SEO Case Study: How NinjaOne Increased Traffic 678% In One Year

NinjaOne is an IT management platform that focuses on:

• RMM (Remote Management & Maintenance)
• MSP (Managed Service Providers)
• IT Departments
  

More than 15,000 customers in 80 countries work with NinjaOne to automate IT, cut costs, and reduce risk.

The NinjaOne Blog in a Nutshell

Want to get right to the good stuff? Jump to our Key Takeaways.

It’s not easy to find websites that have grown in traffic following the recent Google Search algorithm updates. In stark contrast to many of its competitors, NinjaOne has increased total organic traffic from an estimated 22,470 to 175,034 searches per month (according to Ahrefs).

That’s an increase of 678% in just one year.

The NinjaOne blog, the website’s primary source of organic traffic, has grown from 7,000 visitors to 110,000 visitors per month and shows no signs of slowing down. 

The blog has around 750 articles that span several formats:

1. “How To” guides. 161 articles generating the most traffic per page by a good margin (see Table 1.1).
   
   Five of these guides are among the website’s top ten pages for traffic, including “How To Update Your PC’s BIOS,” which accounts for a whopping 13.5k hits per month.
   
   NinjaOne employs a great structure to these that you can easily adopt for your own articles, as explored in Key Takeaway #4: NinjaOne’s intelligent structure for “How To” guides.
   
   
2. “What Is” definitions. Just under 100 articles, attracting 14.5k page visits every month.
   
   Interestingly, they rank well despite their reasonably short length. For example, “What Is Main Memory? | Definition” is just 388 words but receives 3k monthly visitors.
   
   We discuss implications for short, high-value articles like these in the context of recent Google Core Updates in Key Takeaway #5: The surprising success of micro “What Is” articles.
   
   
3. Other guides. A wide variety of additional guides appear in the blog — and not all of them with great success.
   
   This is interesting because the approach is traditionally regarded as very sound, even foundational: write high-value, helpful content for specific members of your target audience.
   
   In NinjaOne’s case, though, an entire series of guides dedicated to Managed Service Provider (MSP) growth contributes barely any hits per month.
   
   We explore this in greater detail in Key Takeaway #6: No SEO love for super helpful content.
   
   
4. Best practices. The best practices pages are on the lower end of traffic per page compared to other types.
   
   Still, there are some clever tactics at play here worth emulating — especially when it comes to keyword placement and titles. For details, see Key Takeaway #3: Keyword placement pays off in a big way.
   
   
5. Best X pages. Round-ups of the best software solutions for, e.g., Network Management Tools or Patch Management Software. 18 articles contributing nearly 900 hits per month.
   
   These articles have low search volume and low traffic per page (see Table 1.1) but likely have higher conversion rates than many other pages.
   
   
6. VS Competitor pages. 55 articles generating 3.8k hits per month. Each article compares NinjaOne to a competitor, such as “Compare ManageEngine vs NinjaOne.”
   
   Like Best X pages, they are low volume but likely high-converting.
   
   
7. Company news. Updates and press releases on features, partnerships, and more. 315 posts, accounting for 20.8k hits per month. 

‍

Table 1.1 – Types of articles on the NinjaOne blog

‍

These different article types allow NinjaOne to cover each stage of the traditional content marketing funnel very well, with about 50% of articles appearing at the Top of the Funnel (ToFu), 37% in the Middle (MoFu), and 13% at the Bottom (BoFu).

‍

This ensures potential customers are engaged at every stage of their journey — driving awareness, consideration, and conversion with targeted content.

A Note on NinjaOne’s Rebrand

When I started looking into NinjaOne’s backlink profile, I realized it had a previous website. It was redirected from ninjarmm.com to ninjaone.com in late 2021.

‍

At first, I wondered if this could be a reason for the explosive traffic gain on the newer website. That is, NinjaOne might have benefited from moving over existing content and redirecting backlinks. 

However, the previous website only had an estimated 8,499 page visits per month.

‍

This has now grown to over 175,000 — an increase of 1,959% — which implies the redirect was only a small factor in its recent traffic growth.

Site migrations are notoriously complex affairs, and a lot can go wrong. This is an example of one that was performed well and gave the website a good foundation to grow.

Our Key Takeaways from NinjaOne’s Content Strategy

Here are our eight key takeaways from NinjaOne’s content strategy: 

1. A good understanding of target audience
2. Strong linking from Top of Funnel (ToFu) pages to service pages
3. Keyword placement pays off in a big way
4. NinjaOne’s intelligent structure for “How To” guides
5. The surprising success of micro “What Is” articles
6. No SEO love for super helpful content
7. A great example of a helpful FAQ page
8. Domain Authority has room to grow

I've included a high-level overview of my methodology, including the tools used, at the end.

Key Takeaway #1: A good understanding of target audience

NinjaOne is very clear and specific on who its target audience is. This helps build trust with the reader, increases topical authority, and, I suspect, will lead to increased conversions.

I see NinjaOne’s approach as:

• Distilling the company’s core service
• Expressing how that service helps its target audience
• Building content around this
  

This unified strategy starts from the home page’s Unique Selling Proposition (USP).

I love how short and specific this USP is. There’s a lot of lifting being done by less than 20 words. This is the opposite of many USPs I see, which are unspecific, unclear in terms of the main benefit, and amount to a couple of paragraphs of buzzwords.

NinjaOne also keeps its audience in focus with its blog categories.

These highlighted categories are specifically mentioned by its USP. 

It goes even more granular and mentions specific job roles at the beginning of blog posts.

This tactic of “calling out” your audience is powerful because it allows the reader to see themselves in the copy, helping them become personally invested in the article. It’s a tactic we use on our own blog and when writing articles for our partners. 

Key Takeaway #2: Strong linking from Top of Funnel (ToFu) pages to service pages

Almost 50% of NinjaOne’s content is targeted towards the top of the conversion funnel (ToFu). These pages include the top three traffic-generating pages for the blog:

• How To Update Your PC’s BIOS (14,213 page visits/month)
• How to Update Drivers on PCs and Troubleshoot Common Issues (3,927 page visits/month)
• A Complete Guide to IPConfig Commands (3,179 page visits/month)

As with most ToFu content, these topics are very broad, and I would expect conversions to be minimal. Also, there are few natural opportunities to link to NinjaOne’s service pages.

To get around this, NinjaOne frequently adds a short paragraph linking the topic to its core services, as shown in this guide on IPConfig Commands.

Every blog post also ends with a CTA box and a “Start Your Free Trial” button.

This ensures every blog post acts like a “mini-funnel” and gives the possibility (however small) that a visit might end in a conversion. That said, in-content links can be more effective for SEO purposes, as they provide Google with more contextual links between two pages.

Key Takeaway #3: Keyword placement pays off in a big way

Page titles are an important ranking factor, and there are several ways to optimize them. We all want our titles to be creative and original and stand out in the search results. But keyword placement also matters.

NinjaOne’s strategy is particularly noteworthy: It typically places keywords at the beginning of its page titles — yet manages to maintain creativity and originality.

Let’s take a look at two examples:

• Server Management Defined, Best Practices & Tools
  
  This page ranks number one on Google.co.uk for the keyword “server management” and has even gained the featured snippet.
  

I love what NinjaOne has done here.

Most of the top ten results have the same page title: “What is Server Management?” Changing the title to “Server Management Defined, Best Practices & Tools” makes it stand out and tempts the reader with more value in the form of best practices and tools.

The subheading “What is Server Management?” also appears near the start of this article to ensure search intent is covered. Additionally, the content’s structure helps capture the featured snippet with a couple of explanatory sentences and bullet points.

The structure also makes the article easy on readers’ eyes and very scannable.

• GPUpdate: How to Force a Group Policy Update Remotely 

With almost 5,000 monthly visits, this page is NinjaOne’s best-performing MoFu content. “GPUpdate” is the keyword with the most searches for this page, and NinjaOne ranks on the first page for it on both Google.co.uk and Google.com.

This page also ranks for 75 featured snippets in the US and 15 snippets in the UK. 

To put this into perspective, connectwise.com, a competitor with a similar domain authority, has only 139 featured snippets across its entire website.

Here are two more examples of pages ranking well with the keyword at the start of the title:

• Backup and Disaster Recovery (BDR) Explained 
• RMM Pricing | How Much Does RMM Software Cost?

Pro Tip

It’s a really good idea to study the SERPs before writing a page title. Check which page titles Google currently favors and the common words, phrases, and modifiers used in each. Don’t be afraid to experiment with a few different titles if you aren’t ranking as well as expected.

In very competitive niches, you might notice that your competitors frequently change their page titles. If they’re outranking you with these changes and you’re finding it hard to keep up, tools like Little Warden can track them for you. .

Key Takeaway #4: NinjaOne’s intelligent structure for “How To” guides

The “How To” guides are responsible for approximately half of all NinjaOne’s blog traffic. Five of these articles are in the website’s top ten for traffic, according to Ahrefs.

‍

Table 1.2 - Top Ranking "How To" Guides

‍

The “How To” articles also comprise 50.8% of NinjaOne’s 596 featured snippets.

I believe a lot of this success is due to how well the content is structured.

The user interface NinjaOne employs is very clean and clearly shows who wrote the article, the blog category it belongs to, and when it was last updated.

‍

Next to each author’s headshot is a link to their individual author page and some background information about why they’re qualified to write this article.

As you may know, Google has been placing a lot of emphasis on websites displaying strong E-E-A-T (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness) signals in its recent updates to the Search Raters Guidelines. These author profiles are just one way NinjaOne shows good trust signals. 

NinjaOne has also added author schema that includes this information, in line with Google’s best practices.

I personally believe adding author schema will become vital to distinguishing human-made content from AI-generated content. The recent Google API Leak also shows that Google is tracking author details, further showing how vital this is.

Additionally, I find it interesting that NinjaOne lists a technical reviewer for its “How To” articles. The other article types that I checked weren’t reviewed. My working assumption is that the company calls its writers “Editorial Experts” and has a technical expert review the guide. Or perhaps the NinjaOne team believes adding a technical reviewer will help with E-E-A-T. (And who’s to say they’re wrong?)

Moving on to the content, I find it very scannable, with the advice laid out in easy-to-follow bullet points.

The subheadings for the content also follow SEO best practices and are in a clear, logical order.

What I particularly like about these “How To” articles is they offer a lot of return on investment (ROI). Each article is only around 1,000-1,500 words and doesn’t have any custom videos, images, or similar on-page assets. They follow a template and would be quick to produce.

Sure, you could add many of these extra details, but Google is already rewarding the pages with traffic. These pages are also at the top of the funnel, where the extra investment might not make sense at this time.

Pro Tip

While I like how the content subheadings are structured, NinjaOne has a technical SEO problem that I see on many websites. The menu headings also use HTML heading tags.

"By Industry," "By Department," and "For MSPs" are all styled as H3s, which seems superfluous. It means 30 additional <h3> tags are inserted into the page before the <h1> tag from the content.

In our opinion, it's unadvisable to use heading tags for stylistic purposes. Instead, NinjaOne could employ custom CSS selectors for these menu headings.

Semrush has a great guide that explains why this is best practice.

Key Takeaway #5: The surprising success of micro “What Is” articles 

It was surprising to find that “What Is” articles are the second-best article types for driving traffic to NinjaOne. There are 99 of these articles on the website, and they attract an estimated 14.5k page visits every month.

Most of these pages are quite short but rank incredibly well:

Table 1.3 - Short "What Is" Articles

This neatly illustrates what Google has said regarding word count following the Helpful Content Update in 2023: You do not always need thousands of words to rank —  just enough to be “helpful.”

These articles also rank for 8,547 keywords — many of which are related to NinjaOne’s core business, such as “backup server,” “server management,” and “backup and disaster recovery.”

‍

These two pages stand out for their high traffic value:

• What is RMM? Comprehensive Guide for 2024  ($10.3K)
• What is Apple MDM & iOS MDM ($5.9K)
  

“Traffic value” represents the price you would pay in Google Ads each month to rank for the same keywords. If we assume each article costs around $200-$300, you can see that these blog posts offer a great return on investment.

The argument against “What Is” pages

Definition pages sit right at the top of the funnel, and I doubt NinjaOne’s target audience of IT specialists is searching for such rudimentary terms. When I dug deeper into these pages, I also found some don’t have any internal links to other blog posts.

‍So, how relevant are they, and why publish them?

‍One could argue that it builds topical authority in the IT niche and sends good signals to Google. These pages are also quick and easy to write and provide a touchpoint for the brand.

‍Could NinjaOne approach this in a better way?

‍Yes, I think there is scope for more “What Is” articles that can link back to NinjaOne’s main service pages. 

To do this, NinjaOne could use Wikipedia (which has perhaps the best internal linking strategy on the internet) and a keyword research tool to get ideas for highly relevant new content and improve its existing internal link structure.

Let’s use NinjaOne’s keyword “endpoint management” to illustrate the process.

First, it would use the Google operator “intitle” to find relevant pages on Wikipedia.

This search returns three results. For this example, let’s say NinjaOne focuses on this Wikipedia page: Unified endpoint management.

(Take note of the pages that Wikipedia links from within the content, as these will support the main topic’s content.)

Next, NinjaOne could use another Google search operator to check if its site has already covered this content. We can see there’s already an article for “mobile device management (MDM).”

However, there isn’t a page for “enterprise mobility management.”

Now, NinjaOne would need to check if this keyword needs its own dedicated page. To do this, the team would use a Google search or a keyword research tool and look at the first ten results.

The image above shows that page titles are targeted (with little variation!) toward “What is Enterprise Mobility Management?” This keyword also has decent organic traffic and relatively high traffic value, making a strong case for a new page.

There are two more checks I like to make before approving keywords for new content. 

The first is to check if the website ranks in the top 100 for the keyword. Sometimes, it might be without mentioning the keyword in the title.

The second check is using a Google search to see if any content is ranking for this keyword. In addition to ruling out keyword cannibalization, any returned results could make for great internal links down the line.

Note that I have removed the “intitle” section from the Google operator search. The new search will check if any pages are relevant to the keyword in quotation marks.

Eight results are returned in this example, but the articles don’t target EMM in the title. This suggests a new page should be created and can be linked to the existing content and the service page.

Google will then crawl the internal links and hopefully notice the site covers the topic in depth and is an authority on the subject.

This type of keyword research is best done at the start of the project. However, as the above example shows, running periodic content audits can help uncover untapped opportunities.

Key Takeaway #6: No SEO love for super helpful content

A content strategy that seems very logical is writing content that helps potential clients grow their business. This has numerous benefits.

• There are a lot of pain points and interesting topics to write about
• Your website becomes a valuable resource in the niche
• Potential smaller clients can grow into bigger clients

NinjaOne has devoted an entire blog category to this type of content: “MSP Growth”. Below are some of the pages and their organic traffic estimates from Ahrefs.

Table 1.4

‍

As you can see, these five pages receive only one click in estimated organic traffic and have gained just two backlinks. Yet NinjaOne has invested a lot in these articles.

The word counts are much higher, the authors hold senior positions in the company, and each article contais embedded videos and custom images.

It’s clear that, in SEO terms, these articles aren't a success. However, they could still reach their target audience by being retargeted for social media (just one great way to maximize ROI from blog content), NinjaOne's newsletter, or through good internal linking.

Key Takeaway #7: A great example of a helpful FAQ page

Many FAQ pages on the internet are poorly executed. They're visually unappealing and often seem to have been added as an afterthought, with no real cohesion behind their purpose.

This isn't the case with NinjaOne’s FAQ page.

I really like the user experience here. The questions are arranged neatly in columns, and the answers hidden behind plus signs, so you view only the information you choose to see. Answers are short and succinct, with internal links to relevant pages for more information.

It appears a lot of thought has gone into the questions and answers provided. They cover services NinjaOne offers, who the company is, what it does, how customers can contact the team, and more. Not only is this information genuinely helpful to readers, but it also communicates good E-E-A-T signals to Google.

NinjaOne has also added FAQ schema to its FAQ page, which can help the company gain rich results in Google searches.

Setting up FAQ schema is relatively quick and easy, but you might be surprised at how many websites fail to do it.

Key Takeaway #8: Domain Authority has room to grow

As Google’s algorithm continues to push smaller websites down the search results, having a solid backlink profile is more important now than ever.

According to Ahrefs, NinjaOne has a Domain Rating (DR) of 71. This is about average compared to other websites in the competitive IT management niche.

‍

The site also has 60,296 backlinks gained from 2,112 domains. Most of these backlinks come from websites with a DR of 40 or higher.

I find this interesting because one theory for why websites were hit in the recent Google algorithm updates is that they had too many low-quality backlinks.

This isn’t the case with NinjaOne. It only has 10.8% of all backlinks from websites rated DR 30 and below. Traffic continues to grow significantly despite the upheaval caused by the recent updates. I would like to add that correlation doesn’t equal causation.  And perhaps, this niche is less-affected by the automated spammy backlinks that plague others. But it is certainly interesting to note.

The page that has gained the most backlinks is NinjaOne's 5.4 Summer 2023 Update: Elevating Automation and Enhancing Visibility.

I found this quite surprising as it is a company update and not something that I would expect to have backlinks from 117 referring domains.

I also found that NinjaOne has been having success with blog posts that feature statistics. Four of these pages are among the top five blog pages for gaining backlinks.

I especially like the IT Horror Stories article. It’s creative, well-written, and links well to service pages. It’s also something NinjaOne could turn into a series of articles.

This is exactly the type of content bloggers would link to when writing similar articles. That’s what makes articles with statistics such a successful backlink strategy.

Finally, I noticed from the list of top articles that two pages — each from a different year — cover the same topic: “Small Business Cyber Security Statistics.” One is from 2019, and the other is from 2024. One version writes the keyword as “cybersecurity” in the page title; the other writes it as “cyber security,” with a space. This isn’t ideal.

However, there’s a way to avoid the time, effort, and problems of creating new pages every year. You can maximize link equity from yearly reports by editing them every year rather than creating a new URL. This keeps all the backlinks on one page rather than diluting them across many pages.

NerdWallet uses this strategy a lot — and to great effect. For example, the company has published a tax guide on the same URL every year for the last four years.

According to Ahrefs, this guide has picked up 496 backlinks from 171 referring domains — and that number grows every year!

Final Words

This case study showed that NinjaOne’s blog was the primary driver of its 678% organic traffic growth. Most of its traffic comes from helpful guides addressing specific needs, including “How To” articles and content that covers definitions and best practices for particular topics/concepts.

This focused approach, combined with strong E-E-A-T signals and a robust backlink profile, enabled NinjaOne to achieve remarkable growth and maintain high search rankings amidst algorithm changes.

What impressed me the most was the amount of organic traffic the website has gained for relatively short articles. NinjaOne has mastered the art of writing just enough to answer the search query and rank well for the keyword. This likely provides a great return for the amount invested into the content.

Throughout my analysis, I also observed some potential areas for growth — both in terms of new content and backlink opportunities. It will be interesting to see if NinjaOne can maintain this level of organic growth in the months ahead.

Methodology

Tools used:

• Ahrefs
• Screaming Frog
• ChatGPT 4
• Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine

The goal of this case study was to uncover the primary factors contributing to NinjaOne’s impressive organic traffic growth. 

I started by using Ahrefs “Site Explorer,” which highlights top-performing pages and their traffic gain over the last few years. I then used Screaming Frog to crawl the blog; this provided a list of URLs with their titles and word counts.

Next, I used ChatGPT to sort the pages into the different stages of the conversion funnel. However, due to the current limitations of ChatGPT, a lot of this work had to be performed manually.

Finally, I sorted the articles into article types and put these through Ahrefs’ “Batch Analysis” tool. I also manually analyzed the website’s content to gain a deeper understanding of the user experience and content structure.