Background

Piktochart is a B2B SaaS company that enables users to create professional graphics, such as reports and data visualizations, with ease. When I joined the team in 2019, they already had a solid website and a large user base. However, we faced some traffic challenges:

• 90% of traffic came from the homepage, one landing page, and one blog post. This made acquisition unstable, as traffic would fluctuate significantly with Google updates or ranking changes.
• One blog post drew more traffic than all others combined, but it wasn’t great at converting visitors to users.

To address these issues, we needed to diversify the traffic and make it more relevant to our product. Because Piktochart already had an extensive template library, creating a template gallery was a natural choice.

However, the existing in-app categorization of templates was based on technical criteria, resulting in a less intuitive user experience. Resumés, for example, had the same format as posters. So in the app, they would be categorized under the poster category.

This categorization meant we couldn’t simply develop a basic web app connected to an API and consider the job done. Furthermore, we had limited resources, with only a part-time freelance WordPress developer available.

Taking these challenges into account, we decided to re-categorize the templates ourselves and use a custom post type to expand the current WordPress site with a template gallery.

As the project lead, I was responsible for planning, managing, and launching this initiative.

Results at a glance

• 2,500,000 million visitors since its launch in 2020.
• Over 320 referring domains and increased link velocity.

Main takeaways

• You can have an incredible product, but you still need to give people a taste before you ask for something in return. Even if you’re asking for an email, you still need to show what you can do for them.
• UX matters, both for marketing as well as the product. Don’t just think people will “figure it out”. Figure it out for them.
• Marketing needs to be involved from the beginning. Creating a purely technical product can lead to a mismatch between how what people are looking for, and what your product does.

Overview of the process

Keyword research & planning

Since the existing templates weren’t created with SEO in mind, the main categories were going to drive all the traffic. I created a keyword plan that was based on categories and that enabled us to expand into subcategories. For example:

• Main category: brochures
• Subcategory: trifold brochures

Here are some examples of this keyword research.

Keyword	Global Vol (searches/m)*	Difficulty*
brochure templates	45,000	43
flyer templates	29,000	45
trifold brochure template	4,100	29
poster templates	20,000	56
infographic template	54,000	62

I did this research for every format we had within the app at the time (Infographics, Presentations, Flyers, Posters, Reports).

The keyword research allowed us to put templates in the right category. As I mentioned earlier, resumes and CVs shouldn’t be in the poster category. We took this opportunity to create a lot more categories that were more UX-friendly.

Creating the design

The aim of the design was to strike a balance between UX, conversion, and SEO.

I put together a low-fidelity mockup to guide a freelance designer. We wanted a clear overview of the templates while keeping the pages optimized for conversion. To achieve this, we aimed to have a prominent call to action at the top of the page and when viewing individual templates. Here’s a glimpse of what the mockups looked like:

Template index:

Single view:

The designer came back to us with these high-fidelity mockups.

Template index:

Single view:

The designer initially wanted to move the title and CTA to the left, but we felt that putting the template on the left made it more consistent with the template index and looked nicer.

On-page & technical SEO

When we first rolled out the template gallery, the individual templates only featured images. However, this could lead to duplicate content issues, so we decided to include a unique description for each template.

At first, we hired freelancers to write the descriptions. But as we introduced new templates every month, we ended up crafting the descriptions ourselves. We ensured each description contained the title, a keyword, and some related terms.

At this stage, it was crucial to implement a well-structured URL scheme for the site to keep things nice and organized and make it easy for Google to crawl the site.

With the template titles and descriptions available, it was relatively easy to create meta-titles and meta-descriptions. I used an Excel formula to generate a title structure that automatically incorporated the template’s title for the meta-titles. As for the meta-descriptions, we repurposed the template descriptions, just making them a bit more concise.

Link building

Once the project was live, promotion became our next focus. Thanks to Piktochart’s strong domain, many categories and templates started ranking organically. However, we still wanted to boost visibility for the most crucial categories.

I collaborated with a link-building agency to create links for our most valuable categories, ensuring that we targeted areas where we had a realistic chance of success.

The result

If you’re interested in seeing the final result, feel free to check out the live gallery. We first launched the initial gallery in 2020, and since then, the project has undergone several iterations. For instance, the entire website underwent a redesign, so the gallery had to be updated accordingly. Fortunately, the gallery’s structure remained intact, so we only needed to make a few styling adjustments.

In terms of traffic, the gallery is still growing exponentially. Below is a screenshot from Ahrefs.

The new gallery significantly increased the rate at which it gained backlinks (link velocity)