and with only $1.3 million in funding
You might not have heard of this startup.
This is because it's always operated with a remote team ever since its inception.
Zapier is one of the most awesome tools in the market. It helps web applications ‘talk’ to each other and creates automations between apps.
With no-code/low code startups growing, Zapier has been on the top of the list people are giving attention to. Many clones are also coming into the market, with many similar startups popping up to compete with Zapier.
One of Y Combinator’s alumni, it is one of the few startups that hasn’t needed much funding at all. It drives high quality traffic to its website every month, most of it being organic (not paid).
What was its growth strategy?
Its growth strategy is super smart and one I didn’t even notice until I was in it myself.
Zapier itself is all about integrations. It’s known as a ‘translator’ between web APIs, making user’s tool stacks speak to each other.
For example, if you received a lead in your CRM and then wanted to trigger an event in another tool, this is where Zapier shines and helps integrate.
But how did it grow into a $140 M ARR machine with a $5 billion valuation?
Zapier’s growth strategy is all-around content marketing.
It’s blog consists of hundreds of guides on how to plug tools into each other. Such titles include “Send a Gmail email from new deals in Hubspot CRM”. By appearing in searches for these topics, it has managed to sneakily become a destination for people’s inquiries which results in users trying out the tool.
Zapier creates unique content via a long-tail keyword strategy
From Ryanberg. Co’s blog, in 2018, Zapier had over 25K unique pages that are search optimized for these automations. For example, when I type in “automate Google spreadsheets and Hubspot,” this is the first result I get.
What’s brilliant is that it nails the whole aspect of capitalizing on long-tail keywords. Generally, it’s pretty hard to rank for 1–3 keywords so being able to capture longer search terms is brilliant.
This strategy helped the blog get to over 600,000 readers in just three years from scratch, and the blog continues to grow as new tools and integrations are added to Zapier.
But how is this sustainable?
You might be thinking, how is this growth marketing strategy sustainable when you have to churn out so much content. Of course, in the beginning, they wrote it up themselves, but the formula has been laid out already by the team, and they know exactly what needs to be done.
So instead of needing to announce, write up blog posts, and more, they now require new partners that want to be onboarded to write up the announcements themselves.
Here is a list of things that they need to do:
- Getting partners to set up their own page explaining the integration on their site and linking back to Zapier
- Get partners to write up a blog post about it
- Adding links to the top ‘zaps’ (what they call the automations) in the partner’s app
It’s obvious to see that the requirements all benefit Zapier’s SEO strategy in one way or another. From backlinks to free traffic, it all adds up to driving traffic to Zapier’s website.
This genius, long-tail keyword strategy has been the backbone of Zapier’s growth and marketing strategy ever since.