Looking for new tactics to empower your Search Engine Optimization (SEO) growth?
Then, Intercom makes for a great B2B SEO case study!
The company rakes in 140K+ monthly organic traffic and has converted over 25K customers.
Plus, its valued at $1.3 billion and earned $250 million in revenue in 2022.
How did Intercom do it?
Let’s explore the Intercom SEO strategy, the tactics employed, and the victories it earned.
The Intercom SEO Strategy Steps We’ll Cover Are:
- Creating Evergreen Content
- Targeting Keywords for High-Quality Traffic
- Following Standard On-Page SEO Practices
- Earning Backlinks
Let’s get started!
1. Creating Evergreen Content
SEO professionals know content marketing is vital to growing website traffic.
But here’s the thing:
A content strategy that doesn’t align with your users’ interests won’t benefit your company’s growth. That’s why content creation, much like Search Engine Optimization (SEO), is a continuous process — where you keep working on it to retain its benefits.
And that’s where Intercom succeeds! 🥇
The company excels at creating evergreen content that stays relevant to its target audience over long periods. That also means the content needs fewer updates and re-optimizations to keep bringing in traffic.
Now, Intercom creates evergreen content across various subfolders, including:
A. The Intercom Blog
Intercom’s blog is the crux of its digital marketing and content strategy.
It provides a mix of useful content, including thought-leadership posts, videos, podcasts, and more across different categories, including:
- Artificial Intelligence & Automation
- Customer Service
- Customer Engagement
- Engineering
- Product & Design
- News & Updates
- Podcasts
The blog post content addresses top-of-funnel topics that help attract targeted B2B traffic to the website, serving as the first touchpoint between a potential customer and Intercom.
That means using a keyword strategy consisting of product, informative, and mid-tail or long-tail keywords to win over users in the awareness stage.
Notice how the blog posts below rank for mid-tail keywords with low to medium search volume.
In fact, the blog post about “what is customer acquisition cost” is one of Intercom’s highest-performing pages.
By targeting evergreen content based on a set keyword strategy, Intercom has built a steady stream of inbound traffic comprising its ideal buyer persona. This highlights the importance of topical relevance and keyword research in creating a content marketing strategy.
Looking to learn from the best?
Explore the Best SaaS SEO Case Studies for inspiration.
B. The Intercom Help Section
Intercom’s “Help” subfolder is another big content repository that helps drive traffic and customer success. It’s a treasure trove of SEO content based on branded keywords and products.
It contains various customer support articles that draw traffic based on Intercom customer data — about users who need help overcoming issues while using the product.
Here are some of the top help pages.
The best part?
Intercom can create more customer support content based on new customer data (support requests and queries) and product features. Plus, this stays relevant as long as Intercom’s engineering team doesn’t deploy any major UI or design changes.
C. The Intercom Academy
Another resource for users, Intercom’s Academy is a knowledge base of courses to help customers maximize the value they receive from the product.
Although not a major traffic driver, its customer-centric purpose makes for a good user experience and helps drive customer success. And like the help articles, these pages contain content that provides value without needing frequent updates.
Key Takeaways
- A good content marketing strategy can be an excellent magnet for high-quality traffic. It’s one of the major foundations of any SEO effort.
- Evergreen content can draw traffic while staying relevant to your target audience over long periods.
2. Targeting Keywords for High-Quality Traffic
Intercom is a B2B company that offers a customer engagement and service platform with live chat and help desk features.
That’s why its content marketing strategy is directed towards helping customer service employees thrive.
Here’s a look at some of its blog pages that offer information on different aspects of customer service, including:
- Automated customer service
- Chatbot marketing
- Marketing technology stacks
This targeted keyword approach lets Intercom address the core problems of its target audience and draw high-quality traffic with the highest chances of conversions.
Plus, creating a content topic cluster around customer service helps establish Intercom as a thought leader. It also demonstrates authoritativeness — a core parameter of Google’s E-E-A-T guidelines.
Now, E-E-A-T (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness) isn’t a search engine ranking factor, but it helps determine whether you produce high-quality content. And building topical authority helps you rank higher on search result pages for any topically relevant keywords.
Bottom line: Intercom’s targeted keyword approach is integral to boosting the company’s key marketing metrics, like traffic and revenue. Plus, it helps the company become an authority on customer support and service.
Key Takeaways
- Do keyword research to find and address the critical issues of your target audience.
- Ensure your targeted keywords help bring in traffic with a high chance of conversions.
- Cover all relevant keywords in a topic cluster around your business’s central purpose to build topical authority.
3. Following On-Page SEO Best Practices
On-page SEO also helps search engines identify if a landing page contains information relevant to search queries. 🔍
So it makes sense that Intercom articles and other pages follow on-page SEO best practices. This ensures that search engine bots can easily crawl and understand any Intercom landing page.
These on-page SEO tactics include:
1. Using a Uniform URL Structure
Intercom uses a crisp URL structure that includes the subfolder or category and the main keyword.
This lets users and search engines immediately understand what to expect from the page. Plus, it’s a crucial element that should be on your technical SEO checklist.
Its general structure is either:
- www.intercom.com/<subfolder>
- Examples:
- https://www.intercom.com/pricing
- https://www.intercom.com/messenger
- https://www.intercom.com/fin
- Examples:
OR
- www.intercom.com/<subfolder>/<keyword>
- Examples:
- https://www.intercom.com/blog/customer-service-chatbots
- https://www.intercom.com/industry/ecommerce
- https://www.intercom.com/campaign/state-of-ai-in-customer-service
- Examples:
Need more evidence on the benefits of clean URLs?
Check out how Adobe uses URL structure as a part of its B2C SEO strategy.
2. Adding Headings and Subheads
The company incorporates relevant headings and subheads on its pages, which enable a better page structure and user experience for any website visitor.
The headings help break up chunks of text, making it easier to read and access different sections on the page.
They also make the pages more search-friendly in the eyes of Google.
3. Adding Meta Descriptions and Image Alt-Text
Intercom, like any other SaaS website, has a lot of tool pages with high-quality images. But they also ensure that each page has a meta description and all images have alt-text (meta text describing the image).
This helps improve user experience by letting a website visitor know what the page and images are about in case the images don’t load or if the user is blind (or visually impaired).
It also gives search engines an idea of the page’s contents, providing context about its relevance to the topic.
4. Using Internal and External Links
There are two types of links to add to articles:
- Internal links: Linking to another page on your website
- External links: Linking to pages on other websites
And Intercom uses them both.
Why?
Internal links help improve navigation and user experience by linking related Intercom articles. It also helps search engines discover new links on your website and pass page authority between related pages (read: page rank benefits).
On the other hand, you can build trustworthiness by linking to other authoritative websites that are relevant to your topic.
Remember: Trust is the most important aspect among Google’s E-E-A-T guidelines, which determine your page quality rating and affect rankings.
But how do you keep track of your internal and external links?
You can use tools like Google Search Console or Ahrefs to review your internal and external links.
Key Takeaways
- Similar to technical SEO, on-page search engine optimization is vital to any SEO strategy.
- On-page SEO helps search engines understand the relationship between your content and user search queries.
- Elements like your URL, headings, and meta description help visitors and search engines understand what your page is about. Headings, internal links, and images help improve the user experience.
4. Earning Backlinks
Being a SaaS tool, it’s normal for Intercom to use its app integration and mobile app pages for link building.
But remember how we said Intercom posts evergreen content relevant to its target audience?
That same valuable content also garners Intercom tons of backlinks.
Take a look at some of the high-quality backlinks Intercom receives due to its blog pages.
This speaks volumes about how relevant Intercom’s content is to users and other businesses.
Plus, it helps that the company also puts out reports and guides offering insightful, original data reports, which are shared a mile a minute on social media.
PS: Google tries to keep original reports in positions of higher visibility on search result pages for longer.
In any case, these backlinks help Intercom maintain a high domain authority, which contributes to a higher search engine ranking.
But remember: It’s more important to earn high-quality backlinks than many backlinks.
In fact, you should periodically check your website’s backlinks to disavow low-quality and spammy links (if there are many links that are likely to trigger a manual action penalty).
How can you check your backlinks?
You can use SaaS SEO tools like Google Analytics or Google Search Console.
For Google Analytics (GA4), check the Traffic Acquisition report and set the default channel group setting to “session source / medium.” You can even apply a filter for source medium exactly matching “referral.”
For Google Search Console, check the links sections. Backlinks are listed in the Top linking sites box.
Once you review these links, you need to create a list of the pages or domains you want to disavow in a text file. You must upload the text file to the Disavow links page of Google Search Console.
Looking for ways to earn high-quality backlinks?
Discover how Zapier leverages its integrations to earn backlinks.
Note: Backlinks aren’t the chief determinant of high search rankings. While they are helpful for your B2B SEO strategy, they don’t need to be the basis of your SEO effort. Trust us, we’ve ranked for hundreds of keywords without backlinks!
Key Takeaways
- High-quality backlinks can help you build domain authority, but low-quality ones can lead to rank penalties.
- SaaS websites can use app integrations and useful, relevant content for link building.
Taking a Page Out of Intercom’s SEO Strategy
The bedrock of Intercom’s B2B SEO strategy is great content.
It works well as a long-term plan for driving high-value traffic alongside other digital marketing elements, like social media and Google Ads.
And just like Intercom, you can use content creation to gain a SaaS SEO advantage.
But remember, content marketing is a game of strategy. You’ll need to play to your strengths rather than cover the same topics as other companies or competitors.
Not sure how to do that?
Connect with Startup Voyager, and our SEO team will help you uncover the perfect SEO content opportunities for your business. 💰
