimated organic traffic by removing thousands of user-generated pages.
Almost all of the website’s traffic loss seems to stem from deindexing the subdomains used to host their members’ writing portfolios:
A quick Google search for “contently writer portfolios” suggests that the company made the deliberate decision to deindex all writer portfolios by default, and only relist them once they’ve been manually vetted and approved:
We can see that these portfolio subdomains are now 302 redirected back to Contently’s homepage:
And looking at the keyword rankings Contently lost in the process, it’s easy to guess why this change was necessary. It looks like the free portfolio subdomains were being abused to promote CBD gummies and pirated movies:
| Datanyze | 2023 | 2024 | Absolute change | Percent change |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Organic traffic | 486,626 | 22,077 | -464,549 | -95.46% |
| Organic pages | 1,168,889 | 377,142 | -791,747 | -67.74% |
| Organic keywords | 2,565,527 | 712,270 | -1,853,257 | -72.24% |
| Keywords in top 3 | 7,475 | 177 | -7,298 | -97.63% |
Datanyze provides contact data for sales prospecting. They lost 96% of their estimated organic traffic, possibly as a result of programmatic content that Google has since deemed too low quality to rank.
Looking at the Site Structure report in Ahrefs, we can see over 80% of the website’s organic traffic loss is isolated to the /companies and /people subfolders:
Looking at some of the pages in these subfolders, it looks like Datanyze built thousands of programmatic landing pages to help promote the people and companies the company offers data for:
As a result, the majority of Datanyze’s dropped keyword rankings are names of people and companies:
Many of these pages still return 200 HTTP status codes, and a Google site search still shows hundreds of indexed pages:
In this case, not all of the programmatic pages have been deleted—instead, it’s possible that Google has decided to rerank these pages into much lower positions and drop them from most SERPs.
| BetterCloud | 2023 | 2024 | Absolute change | Percent change |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Organic traffic | 42,468 | 2,489 | -39,979 | -94.14% |
| Organic pages | 1,643 | 504 | -1,139 | -69.32% |
| Organic keywords | 107,817 | 5,806 | -102,011 | -94.61% |
| Keywords in top 3 | 1,550 | 32 | -1,518 | -97.94% |
Bettercloud is a SaaS spend management platform. They lost 94% of their estimated organic traffic around the time of Google’s November Core Update:
Looking at the Top Pages report for BetterCloud, most of the traffic loss can be traced back to a now-deleted /academy subfolder:
The pages in the subfolder are now deleted, but by using Ahrefs’ Page Inspect feature, it’s possible to look at a snapshot of some of the pages’ HTML content.
This short, extremely generic article on “How to Delete an Unwanted Page in Google Docs” looks a lot like basic AI-generated content:
This is the type of content that Google has been keen to demote from the SERPs.
Given the timing of the website’s traffic drop (a small decline after the October core update, and a precipitous decline after the November core update), it’s possible that Google demoted the site after an AI content generation experiment.
| Ricotta Trivia | 2023 | 2024 | Absolute change | Percent change |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Organic traffic | 193,713 | 16,551 | -177,162 | -91.46% |
| Organic pages | 218 | 231 | 13 | 5.96% |
| Organic keywords | 83,988 | 37,640 | -46,348 | -55.18% |
| Keywords in top 3 | 3,124 | 275 | -2,849 | -91.20% |
Ricotta Trivia is a Slack add-on that offers icebreakers and team-building games. They lost an estimated 91% of their monthly organic traffic, possibly because of thin content and poor on-page experience on their blog.
Looking at the Site Structure report, 99.7% of the company’s traffic loss is isolated to the /blog subfolder:
Digging into the Organic keywords report, we can see that the website has lost hundreds of first-page rankings for high-volume keywords like get to know you questions, funny team names, and question of the day:
While these keywords seem strongly related to the company’s core business, the article content itself seems very thin—and the page is covered with intrusive advertising banners and pop-ups (a common hypothesis for why some sites were negatively impacted by recent Google updates):
The site seems to show a small recovery on the back of the August 2024 core update—so there may be hope yet.
Final thoughts
All of the data for this article comes from Ahrefs. Want to research your competitors in the same way? Check out Site Explorer.
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