Marketplace SEO: 16X YoY Revenue Growth through SEO w/ a 3-Year Client

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

MentorCruise was getting high-quality traffic and revenue through SEO, but the platform knew that they were fully taking advantage of the channel. For many lucrative queries they needed to rank for, they were mostly on the second page of Google Search. 

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 more than 2 million visits per year, have a year-on-year growth of 1,600% over the three years they’ve been a client, and monthly trials by 1,000% in the past 18 months.

As of 2023, MentorCruise has been a client for more than three years. Our long-term partnership is a testament to the success and longevity of our strategy. At Embarque, we still make experimentations to scale MentorCruise’s revenue and traffic growth via SEO.

The Problem - MentorCruise didn’t have a proper SEO strategy set in place

MentorCruise is a platform led by experienced tech professionals. Despite having brilliant mentors, they struggled to unlock their maximum potential in revenue and traffic. At the time, it was evident that their SEO content strategy was the issue. 

Many people tend to discover MentorCruise through Google through their mentorship landing pages and blog content, but they weren’t optimized for search, and there wasn’t a clear strategy set in place to increase traffic and revenue growth through SEO.

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Because of this, their ranking was lackluster and they weren’t bringing in as much revenue as they could have. 

Optimizing their platform for SEO seemed like the best way to resolve their dilemma. In fact, they have been meaning to try their hand at SEO for a while. 

“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
•  The content lacked depth
•  The content didn't cater to MentorCruise’s target personas

In other words, the content was too generic.

The content provided by the agencies they worked with did not represent their brand well nor did it appeal to their target audience. 

The platform experienced minimal to no positive changes in exposure because they weren’t targeting the right keywords. There was no significant increase in MentorCruise’s conversions because their content was not dynamic enough to grab their audience’s attention. 

Even with the help of different marketing agencies, there was a lack of growth in MentorCruise’s traffic and revenue. 

At this point, it was clear that MentorCruise could only overcome this issue if they optimized their platform from a new perspective. 

Now, as our client of 3 years, Dominic and his team have finally succeeded in growing their business. With our help, they were able to increase their flow of traffic and year on year revenue using their newly SEO-optimized content. 

“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. Today, it’s on 63. While this DR was still below many of its competitors, there were already many low-level, high-volume keywords we could rank for. This gave us an opportunity to help MentorCruise stand out among their competitors by targeting dynamic and highly effective keywords to replace their previous generic content. 
• 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. We used this data to create engaging content for various customer segments. This resulted in higher conversion rates. 
• Targeting keywords with a high purchase intent. These consisted of queries searched by people looking for paid mentorship platforms. By doing this, we were able to improve their ranking, provide relevant and high-quality content, and highlight MentorCruise’s mentorship offerings to drive more sales. 
• 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. We ensured that their brand was consistently well-represented across all new content. We aimed to maintain their brand identity as their platform steadily gained more traffic and conversions. 
• Opening up the blog for mentors. By doing this, we were able to take advantage of community-generated content for SEO, boost community engagement, foster loyalty, and highlight mentorship stories we love to hear.
• Executed on an SEO content calendar. We started creating great content around low-level, high-volume keywords searched by relevant customer segments. This organized system provided a steady supply of well-written and SEO-optimized content to maintain MentorCruise’s flow of traffic and revenue. 
• Content republishing. Aside from generating new content, we also found potential in optimizing the existing material on MentorCruise’s website. We’ve gone through blog posts and landing pages 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 1,600% increase in annual revenue

With our help, MentorCruise experienced the following changes in 18 months:

•  Search traffic went from a little over 450,000 visits to over 2 million
•  More than 433% increase in monthly trials
•  More than 1,600% increase in annual revenue, year on year 

By scaling its SEO content marketing processes, MentorCruise saw results after a couple of months. We were able to transform MentorCruise’s platform with our unique approach to SEO optimization.

Over the past 3 years, MentorCruise experienced a level of growth that other content marketing agencies could not provide. The content we created for their brand brought an influx of traffic to their platform, which paved the way for higher conversion rates, an increase in their monthly trials, and significant growth in their annual year on year revenue. 

“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.
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.
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.

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