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Services: SEO

How We Helped a Flashcard App Achieve 3.7X Growth and $4.7M ARR in a Year

anki pro case study
by Dennis Lazard · Written August 1, 2024 · Updated August 9, 2024
400k+
MRR
3,7x
Organic growth
17X
Organic signups

About The Brand

Anki Pro is a mobile app designed for faster learning. It offers Anki flashcards for students and teachers so they can prepare for exams and learn languages and university subjects faster.

While this app received a great market recondition (2.5M + downloads and an average 4.8+ rating), Anki Pro’s 8.6k + community suggested a new improvement to the company’s roadmap: a web version of the platform designed for studying from PCs and iPads.



The Challenges
Considering the app’s success and community request, the Anki Pro’s goal was to improve the website’s performance in terms of usability, SEO and design aspects.

So, to get started crafting a request-tied strategy, we first focused on exploring how well the current web version works. Here are some aspects we identified as our focus areas:

  • The landing page built by their in-house team was closed from indexation, lacking necessary UX/UI optimisation, value propositions, and social proof, reducing chances for organic search and lead conversion.
  • They also had a cut web version with a hybrid experience for users where we identified React tech performance issues.
  • Anki Pro didn't initially have any pages configured for crawling, so optimising the site's structure also became one of our focus areas.
  • The web platform contained a library of 50,000 pre-made decks, so they wanted to create a separate category library on the website and index them to drive organic traffic.
  • Anki Pro website didn't have a blog, which we had to build from scratch to capture informational and navigational keywords from users.

Strategic Approach
Once we agreed on a defined strategy with the client, we broke it down into six steps to gradually resolve issues one by one:

  • 1

    Step 1: Traffic research

    We performed comprehensive traffic research on Google US and competitor analysis, which involved examining search trends, identifying high-traffic keywords, and analyzing the performance of competitors in the niche.
  • 2

    Step 2: Mass-index pages

    We prioritized the pages by intent and started to mass-index the most profitable pages—those with the highest potential to drive traffic and conversions based on user search intent and relevance. By the end of this step, we successfully indexed over 85% of Anki Pro pages, significantly improving their visibility in search engine results.
  • 3

    Step 3: Separating landing page and web

    We created the landing pages on Webflow while their app remained on React, connected by links. Separating the landing pages from the main app increased the speed. It also gave us flexibility in optimizing each for its specific purpose—landing pages for marketing and conversions, while the app for user engagement and functionality.
  • 4

    Step 4: Deck library architecture creation

    We have created the architecture of the deck library – building tags and categorized them by topic clusters. This organization was designed to help users to easily navigate through different topics and find relevant content. The final result was the deck library with a separate chapter and 50,000+ unique indexed pages driving high volume of organic traffic and new monthly users.
  • 5

    Step 5: Building a new main page mockup

    Our next step was redesigning a main page mockup to resolve issues we identified during the research. We focused on improving user experience and building trust with visitors by incorporating elements such as testimonials, case studies, value propositions and key benefits of Anki Pro offerings.
  • 6

    6. Blog creation and content filling

    We have created a separate blog and started adding blog posts there for informational keywords and to attract new organic traffic audiences. By filling the company's blog with informative, useful, and engaging content, we were able to increase the website’s visibility in search engines and help users to get helpful information, which increased conversion from leads into paid users over time.

The Results:

Result 1: 3.7X organic growth in just 1-year

The “before” Anki Pro’s website metrics were 8k organic clicks per month. Our traffic research, blog creation, website improvements, and each page optimization resulted in 9.72K organic clicks in April 2023 per month as a midterm endpoint and ‘24 - 36.7K organic clicks per month as a final result after a year.

Result 2: 17X organic signups in a year

With our SEO efforts that involved mass-indexing pages, separating mobile apps and landing pages, and UX/UI improvements, we achieved higher brand recognition and a stable flow of organic, high-quality leads – from 45 to 316 in May 2024 to 756 organic signups in July 2024 (17x growth).

Result 3: A clear roadmap to achieve extra $4.7M ARR

For a company to continue growing organic traffic in the long run, we developed a clear roadmap by topic clusters on how to achieve it. We also collected organic traffic in Google US that can give extra $400k+ MRR ($4.7M ARR).
ESA team combine both a creative and data-driven approach in performance marketing, testing around 10 hypotheses per week for acquisition, engagement and retention. Their work on developing and executing a product growth strategy for the UK and US markets has led to a 68% increase in our number of monthly clients and $1.3M raised in Oct 2019 based on our growth metrics with ESA.”
Roman Grigoriev (www.splento.com)
CEO at Splento (fundraised $1.3M)
“​​I can't speak highly enough about ESA team! They have transformed my website from a store that functioned fairly well, to a fully optimised platform which performs better and generates significantly more income through substantially better sales conversions. We have a plan to continue building on the fantastic 7-figure revenue growth we’ve already achieved this year, and I have no doubt that with ESA team on side we will accomplish all this and more.”
Hanna Sillitoe (www.hannasillitoe.com)
Skin Healing Expert, BBC Dragons’ Den Brand
"ESA Agency are SEO and PPC team of our Spain and Portugal eCommerce shops. They created our new websites from the ground up, improving UX usability by 4x times. The result? Double the online visibility of our brand and an increase in our online revenue of 150%. We couldn’t be happier! It’s a perfect partnership."
Ilya Adamsky (www.sleep8.es / www.sleep8.pt)
CEO at Askona Europe (Brand Sleep.8)
“I met Dennis and his Google team, when they pitched their startup Smartsub. We accepted them to our accelerator program in 2017, Batch 9 and they successfully passed through it. Within a short period of time they managed to develop MVP of their product, design and implement go-to-market strategy launching the product on the US market. Their broad digital business experience and data-driven approach allowed them to make things done.”
Cristobal Alonso (www.startupwiseguys.com)
CEO at SWG (funded Smartsub in 2017)
“ESA team with their Google Ads skills, growth mindset and natural ability to mentoring are able to bring a lot of value to startup ecosystem with so many tech companies in their growth stage and businesses struggling with Google online advertising.”
Monika Synoradzka (www.hugething.vc)
CEO at HugeThing (funded Smartsub, 2019)
ESA team had outperformed my expectations working with one of our main SEO clients. They delivered X2-times organic traffic growth for 12 client’s websites, working with technical, content and link-building SEO optimisation in Google, website structure, navigation, technical code and conversion rate optimisation.”
Maria Kristalinskaya (www.bbdo.com)
Head of Retail Media at eBay (GE), Techstars Startup Mentor, ex-BBDO
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