Helping MentorCruise increase its revenue by 800% & reach 2 million search visits

MentorCruise is an online platform offering mentorships from people working at top technology companies worldwide, such as Google, Apple, and GitHub.

After being unsatisfied with results from other content marketing agencies, MentorCruise decided to try out Embarque’s services. In this case study, we will explore how we helped MentorCruise increase their search traffic to 2 million visits, annual revenue by 800% and monthly trials by 433% in the past 18 months.

Throughout this experience, MentorCruise was exposed to the opportunities that could come from significantly expanding their distribution with SEO, helping the platform reach more mentors and mentees in the process.

The Problem - MentorCruise was not optimized for SEO

Many people tend to discover MentorCruise through Google. While the platform already had a blog, the content it included wasn’t optimized to rank for relevant keywords.

“SEO has always been our most attractive channel, with conversion rates up to 5x higher than any other. Investing in it was a no-brainer,” says Dominic Monn, the founder of MentorCruise.

But, with minimal time available to create great SEO content regularly, Dominic decided to have a go at working with content marketing agencies. Needless to say, he wasn’t happy with the results. These were his problems:

     
  • The keyword research wasn’t targeted enough for needs and included suggestions that MentorCruise would not have been able to rank for
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  • The content lacked depth
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  • The content didn't cater to MentorCruise’s target personas

In other words, the content was too generic.

Dominic began looking for other alternatives and stumbled upon Embarque. After a short exploratory call to define the deliverables, he decided to try out our services.

“The content we’ve gotten from other services was flat and unexciting and served purely for SEO reasons. Since working with Embarque, we are getting compliments on the insights of our content too. It’s priceless,” says Dominic.

The Solution - Focusing on implementing SEO content systems and optimizing old content

MentorCruise was still at the beginning of its SEO strategy, which meant we were able to help it grow fast by focusing on ranking for low-competition, high volume queries. We’ve taken the following steps to create an SEO-based customer acquisition funnel for MentorCruise:

     
  • Prioritized low-level keyword research. MentorCruise had a domain rating (DR) of 35. While this DR was still below many of its competitors, there were already many low-level, high-volume keywords we could rank for.
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  • Targeted key customer segments. Career mentorship attracts many different types of people. Gathering data from customer questionnaires and traffic sources helped us identify key customer segments. These included people in the midst of changing careers, entrepreneurs, and technology professionals. Through this research, we’ve come to the realization that MentorCruise has an extensive range of topics to cover and produce helpful content around.
  • Targeting keywords with a high purchase intent. These consisted of queries searched by people looking for paid mentorship platforms.
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  • Setting blog processes and branding guidelines. We scaled up a process for ensuring that every blog post is aligned with MentorCruise’s branding guidelines. Every piece of content was to be optimized for branding, the target audience, and search.
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  • Executed on an SEO content calendar. We started creating great content around low-level, high-volume keywords searched by relevant customer segments.
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  • Content republishing. We’ve gone through blog posts that were over a year old and could be optimized to target specific keywords. Old blog posts tend to rank faster because Google has already indexed them in some form or another.

Results - More than 800% increase in annual revenue

In 18 months, MentorCruise experienced:

     
  • Search traffic went from a little over 450,000 visits to over 2 million
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  • More than 433% increase in monthly trials
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  • More than 800% increase in annual revenue

By scaling its SEO content marketing processes, MentorCruise saw results after a couple of months.

“Embarque’s services didn’t just feel like another writing gig, but they also offered a high-level SEO strategy and framework to drive more traffic to my business,” says Dominic.

Since starting on our SEO content strategy, MentorCruise’s traffic increased by 114%. Today, MentorCruise’s top 10 website pages were created by Embarque.

Old blog posts that received 0 traffic immediately saw 100 new visitors just a week after initiating content updates. For instance, the republished article “The meaning and definition of mentorship, mentor and mentee” quickly rose from its position at #30 in the U.S. to #5 in a week.

According to Dominic, the biggest eye-opener happened during the republishing. “Suddenly, the old blog post I personally wrote two years ago became the biggest traffic magnet of all blog posts!”

Conversions significantly went up too. After targeting keywords searched by people who are actively looking for mentorship and optimizing each blog post for conversion, we achieved a 433% increase in monthly trials.

“I can see the payoff on a weekly basis,” Dominic says. “As we’re targeting more and more low-level keywords, with each bringing at least several additional hundred people to the website every month.”

Takeaways

     
  1. You can significantly expand your reach through SEO. Through effective keyword research and targeting, we harnessed the potential MentorCruise had in considerably increasing its organic search traffic. According to Dominic, it’s exciting to see such rapid growth and realize that this is only the beginning of their SEO strategy journey.
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  2. Your SEO efforts will never be in vain. Through content updates, old blog posts quickly rose to the top 10 results for relevant keywords. Dominic says he now realizes that SEO content is ultimately a long-term investment, which will inevitably pay, even when the returns don’t initially seem clear-cut.
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  3. SEO is a distribution channel optimized for scale. MentorCruise already validated the need for its services. By fleshing out its target audience segments, we were able to do effective keyword research and target a wide range of people searching for many different topics related to career-based help.

Create great SEO content at scale with Embarque

Mentorship is an area that touches many different industries and can target various types of professionals at a range of career stages. Though MentorCruise is just at the beginning of its SEO journey to drive in relevant traffic and increase its revenue, we’re expecting even bigger results in the next few months.

Do you have a business that can benefit from scaling your SEO processes? Email julian@embarque.io today for more information.