Every entrepreneur has a “light bulb” moment. For Incfile co-founder Dustin Ray, his bright business idea was to help other future entrepreneurs navigate the often-bumpy path to business success.

A vision that Incfile has now accomplished for close to 800K+ entrepreneurs since 2014…and counting.

But, Ray had another light bulb moment soon after in 2016 when he realized the SEO firm he’d hired wasn’t delivering the results he wanted (and needed). So he hired us to jumpstart growth.

And grow we did. In one year we hit a 400 percent increase in organic search traffic and a 300 percent increase in revenue from this traffic.

We did it with epic content, quick technical fixes, smart link building, and a little bit of SEO savvy.

In year six, we’ve reached pretty epic results — 3,000 percent traffic increase and 800 percent revenue increase from the inception of our relationship.

Read on to find out exactly how we did it as we share our insight secrets to massive, quick SEO growth for a product-led brand.

Challenge

The business formation industry can be cut-throat, with the big dogs commanding an overwhelming majority of market share and top slots in the first page of Google search results.

We knew we had our work cut out for us.

With so many major competitors, visibility and market share seemed, at times, insurmountable. Their previous SEO agency wasn’t getting them the traffic they wanted or writing high-quality content quickly, and Incfile wasn’t ranking well for their top keywords that would drive growth.

When we made the pitch, we knew we had to address these SEO and content pain points before anything else.

Strategy & Execution

Our first step was to tackle SEO head-on with a smart content strategy backed by technical SEO and link building.

Our comprehensive SEO site audit uncovered numerous technical issues and nearly an entire website of pages that weren’t optimized for search.

A competitive analysis brought to light gaps in SEO and content where other brands were beating Incfile, but it also revealed new opportunities to tighten up our strategy and gain some big wins with “low hanging” SEO fruit.

And so, we were off to the races. A race that ended in the incredible results we mentioned above. Here’s how we did it…

2016- 2017

  • Created an overall SEO strategy that started with really understanding the Incfile customer — what problems they had, how we could solve them, and how we could build content around SEO keywords by writing really great content in the form of new landing pages for the site and revamping their blog
  • Focused heavily on “LLC” as a head keyword to rank on the first page
  • Wove in other long-tail keywords we could more easily rank for like, “how much is an LLC” or “what an LLC operating agreement is”
  • Honed in on a local SEO strategy that targeted state-specific keywords and content, creating LLC guides for different states to create more personalized information and capture keywords such as “forming an LLC in Texas”
  • Incorporated other relevant keywords and content around business services that aligned with Incfile’s customers and products, such as registered agent service, DBAs, business names, and more
  • Starting building links and diversifying their backlink profile

2018-2019

  • Conducted in-depth SEO competitive analysis (looking at who is a first-page competitor, which often differs from brand competitors) and launched “SEO 2.0” — an initiative to close the gap between Incfile and their competitors
  • Tackled weak content (boring 300-500 word blog posts without any images or multimedia) by revising, removing, or redirecting it to help the right pages rank
  • Made technical SEO fixes and improved page speed
  • Increased our use of schema markup to snap featured spots in People Also Ask questions and rich snippets
  • Looked at keywords where we could build downloadable content offers such as templates or tools
  • Targeted the “big money” keywords that we knew would give us a lift in revenue
  • Worked toward building out industry-specific keywords and content

2020

  • Shifted into deeper work on large-scale focus projects focused on revenue growth and the middle (MOFU)/bottom (BOFU) of the funnel
  • Launched a series of YouTube videos built around priority keywords to increase YT search traffic and gain video results in Google
  • Conducted regular content audits to identify underperforming content and optimize it
  • Emphasized our focus on link building to improve our backlink profile and gain higher quality links by building out a “Link Building 2.0” team that focused on content outreach + content creation and a team dedicated to doing so
  • Updated our blog design with schema, social tags, and page optimization improvements, in addition to looking at where we could incorporate more MOFU and BOFU calls to action (CTA)
  • Focused on telling more customer stories through custom storytelling videos, blogs, and social media content to add “social proof” signals to our website
  • Began testing content featuring industry experts and influencers, along with guest posts to build our outreach strategy

2021

  • Combined SEO, content, and lead generation into one large collaborative Organic Growth team
  • Migrated the entire Incfile website to HubSpot CMS, making it easier to optimize content and manage SEO from the marketing team without relying on the product team (so we could move quicker — a big win for any SEO team)
  • Ramped up existing focus projects, like video marketing and content outreach, once again expanding the teams dedicated to these channels and doubling down on projects and results to expand into new territories for the brand
  • Conducted deep analysis and testing of our content CTAs to see where we could push revenue and lead generation further, converting more people from top to middle and middle to bottom of the funnel
  • Launched surveys that did triple time: built out owned data from the brand that was then used to create unique content no one else had, featured in PR, and linked to across the web, improving the backlink profile
  • Built out a standardized promotional plan for every piece of content so that we weren’t just “writing and hoping they would come,” but instead ensuring our content was supported by a paid media plan to bring in more leads
  • Improved website accessibility

2022

  • Added a UX Content team to our Organic team to build out a much-needed smart layer to our SEO strategy by including user testing, conversion optimization, and content design (product writing) for optimized product pages
  • Launched a grant and scholarship program for entrepreneurs to assist with outreach and link building strategies
  • Began an extensive website overhaul, incorporating UX to improve content, navigation, and SEO
  • Compiled all existing content, tools, and downloads into a single Resource Center where visitors can easily find the information they need at whatever stage of the entrepreneurial journey they’re in
  • Added more functions to our organic growth team for SEO/content, including a dedicated Director of Content, Video Expert, Blog Outreach Expert, Content Production Expert and Content Storytelling Expert.

Results

In just the first 12 months, we were able to achieve 4x the traffic and 3x the revenue — a huge win for us and Incfile, which led to doubling down our team and budget to achieve even more growth.

Within three years, we’d grown to 13x the traffic and 4x the revenue. And now, in our 6th year, the organic traffic has grown more than 3,000 percent since we started, and revenue has grown more than 800 percent. 🤯🤯🤯 Our head explodes with that growth and pride.

By 2019, we’d ramped up our SEO efforts to great effect, surpassing even our stretch goals for search traffic and first page keyword rankings.

In 2020, we saw tremendous growth in traffic from our SEO content, including our Start a Business guides and our Help Center.

We also saw improvements in site health, page speed, referring domains, and rich snippet results.

Our SEO efforts continued to yield major results in 2021 as we saw big gains in conversion rate, YouTube traffic, and organic revenue, and we doubled our number of first page keywords.

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