Explo Increased Search Traffic 18x with Letterdrop

About Explo

Explo is a YC-backed Series A startup with 20 employees. They help companies build custom dashboards that can be embedded within customer apps. Organic search and social media are a large part of their customer acquisition strategy as they rapidly expand with their recent $12M round of funding.

Company Size: 25

Funding: Series A

Founded: 2019

Website: explo.co

Industry: Business Intelligence, Developer Tools

What Were Explo’s Challenges Before Letterdrop?

They Were Unsure About How to Approach Content

Explo built a strong, cold, outbound motion.

But in order to scale, they needed customers to be inbound. Explo wants to be front and center when developers and PMs build product dashboards and search for solutions.

To do this, Explo knew they needed to create content regularly to drive traffic via SEO, LinkedIn, and Twitter. But they weren’t sure how to get started.

They Struggled with Consistency

Andrew Chen, COO of Explo, started their blog in early 2021. Between the billion things that needed to be done to keep Explo running, he didn’t have time for content. Towards the end of 2021, once their outbound was starting to plateau, he realized that he needed to invest in inbound.

Why Explo Chose Letterdrop

Andrew explored lots of options, but they all ended in disappointment.

Employees were putting out fires. Contractors were flaky. Agencies were slow and had massive upfront commitments.

Andrew was sold on Letterdrop’s pitch for a software platform that would make sure content got done, best practices and all. He also took advantage of Letterdrop’s agency offering to fill their talent gap and increase their content production.

“The software lets me stay involved in content but brings it down to just 30 minutes per week and I think that was the perfect balance for me.” — Andrew Chen, COO of Explo

How Did Letterdrop Help Explo?

Tyler Suss, Head of Marketing at Explo, says that Letterdrop added value in three buckets:

1. Content strategy
2. Content creation
3. Content delivery

Letterdrop Centralized And Streamlined Content Production For Explo

Letterdrop helps the Explo team manage, edit, and schedule content in one convenient location. Everyone on their team has the proper access to content projects. No one has to switch back and forth between tools like Google Docs, Notion, and Webflow. The result is a streamlined content engine that runs like clockwork.

Here are some ways in which Explo sees value with the Letterdrop platform:

• The built-in SEO optimization checker gives the Explo team peace of mind that their content follows best practices. They don’t have to log in or copy/paste into separate SEO tools. It just happens before publishing automatically.
• Automated content scheduling – saves them 30 mins per channel distributing on social media and their Webflow site. One click and content is in all the right places instead of manually logging into each and standing up content.
• Content calendar and project management — gives their team a central view of progress. 
  • This gives Tyler transparency into the stage of each blog post.
  • It tells him when his inputs are needed –  preventing common communication mishaps that happen when working with writers or agencies.

The Letterdrop platform gave Explo best practices and thoughtful automation that finally made running their content marketing playbook simple.

Explo Now Pushes Content Out Consistently

Andrew tells us that Explo struggled with content consistency for a year.

“It’s very hard to prioritize when there are a billion other things going on with the startup.” — Andrew Chen, COO of Explo

That all changed as soon as they got on Letterdrop.

“When we started using Letterdrop, it made it so that we could consistently push out content,” says Andrew.

Having a scheduled push and help from the Letterdrop team allowed Explo to ramp up content creation while spending just the right amount of time on their end.

Letterdrop Saves Explo Time on Content Ops to Focus on Bigger Priorities

“Letterdrop being our source for everything with SEO, content creation, and distribution saves us a lot of time to focus on other areas of the business. Instead of having to go to several different tools or work with multiple agencies or content writers…we’re able just to have one true source for that.” — Tyler, Head of Marketing

Getting set up was pretty straightforward for the Explo team. They connected Webflow, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Google Search Console all on their first day.

Letterdrop's Agency Is a True Content Partner

“We had sessions with you, and you helped us formulate our organic search plan. It helped us validate topics and our strategy. The SEO expertise you guys bring is very helpful. Also, on the content side, the writing team really dives into the briefs I give them. They sometimes challenge us and ask, 'How does this really fit into the narrative?' It seems more like an intimate partnership than a large agency where you get a number of words per article, and people are just executing against the statement of work. We get much more value than that." — Tyler, Head of Marketing

Let’s Talk Numbers. What Results Did Letterdrop Achieve for Explo?

Explo went from 50 to 900 organic monthly visitors from Google Search, an 18x improvement in 6 months.

They ranked on the first page of Google for 30 competitive non-branded keywords. They now have more inbound leads from Google and LinkedIn to support their outbound motion (and one day eclipse it).

Inbound Numbers up and to the Right

Tyler discusses Explo’s increase in search traffic after using Letterdrop:

“We’ve seen quarter over quarter, month over month, a net increase in our SEO…one of our main outputs or metrics that we’re measuring from a content production. All the metrics we care about are up across the board - impressions, clicks, traffic. We’re ranking for keywords we care about like “customer facing analytics” and “embedded analytics”

The data shows that Letterdrop has made a difference in Explo’s visibility and number of inbound leads.

Explo Beats Their Competition on Paid Acquisition by Running Ads Against Content

Tyler runs an intelligent ad strategy that involves running Google Search ads on competitive keywords and directing them to blog posts that answer the specific search query. This lowers their CPC, and they rank higher than other ads since their content is relevant to the actual search query, so Google prioritizes them. Running ads against posts created and SEO-optimized with Letterdrop perform way better than landing and marketing pages.