How I’d Do SEO For Motion

Some Thoughts on How I’d Get More Traffic

Intro

Motion is an automated, ai-powered, all-in-one time management and productivity tool that integrates a calendar, to-do list, project manager, and meeting scheduler.

As a super-ADHDer, Motion is an awesome help and really does save time, and I purchased a subscription after testing it out on a free trial. And also as a super-ADHDer, my mind jumped to coming up with some ideas of how I’d do SEO for Motion.

A key feature is that it automatically reschedules tasks if whatever you’re working on runs over. It does other cool things, but I’m not doing a deep dive into Motion and its features. There are some comprehensive reviews here and here.

Since it’s a relatively new idea – a scheduler/calendar/productivity tool powered by AI – there’s not a lot of competition doing the same thing. Instead, there are several competing products with capabilities that overlap with Motion.

Being an SEO nerd, I couldn’t help but put Motion into SEMRush to see how it’s doing organically. I found some big opportunities. It’s not that their site’s SEO is “bad”, because they haven’t been around very long. They’ve probably been focusing on developing the product, which is often the case with startups.

Out of curiosity and as an exercise to keep my skills sharp, I  decided to look for ways to grow their organic traffic if I had the chance to do some SEO for Motion.

Current Situation

SEMRush’s estimated traffic tool shows Motion’s organic traffic has fallen nearly 70%, from 45,255 visits in January to 13,808 in April. Crucially, it looks like they were hit by Google’s core algorithm updates in September 2022 and March 2023.

---

My Diagnosis

Lack of Non-Brand Keyword Rankings

Motion is only ranking well for branded keywords. There are 74 keywords appearing in Google’s top 20 search results and they’re all branded.

Ranking this well for branded terms is great because it shows strong brand recognition. But it indicates organic weakness because they aren’t ranking for anything that describes the product, what it does, and the problems it solves.

The highest-ranking non-branded term is to do list calendar at position 96, and it’s a term that only gets 210 monthly searches.

Product Feature Keywords Need to Improve

I looked at the keywords Motion currently used to describe the core product features (to do list, calendar, project planner, and meetings) and discovered better ones that could replace them.

The goal isn’t to try and rank for huge keywords calendar or meetings – because that would be impossible – but to find variations that best describe Motion’s unique features.

A (really simple) model shows the potential opportunity under two scenarios, with growth of 10% and 30%. A (rough) modeling shows this growth could deliver potential incremental revenue of $2.6m to $6.4m.

---

Solution & Strategy

SEO for Motion requires optimizing for and nonbrand keywords. These can be separated into two groups:

1. Terms people search for that describe the things it does, i.e. product features, like scheduling meetings.
2. Topics related to the benefits the tool provides, like better productivity, increased focus, and improved time management.

My strategy would have a two-pronged plan of attack:

1. Optimize existing product feature pages
2. Create topic clusters and publish content around productivity themes.

---

Solution 1: Optimize Product Feature Pages For Better Keywords

The obvious place to start is by reoptimizing the four main product feature pages from their current keywords:

• Calendar
• Project Manager
• Task Manager
• Meeting Assistant

These core product features keywords also appear in the menu navigation:

I’d change them to subtle variations that would be much better at capturing intent;

• Calendar App
• Project Planner
• Task Management
• Meeting Scheduler

Adding these keywords to top-line navigation links will also signal their importance to Google:

Here’s my thinking about changing these keywords:

---

Product Feature: Calendar

Optimizing around Calendar is way too broad, so I looked for variations. They’re already using some nice descriptive keywords: ai calendar app and intelligent calendar.

The problem is there’s not a lot of volume for these, only 20 monthly searches vs 9900 for calendar app.

I found some nice keywords the Calendar page could be optimized for:

Product Feature: Project Manager

At first, project manager sounds like a good choice for the Project page. But a look at the SERPS shows the intent is quite different; it’s content about the project manager role and career opportunities.

Next, I looked at project management app. Trello ranks #20 and Asana #30, but the top ten results are all articles reviewing project management apps. Still, the presence of two competitors – albeit much stronger domains – shows this term has some potential.

I’d use these keywords:

Product Feature: Task Manager

The Task page is optimized for task manager, which has a ton of search volume: 27,000 monthly searches. But the intent isn’t there. The top 20 search results are all related to the Microsoft Windows Task Manager.

Task management has 5,400 monthly searches and task management app gets 1,600. Both are much more achievable than task manager. 

An important semantically relevant term is to do lists, which would have the dual effect of describing a closely related concept as well as optimizing for a major term.

These are some nice keywords to optimize for:

Product Feature: Meeting Assistant

The Meetings page is optimized around meeting assistant, which isn’t ideal. At first, it looks like there’s good intent with several top ten results for ai-related meeting tools, closer inspection reveals they’re products for summarizing meeting recordings and notes. Additionally, the term only has a monthly search volume of 40, though Motion does rank in position 3.

These are some good candidates:

---

Solution 2: Create Editorial Content Around Related Topics

The existing blog could be built out further using the topic/cluster model to publish high-quality content about productivity topics.

The blog doesn’t get much traffic, around 150 visits a month, but it has been increasing at a nice trajectory:

Besides growing organic traffic, publishing more content would help the site be seen as an authority, and increase Motion’s E-E-A-T.

This will require at least 20 new editorial guides to start, and then developing a regular publishing cadence to publish more.

---

Editorial Content Ideas

There’s a great opportunity to transform Motion’s blog into an authority on productivity-related topics. There’s already a great article on the Pomodoro Technique that shows the potential for this and a lot more like it can be published.  

A look at Motion’s blog performance compared to competitors gives a look at the opportunity:

The competition gets more out of their own blogs than Motion, and this is a huge untapped opportunity.

I looked at what competitors are publishing and they’re positioning themselves around various productivity topics. There are a ton of topics and ideas for all kinds of content. Here’s five:

Topic	Keyword	Yearly Volume
Eisenhower Matrix	urgent important matrix	34,800
Pareto Principle	what is the 80/20 rule	34,800
Time Blocking	time blocking	64,800
Eat the Frog	eat the frog	79,200

Potential keywords for these five topics have the potential to bring in 40,000 – 53,000 yearly visits, with $2.4m – $5.3m in potential revenue:

Wrapping Up

Motion is an awesome tool and they’re really onto something. Their organic growth could really take off with some straightforward keyword optimization and by aggressively publishing topical content. This would grow their authority both with Google and people, and establish them as real experts with lots of link-worthy content.

Want More Traffic for Your Site?

If you like these ideas on doing SEO for Motion, get in touch, and I can help do the same for your site.

---