Have you been struggling to acquire more users organically? Check out this helpful presentation, Organic User Acquisition: Tactical Ways to Grow Your User Base, from Alex Birkett of HubSpot—or read our quick summary below to get started.
Step 1: Build a winning content strategy with pillars and clusters.
As you work on improving your organic rankings, always keep in mind that business results are more important than rankings. If you’re ranking high, but users aren’t converting, you may need to rethink the terms you’ve targeted. An effective strategy can be to focus on ranking for high intent terms so you’re going after users who are ready to buy. Once you find an approach that works, make a playbook to scale it.
Along with identifying effective keywords, start to build clusters of content around specific keyword pillars and link related pages together to improve your website rankings.
AccuRanker is a great tool for finding the “pillar” keywords you can build clusters around, as well as sending regular keyword reports to team members. You can break out your cluster content into tier 1, 2 and 3 content with low to high relevance and authority to help with prioritizing efforts among your team.
Step 2: Think about promotion before you even start creating
Too many people just jump into writing without thinking about how they will promote a post. If you know how users will arrive at your post, you’ll have a much better understanding of what they expect and how you can meet their needs within your content.
A simple way to start this process is to examine competitors: just search for your target terms, find the top 3-5 results, then look up the ahrefs backlink profile for each. This can give you a set of sites to request links from.
Other sources of possible inspiration and promotion include influencer sites like Onalytica and Buzzsumo, while software review sites provide a wealth of information about related product categories.
Finally, link roundups, agency partners and even Slack or Facebook groups can all deliver helpful ideas and opportunities for promotion. Based on your research, create a list of people and sites to target with your promotion requests once your content’s been created.
Step 3: Create awesome, linkable content
There are many ways to create great content, but HubSpot focuses on creating content with catchy “hooks” such as unique images, special data, original charts, frameworks with new names, quotes and lists of pros and cons.
This type of content is highly linkable and, especially if you create images and data with your brand on it, is likely to get you linkbacks and result in others reusing your content extensively.
Step 4: Promote and build your links
Once you create your keyword-targeted content, the hard work is only partly done. Now, it’s time for some intensive link building efforts.
Start by ensuring that you’ve included internal links between the relevant pillar and cluster pages on your site. Then, get started with your external promotion requests. Contact the influencers and sites you identified in step 2 and ask them to link to and share your content.
When contacting people, be human: don’t automate too much, be direct with your request and don’t follow up too many times. That’s the surest path to success.
Step 5: Tweak, optimize and get customers
Congratulations are in order—you’ve launched a comprehensive effort to improve your organic user acquisition efforts! Unfortunately, your work still isn’t done. Now that you’ve launched this new test, it’s time to measure, analyze, optimize and test again.
As you grow more familiar with this process, you can start to focus your efforts more specifically on increasing rankings and traffic or conversions and acquisition.
You may find that different sets of keywords and different promotional avenues are more effective for different goals. But you’ll never know for sure until you try.
There you have it: 5 simple steps to improving your organic user acquisition. Give them a try and report back!
