Driving organic traffic in the SaaS space can be a challenge for many businesses, especially considering the ever-growing nature of the industry and the high level of competition.

In such a saturated market, businesses must trial more creative avenues for marketing outside of the norm. This is particularly important in the SEO game, which Zapier are playing very successfully.

In just three years, Zapier has quadrupled its organic traffic from 1.19 million users per month to nearly 5 million. Let’s explore how Zapier used various avenues to accelerate organic growth.

What is Zapier?

Zapier describes itself as an “online automation platform”. Its solutions enable users to connect various services and apps to streamline or automate routine tasks without any need for coding.

For example, let’s say that you are working with Google Sheets and would like new leads generated through Salesforce to be entered into a new row when the lead comes in. Zapier connects to both platforms and can send “Zaps” between each one, allowing you to send information in the way that you need to. This opens a world of possibilities in workflow management for many businesses.

Exploring Zapier’s SEO Metrics

As of November 2023, Zapier’s website attracts an impressive 4.8 million monthly visitors. Comparing this figure to the site’s November 2020 performance, where the website drove 1.19 million monthly visitors, we can observe an impressive growth rate of over 300%.

zapier SEO metrics

Zapier also boats a substantial 6 million backlinks and 1.4 million keywords in the top 100 organic search results, with 42.8K in the top 10.

How Zapier accelerated organic growth

Product-led growth

The automation platform’s PLG model has been a huge contributor to the success. Zapier takes a bottom-up approach, speaking directly to the needs of end users. A core part of Zapier’s business approach is its commitment to staying transparent and data driven.

SEO efforts fuel its PLG engine, driving MQLs through free demo signups and a freemium model that gives users 100 tasks for free each month at the basic tier. Zapier took a data-driven approach to the continued development of the product with tight feedback loops. This occurs by conducting frequent surveys of new features and then “zapping” relevant data into an Airtable. By doing so, Zapier can use data to improve its features for key users.

With a highly successfully deployed marketing strategy, Zapier has set the product up for success in such a way that the needs of its customers feed into every part of what they do.

Integration pages

Zapier labels itself as an “automation platform”. With only 400 searches for this term per month, it’s easy to understand why targeting keywords in this realm wouldn’t lead to the level of growth we see today.

Instead, the Zapier team recognised early on that their SEO strategy would need to focus on demand generation and what their customers are really searching for. They product addresses pain points, and customers will be searching for ways to resolve them without necessarily knowing that a solution like Zapier exists.

Zapier created its integration (/apps/) pages with this in mind. They successfully targeted users looking for a way to connect different apps.

Zapier tiers its integration landing pages to capture a broad range of search intent:

  • A landing page for each individual app (Trello, Slack, WooCommerce etc.)slack integrations on zapier
  • ● A landing page for every app-to-app integration (e.g. Trello + Slack, Trello + WooCommerce, Slack + WooCommerce etc.)slack + trello integration zapier
  • ● A landing page for a 3-part app-to-app workflow (e.g. WooCoomerce to Slack + Trello)woocommerce trello slack integration zapier

With the help of this structure and creating pages in this way, Zapier has been able to target a wide range of different integration-based keywords.

Keyword SV
slack integrations 1400
trello slack 400
trello slack integration 300
trello integrations 400
woocommerce slack trello 10

This variety of keywords perfectly targets a range of high-intent searches and covers a range of keywords from high volume, high competition to low volume, low competition. The variety gives the website a huge reach across a plethora of customer bases, meaning they can rank for a high number of long-tail, niche queries.

Zapier claims to connect to over 6000+ apps. With the sheer volume of pages that have to be produced to successfully deploy this kind of strategy, you might wonder how they’ve managed to do this. And the answer is programmatic SEO.

Zapier’s secret weapon: programmatic SEO

Programmatic SEO creates a range of optimised pages at once, using existing data and pre-programmed rules. It helps drive more traffic and revenue, while also giving potential customers relevant and helpful content.

The programmatic approach allows them to roll out individual pages for every single app they support, along with every combination of apps, using data from their existing database. A few data points they use include:

  • a short description talking about each app
  • a list of apps that the current app can be connected to
  • a clear call to action
  • supported triggers and actions that users can benefit from
  • related blogs and articles

This approach has very much contributed to the acceleration of their organic growth.

Strategic blog content

Zapier also uses strategic blog content to accelerate growth.

One example of this is blogs they have created on “best X apps”, including “Best Calendar Apps” and “Best Productivity Apps”. These article types rank for over 400,000 keywords:

high performing zapier content

These blogs rank well for a number of reasons:

  • The content is of high quality.
  • The internal linking structure they have created is solid.
  • The pages acquire high quality backlinks.

How Zapier converts readers

It’s all well and good generating large amounts of traffic. But how does Zapier go about converting a user for a term such as “best calendar apps”, given that this is not directly the product they are offering?

There is a clever reason behind creating blogs such as these and why they are useful to Zapier’s specific product offering. Let’s take the Best Calendar Apps article as an example.

Firstly, the article lists different calendar apps: Google Calendar, Outlook Calendar, Apple Calendar etc — all of which Zapier offers connections to other apps. The assumption is then, if someone is using one of these apps, they may be in the market for creating an automated workflow involving one of these apps in the future.

Throughout the blogs, they include various calls to action that encourage users to look at Zapier:

  • CTAs for connecting calendars to other apps: “Bring content to your calendar by connecting other apps: Learn How”
  • In-content CTAs that flow from specific sections within the article: “Here’s how you can supercharge your Microsoft Outlook calendar with Zapier.”
  • Related reading: “Check out our lists of Android calendar apps, iPhone calendar apps, and Mac calendar apps if you want those sorts of platform-specific applications.”
zapier blog ctas

This format is copied across all “Best X App” pages to convert users.

Key takeaways

  • PLG is a core part of Zapier’s overall business success
  • Programmatic SEO has been a very successful route for the automation platform
  • Blogs make up a huge portion of traffic and Zapier have covered all possible CTA bases, creating content that will resonate with end users
  • Zapier’s /apps/ pages have been created in a way that the end pages explain possible workflows that can rank for niche, long-tail keywords
  • Internal linking plays a part in giving the website hierarchy and authority