How monday.com Increased Organic Traffic By 49% After Adopting Semrush

SEO

By Chris Barnhart Last updated Aug 25, 2021

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Results Summary

178 pieces optimized

49% of total positions increased

38% of pieces that were optimized are on the first page of Google search results

28% increase in visits

31% increase in work-related signups

The Challenge

Rotem Shay previously worked as Head of Performance Marketing at monday.com. After working with the acquisition team for years and learning the strengths and weaknesses of the paid, non-organic channels, he recognized the huge potential for growth that lay in the world of SEO.

monday.com’s journey with Semrush started even before the formal establishment of the SEO team in October 2020. 

“We already used Semrush’s keyword research functions as a complement to our PPC team research. It was great for researching ideal keywords for our campaigns and assessing our efforts against the competition.” 

Rotem Shay

Once the initial SEO team was established, however, Rotem knew he had to start somewhere—with content creation. As a part of this plan, Rotem set out with a Q4 2020 goal to have more than 350 pieces of content on monday.com’s blog—based on audience and keyword research—to get things up and running.

The team managed the creation of all of these pieces using a blog planning template like this one. 

This involved everything from topic brainstorming around the company brand, identifying which keywords should be targeted and prioritized, creating content briefs, and organizing a team of content writers to produce such a volume efficiently.

For Q1 in 2021, the goal was refined to around 270 pieces of content based on the variety of content and keywords to target. 

The Solution

Why Semrush?

In addition to previous interactions with Semrush during Rotem’s involvement with paid acquisition at monday.com, the recent development of the SEO team offered an opportunity to expand the existing partnership and offer a way for the SEO team to enhance their efforts.

Ultimately, the determined goal was for 15% of the PPC achievements (use of Google Adwords, etc.) to come from organic SEO activity moving forward.

“After my experience with Semrush with the PPC team, I started digging into the pillars of good SEO strategy and I was interested to check out more of Semrush’s features to see where we could run with it.”

Rotem Shay

Onboarding with Minimal Effort

Semrush was user-friendly—perfect for onboarding monday.com’s small but mighty—and growing— team, who varied in their SEO experience.

In the case of the SEO Writing Assistant, content writers are able to copy and paste any content from the monday.com domain, whether it’s a landing page, a blog, or something from the Template Center, add the targeted keywords and target audience location, and voilà! 

Due to how intuitive the tool is, SEO team members were able to teach the Localization team, which focuses on creating valuable content in languages other than English, how to use the tool for their unique audiences, and how to create high-performing content in other languages for their respective markets. 

Using Multiple Tools Within One Platform

While the SEO Writing Assistant is one of the monday.com SEO team’s most-loved and used features, they also use the SEO Content Template to help guide their content writers in their process of creating SEO-optimized content from scratch. This tool makes it easy for both in-house writers and contributors to get rolling with content without having to create briefs out of thin air.

Another advantage for their team is how the tool analyzes competitive content from the top 10 ranked pages on Google for the keyword at hand and provides suggestions for semantically related keywords and word count.

In the image below, you can see how the SEO team used Semrush and the keyword “scrum” to better inform their pieces related to that topic. 

There is even a Google Docs plugin for Semrush, so it can be used directly on drafts within Google Docs. 

When it came to targeting keywords, the team used additional SEO tools to understand keywords related to their product offering and then evaluate them based on a few factors, including:

• Volume
• Keyword difficulty
• User intent

In order to make prioritization multi-faceted and prevent any blind spots, the team created a unique scoring system. They created an internal rubric for each of the above factors, and the total of these scores was used to determine which pieces and keywords were of the highest priority to optimize.

In the picture below for example, “project management software” would be the highest priority. 

This then could help shape what content would be created for the quarter for blogs, landing pages, and more.

Gaining Real-Time Insights

As an individual edits a piece of content, the score increases or decreases on a scale of 10, as does the circle and color on the bullseye. Some of monday.com’s team members have described the game-like feeling this adds, making it an enjoyable and creative task. 

monday.com’s SEO team specifically uses: 

• The SEO section to find more keywords to add
• The Readability section to make sure word count and structure are reader-friendly
• The Tone of voice section to understand which sentences are too formal or too casual 

For example, we optimized content created for targeted keywords: project management software, PMO, portfolio management, and process management and now have the pieces ranking on the first page of Google results.

They also use the simple scores to track what their content scores were before and after optimizing them with Semrush. These numbers can then be used to compare against their content performance, using complementary tools and SEO software suites to help them analyze their overall content optimization efforts.

In their weekly iterations, SEO content team members are responsible for optimizing their content using the Semrush Writing Assistant. On the far left of the board, you can see the keyword they are targeting for, and entries of the score before and after they used the tool to guide their edits.