Jakub Rudnik’s Post

When I joined AC, organic traffic had fallen consistently for 24 months -- down 35.8% March '21 to April '23. This was a new challenge for me. Scribe's website was in its infancy when I joined; at G2 there were plateaus, but the graphs always went up and to the right. My instincts are always to create, to expand -- I want to build and to grow. But net-new wasn't going to be enough. We started at the foundation. Our website team prioritized modernizing and speeding up the site. Lighthouse and other performance scores have improved dramatically; load speeds were cut down; and we've made significant strides on site structure, menus, etc. This work has been the rising tide that lifts all ships. Across the site, we have a sprawling library of content, in various states of upkeep, typically created independently from other site sections. We pruned ~35% of our blog content, and moved content between folders to better match intent. Mountains of broken links and redirects have been chipped away. 1/6 of our highest-intent blogs have been rewritten, and we've systematically improved interlinking across the majority of organic-focused content. We did generate net-new content. With the ramp time needed for organic content to index, rank, generate traffic, then prove out trials/signups/etc., we needed to start the clock as early as possible. We focused on areas of the site where we could move fast and Google was showing us positive signals (ex: Glossary, PFIGS blogs), and on content types that I had strong belief in for future revenue (ex: Listicles). With focus and AI support for content drafting, in April and May 2023, we published more content than the previous three quarters combined while cutting budget. The last piece was a shift in mindset. Content at AC had to move from a service org to a growth-oriented team. New metrics, enabling the team with data and context, ruthless prioritization. There's still headroom before we reach that March '21 peak, and in our categories there's pretty limitless potential beyond that. But organic traffic is up 26.3% from the bottom and we're carrying that momentum into 2024. Even better, trials and revenue where we invested heaviest (blog, glossary) are up 40%. I'll share more details about each strategy over the coming days and weeks. And this year as we shift even further into a growth mindset, I'll post learnings. Every company/site is different, and content/SEO are changing constantly, and posting here has clarified my own beliefs more than anything else. 11.5 months left to make 2024 a year of growth.