The challenge
Although Matillion is an established player in the cloud ETL space, their marketing team had difficulty integrating a seamless strategy for traffic and conversions across the website and key landing pages.
The problem was two-fold.
First, organic traffic to the website was stagnant. Additionally, out of the visitors that were finding Matillion’s website organically, most of them weren’t converting into leads.
They needed a solution that would tackle both of these issues head-on.
The strategy
The Directive team was tasked with establishing a robust SEO strategy to draw qualified users in and optimize the landing page experience to produce high-quality conversions from Matillion’s ideal customers. To achieve significant results in both areas, we concentrated our efforts on link building, internal linking, and key conversion rate optimization tactics.
Growing domain authority
With SEO, there are various factors that influence organic traffic growth.
We identified backlinks as a key missing piece that hindered Matillion’s website from succeeding in organic rankings. To close the backlink gap and build Matillion’s domain authority, we sought out to secure guest blog opportunities from credible, industry-leading websites. Creating content for external publications allowed us to build high-quality backlinks, while simultaneously promoting the Matillion brand to a much wider target audience. This was a joint effort between Matillion’s marketing team and external guest writers.
After establishing a solid off-page SEO foundation, we turned our focus to improving Matillion’s on-page SEO. The Directive team implemented a tightly-knit internal linking web to improve user experience and make the site easier to crawl for search engines. We strategically place relevant links throughout the website to encourage users to click through and discover additional resources such as a helpful service page or a compatible blog article. This tactic also contributes to improving domain authority as it distributes internal link equity throughout different pages on the site.
Eliminating distractions
In the second phase of our strategy, we noticed that Matillion’s main landing pages were driving some organic traffic; however, these visitors were not clicking on the main call-to-action (CTA) and converting to leads. Instead, we observed that guests would browse through the page and click on various other links.
To shift the audience’s focus towards the primary CTA, our team set out to remove any clickable distractions that didn’t offer value to the audience. This included various internal links and the main navigation bar.
As with any good marketing tactic, it’s important to test variations of a landing page before making a final decision. We conducted a split test to compare the original version of the landing page against the version without distracting internal links. The test was structured so that 50% of site visitors saw the original landing page, while the other 50% were shown the new variant without internal links.
The results speak for themselves
Directive’s approach to link building and growing domain authority led to a rewarding outcome for Matillion’s organic traffic numbers.
Compared to the previous year, organic traffic surged 32% on the homepage and over 268% to blog posts. Overall, we landed 31 backlinks from reputable domains to Matillion’s site. This lead to a boost in organic traffic and helped to establish a stronger, more credible digital presence for the brand.
On the conversions side, the split test results were equally noteworthy. In less than one month, the new landing page variant excelled with an average of 88% click-through rate. These results proved the hypothesis correct: we had the ability to shift the viewer’s focus towards the main conversion form by removing clickable distractions on the page. After running the test for one month, demo sign-ups increased by 49% MoM.
By partnering with the Directive team, Matillion was able to establish a streamlined process to drive organic traffic, conversions, and make a measurable impact on the business’s bottom line.
“We lean on Directive as an extension of our marketing team rather than a vendor. They care about what we care about — things like lead quality, opportunity creation, and revenue generation,” adds Sonya Hansen, Director of Demand Generation at Matillion.
