BugHerd, a leading website feedback tool, transformed its results from SEO by streamlining their content production workflow with the help of Surfer.
We sat down with Hennika Kestilä, Growth Marketing Consultant and Marina Domoney, Marketing Communications Lead at BugHerd, to explore how BugHerd leveraged data-driven content optimization to achieve significant organic traffic and conversion growth.
Initial SEO goals
BugHerd’s goal was to create content that ranks well and provides genuine value to readers.
“We wanted to ensure our content was well-structured, used the right keywords, and that it attracted organic traffic and engagement.”
— Hennika Kestilä, Growth Marketing Consultant at BugHerd
They needed content optimized for search that would drive organic clicks to the business.
Outsourcing SEO to an agency
Instead of building an in-house SEO team from scratch, BugHerd partnered with Digital Rhinos, an SEO agency that handles their content pre-production and research.
They conduct detailed keyword research tailored to BugHerd's market position and assist the company’s content team with SEO content planning.
For example, the agency delivers detailed briefs containing primary keywords, secondary terms and competitor insights.
BugHerd's internal team then uses these briefs to write content using Surfer’s real-time recommendations.
“Once we have the brief, we use Surfer to develop the content, ensuring we hit recommended keyword density, structure, and readability targets.”
– Hennika Kestilä, Growth Marketing Consultant at BugHerd
Following these suggestions ensures that their content is optimized to rank for their target keywords.
Take Marina’s exhaustive guide on tracking website bugs, for example.
It’s a long-form article with 37 headers that dives deep into what website bugs are, the tracking process and suggested tools.
You can see that the article is optimized for its main keyword.
And ranks in position 1 for a highly related term.
Outsourcing their SEO planning helps BugHerd’s marketing team focus on what they know best—their product and customers—while the agency handles time-intensive SEO tasks.
This partnership delivered instant expertise, eliminating the need to hire and train specialized SEO staff in-house. BugHerd benefited from the agency’s experience and insights, having worked with clients in the same industry.
Scalability and efficiency with Surfer
"Without Surfer, we would be lost. It would take us twice as long to produce content. That's multiple hours saved in optimizations for every blog!"
— Hennika Kestilä, Growth Marketing Consultant at BugHerd
Surfer's instant feedback loop has improved their workflow in several measurable ways.
The team now produces highly targeted, quality content in half the time compared to their previous process.
Since Surfer automatically benchmarks content against top competitors for each target keyword, this eliminates hours of manual research scanning through search results and dissecting competitor content.
Writers can simply open Surfer and start writing. As Marina notes,
"You can forget about keyword optimization and write the content as you like. Then at the end, you just click a button, and Surfer finds and replaces words with secondary and NLP keywords."
This feature alone saves multiple hours of optimization work for every blog post. A content team publishing four articles monthly can reclaim 4–8 hours of productive time each month.
Perhaps most valuable was integrating established, proven workflows within Surfer rather than building systems from zero, accelerating their path to results.
Results
As a result of these efforts, BugHerd saw impressive results in its organic performance:
- 39% increase in sessions from non-brand organic traffic in the most recent quarter compared to the previous year
- 45% increase in clicks from non-brand organic traffic in the same period
Their SEO strategy also led to tangible business results–a 127% increase in non-brand organic search sign-ups compared to the previous year
Here’s a recreation of their impressions from Google Search Console.
The team's ability to consistently make high-quality SEO-friendly content led straight to actual business results and shows how the right mix of SEO tools, outsourcing, and internal processes can build a long-lasting system for content success.
“BugHerd's use of Surfer has significantly improved content production efficiency and scalability. Surfer has allowed us to produce a higher volume of optimized content without compromising quality, which has had a flow-on effect on the team’s overall efficiency.”
— Hennika Kestilä, Growth Marketing Consultant at BugHerd
