176k monthly visits in 7 months

The human brain processes visuals 60,000 times faster than text. This makes images a game-changer for anyone looking to communicate more effectively—exactly the mission of the software company Piktochart.

Launched in 2012, Piktochart is a web-based graphic design tool that empowers non-designers to create captivating visuals, including reports, presentations, infographics, and social media graphics. With more than a decade under its belt, Piktochart is a bootstrapped success story that’s reached millions of users across the education, nonprofit, and other sectors.

Despite its longstanding success, however, Piktochart recently faced a challenge familiar among many mature businesses: slowing growth. Looking for a fresh approach to reinvigorate its content strategy, Piktochart partnered with daydream in May 2024 to test programmatic SEO (pSEO). Within seven months of working together, daydream helped create 2,200+ new pages—resulting in a dramatic traffic boost of 176,000 additional monthly visitors. Here’s how it happened.

Slow content production and stagnating results opened the door for a pSEO experiment

Piktochart’s blog has historically been a reliable driver of organic traffic, fueled by an in-house SEO strategist and a team of five freelance writers. The company has long invested in high-quality editorial content, publishing in-depth guides that showcase its expertise. Yet despite these efforts, content production was slow, and blog performance plateaued.

“The challenge for us was to be able to produce in quantity,” said Piktochart’s marketing lead, Wilson Moy. “We have a pretty solid domain authority and we have a lot of articles—but we're looking to grow our traffic more and looking for new strategies to experiment with.”

On average, Piktochart’s freelancers produced about six long-form articles per month. Though these in-depth guides were effective in establishing Piktochart’s authority, Wilson was curious if automation could complement their efforts by scaling content faster. Could it actually generate quality content capable of breaking through the company’s growth plateau?

This presented an ideal opportunity to explore programmatic SEO—a strategy Piktochart had never tried before. With full support from Piktochart’s previous CEO Ai Ching Goh, the company partnered with daydream to put this idea to the test. 

daydream’s work with Piktochart

In May 2024, daydream kicked off its work with Piktochart by first researching topics and keywords relevant to the graphic design space. This led to eight initial programmatic templates. 

However, rather than diving headlong into any at once, daydream’s team created small batches of each template for a one-month testing period. As daydream’s growth lead Nicolás Cerdeira explained, “It doesn't make a lot of sense to spend a lot of time working on these pages if they don't end up bringing organic traffic.” 

Including testing and technical setup, it naturally takes time to land on and execute the right pSEO strategy. After validating which templates were worth scaling in the test period, daydream settled on a variety spread across Piktochart’s entire marketing funnel.

Below, we explore three templates in more detail and how they supported Piktochart’s goal of increasing brand awareness: 

1. Colors
2. [Color] Color Shades
3. [Color/Topic] Color Palettes

Top-of-funnel page templates that provide design inspiration

During the keyword research process, daydream’s team had noticed tremendous search volume for queries relating to colors. These included questions about hexadecimal codes and complementary color palettes. For instance:

• colors that go with green (6,800 monthly searches)
• rose gold color code (3,500 monthly searches)
• what color is apricot (2,500 monthly searches)

Top-ranking results for these keywords often came from design companies like Figma and Adobe—and for good reason. These searches typically stem from users seeking inspiration for design projects, like someone looking for the perfect color combination. This made the color-related keyword clusters a ripe top-of-funnel content opportunity to attract potential users and establish Piktochart as an authority within the graphic design space.

Colors

• URL structure: piktochart.com/tips/what-color-is-x
• Keywords: “what color is [x],” “color codes [x]”
• Pages: 667
• Example: What Color is Pale Pink? Meaning, Code & Combinations

Pages in this category provide an overview of individual colors, including their aesthetic qualities, cultural meanings, technical specifications, and potential uses. Starting with a vivid description of the given color and ending with potential design applications, this template provides users with a creative launchpad to kickstart their projects. 

[Color] Color Shades

• URL structure: piktochart.com/tips/shades-of-x
• Keywords: “different shades of [x],” “shade of [x]”
• Pages: 192
• Example: The 25 Best Shades of Red (+ HEX Codes)

The [Color] Color Shades template resembles the Colors one, albeit presented in a listicle format. Pages created using this template explore dozens of shades for a given color, emphasizing their unique characteristics, HEX codes, and practical applications in design. Aside from showing Piktochart branding for each shade described, each page ends with a CTA encouraging users to explore Piktochart’s platform for their design projects.

[Color/Topic] Color Palettes

• URL structure: piktochart.com/tips/[x]-palette
• Keywords: “[x] color palette,” “what colors go with [x],” “colors that go with [x],” “do [x] and [x] go together”
• Pages: 878
• Example: The Best 15 Red Color Palette Combinations

The final top-of-funnel template created by daydream explores color palettes, with the goal of educating users on how to use a particular palette in various creative contexts. Since the palette keywords included specific shades (e.g., /forest-green-color-palette), color combinations (e.g., /brown-pink-color-palette), and situational palettes (e.g., /christmas-color-palette), the number of possibilities for how many pages could be created were virtually endless. 

daydream settled on creating close to 900 pages using this template, which explains the “why” behind color choices and then contextualizes the given palette with real-world use cases. To wrap things up, each page also points toward Piktochart as a tool to bring users’ ideas to life.

The impact: 2,200+ new pages and 176,000+ monthly visitors

Since partnering with daydream, Piktochart has published more than 2,200 programmatic pages. This amounted to around 320 pages per month, which far exceeds Piktochart's traditional editorial strategy.

Aside from the sheer quantity of content created, Piktochart also saw big wins in traffic and SEO performance.

Sustained traffic growth

• Overall, organic traffic to daydream’s programmatic pages alone grew 2x to 3x month over month.
• daydream’s programmatic content drove 176,000 users to Piktochart’s website in December 2024 alone—a month that typically sees a dip in organic visitors. “December is our slowest month,” Wilson said. “Traffic all across the site drops—our homepage, blog, everything. But we saw the numbers of the pSEO pages still going up.”

• In fact, December’s traffic gains represented a 75% month-over-month increase from around 103,000 users in November.

A clear boost in SEO performance

• Data from Ahrefs shows a clear upward trend of growth in organic keywords since May 2024, when Piktochart began partnering with daydream. The total number of organic keywords it ranked for jumped from 165,086 in May 2024 to 343,315 in December 2024—an extraordinary 108% increase in just seven months.

• Diving into specific templates in more detail, the 850+ pages created using the [Color/Topic] Color Palettes template rank for over 29,000 organic keywords. Many pages have achieved first-page positions for high-volume search terms like “sunset color palette” (7,900 searches/month) and “lunar new year colors” (6,500 searches/month). 

Asked whether the impact of daydream’s pSEO strategy met his team’s expectations, Wilson admitted, “To be honest, we weren't sure what the result would look like. We set a very standard goal—and then of course, exceeded that goal for Q3. And then for Q4, the results went beyond that goal as well.”

So would Wilson recommend pSEO as a growth strategy to other companies?

Based on his team’s experience, yes—and not just for established companies that have hit a SEO plateau like Piktochart. As Wilson said, “For companies where it’s early stage [and] they’re just trying to build authority on Google, I think pSEO articles would be a good way for them to gain exposure and brand awareness.”

daydream can help level up your SEO strategy

By partnering with daydream, Piktochart implemented a full-funnel programmatic content strategy that revitalized its growth and increased traffic. 

Curious about using pSEO to amplify your business’s presence? Whether you’re experiencing your own growth plateau or just getting started, we can help your business scale through AI-driven, pSEO-powered content. Find out how daydream can build a high-performing growth channel for your brand by reaching out to us. Let’s chat!