• IT/Software

How FreshBooks Safeguarded $1M in Traffic Value with Proactive Alerting

FreshBooks is an accounting software company that helps small and medium size business owners. Having customers in over 160 countries, the 700+ person team at FreshBooks reaches across the globe with headquarters in Toronto, Canada and offices in the US, Mexico, Netherlands, Croatia, and Germany.

FreshBook’s achievements:

Safeguarded $1M in traffic value with proactive alerting
Implemented SEO governance across the entire organization
Quality assurance from staging to production

FreshBooks (opens in a new tab) is an accounting software company that helps small and medium size business owners. Having customers in over 160 countries, the 700+ person team at FreshBooks reaches across the globe with headquarters in Toronto, Canada and offices in the US, Mexico, Netherlands, Croatia, and Germany.

The challenge

Keeping on top of a site with thousands of pages is a challenge for any organization. Combine it with multiple stakeholders that own different pages of the site, it becomes near-impossible.

This exact situation is what led Krinal Mehta, Senior SEO Manager at FreshBooks, to give ContentKing a try.

The single biggest problem ContentKing solves is helping keep a tab on any changes happening on the site AND alerting for anything that might impact our SEO performance.

At the time, FreshBooks was a one-person SEO team — and has now grown to a team of three — who all rely on ContentKing to keep an eye on everything happening on their site.

The solution

Using ContentKing’s Change Tracking, FreshBooks can see the exact moment when updates are made on their site and receive real-time alerts to notify them of any changes.

These features not only solved the problem at hand but became the driver for forming a new committee within their organization: The Web Council. The Web Council uses ContentKing’s monitoring and alerting to enforce SEO Governance across their site and organization.

On top of that, ContentKing has proved valuable for other teams within FreshBooks including:

  • SSL alerts that prompt infrastructure teams to renew certificates ahead of time.
  • Segments that allow market managers to monitor the health of their market specific website pages.
  • Real-time data that is vital for creating a Google Data Studio dashboard for senior leadership to view.

The value that we’ve received in the first few months pays for the platform several times over. Not to mention the ability to set up entirely new internal processes, workflows, reporting, and improved communication between teams that ContentKing has enabled.

The results

Using ContentKing has resulted in many benefits for FreshBooks, but here are three that stand out for the impact they’ve had.

1. Safeguarded $1M in traffic value with proactive alerting

A key advantage of real-time SEO monitoring is the ability to be proactive rather than reactive. Krinal mentioned several instances that ContentKing has saved them from significant traffic losses, resulting in a traffic value worth $1M.

In one instance, a large number of pages were accidentally no-indexed. By being able to detect this in real-time, the team was able to fix them before Google noticed and dropped them from its index.

Other issues that ContentKing helped detect:

  • Identifying a large number of pages where H1 tags went missing
  • Identifying pages where content was accidentally deleted
  • Detecting significant post-release bugs
  • Detecting analytics tags that were accidentally deleted
  • Broken links, redirects, canonicals

For us the real improvement is the traffic that was NOT lost due to ContentKing,easily worth $1M.

2. Implemented SEO governance across the entire organization

ContentKing was able to bring together several FreshBooks teams including SEOs, web strategists, web developers, analytics professionals, tech directors, content marketers, support managers, and project managers.

Through the formation of The Web Council, FreshBooks has been able to minimize web incidents by keeping everyone on the same page across the entire organization.

The Web Council includes members from SEO, Web Services, and Creative Services. Members proactively monitor the site with ContentKing Alerts via a Slack channel, and issues are prioritized based on their impact on the business.

If you’re an in-house SEO, ContentKing is a no-brainer. If you’re on the agency side or run your own projects where multiple stakeholders are involved in making changes to the site/ site is large, I highly recommend you sign up for a free trial.

3. Quality assurance during staging to production

ContentKing also gives FreshBooks peace of mind and quality control when it comes to website updates.

As part of their quality assurance process, they use ContentKing monitoring to compare staging environments before taking it live—ensuring that no on-page SEO mistakes slip through the cracks. They also use custom elements to monitor any staging links that might accidentally go live or are added to a live page.

The impact of real-time monitoring and auditing within FreshBooks’ SEO has led Krinal to describe ContentKing as a “SEO Insurance Policy.”

The value that we’ve received in the first few months pays for the platform several times over.

To wrap up: ContentKing has allowed FreshBooks to have complete control over their SEO efforts. It’s been a solution that ensures everyone is on the same page and one step ahead, helping avoid any disruption to organic traffic.

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