Case study: Driving traffic with content for Styra

Case Studies

Policy as code platform beats all competitors in key industry terms, doubles organic traffic value

Editorial calendar

Content writing

Technical SEO

On-page SEO

Paid advertising

About the project

Styra

Cloud-native security

Redwood City, California

One year

Case

Styra faced tough SEO competition in the cloud-native security and policy management space. Direct competitors were outputting a steady stream of content and ranking for core industry terms that Styra had helped coin. Styra needed to establish its digital presence and dominate the share of voice. And the company needed that done yesterday.

The review

Exceptional B2B partner for driving strategic growth and market visibility

“Productive Shop has been an invaluable ally in elevating our digital campaigns and SEO efforts. Their team displayed a remarkable understanding of our technical landscape, industry context and marketing strategies. The results we’ve achieved together are a testament to their expertise and dedication. Their data-driven methodology, combined with an emphasis on understanding our customers and their journey, has significantly impacted our lead generation and market share of voice. I wholeheartedly recommend Productive Shop to any B2B SaaS company looking to drive traction and excel in a competitive market.”

Megan Scofield

CMO, Styra

About the client

Styra: Authorization for enterprise applications and infrastructure

Styra is a leading provider of cloud-native authorization solutions, specializing in policy and security management for containerized, microservices-based and cloud-native applications and their infrastructure. They are best known for their open-source project, Open Policy Agent (OPA), a general-purpose policy engine designed to help organizations enforce fine-grained, context-aware policy-based access control across their cloud-native stack.

To build a robust B2B lead gen engine, however, Styra had to output high-quality content that ranked well and educated buyers on the benefits of buying a cutting-edge ready-made authorization solution.

1,117%

Visibility increase (0.93% to 11.32%) from July 2022 to March 2023

107.81%

Traffic cost increase (6.4k to 13.3k) in one year

Top 3 rankings

700+

High-value keywords harvested

Performance

Performance results

Challenge

Navigating the competitive SEO landscape

Low share of voice and a lack of keyword rankings

Styra was not ranking for crucial industry terms, which made it difficult for potential clients to discover their services through search. This lack of keyword ranking led to poor visibility and a low share of voice in the heavily contested cloud-native authorization sphere. With competitors occupying prime positions on SERPs, Styra was missing out on valuable opportunities to showcase its expertise and establish itself as a thought leader.

Technical SEO troubles

Through multiple audits of Styra’s website, Productive Shop’s consultants identified various technical SEO problems that negatively impacted search engine crawling and indexing. For instance, the website’s poor performance on mobile pages resulted in limited organic traffic and low visibility. There wasn’t a cohesive internal linking plan in place either. No SEO content strategy would have been effective in the presence of these issues.

Solutions

Delivering exceptional SEO results for tech startups

Boosting Styra’s share of voice by 700% with a data-driven approach to SEO

Productive Shop worked closely with Styra to develop and implement a robust, data-driven SEO strategy to address the challenges the company faced. Together, we focused on improving share of voice — an important metric for benchmarking yourself against competitors — through content writing and SEO optimizations. Styra saw an increase from .06% to .48% of the total share of voice for all keyword clusters from April 2022 to February 2023, pushing out direct competitors.

Creating an editorial calendar aligned with business objectives

Productive’s SEO specialists conducted in-depth keyword research to identify high-potential terms and phrases relevant to Styra’s target audience and industry. Based on this research and feedback from Styra, Productive Shop writers developed an editorial calendar focused on selected keywords. Together with Styra SMEs, we then crafted high-quality, SEO-optimized blog posts that targeted specific keywords and addressed pertinent topics within the cloud-native authorization space.

Thanks to these SEO writing efforts, Styra harvested over 700 keywords, ranked top 3 for 48 high volume, high cost per click (CPC) keywords and dominated SERPs rankings for major industry keywords.

Saving thousands of advertising dollars with featured snippets

Recognizing the value of featured snippets, Productive Shop implemented a targeted strategy to earn these highly visible placements for Styra. With the right keywords and content structure, Styra was able to not only rank #1 for critical terms but also be prominently displayed on the results page. The success in capturing these rich snippets further bolstered Styra’s online presence and strengthened its competitive advantage.

Increasing organic traffic value by 106.25% with internal linking and technical optimizations

Styra’s website was thoroughly audited by Productive Shop’s SEO consultants, who identified issues and recommended solutions. By optimizing Styra’s website to meet Google’s technical standardsaddressing these problems, the website’s visibility on SERPs improved, leading to increased organic traffic and user engagement. Styra saw an increase in the value of organic traffic of 106.25%, from $6.4k in April 2022 to $13.3k in April 2023. Even Google recognized our combined efforts and would periodically send encouragement in the form of Google Search Impact awards.