Thesis and Adobe prove SEO content doesn’t have to be boring to be useful

30-second summary:

• To make Adobe findable via non-Adobe keywords, Thesis created over 100 helpful, entertaining, professionally informed, SEO-rich articles to draw people closer to the brand.
• Thesis’ writing director, Tyler Stenson describes a very interesting process of how they worked with Adobe to create valuable, engaging, and unique SEO content.
• This article serves as a great focal point on how to create helpful, entertaining, professionally informed articles that actually build relations and help people reach their goals.  

Adobe is the industry standard for creative software. Most makers know this, but what about the rest of the internet? To make Adobe findable via non-Adobe keywords, Thesis, a digital agency in Portland, Oregon, created over 100 helpful, entertaining, professionally informed, SEO content to draw people closer to the brand. 

Adobe recognized that they were findable in search engines through all of the expected product names and branded phrases—search well-known products like Photoshop or InDesign and Adobe dominates search results. But seek out unexpected subjects like food photography or vector illustration and the company with the industry-leading products for these types of creative outlets were falling short.  

A modern editorial approach 

Tasked by Adobe with increasing search traffic to Adobe.com to attract new audiences with new interests, Thesis took a modern editorial approach. They wielded data—strategically researched keyword opportunities—in concert with rich editorial articles and tutorials to orchestrate a seismic SEO effort that aimed to pull people closer to the Adobe brand. 

To be truly helpful, these SEO articles required more than desk research. They required a unique point of view that comes with experience and talent. So Thesis built a database of more than 100 subject matter experts (SMEs)—professional photographers, designers, illustrators, videographers, editors, colorists, sound engineers, and even ASMRtists—and Thesis’s writers interviewed them.

The writer made sure they made nailed every detail in every article by using recorded phone calls and video chats, live demonstrations, close study of interview transcripts, and exchanges of fact-checking emails. It was more than simple SEO, this process created a library of diverse expertise that added depth to topics covering dozens of creative disciplines. 

Smooth sailing requires ship-shape operations 

In over 100 SME interviews, Thesis collected more than 5,200 minutes of expert advice. You can watch the entire ‘Game of Thrones’ series and the first season of ‘The Wire’ in less time than that. Keeping to a newsroom-like schedule, Thesis built, managed, and fine-tuned a workflow that gave writers enough time to conduct interviews and write articles, editors enough time to edit them, and designers enough time to make the pages beautiful.  

Working in month-long sprints, the Writing and Design teams paired tens of thousands of words (actually 101,639 words—longer than ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’) with hundreds of images, coming together in 108 new, entertaining editorial pages with real value to the reader and real SEO impact to the brand. A massive information resource on topics and disciplines that Adobe products can help creatives pursue, from landscape and pet photography to children’s book illustration, audio editing, storyboarding, film effects, and more. 

More than just pretty words and pictures

This is not your average snooze-inducing, keyword-salad SEO content. These are well-considered editorial pages with the user’s experience top of mind—always relevant, entertaining, and educational.

Adobe products are top-of-the-line creative software, but what the product can do isn’t always as inspiring as what you can do with it. Each page has SEO content that translates the expertise of professionals into digestible bits of wisdom, offering step-by-step guidance or linking to helpful tutorials at Adobe.com, giving readers guidance in new creative endeavors and showcasing how Adobe products can help them achieve those goals. 

And more than that, each page is primed for SEO publishing—optimized copy, customized metadata, and intentional HTML structures that maximize SEO scoring.  

Before finalizing each article, Thesis ensured it earned an A-grade or better in the Clearscope optimization tool, and that attention to detail paid off. First-page rankings grew 26% quarter over quarter. In the first six months, organic traffic to Adobe Creative Cloud SEO content pages increased by 88%.

Even though it wasn’t an expected or requested KPI, Adobe also experienced a 139% increase in revenue driven by these same pages through organic search—proof that this Herculean editorial effort made their products more accessible than ever before. 

Increased visibility for broader search terms

Now when someone searches the internet for tips on shooting night photography, taking great portraits, using shallow depth of field, creating comic book art, drawing anything from roses to feet, mixing music, recording a podcast, creating a shot list, editing video, and so much more, they can find the answers they need in clear language that’s informed by expert advice, alongside beautiful images. And it just makes sense that these articles live on Adobe.com, a hub for creativity and design—a resource that now has dozens of articles that provide budding creators with next-step guidance to pursue their creative dreams. 

In what may be the ultimate marker of success, now when you ask Google if black is a color, the information card at the top of the search results pulls from the article Thesis created for Adobe. And the work continues by expanding the encyclopedic creative knowledge and experience available on Adobe.com.

Thesis and Adobe keep generating new articles, doing their part to make this corner of the internet a little more helpful, a little more beautiful, every day (while also increasing organic search traffic to the website).

Tyler Stenson is writing director at Thesis, a digital agency based in Portland, Oregon.

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