How BoldDesk Gets 800+ Brand Searches 2 Years After Launching

After the most recent update of search data for the SaaS trends Database, BoldDesk tops our list of fastest growing SaaS companies in the 4 year time period.

Its brand search volume has grown about 8000% since its launch.

Let's look at BoldDesk's main user acquisition channels in this case study.

The Product: What is BoldDesk?

BoldDesk is a complete suite of customer service software for small businesses. That includes things like ticketing, a knowledge base, task management.

Their main differentiating focus initially was on being allowed to have unlimited agents (i.e. customer service seats), but now they've shifted towards focusing on automating as much as possible (e.g. AI generated responses that agents can edit, which saves time).

BoldDesk is a product made by the SyncFusion team (remember that, it's important later) that was launched in late 2022, so it's still pretty new. SyncFusion is a UI component library for developers.

How BoldDesk Gets Customers

Here's a breakdown of the main traffic channels that BoldDesk uses, according to SimilarWeb.

Direct is the majority, as is typical for most sites.

Aside from that, the significant channels are:

• Organic search (31%)

• Referrals (7.5%)

• Social (3%)

• Paid search (3%)

Organic Search

Even though BoldDesk has grown quickly, their organic search traffic didn't really pick up until the last 6 months or so.

Recently, they've been scaling up their content publishing volume on their blog, which has started to produce results.

They focus mainly on topics that a customer support head might want to see:

• Business requirements documents

• Standard operating procedures

• Guide to using Slack for customer service (which they can tie-into a Bolddesk integration)

And all this content published on a regular basis has led to high rankings for terms like “show appreciation to clients” and “sorry for any inconvenience caused” (from people looking for different ways to phrase it working in customer service)

This is a very standard SEO approach, but it's working well.

In each of these posts, there's a non-obtrusive widget introducing the BoldDesk product with CTAs to get a free trial or demo.

Paid Search

BoldDesk doesn't focus too much on paid search, but does advertise on a few types of keywords:

• Product relevant keywords like “IT support”

• Brand keywords like “zendesk alternatives”

These lead to custom landing pages tailored to the term.

Referrals

BoldDesk has an advantage that most SaaS companies do not - SyncFusion already has traffic from their other projects.

They can expose their existing users to their new products (like BoldDesk), and essentially get new users for “free”.

If you look on the SyncFusion homepage, you'll see a section with links to their other companies:

On top of that, BoldDesk get's a bit of referral traffic from:

• Directories like Betalist.com and G2

• Other customers - Since “BoldDesk” appears on some widgets and associated customer service pages on their users' sites, they get a bit of referral traffic. However, it's far less prominent than their competitors' branding, so I'm curious if this is a conscious decision or if they are missing an opportunity.

Social Media

With about 1,000 followers on LinkedIn, BoldDesk generates a small amount of traffic.

But the bulk of social traffic comes from Reddit.

I dug through all the mentions of BoldDesk that I could find, the vast majority were clearly posted by someone associated with BoldDesk. There's nothing wrong with that, but it shows that if you want Reddit traffic, you'll need to go out and get it until you have a much more popular company.

One cool thing that they've done is created a r/BoldDesk subreddit. 

So when someone searches for “BoldDesk reddit”, which is common these days when looking for reviews, they'll likely click through to the subreddit, and see top/sticky posts that BoldDesk controls.

What You Can Learn From BoldDesk

Looking at BoldDesk's evolution from a high level is pretty interesting to me. I think we can divide its traffic strategies into a few blocks.

Early Stage Traffic

Even though organic search traffic is now BoldDesk's main focus, at the start they spent their time on channels that produced faster results:

1. Referral traffic - Initially, BoldDesk leveraged their existing products/connections in order to promote BoldDesk.

2. Paid traffic - If you have the marketing budget, you can acquire high quality traffic traffic with no delay while you wait for organic traffic to kick in.

3. Reddit - Even if you have no followers on Reddit, it doesn't matter. Posting in threads that people stumble upon while looking for products can get you some decent traffic early on.

After Finding Product Market Fit

BoldDesk found its place in the support market by focusing on small businesses looking to automate customer support as much as possible.

They learned to focus on this by using feedback from the early stage traffic they were able to scrounge together.

Now, BoldDesk is scaling up (and has been for a while) their blog content creation, which will lead to sustainable and scalable “free” traffic that leads to a steady stream of new users.