Clay grows SEO with Community UGC

Clay’s community was taking off fast, but all the good stuff — the insights, conversations, and content that made Clay special — was stuck behind Slack walls. They were missing the chance to drive real traffic to their public site and weren’t tapping into their own community’s expertise to boost the brand in an ultra-competitive space.

Challenge 

Even with great content, Clay’s community kept getting buried in search results. Competing platforms were outranking them for key terms and to make things worse, they were stuck competing with search results for literal clay, one of the most common materials on earth.

Solution

To support Clay’s new mission and amplify community-driven growth, we implemented an integrated approach combining SEO, identity, and engagement:

• Surfaced Valuable Conversations: We made Clay’s highest-signal Slack conversations publicly accessible and discoverable by structuring them with canonical URLs and targeted SEO tactics.

• Community Identity & Recognition: We launched a badge system to spotlight Clay Experts, Cohorts, and Creators, rewarding contributions and building a clear sense of belonging.

• Branded Experience: We developed dedicated landing pages, in-Slack events, and a fully white-labeled, branded community site to ensure everything reflected Clay’s look, feel, and values.

Results

These initiatives delivered both measurable growth and stronger community alignment:

• Clay’s community site ranks #1 in search for its community terms, driving ~1,000 monthly visitors from ChatGPT-related searches alone, plus additional organic traffic from other keywords.

• Community experience improvements fueled consistent word-of-mouth growth, reinforcing Clay’s reputation and reach.

• The new community identity increased member engagement and elevated key contributors, strengthening the ecosystem from within.

Next Steps

The next phase focuses on deeper integration and distributed content creation:

• Salesforce Integration: We’re building a tighter connection between the community platform and Salesforce to drive CRM adoption and unify data.

• Empowering Community-Led Content: By enabling creators and experts to produce and publish content directly, Clay will cultivate authentic, user-driven resources that scale organically and foster trust.