Looking for reliable SEO tips to help your SaaS company grow traffic?
You can learn from one of the best — Adobe!
Adobe Inc. is a software company that offers its users various solutions, including:
- Adobe Photoshop (tool for image editing)
- Adobe Illustrator (tool for vector graphics)
- Adobe Analytics (SEO tool for web analytics)
- Adobe Commerce Store (marketplace for ecommerce SEO and marketing automation tools)
The website currently gets over 110 million in organic traffic.
But this wasn’t always the case.
Rewind about 8 years, and they had over 12 million organic traffic (in 2015).
Then, from end-2018 to mid-2021, they plateaued at around 60 million organic traffic before soaring to over 110 million in 2023.
What’s Adobe’s secret to success?
The quick answer is search engine optimization (SEO).
However, it’s a little more nuanced than just that.
Let’s explore the issues they identified and how they resolved them using SEO to unlock higher organic traffic growth.
This Article Contains:
What Problems Did Adobe Identify?
Here’s where things were going wrong for Adobe:
Firstly, Adobe didn’t have dedicated pages for every product and feature.
It provided a poor digital experience for customers and search engines since many of their offerings were meshed together on one page.
Secondly, its products would rank solely for branded keywords.
Think: Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator, etc.
Now, this isn’t bad, but that meant people weren’t finding their software when they searched for relevant keywords like:
- Image editing software
- Analytics software
- Video editing software
- Vector graphics software
That’s a huge loss, considering the number of tools Adobe offers.
What did Adobe do?
Adobe SEO Strategy: 5 Steps to Boosting Traffic
Adobe needed a plan of action that dug deeper than surface-level SEO best practices to boost organic search visibility.
That’s why their content optimization strategy makes for one of the top SEO case studies to learn from.
These are the steps Adobe took to achieve SEO success:
1. Create Individual Product & Feature Pages
Adobe had product pages chock-full of products and features.
However, these features didn’t do much to bring traffic to the site as keywords.
Imagine Adobe Analytics not ranking for keywords like “digital marketing” or Adobe Marketo Engage not ranking for “marketing automation!”
To rectify the issue, the company created individual pages for the top features of its products. This helped with content optimization — by creating an association between branded and non-branded keywords.
Let’s look at Adobe Express as an example.
Their Express-related content currently generates an average of about 15 million organic traffic per day.
Not bad for a page that started in May 2021 with zero traffic.
Plus, tons of traffic for the Express path (www.adobe.com/express/content) comes from its feature and create pages, including:
- https://www.adobe.com/express/feature/image/remove-background
- https://www.adobe.com/express/create/logo
- https://www.adobe.com/express/feature/image/editor
- https://www.adobe.com/express/feature/image/resize
This helps Adobe Express rank for non-branded keywords like background remover, photo editor, logo creator, and more. Take a look below.
Now, if you imagine this on a larger scale with a whole series of Adobe products, consider the number of non-branded keywords Adobe can rank for through product features!
Key Takeaways
- Ensure each product page ranks for its key features and ideal use cases
- Perform keyword research to identify the top search queries related to your features (you can use an SEO tool like Google Search Console to identify these queries)
- Optimize your product or feature pages with the queries identified in your keyword research
2. Create Common Templates for Feature Pages
Building individual feature pages can seem like an uphill task.
But Adobe made easy work of it by templating the structure of these pages to include:
1. A brief intro about the feature, including CTAs (calls to action) that link to the product.
2. They provide around three to four sections describing what you can do with the features.
3. Next, they provide steps on how to use the product.
4. This may be followed by a video tutorial and some FAQs.
5. Finally, they link to their product and a related product at the end of the page.
Most feature pages have small content and personality (design) variations. However, they essentially follow the same template to ensure a memorable digital experience.
Why?
It helps Adobe scale its product and SEO content marketing, plus lets search engines understand these feature pages.
Plus, it makes them familiar to users, improving their customer experience. This way, if they want to adopt a new Adobe feature, understanding its value shouldn’t be too hard!
Key Takeaways
- Templated pages can help you scale product, feature, or integration pages for SaaS website and ecommerce SEO
- Make it easy for search engines and your audience to understand your pages (for a better customer experience)
- Using images, videos, and tips to keep your audience engaged
3. Create a Uniform URL Structure
Adobe used a uniform URL structure to help search engine algorithms understand and index their pages.
This included a branded and non-branded keyword in the URL.
For example, the features pages are structured as follows:
| https://www.adobe.com/product/feature/feature-name Or https://www.adobe.com/products/product-name/feature |
Here are examples of Adobe Photoshop Lightroom and Adobe Experience Cloud.
- https://www.adobe.com/products/photoshop-lightroom/edit-photos.html
- https://www.adobe.com/products/photoshop-lightroom/video-editing.html
- https://business.adobe.com/products/analytics/web-analytics.html
- https://business.adobe.com/products/marketo/marketing-analytics.html
The company used best practices to make it easy for users to identify Adobe products, features, and use cases with just a glance at the URL. Most importantly, it lets search engines make sense of the pages and understand how they’re linked to related pages.
So, when any of these feature pages rank well, the top-level product page also benefits.
Key Takeaways
- Uniform URLs are as important for on-page search engine optimization (SEO) as using a meta description, meta tag, and schema markup (structured data)
- Your URL strategy can help search engines identify related pages
- Include a target keyword in each URL
4. Provide Free Offerings
When you think of Adobe Products, you may think of licenses and subscriptions.
So, naturally, many people look for free ways to use its products.
How did Adobe address this?
Aside from offering free trials, they created free tools for users, including:
- Free online photo editor (Adobe Express)
- Free image background remover (Adobe Express)
- Free PDF editor (Adobe Acrobat)
- Free logo maker (Adobe Express)
- Free image resizer (Adobe Express)
This helped Adobe draw massive traffic from keywords that included “free” + “feature”, improving its overall search engine ranking.
Here’s a look at the top keywords:
How does this help?
It lets Adobe compete with competitor tools (like Canva) that provide free photo editing and design software for social media, presentations, and more.
Key Takeaways
- Free offerings are a great way to steal competitor traffic
- Free products help you outdo competitors (it’s why Google Analytics has more users than Adobe Analytics — 37M websites on Google Analytics vs. 70K companies using Adobe)
- Free tools can be a great way to convince users to try other paid products
5. Internally Link Related Pages
The templates and features pages gave Adobe a massive directory of pages they could compile into SEO content hubs.
Look at how much organic search traffic comes from their Adobe Express and Adobe Acrobat pages.
Adobe Express has a massive 2,313 pages, including feature pages, templates, tutorials, and more. These pages are internally linked, creating a content hub that keeps visitors on Adobe’s site longer.
Moreover, these pages work as an alternative to a blog for content marketing.
They also help create a smoother user experience and stronger topical authority, which is critical according to Google’s E-E-A-T guidelines. These guidelines help Google identify the quality of your content and propel you to the top of the search results.
Key Takeaways
- Internal linking is one of the few SEO best practices to share search engine ranking benefits between pages
- Linking related pages can help you build topical authority on a search engine like Google
- Linking related pages is a great way to improve user experience and keep traffic on your site for longer
Now, you may be wondering: What was the impact of these SEO efforts?
Let’s find out.
The Impact
As mentioned earlier, Adobe’s traffic has skyrocketed from 12 million in 2015 to 110 million in September 2023.
Its SEO efforts have helped Adobe attain an estimated organic traffic value of over $43 million compared to its estimated spend on paid traffic, which is slightly over $2 million.
Plus, Adobe reported a revenue of $4.89 billion in the third quarter of the 2023 fiscal year.
Wouldn’t you say that’s worth the effort?
Learning from Adobe’s SEO Strategy
Adobe’s SEO strategy is a good case study for SaaS organizations that want to leverage their tools and features to boost organic search traffic.
But remember, simply following in Adobe’s footsteps won’t take you to the top. 📈
SEO success (whether on-page, local, or technical SEO) goes hand in hand with consistent and targeted effort that’s backed by expert-level insight into your strengths and weaknesses. You need to know yourself and your competitors.
Need help with that?
Get in touch with the experts at Startup Voyager for insider SEO tips and strategies (over and above SEO best practices) to drive massive traffic to your website.
