Techwalla
Techwalla seeks to make technology accessible to everyone, especially parents and children navigating an online world that isn’t always as safe or private as it seems.
I managed Techwalla for slightly over a year, beginning in 2017. Leaf Group had hired me to helm its pet health and behavior vertical, Cuteness, in 2016 and several months into that exciting project, the online publisher gave me an irresistible promotion.
I was to assume a managerial role Leaf Group’s personal finance site, Sapling, as well as the technology brand Techwalla.
During my time with Techwalla, I worked alongside Leaf Group’s skilled SEO team to drive the site’s domain ranking for consumer technology searches. We challenged and tracked the high-volume queries our competitors ranked for and experienced tangible SERP success for topics around streaming, connected-home devices and security issues for children using social media and smartphone apps.
Ultimately, over 70% of Techwalla’s 7 million monthly visits came from organic referrals — Google, Bing and Yahoo, respectively — and the remainder of our traffic was referred from our growing email newsletter, which had ballooned from 30,000 subscribers in 2016 to 80,000 subscribers in 2018.
That 166% growth in email subscription is attributed to standard tactics like aggressive lead capture and promotional campaigns, but also from demographic and psycographic research that helped us identify not only our primary audience segments, but also what they valued and the solutions they sought online.
While Techwalla was never a social media success, the site is a strong example of how SEO and email are key tactics in over-arcing strategies to build both your audience and brand through data analytics and editorial best practices.
