How To Rank #1 For a Keyword With a Difficulty Score of 89?

When Tope Awotona emptied his bank accounts in 2013 to build Calendly, he probably didn't expect that his scheduling tool would become one of the most fascinating SEO success stories in SaaS history.

Today, Calendly receives over 1.1 million monthly organic visits and serves 20 million users across 200+ countries, with 86% of Fortune 500 companies using their platform.

This is the story of how smart SEO moves turned a simple product into a $3 billion empire.

Calendly ranks #1 for the keyword “Appointments booking“. The keyword difficulty score is 89 & global search volume of almost 10k with thousands of keywords variations and dominating those too.

Business Model

Calendly operates as a freemium SaaS platform, offering a free basic plan and premium subscription tiers.

Its main revenue comes from paid plans, Standard, Teams, and Enterprise, which add features like integrations, team management, and advanced scheduling.

Enterprise deals provide custom pricing and support. Additional income may come from add-ons and integrations.

This model drives viral growth and recurring revenue, targeting both individuals and large organizations.

SEO Lessons To Learn From Calendly:

#1 Programmatic SEO:

The cornerstone of Calendly's organic growth strategy is its programmatic SEO approach.

Instead of manually creating content for every possible integration, they built a system that automatically generates pages for different software, apps, and tools they support.

This strategy targets keywords following the pattern "{software} scheduling integration" - a brilliant move that captures users at the exact moment they're looking for solutions.

The results speak for themselves.

Their Salesforce scheduling integration page receives 509 monthly organic visits, while their Zoom scheduling integration pulls in 462 visits.

When you multiply this across thousands of integrations, the traffic adds up quickly.

Each programmatically generated page follows a consistent structure that includes a clear title combining "Calendly + {app}", detailed integration overviews, feature lists, benefits, and clear call-to-action buttons.

This approach demonstrates how technical SEO can scale content creation while maintaining quality and relevance.

#2 On-Page SEO:

Calendly is the perfect case study of product-led SEO.

Calendly's SEO success didn't happen by accident. It was built on a foundation that most SaaS companies overlook - turning every user into a potential SEO asset.

The genius lies in their viral growth loop, where users share scheduling links, creating natural backlinks and driving organic discovery. Something similar to what Dropbox and Facebook did.

Calendly's on-page strategy extends far beyond its programmatic pages.

Their content marketing focuses on topics that their target audience actively searches for - productivity, Recruiting, Sales optimization, and the product itself.

This approach drives organic traffic from users seeking solutions around their workflows.

The company has built strong domain authority through this content strategy, moving away from paid advertising to focus on organic growth.

With only 67 paid keywords against 233k organic keywords, Calendly shows how rich and sustainable organic traffic from search engines is.

Calendly blog serves as a hub for valuable insights that position Calendly as a thought leader in the productivity space.

What makes their on-page strategy particularly effective is how they align content with user intent.

Take a look at this blog post from Calendly. This topic targets the workflow of one of their core target audience, Recruiters.

Rather than creating generic scheduling content, they focus on specific pain points recruiters face while recruiting.

Such topics naturally lead users toward their scheduling solution.

One of the top keywords this page ranks for is “Recruiter Apps”.

The global search volume is 3.5k & potential search volume of 8.5k with 1.4k keyword variations.

At present, this page ranks on page 2. Imagine the conversions once it starts ranking in the top 3.

Interestingly, thanks to the amazing product that Calendly has built, it also ranks in the Top 10 in AI overviews for the target keyword.

Note: The blog post doesn’t rank in the AI overview. The mention of Calendly from another blog post does. Brand awareness 101 🔥

#3 Off-Page SEO:

Perhaps the most genius aspect of Calendly's SEO strategy is how they turned their core product into a link-building machine.

Every time someone shares a Calendly link on their website, social media, or email signature, it creates a potential backlink opportunity.

This build links naturally. Backlinks that occur organically because people genuinely want to use and share the service.

While individual links might seem low-value, the scale is massive. With 20 million users sharing scheduling links across the web, the cumulative SEO impact is substantial.

The company has also leveraged professional networks effectively, particularly LinkedIn. They enable users to add Calendly booking buttons directly to LinkedIn profiles, creating additional touchpoints and link opportunities.

This strategy recognizes that their primary audience consists of working professionals who actively use LinkedIn for networking and business development.

Calendly's approach to off-page SEO includes 147 integrations with major platforms like Salesforce, HubSpot, Microsoft Exchange, and Zapier.

Each integration creates opportunities for co-marketing, guest content, and natural link acquisition from partner websites and user communities.

These partnerships serve a dual purpose:

1. Provides genuine value to users.

2. Authority backlink opportunities.

#3 Technical SEO:

The website & content pages are independently good enough on the technical SEO grounds. But the booking widget has caused trouble for developers.

The company and the developer community have worked together to address these performance issues.

Solutions include implementing asynchronous loading, using lazy loading techniques, and delaying script execution.

One developer reported improving their page speed from 40 to 80 points by loading Calendly scripts after a few seconds rather than immediately.

One interesting thing I noticed in the website traffic journey is that users go to Stripe after landing on the Calendly page.

This tells how fluent third-party integrations are. Also, people prefer paying for the Calendly user’s time, showing the trust people have in the product.

Mobile optimization is the backbone of the technical SEO side. Nearly 62% of users visit Calendly from their mobile devices, which is insane.

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