How LottieFiles Fixed Its Content Strategy to Grow Traffic by 55% in Less than a Year

LottieFiles breathed new life into the content strategy for its two websites, producing top-notch videos and blogs.

Then, they watched as web traffic soared and doubled the website’s top-10 keyword performance.

Let’s explore the strategy behind this success and highlight takeaways for you to boost your own content marketing.

About LottieFiles

LottieFiles is an innovative platform that revolutionized the way animations are shared and used in digital projects.

It allows teams to create captivating, engaging, and interactive animations to enhance their websites, apps, and other digital experiences.

LottieFiles also offers seamless integration with popular design tools and development frameworks such as Adobe After Effects, Canva, WordPress, and Figma.

The company is now used by over 5.2 million users from 250,000+ companies worldwide, and in 2021 it acquired IconScout.

How It All Started

LottieFiles’s website traffic remained stagnant for a long time, limiting the company’s growth opportunities.

To solve this, Marianne Tan, LottieFiles’s SEO lead, undertook a series of content audits across all digital assets.

After identifying underlying issues and enacting a few key changes, both the LottieFiles and IconScout websites saw their traffic increase.

The company experienced the following:

• LottieFiles organic traffic increased by 55% in less than a year, with 260,000 users in March 2023 compared to 170,500 users in May 2022

• IconScout’s web traffic rose by 77%, from 346,000 organic visitors in May 2022 to 612,000 in March 2023

• The LottieFiles website ranked for 1,454 keywords in the top 10 in February 2023, compared to only 702 one year earlier (+107%)
• They also ranked for a total of 22.5k keywords in February 2023, compared to 21k keywords in Feb 2022 (+6.96%)

Let’s see which tactics helped the company get these impressive results.

How LottieFiles and IconScout Grew Their Web Traffic and Boosted Keyword Hits

1. Website and Content Audits

Tan and her team took a big look at both websites and the content used to promote them in a bid to improve organic traffic.

“When I came in, I did a whole website audit (and) I also did a content audit to see what we could do to improve,” Tan said.

Running an audit is the best first step in finding gaps and opportunities in your content strategy.

It helps you find underperforming areas and fix them. Besides, it’s also useful to identify patterns—for example, to see which topics and content formats perform best.

2. Making Content Planning Strategic and SEO-Oriented

Tan found that a lot of the content was being published without proper optimization and a specific objective.

In some cases, the company was “basically publishing blogs for the sake of it, without providing context,” she explained.

Following the audits, Tan took a more strategic approach to planning text and video content.

She managed to boost both website traffic and keyword performance by optimizing blog posts and landing pages for search.

For example, the team is now creating educational content targeting specific niche keywords. It helps the brand attract relevant traffic at the top of the content funnel.

For instance, the blog post from the image above is already ranking for some of its primary keywords:

3. Optimizing YouTube Videos for Search

The audit also found that YouTube was an important traffic driver for LottieFiles and IconScout.

However, most of the videos were created without any keyword strategy in mind.

Tan decided to change the way videos were published to boost their potential as content marketing assets.

“We needed to optimize our YouTube SEO and content for better search engine visibility,” Tan said, explaining that she made the decision to start researching and adding keywords to video captions and titles.

The team also ensured that all videos had relevant links pointing back to the website.

All this helped boost traffic to LottieFiles and IconScout, while the company also saw an increase in YouTube subscribers.

On their channel, LottieFiles is sharing engaging educational videos providing helpful advice for their designer audience. For example:

4. Improving Blog Post Performance

After finding that many blogs lacked context, Tan implemented a new method of crafting high-performing articles.

First of all, she replaced random topics with new ideas based on keyword research. This played an important part in improving the websites’ keyword performance.

They also began embedding videos in the blog pages, which helped increase the average time on page and bounce rate.

Adding video and visual content to your blog post is a great strategy for generating more organic traffic. This is because users stay longer on the page, which sends positive signals to Google.

According to our State of Content Marketing 2023 Global Report, articles with at least one video generate 70% more organic traffic than those without.

Videos are not the only type of visuals you can find in their blog posts. As a company helping their customers create animated images, LottieFiles features lots of samples of great animation in their blog posts. For example:

Finally, all blogs are now delivered on social media, via newsletters, and through content exchange partnerships.

5. Improving Social Media Content Strategy

After improving the videos and blogs, Tan and the SEO team took a new look at how to share content via social media.

“Social media is not a cookie cutter concept—what works on Instagram will not work on LinkedIn, will not work on Facebook, so on and so forth,” Tan said. “We had to change and adapt to see where our audience was.”

Personalization was a critical component of the new strategy.

With a service offering website animations, LottieFiles appeals to many stakeholders.

For example, Tan targeted social media posts on Twitter, knowing that’s where the target audience hung out online. Much of their content on this platform is more technical and addresses the needs of the developer audience.

At the same time, their Instagram content is more oriented toward targeting graphic designers. So, posts on this platform are more playful and visual.

6. Experiments with IconScout Product Pages

Tan and her team also ran numerous experiments while working on IconScout, which helped increase organic traffic over time.

For instance, keyword research has truly moved the needle.

Researching primary and related keywords helped them update the website’s most important product pages, such as the landing pages for icons, 3D illustrations, and Lottie animations.

“We added a lot more context to that page, and we started seeing a lot more traffic coming in there,” Tan said. “These pages changed from looking like eBay product listings to pages brimming with information, which brought more readers in.”

They also created pages with collections of animations for particular holidays, such as Christmas or Halloween. For example:

To attract additional views, the team produced blog posts about creating animations for each of those festivities.

Altogether, this tactic turned into a massive traffic driver, according to the LottieFiles team.

“The traffic we’ve been seeing, honestly speaking, we’ve been breaking our all-time high every month since we started making all those different approaches,” added Tan.

7. Improving Interlinking

After auditing LottieFiles and IconScout, Tan found that a significant part of the website consisted of orphan pages.

Such pages had no internal backlink pointing to them. This makes it hard for Google to find and crawl such content, affecting its opportunities for ranking.

To fix this, Tan and her team set about improving page interconnectivity by building links between all topically connected content pieces.

“We made sure that a lot of these pages were much more interconnected. It was based on what was relevant, what people were searching for, and the results that people were looking for when it came to these types of searches,” Tan explained.

8. Optimizing Plugin Landing Pages with Useful Elements

The team also optimized plugin landing pages by adding interactive elements, video guidelines on installation, and FAQ sections.

They also created new types of pages sharing info on various specifics of their products.

“We created landing pages called feature pages to explain the differences between all the features we offer,” Tan said.

All landing pages are structured in a way that creates a great user experience.

For instance, you can learn how to install the plugin with video instructions for every step on the same landing page.

You can also answer your questions using the FAQ section sitting on the same page.

Wrapping Up

Tan’s decision to conduct website and content audits provided a strong foundation for increasing traffic to both LottieFiles and IconScout.

Videos the team published on YouTube and articles on the blog were fortified with keywords and backlinks.

A deep investigation into keywords with help from Semrush boosted the performance of these posts and increased hit rates on both websites.

Following these decisions, LottieFiles and IconScout grew their online presence dramatically.

This expanded their potential audiences, helping both websites attract more quality traffic and leads.