08.05.2024 James Deverick

How ADP increased its Organic Traffic by over 1500% With Targeted Content

ADP gives many SaaS businesses major SEO envy … and for good reason

Leader in HR and finance solutions, ADP has grown to become a dominant force in its industry, but it hasn’t always been that way. The brand’s strong and commanding position has been hard earned – especially its organic search presence.

In this case study, we’ll examine the growth of ADP’s organic visibility since 2012. We’re going to uncover how its website has reached nearly 150,000 organic visitors a month, through excellent SEO techniques and a strategy that has moved with the times.

We’ll also tackle how ADP was able to understand the needs of its target market and produce specific content resource hubs, including tools, in order to capture top spots in relevant SERPs.

If you want to jump to any specific section of our ADP research, click below.

Human resources, heritage and high rankings

ADP (Automatic Data Processing, Inc) is an American provider of human resources management tools founded in 1949 – nearly four decades before purpose-built HR management systems existed. 

Now a major SaaS provider, it offers a range of subscription-based features and products, these are aimed at functions such as payroll, tax management, time and resource management.

In its own words, ADP’s offering is “tailored to you no matter what your business size” and this accommodating approach can also be seen in its content strategies – but more on that later.

SEO has helped ADP to establish itself as a thought leader in HR, offering valuable information for the needs of a variety of stakeholders. Crucially for those looking to gain , it has also enabled ADP cement itself as a go-to HR software brand.

What’s the secret of ADP’s SEO success?

While ADP had gradually been building up  its search presence from as far back as 2012/2013, it wasn’t until late 2018 when things really began to take off and its  organic traffic really started to grow at a very aggressive pace.

Evolving content, driving growth

If you’ve ever been interested in or researched SEO in the past, you’ll know things have changed a lot over the years. Techniques that worked 5 or more years ago, don’t necessarily work or have the same impact now. . 

Looking at ADP’s growth trajectory, we can see its SEO strategy has also developed and changed with the times. In particular,  its approach to content creation and the types of content ADP began to introduce to the website.

Having a quick look at a few snapshots from Wayback Machine also points to this, even if the data we can take from this tool is limited. 

Here’s a snapshot of ADP’s resource section from 2014:

And here’s a much more recent snapshot from 2024:

Even with this small sample, we can see immediately how the site has been restructured over the years. In particular, the resource section has become its own living and breathing space for informative, relevant content that appeals to (and helps) ADP’s target audience and potential users.

Benefit of developing informational content

The improvement in informational content has not only had a positive impact on overall organic visibility for a range of informational keywords, but has also impacted the value of its organic traffic.

The screenshot above provides a glimpse into how some of ADP’s informational content keywords drive huge amounts of traffic value. Given the impressive ranking positions of these articles and keywords, and the corresponding search volume, it’s clear to see ADP has done a great job.

Interestingly, we can also see keywords we’d historically expect to be ranking on more commercial pages, such as “payroll” or “human resources”, being targeted within informational content pages. This shows that ADP has kept an eye on the changing landscape of the SERPs.

Performance of paid keywords

We also want to explore how ADP has used paid keywords to direct organic search efforts. 

Understanding the competitiveness of certain keywords can certainly help when it comes to strategizing how to approach them, establishing whether they will perform organically and the potential costs involved.

Again, this is just a sample of some of the paid keywords that we reviewed for ADP, but as we can see, the efforts made with SEO around these keywords has put them into top SERP positions, using informational content (for the most part), which means that they are in a position to choose whether to pay for them or when to pay for them, saving them money in the long run.

Of course, ADP’s organic traffic dwarfs its paid traffic:

Want to see traffic growth like this? Speak to our SaaS Experts

How ADP’s SEO stacks up vs competitors

Competitor landscape

Looking at specific keywords that ADP has targeted, we’re able to see how it stacks up against some of its closest rivals. For this exercise, we looked at a few keyword variations, including “salary calculator” (which has been a very smart move for ADP), “net vs gross” and “payroll tax”. The nine top ranking domains had a staggering combined search value of over $3.5 million, which highlights how lucrative these topics and keywords are. We then plot this information into one of our in-house visualisation tools and we have the following graph:

ADP is sitting pretty at the top of the tree, with only Investopedia above it. While Investopedia may be higher, it’s important to maintain realistic expectations. Investopedia is such a huge and vast entity within search that realistically up-rooting it is out of the question.

Additionally, we carried out some competitor analysis around some of ADP’s major competitors and again, this highlighted how well the brand is doing overall:

It’s not all about the content

While we can see that ADP has been successful in improving its content offerings, just publishing content isn’t enough in SEO.  Throughout the history of SEO, backlinks have always played an important role in improving page authority, and this is still the case today.

ADP has a huge backlink profile in comparison to its competitors. This is certainly helped by the quality of its content, but also due to the company becoming such an authority within the sector over time. The higher your authority, the more likely other websites will link to your content.

When it comes to backlinks, it’s all about knowing which pages to target. It’s not as simple as throwing as many backlinks to as many pages as possible and hoping for the best. ADP has carefully picked which pages to focus on, for example, “net vs gross”.

 

We carried out one of our own accelerate agency created SPAs (single page analysis) around this keyword and found the following:

Firstly, ADP is number 1, and for a good reason – with around 40 referring domains with a DR of above 40+. While this might seem like overkill when we compare it to the closest competing websites, it’s important to bear in mind that one of those sites is none other than investopedia.


We can also see that ADP actually stepped up  its backlinking game over the last 6 months which has likely helped push them to the top spot for this important keyword.

There’s room for SEO improvements

Keyword opportunities

Like most SaaS companies that engage with SEO, either through an agency like ourselves or in-house, there is always room for improvement.
Carrying out a gap analysis shows that while ADP does very well for large amounts of informational keywords, there are indeed gaps to be found.

Just one example of keywords within ADP’s sector that are specifically around different types of forms. While not all competitors are smashing these out of the park, it’s actually ADP that are trailing behind.

The beauty of SEO is that there are always additional keyword opportunities to be found!

Technical challenges

One area we haven’t looked at in too much detail during this case study is the technical side of  ADP’s SEO. It’s not perfect by any means. While the site is certainly functional and working well, it’s actually built on a fairly old architecture – .aspx. It would be inaccurate to say that this is an inherently bad thing for SEO, but it does come with complexities that aren’t necessarily present in more “standard” website builds.

As the years go by, less and less sites use .aspx and have moved over to more scalable solutions, including headless CMS builds. If the time comes when ADP decides to do the same, a migration from an .aspx build could be incredibly challenging (and costly).

They can’t stop the train

While it’s true that if ADP was to stop SEO work today, there wouldn’t be a change tomorrow, SEO is all about momentum. 

It takes time to build, and we saw this in the graph at the start of this case study – it took time for ADP to gain traction in organic search. Once you start to pick up steam in SEO, it’s critically important to maintain the trajectory. The moment you start to ease off, it becomes very easy to lose all of that hard earned-momentum. Competitors will notice, and they will begin to catch up.

ADP will need to ensure that those high ranking pages continue to be relevant – adjusting them to changes in their industry and in search intent. Continual optimization is going to be crucial as is the production of new content to meet the needs of new search terms and search intents.  

Want fast, lasting rankings? Talk to the SaaS SEO experts

 

What we love

There’s a lot to like about how ADP has grown its organic traffic.
The use of informational content has been critical, along with how that content points back to  its more commercial landing pages.

How ADP has understood its audience’s pain points – for example, around tax calculators, and then to create those very tools within the resource section to not only drive traffic but to provide its audience with the very solution they were searching for.

Creating localized content for various states in the US was very smart, and while not driving massive search volume, it did drive topical authority.

The development over the years of that resource hub, and how it all ties back to other parts of the website.

How could ADP grow further

As we already mentioned a little earlier, not everything is perfect and there’s still more that ADP could do to further improve its search visibility, especially from a content and backlinks point of view.

One thing we certainly would recommend is to carry out a content audit throughout the website. It’s now been a fair number of years that ADP began that content creation process within its website and as we know, Google enjoys fresh and helpful content. Some of that old content may no longer be as relevant as it once was, or there may be content within the site that just isn’t getting the love it needs.

We decided to have a look into the published dates within the resource section of the website, and found plenty of pages from 2020 and earlier (as far back as 2018) that could potentially be reviewed. When content cadence increases over time, as it has with ADP, there’s always a chance that content could begin to cannibalise against other articles.

Additionally, as mentioned, there could well be some great content in there that just isn’t performing due to being outdated.

We also had a look at performance for emerging trends in the industry, such as “ai in finance”. ADP is definitely missing out here and could be something its SEO and content team should look into (or its competitors will).

Summary

Hopefully this case study has helped shed a little light on how ADP has approached some of  its SEO efforts. These have been successful, certainly – both non-branded traffic and branded have grown over the past several years..
Importantly, the more success you find around non-branded traffic, the bigger impact it can have on your actual branded traffic over time. 

While we’ve highlighted some of ADP’s great successes, we’ve also found areas of opportunity that could be exploited by competitors. 

If you’re one of those competitors that is just starting out in search engine marketing and SEO , or could use additional support and insights on your progress and the opportunities in your search market, we’re here to help.

We can be Your SaaS SEO Growth Partner

We only work with SaaS clients, just like ADP, and we’ve delivered exponential growth in organic visibility for a wide variety of enterprise level SaaS companies. Want to see what we could do for you? Book a chat with us below.

 

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