Challenge: dominate a market niche in Brazil

Agendor is a CRM platform that functions as a personal assistant for sales teams. Currently used by more than 4,000 companies daily, the SaaS tool was facing the challenge of increasing visits to its website and generating more new customer conversions through organic traffic. It was also aiming to become a benchmark for sales-related topics in Brazil. That's when they came to Agência Papoca , a global SEO agency.

Agendor's SEO project began in October 2015 and went through three main phases: the start of the project (2015-2017), the maturity phase (2017-2019) and the final phase of SERP dominance in “sales” keywords (2019-2021).

Some of the project’s main challenges included:

Creating a strategy based on producing SEO-friendly content that puts the focus on Agendor’s persona and that meets their needs.
Continuously adapting the strategy for 5 years to ensure that each update of Google's algorithm had a positive impact and consequently increased traffic rather than generating a drop in performance and keyword rankings.
Being constantly attentive to the competition in order to identify new and growing local competitors, as well as foreign companies entering the Brazilian market backed by greater investment.

Despite the challenges, Agendor has managed to continuously grow and is currently the largest sales portal in Brazil, offering quality sales content to more than 700,000 people every month. Consequently, Agendor has consolidated its position as a leader in Brazilian CRM solutions and has managed to position itself among the 3 most sought-after CRMs in Brazil, behind only two international tools that generate 17 billion and 100 million dollars in revenue respectively.

This successful strategy has allowed Agendor to rank in the current top 10 positions for 63.4% of the main strategic sales terms identified - ahead of other national and international competitors.

Step 1: Perform a technical site analysis

This initial step consisted of performing a technical analysis of the site, identifying areas for improvement in the structure of the site, such as loading time, site errors, usability problems and mobile performance.

In addition to Google tools, such as Google Search Console and Google Pagespeed Insights, Papoca used the project setup within Semrush and the Site Audit tool to track the main technical performance metrics of the site.

Semrush Site Audit Overview

Semrush Site Audit has helped to identify and act on the main technical errors of the site, such as duplicate content, pages with 4xx errors, broken links and other areas for improvement, as can be seen below:

Site structure is often underestimated by companies, but it is one of the essential pillars for good SEO performance. Therefore, constant monitoring is necessary to ensure that Agendor is always in accordance with the best technical practices.

Step 2: Get to know the state of the market

This was the second stage of the analysis which objective was to understand:

the state of the market;
the main competitors: their level of SEO maturity, whether they had high domain authority and their progress in terms of positioning.

Initially, to get a macro view of the competitors, Papoca used a number of Semrush features to study the market.

Within the Organic Research tool, they evaluated the ranking and evolution of the domains of both Agendor's and their competitors, which gave a very clear initial view of the growth or decline of each competitor in recent years.

The Competitors tab provides an insight into the evolution of sites that share the same profile of positioned keywords as Agendor. Papoca is able to monitor who is growing faster and has a high volume of keywords. In other words, who the most and least threatening SEO competitors are.

In addition to this chart, the Competitors report shows the main competing domains in keyword similarity:

Currently we see that IBC Coaching and Meetime are the sites with the highest percentage of similarity to Agendor in terms of positioned keywords.

This feature allows Papoca to step away from the market view (where the company indicates the direct business competitors) and focus on the SEO competitors based on strategic keywords; that is, domains that have a high number of similar positioned terms and with whom Agendor will have to “fight” at the top of the SERP. It is also very useful to find new sites that are competing for the same terms and expand the list of competitors.

Another essential criterion of SEO competitor analysis is to understand the domain authority of a website. The Link Building Tool offers relevant insights in this step, both to understand the score of each competitor, as we can see below:

As well as to understand what is the reason behind one domain having better authority than others, such as the profile of backlinks that a site receives. In the example below we see that Salesforce has more links from domains with domain authority over 80 than other competitors:

Semrush Backlink Analytics also allows Papoca to go deeper into the format of backlinks (text, image, form or frame) that these sites receive and the attributes of the links, whether they are follow or nofollow.

To complement competitor analysis, the Keyword Gap tool helps to better understand how keywords common with competitors are divided:

By filling in the main competitors’ domains and comparing, the Papoca team gets an insight into the total volume of terms for each domain, and the intersection of similar terms with each other. This gives an insight into the share of keywords among competitors and the level of SEO maturity among them.

This feature also allows them to compare positioned terms between domains, giving insights about:

Shared keywords, for which each of the domains has rankings
Missing keywords, where all of your competitors have rankings but your site has no ranking (this is one of the best ways to find new opportunities to work on!)
Weak keywords, for which your domain ranks lower than any of the other included competitors.
Strong keywords, for which your domain has a higher ranking than any of the other competitors.
and more!

See the example below:

The Keyword Gap tool came in handy when developing an SEO plan, which we will see below.

Step 3: SEO plan for 10,000 qualified keywords

Now that the foundations have been laid with technical improvements as well as an in-depth understanding of the competitors, the third stage begins: the creation of an SEO Plan that guides which terms are most important for Agendor's strategy.

The result of this plan is a keyword database containing more than 10,000 qualified words used as a foundation to start producing content and improving site pages.

During this stage, some Semrush tools were essential. At first, the Papoca team exported the positioned terms of all identified competitors (remember the previous topic?) using the "Positions" tab in the Organic Research tool.

In addition, the team discovered new ideas for keywords in the Keyword Magic Tool, especially via filters for the terms.

Remember to set up the country for which you want to view keyword opportunities.

With filters they can :

insert terms that identify a behavior, for example, to see keywords containing "how" "which" or "what is";
filter terms of higher or lower volume;
remove keywords that are not relevant to the plan;
filter terms with more than 3 or 4 words, getting insights on long-tail keywords.

After this robust analysis, Papoca already had the most important terms for website pages and producing content for the blog.

In the blog, they aimed to work in more long-tail terms with less competition and to help treat the user's search pain points individually in each piece of content, thereby developing more tailored content, and improving the performance in rejection rate and time on page. Targeted content = more time and user interaction on the page.

To check the strategy of each selected article, the team used the SEO Content Template tool: it confirmed whether they were on the right track regarding keyword choice and other SEO criteria.

The Papoca team has spent 6 years producing more than 700 content pieces for the blog, always evaluating the strategy from one agenda to the next with regard to terms, content format and competitors' strategies.

At this stage, some competitors began to understand Papoca's strategy and they had to change course in order to keep growing and adapt to Google's update changes.

Step 4: Strengthen old content and domain authority

Papoca started producing content in October 2015 with 500-word texts, without any images, infographics or other rich content. At the end of 2016, roughly 1 year into the project, they realized that their content production had to evolve and the team gradually began a cycle of continuously improving old content.

At the beginning of 2017, the production effort was divided between the creation of new articles and a minimal percentage of effort dedicated to improving old articles. Papoca increased the size of the content pieces to more than 800 words and started creating individual and complementary strategies for the most strategic keywords.

A milestone in this moment of maturity was to further evolve the domain authority of Agendor. The backlinks strategy started running in parallel with more power to secure new partners and have more links to Agendor from strong websites. The Link Building Tool within the Semrush Projects was essential during this stage.

The best thing about this tool is the ability to discover the sites that are most important for building authority and the ability to find the contact emails of potential partners.

The site was going from strength to strength, improving its domain authority and the improvement flow was ongoing in order to continue supporting its growth.

Step 5: Dominate sales SERPs

In 2019, with more than 3,000,000 words placed in the top 3 positions, it was time to ensure that Agendor would be at the top of the SERP for the majority of sales terms. To achieve this, Papoca created the strategic keywords dashboard within the Semrush Position Tracking tool.

This feature allowed them to more closely follow the main strategic terms, their positioning and evolution compared to competitors.

Results: $500,000 MRR

Agendor received more than 32,000,000 organic visits between January 2015 and January 2021 - more than 10% of the population of Brazil. This is the Semrush + Papoca effect.

With Papoca's unique methodology, Agendor managed to achieve significant year-over-year growth, without ever suffering large drops following Google updates, to be the current leader in terms of audience in the world of sales in Brazil.

169,188 users read (via organic traffic) Agendor’s content from October 2015 to January 2021
The company achieved $500,000 in MRR in January 2021
Agendor is ranked ahead of all competitors for 63.4% of the strategic sales keywords.

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