2.3M new visitors in under 12 months?! Here's exactly how Peanut did it.
I interviewed Dimitris Drakatos in late 2021 for this episode. He’d been at Peanut App for almost exactly one year as their first SEO lead—and their traffic growth was exponential.
In just seven months, Peanut’s search clicks had gone from 400 to 1.8 million per month. Within 12 months they reach 2.3M. This kind of impressive growth is almost unheard of, which is why I reached out to him to get the lowdown on how his team did it.
From implementing a similar strategy with my own clients, I know how hard these results are to achieve, particularly in competitive niches.
The fundamentals we learn from Dimitris’ story are a solid foundation for building your own SEO machine, but of course, the opportunity size relies on you having the right mix of resources, addressable keyword volumes, and competitive industry dynamics.
Let's deep dive into this case study.
Expect to learn:
- Why building a defensible SEO moat was top of mind for Peanut
- The volume of content published—was it 10 articles per month? 50? 100?
- Why Dimitris didn't focus at all on backlink building
- Were website developers needed?
- The three buckets of keyword types you choose strategically
- Why avoiding cannibalization is so critical when producing content at-scale
- What 7 points are KEY to ensuring content remains a high-quality
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Words of Warning: A quick look at Ahrefs for Peanut App reveals their top 5 pages including page one SERP spots for keywords like ‘unique girl names’ which has 240k global monthly search volume. Brilliant and well-aligned for Peanut, but don’t expect much volume in the B2B SaaS space.
Let’s dig in.
What were Peanut’s goals?
To understand if this strategy makes sense for you, it’s important to understand where Peanut was at in its startup stage and what they were hoping to achieve.
In December 2019, Peanut announced that its user base had grown 60 percent since December, from 1 million to 1.6 million users. In May 2020, they raised their Series A investment round of $12M.
Those of you who’ve been through this startup phase will know that with a fresh cash injection from high-profile VC firms, you’re expected to grow, quickly. You’ll have shifted quickly to having less time, and more cash—which means you’re ready to spend, spend, spend to be even more desirable before your Series B round comes along.
Peanut was in exactly this situation. They wanted to enter into their Series B with a highly defensible position, which meant closing the SEO gap with their competitors rapidly.
Here’s some more context:
- The website was currently not conversion rate optimized. It had the basics about Peanut but was a customer acquisition machine.
- Growth till now came from word of mouth and some paid campaigns.
The main goal was to build an organic acquisition machine, which meant building up organic, relevant traffic to the site. This traffic would help them get data to understand visitor activity so they could begin CRO, drive app installs, and more active users.
No one expected such incredible results. But, when they came, Peanut doubled down.
What was the strategy?
Let's break it down
In a nutshell, Dimitris and his team published 100 blog posts per month. He focused on three silos of keywords (low-hanging fruit, topic clusters, and branded keywords), building out content using SEO best practices in interlinking, keyword optimization, and avoiding cannibalization.
Let's dive in:
Quick facts:
- Domain rating before starting = 60 (he didn’t focus on backlink building because DR was already strong).
- 99% of content produced was blog posts to avoid developer workload.
- All content was published on their blog URL structure /blog/
What were the outputs
Dimitris’ team created 40 articles a month initially. High volumes were designed to close the gap with competitors because Peanut had just 400 in search volume previously.
As they saw quick success, they quickly moved to 100 monthly posts—early success won his project a lot of internal support.
99.9% of the new content was blog articles, rather than product pages, so they didn’t have to request website development from the engineering side.
Backlinks vs publishing velocity
Dimitri decided because domain authority was pretty good already; but there was no organic content strategy, to focus on high-volume production first.
If you’re starting with a fresh website or low DR, I’d suggest mixing your strategy here. First, get a bunch of content published and then do a sprint of backlink-building activity. Both are important, especially in a competitive niche.
The content sends signals to Google that tell them what your website is about, if you cover the full breadth of keywords on a particular topic you receive a boost called ‘topical authority’.
Backlinks, on the other hand, give external authority signals. It’s simple: the more quality, relevant websites that link to your content the better it must be. For example, if a well-known authority on marketing topics like MarketingWeek, links to your article on marketing strategy then it must be a valuable read. That’s why with my clients our backlink-building strategy prioritizes high authority, highly relevant websites.
When the website authority is already pretty good, you should start with high-velocity publishing like Dimitri did. Your second big sprint can identify where targeted backlink building would be valuable.
Choosing which content to produce
When I asked which keywords he chose, Dimitris walked us through his strategy of choosing a mixture from three different silos.
Before diving in he made an important point relevant to every SEO strategy:
When choosing those keywords think strategically:
Bucket one: Low-hanging fruit
Low-hanging fruit is your best friend as a startup marketer. Quick wins secure you trust and breathing room to do the real, long-term work of marketing. And, who doesn’t like to see graphs quickly moving up and to the right?
Dimitris kicked off his SEO strategy by focusing on these low-hanging fruit:
- Low difficulty (<25 KD) with a volume of 2-300 monthly searches.
He added two bits of nuance. He said:
(1) if your domain authority is lower then your “low-hanging fruit” will have a lower KD than 25.
(2) Anything below 2-300 monthly searches is probably not very attractive at this stage. You want to be able to get clicks even if you’re not the #1 result. That being said, if it is a high-converting money keyword then forget about volume and write it!
Bucket two: Topic clusters
Bucket two focused on building out topical authority via topic clusters.
Here’s an example of one of Peanut’s topic clusters: Pregnancy Week-by-Week Guide.
The guide covers the breadth of the topic at a high level (the “hub” or “pillar” piece), and links to more than 42 other sub-articles which each cover individual weeks in-depth—for example, “42 weeks pregant” is one of the “cluster” articles.
This strategy of pillar & clusters around one topic is effective for three reasons:
- Topical authority: Google favors websites with clear authority or expertise on a topic, covering 50+ articles on that topic is a clear signal you have that expertise.
- Internal linking: This strategy lends itself to easy internal linking which helps Google’s crawler flow more easily, as well as teaching Google through ‘anchor text’ what keyword each blog post should rank for and sharing ‘link juice’ between content.
- User experience: Covering the depth of each topic makes the pillar feel more valuable (more likely to build backlinks) and keeps the visitor clicking around and reading more (more time on the page; reduced bounce rate).
Bucket three: Branded keywords
Branded keywords are those that mention your company name. For example, “peanut reviews” is a branded keyword.
Dimitris recommended covering these for two reasons: they’re easy to win the #1 spot and they’re likely to have high conversion rates.
As you can see from the Peanut App Reviews link above, this is one case where the Peanut team built out a custom page. High-conversion pages are worth the investment.
Combine these three to aim to bring quick wins. Everyone loves quick wins—it helps you win internal buy-in.
How did Peanut Maintain Quality with such Volume?
One of the key issues any SEO will bump into with this strategy is maintaining quality and brand whilst scaling up content production.
We dived into this topic together because at 100 SEO briefs and 100 articles per month, there needs to be an operation in place.
Writing and editing: Doing it right
The truth about an SEO project like this? If you don’t get your writers right, your results could’ve been much greater.
Things need to move fast, there needs to be as few editing errors as possible. Here’s Dimitris’ checklist:
- Work with people you’ve worked with in the past—those that you trust to be high quality and committed.
- Build brand guidelines—you’ll be onboarding new writers regularly, and you want to get them up to speed quickly.
- Get two teams to sign off on new content before it goes live: brand and SEO. Every piece of content needs to bring your visitor into your brand AND be optimized well.
- Avoid freelancers from sites like Upwork and Fiver. There is good talent there, but many won’t have time to focus on you and learn your ecosystem, brand and technical knowledge so deeply. Use a dedicated external individual or team so that they invest in you, and understand your product and thought leadership well.
- Make sure the writers you work with fully understand SEO, and aren’t just quality writers.
- Get a good CMS that makes it easy to upload and re-edit articles, or you’ll waste lots of time here.
- Doing the whole thing right takes at least one person who understands SEO completely dedicated to the project.
Thanks for reading!
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