{"id":3267,"date":"2021-09-06T08:31:37","date_gmt":"2021-09-06T08:31:37","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/seobuddy.com\/blog\/?p=3267"},"modified":"2025-01-20T14:57:44","modified_gmt":"2025-01-20T14:57:44","slug":"my-seo-journey-karl-hughes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/seobuddy.com\/blog\/my-seo-journey-karl-hughes\/","title":{"rendered":"My SEO Journey: Karl Hughes from Draft.dev – How to acquire 5.9k organic visitors and DR37 from scratch in less than 1 year"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

My SEO Journey is a new series where entrepreneurs and Indie makers will share their honest SEO Journey filled with failure and success, and most importantly proven results. Episode #30 features Karl Hughes<\/em> from Draft.dev<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n

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\"Karl<\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n

My name is Karl Hughes and I run Draft.dev<\/a>, a niche content production company focused on producing blog posts and tutorials for companies that want to reach technical experts. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Most of our clients are tech startups who sell a SaaS product to software developers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Software developers are notoriously hard to market to, but high-quality, educational content works really well. The problem is that most marketing teams don\u2019t have the technical expertise to write this kind of content (e.g., explaining what\u00a0codeless automation testing tools<\/a>\u00a0are), so that\u2019s where we come in.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In order to produce this kind of deep, technical content, all our writers are practicing software engineers. Because they\u2019re out in the field doing this kind of work, they can write with a technical authority that typical SEO copywriters just can\u2019t.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Our approach has worked really well so far. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

We\u2019ve grown to over 30 clients, 60 writers, and 5 full-time employees in just 12 months.<\/p>\n\n\n

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\"Draft.dev<\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n

What’s your backstory and how did you come up with the idea?<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

I spent 10 years as a software developer and eventually Chief Technology Officer, but I always enjoyed writing on the side. The last company I worked for hit a rough spot during Covid, so I decided to transition out and start doing technical writing full-time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Initially, my plan was to just pick up enough clients to buy some time and figure out what I wanted to do next. I had a few months of savings in the bank, but I have a family to help take care of, so I needed to start making some income soon. Fortunately, within 3 months, I had more work than I could handle, so I started hiring other writers and an editor.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Many of our early clients came from referrals. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

I started with my personal network of startup founders, investors, and consultants. They would make introductions and after we did good work for a client, many of them referred us to other similar companies.

I wrote more about how we found our first 30 clients here<\/a>, but it has almost all been inbound interest.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Since launch, what has worked to attract more organic traffic?<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

While referrals are fantastic, I wanted to start investing in repeatable, scalable growth channels. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Because we\u2019re a content marketing company, it made sense to start investing in content early.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

From the beginning, we\u2019ve used topic clusters<\/a> to build keyword clusters around topics relevant to our niche. By starting with low-difficulty, moderate-volume keywords in our niche, we started picking up search engine traffic pretty early on.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

After a year of publishing one focused piece of content per week, we\u2019re just now starting to have sales calls as a result of our content marketing. We\u2019re in a very narrow niche, so our traffic isn\u2019t incredibly high, but it\u2019s been steadily growing over the past year.<\/p>\n\n\n

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\"Draft.dev<\/figure><\/div>\n\n
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There\u2019s more\u2026<\/div>\r\n

Now it\u2019s time to discover the other 102 steps that will get more organic traffic flowing to your website. Get the SEO Checklist here.<\/a><\/p>\n

Want to get a sneak peek of what it looks like?<\/strong>
\nEnter your email and get a free demo version of the SEO Checklist.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\r\n

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