COPY CrowdStrike's $350M/Month SEO Strategy

On the 19th of July 2024, CrowdStrike pushed out a routine update to its software. And it was, as they say in the industry, not good. 8 million computers running Windows crashed, 3,300 global flights cancelled, hospital backlogs, airports shut, etc., etc. In fact, it was so bad that CrowdStrike's own shareholders sued it. So, how do you get through a disaster like this? Well, not by just surviving it, but by actually using it. You see, if we look at this from an SEO perspective, actually something really interesting happened. Crowdstrike's branded traffic exploded. Look here at the green line in Semrush. This is the branded traffic. So, people searching for CrowdStrike. Branded traffic was pretty stable and consistent at between 70 and 80,000 searches per month. After the scandal, this shot up to more than 700,000 searches per month. This makes sense, of course, cuz some people are going to be looking for fixes. They're going to be looking for updates on what's happened and how CrowdStrike responded. But if this was just a temporary spike because of the scandal, you'd expect to see that traffic come back down, but it didn't. In fact, the branded traffic actually continue to grow through the rest of the scandal year. And by the way, if you're wondering what happened in 2025 and why their traffic was absolutely decimated, we're going to come back to that in a bit cuz there's a huge lesson here as well. So, let's take a look at total organic traffic, the blue line. We can see from this graph that prior to the scandal, the organic traffic and the branded traffic were pretty similar. I.e. the website wasn't bringing in much traffic that wasn't just searching for Crowd Strike. But then things start to diverge and after the scandal actually the organic traffic starts to overtake the branded traffic significantly. I.e. the website is now pulling in traffic that isn't just searching for CrowdStrike, they're searching for other things. This shows that CrowdStrike were able to convert some of the attention and visibility that they got during the scandal and use it to amplify a content strategy that they've been running for about a year at this point. And this is demonstrated through the consistent improvement in visibility of the keywords that they were ranking for. At the time of the scandal, they were ranking for about 4,000 keywords with 78 of these being in the top three positions in [music] the US. But by the autumn, this had increased to 59,000 total keywords with three and a half thousand keywords ranking in the top three positions. And they've maintained this visibility throughout to today. They're now ranking for 93,000 keywords with 5 a half thousand of them being in the top three positions. Of course, anytime there's a scandal, particularly one as large as this, it's going to get some media attention. If we take a look at what happened to Crowdstrike's backlink profile as a result of this, we'll just see how this played out. If we just search Crowdstrike's backlinks for ones that mention the word crash in the title. So, this isn't all of the ones that are related to the crash, obviously, because people use different words for it. We can see they got a total of,00 backlinks including some monsters on sites like Wired, a bunch of cyber security sites, Washington Post, The Register, Mashable, The Guardian, CBS News, Hacker News, PC Mag, New York Times, Bloomberg, Yahoo, Forbes, Tom's Guide, you get the gist. And remember, these are just the links where Crash is in the page title. But of course, those links wouldn't have helped if they hadn't already had a content strategy which they'd rolled out across their website. So what had they been doing to lay the groundworks so that when this scandal came along, they really benefited? Well, back in 2023, they decided to make niche specific content on their site. Pages like this one focused on healthcare. And this isn't just a standalone page. There are related pages and content like dedicated white papers, specific industry case studies, and related highrust assets all under this healthcare category. And because their backlink profile and authority had swelled so much during the scandal, when they start publishing this stuff on their website, it does really well. So here's the healthcare subfolder, and you can see it immediately started picking up some really nice visibility. But they also publish vast amounts of educational andformational material on their blog. So here's cyber security 101, the fundamentals of cyber security. There's a staggering amount of content here. Look at this. There's so much content they've had to break it into alphabetical order, which probably isn't ideal, but it shows you how much there is. You can click on any of these. There's a full article about each of these topics. This is the pillar hub content model that we talk about so often on the Exposure Ninja channel. And this content is really across the funnel. There's some stuff that's very, very topunnel, very informational, very broad. There's other stuff which is much more tailored to people that are really indep. And we can see that this strategy is really paying off with much of this content picking up some amazing keyword visibility here. We're just looking at keywords in the top three positions on Google and we're excluding anything branded. But you can see that really started to swell throughout the autumn and winter of 2024 and they've pretty much maintain that by keeping this content up to date. If building out this sort of visibility is something that you'd love to do for your brand, the team at Exposure Ninja can help you because this is all we do every day. The first step is to get in contact with us. If you're not sure that you want to work with us yet and you instead want to test us out, then you can request a free digital marketing review. The team will take a look at your visibility currently and they'll map you out a prioritized action plan that you can follow to increase your visibility using strategies like this minus the scandal for your own business. This service is completely free of charge. So just head over to exposurinja.com/re today. Now, I'm not going to tell you that all of this traffic is super high intent, ready to buy cyber security. Now, it's not. But what they do is when they're targeting a very top offunnel keyword, but have a reallyformational piece of content like this one here about endpoint security, and then they'll have calls to action that are related to where that person is at in the journey. But they're not trying to get someone to sign up for CrowdStrike there and then, although there is always a free trial CTA in the header if you want it. Instead, they're offering things like downloads of reports because they appreciate that a person at this stage of the journey is looking for information. They're looking to learn. They're looking for guidance. If, of course, they download these reports, then CrowdStrike knows, okay, they're interested, we're in the game, and they can follow up with their sales or with their email marketing. They also have content targeted at people towards the middle or the bottom of the funnel, i.e. people who are more likely to convert. Maybe they're exploring different solutions and considering CrowdStrike. things like these custom stories which they can both rank in Google and also send to people on their email list. They've also got podcasts which help give them visibility on other platforms like podcast platforms and YouTube. One really smart part of their strategy are these reports. They've got this global threat report which they release every year. Really nice landing page, nice way of capturing people who are interested in cyber security more broadly. And of course they pick up their own links. Here's the global threat report for 2025. If we can see, we got 307 links from 166 domains and some of these are pretty tasty. Then CrowdStrike also hosts events. These also tend to pick up loads of links and loads of attention and they give another option for a call to action in the rest of their content. Well, the end result in all of this in 2024, Crowdstrike reported $3.44 billion of revenue, a nice 34% year-on-year increase despite the massive backlash from these outages. But just when CrowdStrike's marketing team are probably starting to give themselves a bit of a pat on the back at surviving the scandal and everything seemed to be going so right, their traffic got cut in half almost overnight. Between March and April 2025, their organic traffic goes from almost a million visits a month to around 500,000. This drop lines up with two events going on in organic search. Firstly, Google's March core update which really threw about rankings for a lot of businesses and secondly the increasing prominence of AI overviews in search on the Google of old when you search for something you typically get a list of websites but increasingly in today's Google when you search for something you get this the AI overview and in many cases whereas people previously would have clicked on a website to get the answer that they needed now they see this they get the information that they need and they don't need to click and we're seeing this increasingly with our clients. Even businesses that have really good visibility in traditional search are sometimes losing quite a lot of their organic traffic because it's being eaten by zeroclick searches and AI overviews. On the surface, this might look like terrible news, but it doesn't have to be. And actually, it wasn't for CrowdStrike because take a look at this. Because of their authority, their backlink profile, and the quality and optimization of their content, they have been increasingly appearing in these AI overviews. Here's their visibility graph inside AI overviews over time. And in fact, CrowdStrike's visibility in AI overviews is continuing to increase today. So, despite losing clicks, they're not actually losing visibility. They're appearing more and more often in search. And this comes down to the vast amounts of highquality content that they have, which Google is happy to draw from and show in AI overviews and the huge credibility and authority that they've built by being mentioned in so many places across the internet. So long-term, actually, none of this seems to have hurt the business. And in 2025, they did $4.24 billion in revenue, a 23% year-on-year increase. So despite the volatility in organic traffic and this shift in how SEO is working in 2025 and into 2026 and the future, CrowdStrike hasn't stopped winning in organic search. They've just been able to pivot to this new era and pick up even more visibility. Okay, but I know what you're thinking, Tim. What if we're not planning to be involved in a global scandal where we force people to queue in hospital corridors and our own stock price falls so much that our shareholders sue us? What are the lessons that we can take from this? Crowd Strike are really winning because of the huge content assets that they've built on their website that gives them visibility for all of these keywords. Yes, [music] the links and the attention seems to have helped improve their visibility in search, but they wouldn't be ranking for that stuff if they didn't have the content that was relevant for those keywords in the first place. So, they've invested a huge amount of time, energy, and money into building out these assets across the website. And one of the pivots that they made is to start thinking in industry terms and breaking out the topics and keywords and interests that people in each industry that they serve would have. They could then produce content that targeted each of those different industry verticals and increase the total amount of visibility and the relevance of that content that the site has online. They don't just public generic information on their blog. They publish really in-depth things that are backed by their own data. This makes them a global authority on the topic and is exactly the sort of stuff that AI tools like AI overviews as well as chat GPT perplexity and Claude love to site in their answers when they're recommending content to their users. So, it's really the base that Crowd Strike has built so that when this scandal came, it didn't destroy the company, it actually improved the visibility of all this content. If you enjoyed this video, check out this one, which is where we break down United Healthcare's $40 million a month marketing strategy. [music] is unbelievable and there are loads of lessons that you can apply.