Turning SEO Visibility into Acquisition: 50% Organic Growth in New Developer Conversions
Want to skip straight to improving your marketing performance? Set up a call today!
Client Background
Square Developer offers tools, APIs, SDKs, and technical documentation that enables developers to build customized commerce solutions, integrate payments, and create tailored experiences using the Square ecosystem. The Developer platform supports a wide range of businesses with specialized APIs and a deep library of resources.
Challenge
Square Developer needed to grow its organic search traffic and visibility for key APIs and solutions within a competitive fintech and developer tools space. Critical goals included increasing organic acquisition, boosting visibility for key product areas like Payments, Bookings, and POS Integration, and supporting bottom-funnel metrics like API call growth through SEO.
Challenges included:
- Poor organic rankings for core APIs (e.g. Payment API, Booking API, POS Integration, Commerce API).
- Technical SEO issues including 404 errors, duplicate content, and sitemap issues.
- Limited structured SEO strategy for content hubs like documentation, partner directories, and the developer homepage.
- Significant gaps in SEO tracking, QA processes, and performance benchmarking.
Strategy
JDM developed a comprehensive SEO program focused on three pillars: technical SEO fixes, on-page optimization, and strategic content creation and expansion.
- Technical SEO Improvements: Fixed outdated, error-ridden sitemaps, corrected duplicate technical content, implemented proper canonical tags, improved robots.txt, and repaired hreflang issues across the Docs subdomain.
- On-Page Optimization: Rolled out keyword-driven optimizations across the Payment API, Booking API, POS Integration, and Commerce API pages. Published new, SEO-optimized pages such as the eCommerce API page; implemented structured data on key blogs.
- Content SEO Strategy: Created new content briefs and blog optimizations (e.g. Serverless eCommerce blog, Podcast blogs). Initiated a podcast SEO strategy targeting platform keywords and implemented SEO content across Partnership and Payment Platform pages.
- Internal Linking Enhancements: Improved Square API internal links and anchor text from technical reference pages to core pages.
- Performance Tracking: Built Looker Studio dashboards to track SEO KPIs and rolled out new SEO reporting and QA processes to monitor site health and growth.
The Results
JDM’s approach helped Square achieve the following:
- +72% YoY growth in SEO traffic
- +50% YoY growth in acquisition from SEO channels
- Ranking improvements:
- Payment API: moved from position 11.2 to Top 5 on Page 1.
- Booking API: improved from position 17.2 to Top 7 on Page 1.
- POS Integration: moved from unranked to position 12.
- Payment Gateway API: improved from position 85 to Page 1.
- Commerce API: improved from position 81.7 to Top 7 on Page 1.
- Payment API: moved from position 11.2 to Top 5 on Page 1.
The increased organic visibility for Square’s APIs, SDKs, and developer tools ultimately drove stronger adoption metrics through increased API calls and accelerating new user acquisition – all in a highly competitive market.