A 270% month-on-month increase in traffic for FooPlugins – how we won at search, quickly

FooPlugins have been selling WordPress plugins since 2010, when the idea of commercial WordPress plugins was still in its relative infancy. Their flagship product, FooGallery, is now used on over 200,000 websites.

FooPlugins engaged Ellipsis in late 2022, with the aim of diversifying their marketing channels and growing the business. They’d tried paid reviews, Google Ads, etc, but none had worked effectively as they hoped.

Hit-and-miss SEO

FooPlugins’ organic traffic was growing already, and there was a significant library of existing content, some of which received strong traffic. This showed us the potential for organic traffic as a source of revenue.

The challenge was that a small number of posts were resulting in the vast majority of traffic: Ahrefs estimated at the time that 3 pages were driving 78% of organic traffic. We characterize this as “hit-and-miss SEO”: some content hits, whilst other content which is subjectively of similar quality, misses.

This is the primary problem that Ellipsis’ FALCON AI solves. FALCON AI predicts – before you create the content – if the content is going to be a hit or a miss, so that we only work on the hits.

New hit content and re-optimizing existing content

FooPlugins engaged Ellipsis on Content Growth, our flagship SEO Content service in November 2022.

Ellipsis’ Strategy team identified opportunities to optimize existing content and grow traffic with new content. Ellipsis took care of the SEO Strategy and content briefs, and FooPlugins’ existing writer worked on the new content.

Any client project is a collaboration, and we were especially pleased with the quality and speed of the collaboration with FooPlugins’ team. Working with Business Manager, Tamlyn, we’ve hit an average publication time of 45 days. Multiple posts are, of course, in progress at any one time.

Here’s Tamlyn from FooPlugins:

Working with the team at Ellipsis has been awesome all-round. We’ve been able to create great content (without all the guesswork), the process is efficient, and they’re always ready to help answer any questions we may have.

Unlike other marketing companies that we have worked with, Ellipsis was able to deliver on their projected outcomes.

Tamlyn Vincent • Business Manager, FooPlugins

270% month-on-month increase in traffic

In the first couple of months, Content Growth made a modest contribution to organic traffic. Once content had been live for ~90 days (Ellipsis’ standard for when content should reach a peak ranking), we saw rankings accelerate. Content Growth-powered traffic more than doubled between February and March 2023. March 2023 saw a significant increase in sales for FooPlugins.

There were challenges along the way. Traffic to one of the pieces of content that made up a large proportion of traffic dropped significantly, dropping 20 places in search results. Ellipsis’ Strategy team looked into this, and identified keyword cannibalization as the issue. We recommended a 301 redirect, FooPlugins implemented this, and within weeks traffic had recovered to previous levels.

Within 6 months of starting Content Growth, FooPlugins’ organic traffic is up overall over 50%, and Content Growth contributes over a third of all organic traffic.

This project has been an excellent collaboration thus far, and we’re looking forward to continuing to build organic traffic and profitably grow sales with FooPlugins for a long time to come!

Here’s Tamlyn again:

We’ve been able to build on our content and target a more relevant audience, which has resulted in positive growth for our business. And we’re looking forward to seeing that growth improve even more with the continued help of Ellipsis.

Tamlyn Vincent • Business Manager, FooPlugins

FooPlugins work with us on Content Growth. If you’d like to discuss your SEO Content needs, get in touch!