Asana | SEO, Strategy
Setting Asana’s SEO Strategy for 2019
Developed Asana’s SEO strategy to double our organic search traffic in 2019 and beyond.
PROJECT TYPE
SEO, Strategy
DATE
2018-2019
RESULT
Developed an annual strategy to 2x Asana’s organic search traffic in 2019.
BACKGROUND / CHALLENGE
Prior to 2019, Asana’s SEO strategy had been a tactic within the overall web and acquisitions strategy, but not a dedicated program. After proving SEO’s impact on the business with a few key wins, leadership gave the approval to grow SEO into a full program, and I developed the strategy to correlate with that launch.
01 // CONTEXT & RESEARCH
Our strategy began with a look at our performance to date and what SEO initiatives we had already seen success with. We also wanted to contextualize organic search within our broader marketing strategy.
02 // GOALS & CHALLENGES
Next, I identified challenges that organic search could solve, and tied them to our broader business goals. Most importantly, I wanted to link our SEO strategy and initiatives to the main business goal: lead the category.
Since growth and getting ahead of the competition were our most important goals, we identified our core metrics as:
Share of search: How much of the SERPs do we own compared to our competitors?
Traffic: Have we doubled our organic search traffic in 2019?
Ranking: Are our tactics working?
CTR: How successful are we at driving web searchers to our website?
Conversions / assisted conversions: Are we attracting the right people and does this impact our business?
03 // TOP INITIATIVES
Now that we knew what we wanted to achieve and why, next was to identify how we would do that.
After looking at our web analytics, keyword research, and search performance, we identified three strategic initiatives to focus on:
Long-form resources
This would capture more potential customers earlier on in the marketing funnel, therefore increasing our traffic and conversions.
Template gallery
Our competitors owned the top results for any query related to project templates. Launching a template gallery on the website, and optimizing it for organic search, would allow us to compete with them — and win.
Video
We saw a 30% increase in the first half of 2018 in the SERPs for our most important keywords. Therefore, if we wanted to maintain and grow our search presence and traffic, we would have to invest (smartly and strategically) in video.
Supporting initiatives
To maintain our previous gains in SEO, we wanted to make sure we were still investing time in fundamentals, such as technical SEO and link building.
