Client Overview

We saw a massive uptick in organic traffic when we began publishing the content. This work eliminated the dreaded months of slow-climbing traffic rates as our numbers skyrocketed to more than triple what we had been seeing. This just goes to show you how impactful the right strategy can be for driving results.

– David Waiter, SEO Strategist @Directive

Before working with Directive, Seagate already had an established brand presence being well known for their external hard drives and gaming hardware. However, having recently launched its Lyve Cloud wireless storage product, Seagate wanted to reposition its brand to expand and include cloud services as well as its existing product lines. This meant expanding into a highly competitive keyword market to rewire Google’s association with the brand “Seagate” to also include “cloud computing.”

Having recently expanded their service offerings to include this new keyword, this campaign was considered a fresh foray into the content. To extend a strong foundation into the cloud computing keyword competition, Directive started with the fundamentals. This began with simple content management and production building out a basic content calendar in Asana to combine workflows and approvals.

The editorial workflow was continuously iterated to better optimize the content production and publication process. After integrating Asana and Wrike into the ideal content management workflow, Directive also held in-person workshops to collaborate with Seagate’s team on monthly topics. With more aggressive ownership from the agency half of this partnership, Directive and Seagate successfully scaled out content to publish.

Finding the right workflow that balances topic curation, writing, editing, approvals, publication, and promotion is never easy. Add in two different teams working together across multiple platforms and it becomes even harder. Directive created multiple iterations of this content project to better align with Seagate’s content management needs. We created a process that reduced friction and streamlined workflow.

This started with an excel-Asana combination that helped with initial bottlenecks. Content management development consisted of Directive entirely managing Seagate’s Wrike platform to create, edit, and publish content leaving only approvals for the client. With this new system in place, it streamlined a previously stalled process so well that they published 60 pieces in Q2 of 2022 alone.

To make sure they were attributing the right boosts in traffic to the right pages and keywords, Directive broke down Seagate’s traffic into three discrepant segments: “cloud,” “mobile,” and “blog.” Regardless of what type of content is being published on Seagate’s site, the Directive team was sure to focus the call to action towards a singular goal of landing pages promoting Seagate’s new Lyve Cloud solution.

This way, any searches and relative content that was coming in from either “cloud,” searches, “mobile” searches, or direct “blog” visits could be attributed to new content helping them grow “cloud” based awareness.

When it comes to SEO, results take time and consistency. Two features that are also key in any successful content marketing strategy build. Directive had to go through multiple iterations of the content workflow to finally get Seagate’s publication system up and running.

During this time, Directive also had to be confident that the content was impactful and would generate significant returns. As is often the case – good things take time. Once Directive was able to clean up the content queue and focus the strategy of cloud keywords, the results started flowing.