How to 100X Your Organic Traffic Using Content

This is a story about a startup in a boring industry whose organic traffic increased from 4K per month to 400K within a year. As you can probably guess from its name, Tomorrow Sleep is in the mattress industry.

Launched in the middle of 2017, they set out to design the first truly connected sleep system with the knowledge, research, and engineering expertise of Serta Simmons Bedding. While their product was groundbreaking, their initial approach to content was anything but.

In fact, they didn’t really start creating online content until the middle of 2018. Almost immediately they realized the significance of their challenge. Long-standing players in the market had already established a strong foothold in organic results. Just publishing any old content wasn’t going to work.

So, the company reached out to Social Media Sharks for help. Their mandate was to create a content strategy, then scale and manage the tactical side of content creation. While traditional measurement tools for tracking and monitoring keywords and positions were useful, they weren’t enough to drive meaningful and drastic impact.

For this, they turned to MarketMuse.

The Objective

Tomorrow Sleep, in consultation with Social Media Sharks, had determined three specific objectives.

1. Draw high-quality traffic to the website.
2. Rank for relevant keywords.
3. Improve the amount of time spent on the website.

The Method

First, primary topics were identified and analyzed with MarketMuse Premium, an AI-powered content intelligence, and strategy platform. Using MarketMuse Research, the team investigated the topic landscape to understand what related topics to consider and how frequently experts mention them when writing on these subjects.

Using MarketMuse Compete, the team drilled down into the top 20 search results for those primary topics to visualize the gaps and opportunities for content creation. The heatmap displays the topic distribution (how frequently mentioned) across each piece of content. This strategy provided insights critical to creating new, in-depth content on existing optics in the space, thereby establishing themselves as experts.

The Results

Within a year, Tomorrow Sleep’s organic traffic increased from 4K per month to 400K per month.

They now outrank their largest competitor (Casper) for primary topics and hold multiple positions in a single search engine result page (SERP). In addition, they have gained authority in the eyes of the search engine to obtain the featured snippet.

Most people will say a domain can only own one position on Google for the query. We found that for a single query where we have the featured snippet, we also own positions one and two across different articles.

The process wasn’t just about driving traffic but driving targeted traffic that’s answering the intent. We’re able to do this organically instead of buying traffic.

Over the last year and a half, we took six really big consumer brands and conducted a test between MarketMuse and Ryte. Not only did MarketMuse exceed what was best in class prior, but we couldn’t find anything to beat it. We always try to find the best tool and not become stagnant. MarketMuse beat them hands down. I don’t mean it functioned better or looks prettier, but the barebones results of rankings and positions were better.

Ryan Monahan – CEO at Social Media Sharks