Case study Rollbar

Rollbar

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The Challenge

Rollbar is a SaaS SDK for error monitoring by developers; in plain English, a cloud-based tool for developers to monitor and debug errors in their applications, available on a subscription basis.

Rollbar is in a very competitive space with at least half a dozen companies competing for the same business. The company had been founded in 2012 but never tried to do SEO before. Instead, they relied on SEM to attract new clients. They hired Cogney to get themselves on the radar of the developer industry through SEO, with the ultimate goal of increasing subscriptions to the service.

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The Strategy

To begin, Cogney conducted a site audit to ensure that rollbar.com was easy to navigate for the typical visitor, a software developer, while its pages were easy for Google to find and index.

The next step was content optimization. Since the site wasn’t very big, it was crucial to make every page count. Cogney reviewed and edited existing pages and wrote new pages to correlate better with developers’ intentions, incorporating scenarios and terminology such as “ruby raise error”, “php error logs”, “java throw exception”, “popular java frameworks,” etc.

Besides revamping the site for content and technical optimization, Cogney hit upon an ingenious mechanism for building authority, a major component of search rank. A site derives authority when other sites link to it, especially if those sites are themselves authoritative and relevant. Taking advantage of a mandatory regulation requiring anyone using Rollbar’s service to declare it in their privacy policy, Cogney recommended that Rollbar email customers with a reminder to post such a link in their privacy policy, thereby creating a virtuous cycle of linkbuilding which increased the site’s rank while upping its visibility in the developer industry.

Services

SEO audit + implementation

Ongoing consulting retainer

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The Keys to Success

The fact that senior members of Cogney were software developers was crucial to the successful optimization of Rollbar.com. Rollbar is a very technical B2B product. Consequently, it would have been impossible to optimize the company’s website without understanding the service and its customers. On one hand, a thorough knowledge of the tool’s functionality, benefits and advantages was required. On the other hand, familiarity with the error scenarios confronted by typical users of the service was indispensable. It would have been impossible to achieve a successful result with this client had the team not been able to write and think in the language of software development.

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The Results

40x

Increase in organic search traffic

140x

Increase in keywords ranking in positions #1-3

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