1.7M monthly visits with just 20 posts
Zapier’s smart SEO play: A case study in trend-driven content
👋 Hey, I’m George Chasiotis. Welcome to GrowthWaves, your weekly dose of B2B growth insights—featuring powerful case studies, emerging trends, and unconventional strategies you won’t find anywhere else.
A few weeks ago, I was at a dinner with a few good friends in Athens.
One of them works as the head of growth at a company you have most likely heard of and even used.
We were discussing organic growth when he told me:
“They added ~2M in monthly organic visits with just a handful of posts.”
“That can’t be right,” I said.
“Yep, it is. Just go and check them out…” he replied.
And, check them out I did.
He was right.
I was wrong.
Because this company drove more than 1.7M monthly visits this year with just 20 posts.
Here’s how.
Breakdown of Zapier’s success story
The company in question is Zapier.
Since the beginning of 2023, they have been consistently posting content on various AI-related topics.
Zapier published roughly 16 articles a month on average from February to October 2023, covering AI from different angles.
I’ve handpicked the 20 content pieces on this topic that are driving the most traffic.
First, let’s take a look at their historical performance, starting from the most recently published one.
So, what result would we get if we calculated the average traffic for all 20 URLs?
With the help of the new Ahrefs feature called ‘Portfolios,’ I created a portfolio including all the selected content pieces:
And here’s the result:
Note: The tool I’m using for this analysis is Ahrefs. Like all SEO tools, Ahrefs has its limitations. Take the data in the above screenshots and throughout this Note with a pinch of salt.
As you can see, Zapier has lost some of the keywords for which these articles were ranking. This has also led to a loss in traffic.
However, the overall monthly volume result is a staggering 1.7M.
Let’s quickly analyze the timeline.
Noticeable growth started around February of this year:
The average monthly volume increased even more at some point between July and September 2023, having reached an impressive 2 million.
If you look at the daily performance, you’ll see that, at some point, these articles altogether reached almost 3M in traffic:
Finally, the independent performance of all 20 articles is shown below:
Notably, most of the URLs rank in the top 10 results for their target keywords, but what’s most important is that the traffic trend for each article keeps growing every month.
So, is there some grand scheme behind this success?
Not really. Let’s dig a little deeper.
Jumping on the ‘trend train’
The topic of AI has always been a point of interest, but it mainly started picking up in terms of interest due to developments in the AI space, most notably the release of GPT-3.5 and GPT-4 by Open AI.
Take the term chatgpt, for instance.
The first search signals were visible around the beginning of December 2022, reaching their highest point around April–May 2023:
Around that time, Zapier posted four ChatGPT-related articles from our list, collectively bringing 1.2M in traffic as of October 9, 2023.
Alternatively, let’s take a less popular term – ai hallucinations.
Zapier published a post answering this query on June 14, 2023, and updated it in early September 2023.
The search trend for this term constantly fluctuates, but it started picking up between June and July of this year – exactly when Zapier’s article first went live:
The piece on AI hallucinations brought around 3K in traffic at its peak in July and is currently at 872 average clicks a month since there was a reversal in this trend.
Zapier anticipated that the keyword would start trending and jumped on the bandwagon.
See the recurring point in both examples?
Zapier effectively predicted the most discussed topics around AI, which then brought them high monthly traffic.
‘So what?’ you may ask.
Anyone can see that AI is trending right now, but not everyone is getting 1.7M monthly traffic.
True, and here’s where other important factors come into play:
Content quality – each AI-related article we analyzed is a deep dive into a specific topic, often with a demonstration of a certain AI tool and/or a complete breakdown of the subject matter.
Zapier’s pre-existing credibility as a source of information – besides being a trusted automation tool and a well-known brand, Zapier has also created an encompassing knowledge center with millions of visits a month (keep reading to learn more).
Creating topical authority – Google prioritizes websites that are considered authoritative in subject matter (in our case, it’s AI) often rewarding them with higher rankings on the search engine results pages.
Now, let’s elaborate on each factor further.
Factor #1: Content quality
The first thing that’s impacting Zapier’s success is content quality.
Let’s analyze their top-ranking article on how ChatGPT works as an example.
The article is a 12-minute read with in-depth research that, first and foremost, provides an in-depth explanation of what ChatGPT is and how its algorithm works.
Thus, it also addresses the interest of those searchers who don’t know anything about the topic, sharing a simple example to show what you can do with ChatGPT:
Next, you have a deep dive into the mechanics behind ChatGPT.
For instance, Zapier explains how the tool was trained on approximately 500 billion tokens to learn how to assign meaning to its language models and predict plausible follow-on text.
You also get a convenient graph that explains the tokenization process:
The same goes for other components, like transformer architecture, natural language process, and reinforcement learning from human feedback – all are explained in detail, often including a concurrent visual.
Notably, Zapier also included quotes from the OpenAI team, adding further credibility to the article.
Thus, you have an all-encompassing piece on how ChatGPT works, with all the technicalities and examples explained in an informative way.
This is a common pattern among all 20 pieces we analyzed as part of this case study.
Zapier’s authority as a source is the next factor at play. Let’s discuss this further.
Factor #2: Zapier’s pre-existing authority
Zapier is a go-to resource on automation and other related topics for many searchers.
How many?
If we look up Zapier’s blog in Ahrefs, it shows over 5 million monthly visits:
If you dig deeper, you can also see why so many people choose Zapier as a source to learn more about different topics.
Let’s take their blog section on productivity tips.
A closer look reveals that Zapier published 378 content pieces on this topic from 2013 to 2023, making it an average of 38 articles a year.
Another example – Zapier’s blog section on business tips.
In this folder, you can find around 400 articles dating from 2012 to 2023, which means that Zapier posted around 36 articles about business tips a year.
A conclusion?
Zapier worked for many years to create in-depth learning resources on automation- and business-related topics, building trust with the readers.
We should also highlight that Zapier is among the most well-known SaaS brands online. This fact drives Zapier’s credibility and attracts many visitors to their website and, of course, plays a role in this success story.
All these factors play into the fact that Zapier has built a strong topical authority, which we will discuss next.
Factor #3: Topical authority
As we mentioned earlier, Zapier has been publishing an average of 16 articles a month from February to October 2023, covering various AI topics.
However, Zapier’s efforts to build a topical authority in this niche started way earlier.
If you take a look at the graph below, you can see that the first content pieces on AI started appearing in June 2016, hitting the peak in February 2022:
Now, let’s move forward to a more niche subject, ChatGPT, and explore how many different articles Zapier offers on the topic.
Just a quick scan of Zapier’s blog has shown that they already offer more than 10 blog posts covering ChatGPT from different angles between February and October 2023.
However, Zapier started talking about ChatGPT a few years ago, as you can see here:
Ahrefs shows that Zapier has created 427 pages talking about this topic since September 2026 and reached a publication peak in March 2023.
Thus, we can say that Zapier has created a topical authority on the topics around ChatGPT, which added to the impressive results in terms of traffic.
Editor’s Note: Another element that may have had a positive contribution toward achieving accelerated results in Google search was the fact that Zapier launched a ‘ChatGPT Integrations’ page that’s constantly expanded with more tools its users can pair with ChatGPT.
So, does this mean that, with a bit of elbow grease, you can repeat Zapier’s success?
And most importantly – how long will the results last?
The answer is less optimistic than you might think.
Everything must come to an end
The truth is that trending topics quickly lose their relevance completely, or their relevance resurfaces later on.
This has already happened with content covering COVID-19.
Here’s what appears in Google Trends if you type in covid and set the timeline for October 2020 to October 2023.
After rocking the internet for almost 1.5 years, there was a sudden drop in the trend.
If we dig deeper and analyze the first result ranking for the covid keyword (which is WHO’s dashboard), we can also see a significant drop in traffic from January 2023.
So, here’s what we can learn from this:
Rapid traffic growth is sometimes followed by a steep decline. This is understandable: once a topic starts losing relevance, the same happens to the content covering it.
You’re facing fierce competition. Everyone wants to capitalize on a trend so, sooner or later, someone else in your niche will outshine you with better content.
Here’s the takeaway.
Even though Zapier is still managing to get so much traffic from the AI topics now, this doesn’t mean that the same will be true in several months.
And most importantly – your content strategy should always focus on evergreen content, not just on what’s currently trending.
Final thoughts
What I want you to remember from today’s note are the following two points:
Very often, things are simpler (and easier) than we think. Zapier achieved great results with just 20 posts.
When you see a growth wave, act quickly and ride it. You’ll figure out the details later.
You could rightly argue:
“Okay, George, well done on spotting this and breaking it down for me. But, Zapier is, well, Zapier. Even if I did the exact same thing as them, I most likely wouldn’t have the same results.”
You would be spot-on.
Chances are you wouldn’t get the same results as Zapier, but rest assured you’d get some results.
And let’s not forget that the Zapier (organic growth) story has been several years in the making.
So, riding waves like this can have a positive impact on your traffic and growth, but to what extent?
As a self-respecting marketer, I’d say, well, it depends.
See you next week!