How we scaled Wethos from 50,000 to 90,000 users in 10 months
The Short Version
I helped scale Wethos from 50,000 to 90,000 users by developing and implementing a two-pronged SEO strategy; 1/ Programmatic SEO, and 2/ Blog migration + new content strategy.
This resulted in:
6X growth in total organic keyword rankings (~360 —> 2,100)
5X growth in top 3 position keywords
Doubled the number of backlinks to wethos.co
50% increase in organic traffic
30% increased in organic acquisition
Learn more about the what, how and why in the long version.
The Long Version
Wethos is software platform for freelancers and independents to start, run and grow their business. 95% of freelancers don’t make 6 figures, and Wethos is on a mission to change that. After securing $8M in funding in late 2021, Wethos invested in building out their platform to enable the next generation of independents to not only make freelancing a viable career, but a profitable one.
Wethos is much more than your average “all-in-one” software. Rather than focusing on enabling freelancers to do everything, they focused on enabling freelancers to do the most important things really, really well.
Scope Projects
Knowing how to scope projects is one of the hardest parts about being a freelancer. Wethos solves this with their robust library of over 200+ scope of work templates for all types of projects, from social media strategy to video production to brand identity, and everything in between. The scope of work templates are extremely detailed, totally customizable, and powered by tens of thousands of users, making them far more valuable than the relatively useless templates offered by the competition.Raise Rates
The best part of these scope of work templates is that they all include crowdsourced pricing data, collected from over 50,000 other freelancers. With the templates, users can gain a better understanding of what to charge for (yeah, you should charge for discovery and handoff!) and also how much to charge. Most freelancers underprice themselves, and miss out on thousands (or even tens of thousands) of dollars each year. With price transparency, freelancers are new enabled to confidently raise their rates and pitch bigger projects with confidence.Get Paid
With embedded payments powered by Stripe and Plaid, freelancers can scope, invoice, and get paid for work, all with the Wethos platform without ever switching tabs. With competitive transaction and processing fees, Wethos empowers freelancers to keep more money in their pockets.
The Challenge
As Wethos achieved product market fit, they shifted their focus on scaling their user acquisition. What they found was that while they were able to acquire a good number of users with paid acquisition on Facebook and Google, the cost per acquisition (CAC) was very high and the retention of those users was extremely poor. In fact, most of them never returned for second session.
What they did realize, however, was that users who were acquired via their scope of work templates converted and retained at a significantly higher rate. These users were valuable because they were:
mostly acquired through organic channels (low cost)
converted, activated and retained at a very high rate
were very intentional and looking to solve an immediate need (scope a project for a client)
acquired and activated directly into the product flow itself
The problem was that they had very few signups coming through the scope of work templates since they were not ranking on Google and there was no SEO strategy in place. The opportunity and challenge was clear:
How can we acquire more users organically through the scope of work templates?
The Solution
Wethos hired me to solve this problem for them. To begin, I performed an SEO Site Audit on the Wethos site to understand where the main issues were and to identify potential opportunities for improvement and growth. From that audit, I discovered two main opportunities:
None of the scope of work template pages were crawlable or indexable by Google, so even if people were looking for “social media strategy scope of work template”, they’d never find Wethos. To drive more organic signups, we needed to solve this issue.
The blog had shown glimmers of success with scope of work template round up posts (i.e. Top 5 social media scope of work templates). They had some decent rankings and a bit of traffic, and even a few signups, but far from being efficient or well-optimizied. The blog not only lived under a subdomain, it also existed on a separate CMS, and was completely disconnected from the rest of the Wethos site in every way. To effectively rank well, capture demand, and drive signups from the blog into Wethos, we needed to fix this.
From this, I developed a two-pronged SEO Strategy.
1/ Programmatic SEO
In order for the 200+ scope of work templates to drive more signups, we first needed to get them to rank and bring in traffic. We created a programmatic SEO strategy to build and scale out keyword targeted and highly optimized landing pages for every scope of work template in our library.
This started with creating a parent page for the templates which lived in our header, and was followed by creating landing pages for each scope of work template. We prioritzed the creation of the pages based on keyword research, examining the search demand and competition, and started with the most important ones, like Social Media Strategy Scope of Work Template. The page structure was well thought out with SEO best practices in mind including:
Optimized heading tags
In-depth, helpful content
Clear messaging and value props
Image optimization
Optimized title tags and meta descriptions to influence CTR
Detailed FAQs with helpful answers (and FAQ schema)
Robust internal linking between related scope templates
As we tested and iterated on these landing pages, we found a structure and template that seemed to work best for rankings, traffic and signups, and from there we scaled them out to our entire library of scope of work templates, in an effort to capture as much rankings, traffic and organic signups as possible.
2/ Blog Migration & Content Strategy
The first step in solving the blog issue was to do a blog migration. This migration was two fold as we not only migrated from a subdomain to subfolder for SEO reasons, but also from WordPress to Squarespace where the rest of the website lived. This not only gave us more SEO opportunities, but also allowed us to manage the entire website in one CMS, and ensured that the user experience was clean and consistent across all web properties.
Along with this migration, the second step was to develop an enhanced SEO and content strategy for the Wethos Blog in an effort to increase organic traffic and signups. This strategy consisted of:
Increasing the cadence of new content published
We ramped up content production on the blog for 2 posts per month to at least 6. All of our content was driven or influenced by keyword research, and posts were well optimized for search. However, we always ensure that our content was helpful and useful for our audience, and many of our articles went into great depths on a given topic. When we published, we not only focused on content distribution, but also looked for any internal linking opportunities across the site.Optimizing and updating “older” content
During the migration, we discovered that we had dozens of high potential posts that were terribly underperforming. Our content team spent about 50% of their time writing new content, and 50% of their time updating and optimizing older posts. This included updating titles, added new sections of content, optimized on-page elements, and a full overhaul of our internal linking structure.Focus on “Scope of Work” content
We knew that “scope of work” content performed really well for us and that it had great potential to rank well, drive high quality traffic, and signups. So while we invested in programmatic SEO for our scope of work template landing pages, we leveraged the blog to rank for similar but adjacent terms and keywords around scopes of work. Most often, these blog posts were roundups of our top scopes in a given craft or skillset, such as 10 Website Scope of Work Templates for Freelance Web Designers and Developers, which ranked well for dozens of keywords and allowed us to target less specific, but high value keywords like “website scope of work”.
The Results
With this two-pronged SEO strategy, Wethos experienced incredible SEO success in a short time frame. Not only were we able to rank in the 1st position for many high-value keywords, we often times completely owned the top of a SERP.
In this example, not only did our programmatic SEO landing page own the 1st position for “social media strategy scope of work template” (with an image), but we also owned the top “people also ask” question as well as the 2nd organic position with our blog post: 12 Social Media Scope of Work Templates for Freelancers.
With this strategy in place, we were able to scale back our inefficient spend on paid media and double down on our organic growth, scaling the Wethos user base from 50,000 to 90,000 in just 10 months.
During this time, the Wethos site saw:
10X growth in total organic keyword rankings (~360 —> 3,400)
5X growth in top 3 position keywords
Doubled the number of backlinks to wethos.co
50% increase in organic traffic
30% increased in organic acquisition
Do you need help scaling your user acquisition efforts? Are you falling behind with your SEO strategy? Are you spending too much money into a broken funnel?
Stop what you’re doing and let’s chat. I can help.