SEO for Snug: from 500 to 50,000 monthly sessions
How a focus on "off-the-radar" opportunities helped an estate planning startup turn organic into their most successful marketing channel.
The client
I worked with Snug, an estate planning startup based in Denver, Colorado, from May 2023 to May 2024.
Aimed at a younger audience than many estate planning services — with a particular focus on new parents — Snug provides easy, affordable access to wills, trusts, healthcare directives and powers of attorney.
When I met the team, they’d recently completed a healthy pre-seed funding round and were in the process of defining a sustainable acquisition strategy.
The challenge
SEO was a brand new channel for Snug. The team had tested a handful of blog posts, but unbranded traffic averaged less than 10 a day.
And, on the face of it, getting started would be challenging. Popular top-of-funnel estate planning search queries are very competitive, and many of Snug’s more established competitors had already invested heavily in gaining that traffic.
To compete directly would have required investment well beyond the resources of a young brand like Snug. And it would have taken too long: pre-seed startups can’t wait years to see results from marketing initiatives.
The approach
If we wanted to turn SEO into a major acquisition channel — and quickly — we’d need to find “off-the-radar” opportunities.
We did that through:
creative keyword research
meticulous clustering
fast-paced, iterative ways of working
Social listening, SERP mining and keyword clustering: finding hundreds of high-intent, low-competition content topics
At the heart of the project was inventive keyword research. Rather than relying on standard keyword research techniques — competitor analysis, seed keyword brainstorms — I looked for keywords and topics our competitors weren’t even considering.
I did this through large-scale analysis of online estate planning publications, social listening and SERP mining, and I used a keyword clustering algorithm based on SERP similarity to minimise keyword cannibalisation.
Through doing this, I uncovered hundreds of low-competition content topics that were low-volume in isolation, but made tens of thousands of searches in aggregate.
How a focus on “state-specific” search demand led to faster publishing and rapid growth
In particular, we focused on estate planning topics that differ significantly between states, because for these topics we could craft a single template and then create local variants. This allowed us to publish 51 pages much more quickly than writing 50 individual posts from scratch.
From 8 referring domains to 126 — without “building” a single link
This approach also took care of off-page SEO: by simply ranking first for a large number of queries, Snug naturally picked up backlinks. When we started working together, Snug had 8 referring domains — according to Ahrefs — and 126 after 6 months, despite us never having “built” a single link.
This created a “virtuous cycle” of growth: ranking for low-volume queries would build up backlinks, which would allow Snug to rank for higher-volume queries, which would generate more backlinks — and so on.
Moving quickly and focusing on what works: how an “SEO sprint” approach got results
Our approach meant we were publishing lots of content across a wide range of topics. To make it work, we’d need to quickly identify the most profitable efforts and adjust our approach accordingly.
We worked in two-week “sprints”, with a reporting setup that focused on broad insights and direction-of-travel metrics.
We used ngram models to measure query growth at a thematic level, rather than tracking individual keyword movements, and we used custom content categorisation to focus on broad content cohorts rather than individual pages.
(All alongside meticulous technical SEO, naturally.)
The results
In 6 months, Snug went from:
less than 500 monthly sessions > 53,600+ (an 11,421% traffic increase)
0 monthly conversions from organic search > 2,000
$250 monthly traffic value > $14,718
This project shows that creative keyword research and rapid iteration can lead to big results even in competitive industries. By focusing on untapped opportunities and adapting quickly to what works, Snug turned organic search into a major growth channel — and quickly.
“Kurt’s approach to SEO was a game-changer for us. He uncovered opportunities we’d never have considered and turned organic search into our most important growth channel in a matter of months. His creativity, analytical depth, and ability to deliver results far beyond our expectations made a huge impact.” — Ian Snow, Snug Co-founder
If you have a similar project in mind, or if you’d like to learn more, send me an email. I’d love to hear from you.