Zapier Content Teardown: How Content Marketing Helped Zapier Reach $140 Million ARR
If you’re looking for an easy, no-code way to automate processes, there’s no better tool than Zapier. Their simple Zaps allow users to create workflows like sending emails to new leads or gathering survey results into a spreadsheet.
And because Zapier works with so many other tools, they’ve crafted a unique and wildly successful SEO and content marketing strategy that has helped the company skyrocket to $140 million ARR as of March 2021.
In this article, we’re going to do a deep dive into said content strategy to help us understand what has been so successful for Zapier—and more importantly, how we can emulate that in our own strategies.
Let’s get started.
What does Zapier do?
First, let’s add a little context. Who is Zapier, how long have they been around, and how do they make money?
Zapier’s tagline is, “The easiest way to automate your work.”
Zapier helps its 3 million+ users to create integrations with over 3,000 different apps. These integrations help to create automated workflows and processes like the examples we see below.
Connect your WordPress website to your Facebook Page so that new blog posts share automatically. Connect your Gmail account to Google Drive so that email attachments are automatically uploaded to Drive and won’t get lost in your inbox.
Founded in 2011, Zapier has quickly grown its list of apps as well as its revenue.
Even with receiving $1.3 million in initial funding, Zapier is now bringing in over $140 million annually, and its content marketing strategy has been a major part of that.
Just take a look at Zapier’s profile on Ahrefs.
With a domain rating of 90, an estimated monthly organic traffic of 1.4 million, and a site that ranks for 1.1 million different organic keywords, you can’t argue with these numbers.
But what we really want to zoom in on is what this strategy looks like. Ready to dig in?
A deep dive into Zapier’s content strategy
Content marketing has a lot of different moving parts. It’s more than just blog content. You have to consider your landing page creation, distribution strategy, video content, and so much more.
Zapier’s content team has obviously taken this into account, even with a smaller team.
Let’s start by looking at all the different types of content they create and where.
Types of content Zapier creates
Let’s start by taking a look at Zapier’s main navigation.
Nearly each dropdown menu leads to one type of content or another. Their Resources dropdown alone leads to their blog, help center, Zapier University, webinars, and more.
So even before we dig a little deeper, we can already see that we’re in for a treat.
Blog
Zapier’s blog home page is set up brilliantly. Their blog categorization (more on that in a moment) is at the very top so readers can easily find the kind of content they’re looking for.
Then directly underneath, we see a featured article and several recent articles. You can see all four of them have the date of October 7, 2021.
Zapier’s content strategy smartly includes regularly refreshing old content. In fact, their post on screen recording software was first published back in February of 2019; however, they regularly revisit it to ensure accuracy anytime someone reads it.
But let’s not get carried away with that topic yet.
The next section of the blog home page has a call-to-action for readers to sign up for their newsletter. This is a great way to nurture interested users who might not be ready to sign up quite yet.
Below this, we’re introduced to a few recent posts: a section with posts perfect for new Zapier users, and a section with trending articles.
So right from the get-go, Zapier has introduced new readers to a wide range of reading material.
Now let’s move on to their blog categorization. Zapier’s blog content falls into five main topics:
App picks: Subcategories are Best Apps, App of the day, and App comparisons. This category focuses on posts about the different types of apps that Zapier provides integrations for. This provides Zapier with a unique selection of keywords they can use to generate traffic and awareness.
Automation with Zapier: Subcategories are Automation inspiration, Zapier tutorials, and Customer stories. This category allows Zapier to create product-led content that helps readers gather inspiration for how to use their tool. These posts likely generate more conversions than other categories.
Productivity: Subcategories are Productivity tips, App tips, and App tutorials. As a tool meant to help automate processes, productivity is Zapier’s bread and butter. This section includes a mix of SEO and thought leadership content.
Grow your business: Subcategories are Small business tips and Marketing tips. This section is also filled with SEO and thought leadership content, written by some of Zapier’s own staff writers as well as guest posts from business owners like this one.
Remote work: Subcategories are Remote work tips and How we work at Zapier. This is a combination of SEO content as well as culture content that focuses on how Zapier’s team handles remote work.
This variety of content shows us that Zapier is using a multi-faceted strategy. They’re not focusing only on traffic, SEO, links, or conversions. Their content is well-rounded, helping them to achieve a number of different goals.
Learning center
The Learning Center is a landing page that houses all Zapier’s eBooks and lead magnets. At the time of this writing, there are 17 different ebooks to click on, each leading to its own landing page and email capture form to download and read the content.
Each of these books is actually made up of various blog posts. According to Zapier’s CEO Wade Foster:
“When we reached 100 posts on our blog, we realized that a lot of those older posts were great but hidden in the back. We also realized that there were certain themes we kept going back to, like remote work and apps. It only made sense to build a strategy from this to start writing books as blog posts.”
Zapier updates
The Zapier updates feed shares information about new integrations and new Zaps with existing integrations. Having a page like this helps the company be transparent with their team about features and updates available to their users.
You’ll often see SaaS tools create “Updates” or “What’s New” pages like this as it’s a great way to ensure your site regularly has new content.
In addition, creating more pages (as long as they’re valuable) helps your site become more robust and provides even more internal linking possibilities.
Zapier university
This landing page features a couple of video courses on how to get the most out of Zapier along with a few featured videos.
What I love about this page is that it’s really simple and only offers six total pieces of content: a video, two courses, and three featured videos. Even with the amount of content we can see Zapier pushing out, it’s easy to tell that they’re still so strategic about it.
Customer stories
Customer stories or case studies should be a part of any good content strategy. Showcasing proven results that others have had with your product or service is a great way to increase conversions with your content.
Obviously, Zapier’s content team knows this, as they’ve created a hub just for customer stories that links to each individual story.
Landing pages
Of course, we can’t forget about Zapier’s 25,000+ landing pages for each of its integrations.
Above, we see a landing page for an app’s profile. However, each app also has a separate landing page for each available integration, like this example with Facebook Lead Ads and Google Sheets.
These pages don’t have a lot of unique copy—instead, they share a quick how-to for setting up the Zap along with links to other popular Zaps and workflows.
However, Zapier doesn’t have a team of copywriters pumping out the copy for these landing pages on the daily.
Instead, they have the teams of each submitted tool/integration create descriptions for their tool and its available workflows. After all, who better to know how a tool works than its own team? Especially if they put emphasis on ensuring all of their writers—in-house and outsourced—are product experts.
And their Partner Program, which lays out the amount of promotion each tool/integration will get based on its popularity, provides a great incentive for these companies to write great copy.
The app profile and integration pages aren’t the only types of landing pages that Zapier offers. They have also created landing pages that organize various zaps by job role.
For example, on the above landing page, marketers can explore zaps and integrations that might help make their specific job easier, like sending automated messages to new leads or adding them to a spreadsheet.
There are currently over 30 of those pages accessible from their main Roles landing page, allowing accountants, teachers, project managers, and even fitness coaches to find zaps perfect for their day-to-day tasks.
How often does Zapier publish content?
Now that we’ve done an overview of all of the content that Zapier’s team is creating regularly, let’s talk about how often they’re pushing new content out. Because it’s a lot.
(And we’re not the only ones who noticed.)
While yes, they do regularly update content, if we take a look at the two weeks or so of their content schedule, we can see the vast majority is new articles.
They publish an average of 2-3 posts every business day, while they only updated 3 posts within that entire span of two weeks.
The three updated posts were all tool roundups:
Why update content? There are a number of different reasons you might want to regularly refresh old blog posts.
First, regularly updated content tells Google that your website likely consists of accurate information. Second, it helps you provide your audience with accurate information. And third, it can also be a great way to improve the post and get it to rank higher, generate more conversions, bring in more traffic, etc.
In Zapier’s case, they’re likely reviewing each of the tools in their roundups to ensure no features or pricing has changed.
But they’re also working to increase organic traffic. And as we can see in their roundup of email hosting services, their organic traffic increased by nearly 3,000 from the end of September (before the update) into October (after the update).
The majority of Zapier’s new posts are a variety of productivity, small business, marketing, and remote work tips. A handful of the new posts are more product-led, talking about various tools or integrations that Zapier supports.
But how can they pump out this much content? And better yet: how can they pump out this much quality content?
That leads us to our next investigation.
Does Zapier write content in-house or use freelancers?
While Zapier does create the majority of their content in-house, they still rely on freelancers and guest posters to flesh out their content calendar.
Looking at the same two-week span we measured earlier, we can see that 17 of the posts were written by various Zapier roles, from content strategists and staff writers to engineers and customer champions, while 11 were submitted by freelancers and guest posts.
In-house: 17
Freelancer or guest poster: 11
Yes, you read that right. Zapier has all sorts of roles creating content for their blog, not only content specialists.
While these team members may have help from the content team to finalize each article, this is a great way to get even more perspectives and ideas on your company blog.
It’s also a great way to increase the content team’s bandwidth so they can publish even more new content.
What does Zapier’s content look like?
We’ve already covered all the different types of content that Zapier creates, from their blog posts to landing pages to webinars and more.
But let’s do a deeper dive into what that content looks like. What are the most common post topics they write about? How long are their posts? Are they focusing on SEO keywords?
Let’s start by digging into their blog post topics and themes.
SEO content
It probably comes as no surprise that Zapier creates SEO-focused content in an effort to rank at the top of search engines for valuable keywords.
One great example of this is their post The best free project management software in 2021. This post focuses on the keyword free project management software, which has 12k global monthly traffic potential and 4.5k US monthly traffic potential.
As we can see from the above Ahrefs data, Zapier’s post is the number one result. And if we zoom into the value of this post alone, we see that it ranks for a total of 6500 organic keywords and has a $235,000 traffic value.
According to Foundation, these types of “best of” listicles drive over half of Zapier’s overall blog traffic.
But even though Zapier itself isn’t a project management software, these tool roundups still make sense for their strategy.
In an effort to convert the thousands of people who visit this post each month, Zapier includes calls-to-action for zaps that utilize each of the tools it mentions. For example, under the section about Trello, these two zaps are mentioned, showing users how they can get even more from each project management tool on the list.
Creating content around high-volume SEO keywords is a great way to increase brand awareness. While many of the keywords Zapier uses aren’t conversion-focused, the sheer amount of traffic they bring in means even a small percentage are likely to become paying customers.
In fact, Foster says that these posts are a major part of their strategy:
“People are always looking for new apps. Being a part of that selection process, we help them choose the ones they want so they can hook them up to other tools that they’re already using through Zapier. Those are definitely the pillar pieces of our content strategy.”
App tips
Another tactic Zapier uses in its content strategy is sharing content with tips on how to use the apps it has integrations with.
No, not Zapier’s own tool (although we’ll talk more about this content format in the next section). But completely separate tools, like in this post 4 hidden Typeform settings you should know about.
This post includes screenshots of Typeform’s interface with instructions on how to use four little-known features. While Typeform itself has absolutely nothing to do with Zapier, there are available integrations that existing Typeform users could be interested in.
As we can see above, Zapier includes a CTA asking readers to sign up for their tool along the left side of the post. And of course, they share a list of several zaps that can be utilized with Typeform.
A strategy like this helps existing Typeform users to become aware of Zapier and the boundaries it can help them cross, increasing both brand awareness and conversions.
Zapier tutorials
Tutorials and step-by-steps on how to use a tool are great for helping existing users get the most out of your product, but they can also be great for generating conversions.
Let’s take the post How to automatically add leads from forms to your database or spreadsheet as an example. It lays out an awesome step-by-step on how to add form entries to a spreadsheet using Zaps.
Essentially, these posts answer questions that people have by using Zapier’s own product as the solution. This is a great way to pique a reader’s interest and get them to click that Sign up button in the corner.
And if they needed even more convincing, there’s an entire list of relevant and ready-to-use Zaps for a reader to choose from and immediately sign up for an account.
Thought leadership
The last theme we’ll focus on in Zapier’s blog content is thought leadership articles. These have little relevance to their product and don’t tend to focus on a valuable SEO keyword, but they’re still published almost daily on the Zapier blog.
Here’s a great example: a recent post called I don't do meetings on Fridays—here's why you shouldn't either, written by someone on the customer success team at Zapier.
It’s less than 500 words and is completely opinion-based, sharing how someone on the Zapier team does their best work.
Several of these types of posts are also submitted by freelancers or guest authors like this post called The 5 avoidable mistakes that cost my business money.
Sharing opinion articles from people who speak to their own experiences and work preferences helps Zapier to become a trusted voice in the productivity and small business space.
Check out this glowing endorsement from one of their readers:
What are Zapier’s most valuable pages?
Yes, Zapier puts out a lot of content. But is this content actually working for them? Where are the dollar signs?
While we don’t have access to their internal conversion data, we can still take a look at the traffic value and estimated website visitors via Ahrefs.
Below, we see a screenshot of all of Zapier’s pages that are worth $100k+ in traffic value. This cost is equal to the amount their team would have to pay in PPC ads to see the same number of website visitors.
While their homepage alone has a traffic value of over half a million dollars, most of the other top pages are all app roundup blog posts. What we also see in the above screenshot is that nearly all of these pages are ranking in the top position for these keywords.
Zapier is saving hundreds of thousands of dollars in visibility by creating and optimizing these blog posts for valuable keywords that are still relevant to their business.
They’re also building thousands of backlinks, nabbing their website a domain rating (DR) of 90 (Ahrefs).
Looking back at Zapier’s Ahrefs overview, we see that their site has nearly 50 million backlinks from over 50 thousand different referring domains.
That’s pretty epic. Their homepage itself has 195k backlinks from 25k referring domains.
But Zapier’s most linked-to blog post is an app roundup called The 6 best Pomodoro timer apps in 2021. This post alone has over 2,000 links from over 600 referring domains.
Creating linkable assets is a great strategy for increasing both domain authority and your business’s reach/brand awareness. Now, all of the people who visit those 2.34k pages linking to this post have the opportunity to discover Zapier.
Now let’s take a look at estimated monthly traffic. Each of the posts below has an estimate of 20k or more traffic, equaling out to nearly half a million monthly visitors—just from these seven blog posts and the website’s home page.
Unbounce’s 2021 Conversion Benchmark Report discovered that the average conversion rate for a SaaS company is around 3%. So let’s do some math.
Let’s say that these top posts bring in 500,000 monthly visitors. We’ll estimate that 3% of those visitors convert into free users, bringing us to 15,000 new users.
We’ll then assume that around 3% of those free users convert into regular paying customers—that’s 450.
With packages ranging from $20/month to $600/month, that means these top pages could be bringing in anywhere from $9,000 (if they all chose the Starter plan) to $270,000 (if they all chose the Company plan) each month.
Since we’ve seen Zapier publishes an average of 2-3 new posts a day along with updating older posts so they’re always sharing current information, they’ve obviously created an incredibly lucrative content strategy.
What can you learn from Zapier’s content strategy?
There is a lot to take away from Zapier’s success. But above all else, understand that your content strategy shouldn’t be hyper-focused on conversions or SEO.
But don’t we all want conversions?
Of course. But that can’t be the only goal.
The vast majority of Zapier’s blog content likely has little to no conversion potential for them. And that’s perfectly okay. The brand awareness, backlinks, and traffic they receive from their content are still invaluable to their business.
Zapier is using their blog to position themselves as an authority in the SaaS and productivity conversation, even if it doesn’t lead to an immediate conversion.
They want to be a key figure in the decision-making surrounding which tools and apps companies will subscribe to. Being in that conversation allows decision-makers to discover how Zapier can improve the processes that use these tools and apps, increasing the likelihood that these companies will give Zapier a try.
Why shouldn’t we focus on SEO?
SEO should not be the only thing guiding your strategy.
While generating backlinks and finding valuable keywords can help your website rank higher in search and increase the number of people who discover your site organically, there’s more to a content strategy than SEO.
Take a page out of Zapier’s book and create tutorials, tips, and other product-led content. Create thought leadership articles written by your team members and experts in your niche. Create case studies and customer stories. Create entertaining content that engages your audience but doesn’t focus on a target keyword.
So what does this mean for us as content marketers?
Your content strategy should have a lot of moving parts to increase performance and success. Create a broad, multi-faceted strategy with content that hits every step of the customer journey, from people who are just discovering your brand to people who are ready to buy.
Find a niche and create content that answers every question you see people ask—even if there might not be a solid keyword to focus on or a clear-cut call-to-action to make a purchase or sign up for a service.
