How Piktochart beat unicorn Canva and 10x’d signups in 3 months

The SaaS challenge

Piktochart is in the competitive graphic design SaaS niche with fierce competition from giants such as Canva and Venggage.

They came to Skale looking to externalize their off-page SEO efforts with a trusted partner that has great experience within the SaaS niche. They didn’t only want to simply increase rankings on Google, but they wanted to focus on driving product signups.

Piktochart understood that having a link-building program that was permanently running was paramount to driving success in their SEO customer acquisition channel. However, they also didn’t have the resources to manage this initiative—it’s a time-consuming job!—so they came to Skale.

The custom SEO solution

Skale built a model to understand the potential number of monthly sign-ups & traffic Piktochart could achieve through SEO based on their existing content. The Skale team took a look at things like:

• Quality
• Quantity
• SEO keywords and terms
• Internal & external links
• Technical aspects

Skale coupled the above with difficulty. This meant understanding the number of referring domains required in order to start seeing the desired results. This helped Skale and Piktochart prioritize their to-do lists and map out an impact-driven project timeline.

The experienced team decided to take an intensive approach to link-building by focusing on

• A single topic: presentations
• Two key pages during one period

Skale then worked with talented writers to create topically relevant content that was pitched to authoritative partner websites as well as new ones. The team specifically focussed on sites in the business and design niche both for domain authority and relevant reach.

Skale worked with Piktochart’s SEO team to make on-page technical improvements across their website. For example:

• Improving meta titles
• Internal linking
• Optimizing target pages using NLP technology

What did this custom SEO strategy achieve for Piktochart?

Thanks for asking. In just three months Skale helped Piktochart increase signups by 860% and 9x visitors from non-branded SEO on two key presentation pages.

Piktochart also ranked #2, above billion-dollar SaaS Canva, for the lucrative keyword “presentation maker” which gets more than 6.3k monthly searches.

What’s more, Skale managed to do this with fewer referring domains than Canva—prooving it’s not all about quantity, but the quality of your backlinks and linking content.

What’s the SEO secret Skale used?

“We focused on securing links on high-quality & topically relevant domains. We know that this approach will get results not just in the short-term, but is also future proof as well.”

Italo Viale, co-founder @ Skale