Airtable, a low-code solution for building and sharing databases, exemplifies the payoffs of a product-led growth strategy. The company spent over three years building its product behind closed doors and refining it with beta customers before launching in 2015. Within six years of its public launch, the company was valued at $11 billion. 

By focusing on user needs, Airtable initiated an effective product-led content strategy that not only meets user demands throughout the customer lifecycle but also generates close to 13,000 organic visits per month. Let’s explore how Airtable’s multi-pronged content strategy works. 

Airtable templates: a core feature for growth

The magic of Airtable lies in its user-friendly spreadsheet-like interface and innovative no-code elements. These features empower users to gather and arrange various types of information into shareable relational databases. These databases can be updated in real-time through integrations and automation, effectively enabling users to create simple applications without writing any code. 

This versatility allows a diversity of users across industries and functions to leverage the product for everything from building marketing calendars to gathering user feedback or monitoring campaign performance. 

The power of preset templates 

One of Airtable’s earliest customer learnings was that preset templates were popular with new users and helped with retention during onboarding. Templates could be organized by user type and use case so customers could immediately understand the product's benefits for their function and get started with the product immediately. Airtable has created over 250 preset templates that live within its template library.

While preset templates were initially developed to meet user needs, they also cleverly attract over 8,000 organic monthly visits by capturing traffic for close to 7,500 longtail keywords for {template + use case long tail}. Each of these longtail keywords might only generate 50-100 organic visits per month; however, at scale, they provide a reliable organic engine for Airtable to attract high-intent users who are likely to convert to customers. 

User-generated templates extend Airtable’s reach

After launching in 2015, Airtable quickly realized that while the preset templates were popular, people were also leveraging the product in surprising ways. This insight led to the development of “Airtable Universe,” allowing users to upload their own templates and share them with others. 

Over 1,000 user-generated templates currently live in the “Airtable Universe” library. Users upload their creations and share them with their colleagues or professional network. Other users can then clone the template to use for their own projects. 

The beauty of this strategy? Airtable only needed to create a standardized page for users to upload and share their templates, and customers do the work to create and socialize the content. In other words, virtually no resources are needed to generate these pages, which bring in about 4,000 monthly organic visits and more than 16,500 backlinks from 800+ referring domains. 

Breaking down Airtable’s template pages: why they work for SEO

Airtable caters to a wide array of industries and functions, providing ample opportunity to capture longtail keywords relevant to a breadth of Airtable use cases. Each template page captures traffic for a hyper-specific longtail keyword like “social media calendar template,” “recipe database template,” or “trip planner template.” 

Airtable categorizes its templates by function and company type. A single template can be found within multiple categories. For example, the social media calendar template is found within the “content production,” “marketing,” and “startup” categories. This interlinking system not only enables easier navigation for the user but also helps search engines like Google crawl the library's contents better. 

Each template page follows a simple structure to meet search intent and capture conversions.

1. The H1 at the top of the page describes the template type to meet users' search intent immediately.

2. Also at the top of the page is a “use template” button that leads to a sign-up page to convert visitors.

3. An interactive visual of the template allows users to click and view different Airtable features and elements. This enables users to essentially try out the product before signing up.

4.  The rest of the page describes the template type to capture additional longtail keywords like “how to use a social media calendar” and “what is a social media calendar.” This section also details Airtable’s product differentiators to drive conversions. 

5. Similar templates are linked at the bottom to encourage site exploration and improve interlinking. 

How Airtable could enhance its pSEO strategy

While Airtable’s pages bring in consistent organic traffic, there’s ample opportunity to optimize them. Other companies, including Asana, ClickUp, and Hubspot, are using similar strategies targeting the same keywords to draw visitors to their websites. By consistently analyzing competitive research, new keyword opportunities, and the latest search engine algorithm changes, Airtable can maintain a dominant position in search engine rankings. 

With pSEO tactics, hundreds to thousands of pages are created using a single page template. This means Airtable can automate the production of new pages without needing to engage writers to manually produce each piece. They can also bulk edit existing pSEO pages when search algorithms adjust or other optimization opportunities emerge. Below are a few sample opportunities Airtable could deploy to level-up its existing pSEO pages and build new ones. 

Opportunity 1: Enhance existing pSEO pages 

Our team consistently analyzes pSEO content performance and keyword trends to identify opportunities for optimization. We use an experimentation framework to test these ideas and then scale successful tests across pages. In Airtable’s case, our team found that keywords related to “how to create {template type}” generate a high search volume. This could be an opportunity for Airtable to add “how to” descriptions to all its template pages and capture this traffic. 

Opportunity 2: Create pSEO articles featuring Airtable templates

In addition to continuously optimizing content, our team analyzes the competitive landscape to proactively generate new ideas for pSEO content. For example, our team found that many of Airtable’s templates are competing with similar tools on the market. For instance, Airtable’s social media calendar template is competing with templates from Hubspot, Asana, and Clickup. With this insight, Airtable might create a series of “Top 10 {use case} templates” articles that highlight Airtable’s templates or list Airtable’s templates among other solutions on the market. 

Accelerate your growth with daydream

We’re working with some of the fastest-growing startups like Notion, ProductHunt, and Tome to help them sustainably accelerate their organic growth through pSEO content. Our platform provides all the tooling necessary to get a robust, high-performing pSEO engine up and running without the expensive price tag.

If you’re interested in using daydream and joining our growing list of customers, email us at hello@withdaydream.com to start the conversation.