When your audience grows up, your content has to grow with it.

How we transformed Square's blog into a strategic brand publication — and drove triple-digit conversion gains without touching search rankings.

Square launched its Town Square blog in 2015 to acquire and onboard small businesses through organic search. The model worked, until Square's audience started moving upmarket, and the customer journey got more complex.

A single-channel, article-led content site couldn't support the buying decisions of larger, more sophisticated businesses. It needed to become something else: a brand publication that could serve multiple audiences, across multiple formats, at every stage of a longer, more considered journey.

THE CHALLENGE: Content migrations are high-risk. Square's editorial content accounted for a significant portion of organic visibility and revenue — a botched migration could wipe out years of SEO equity overnight. We needed to redesign the architecture, expand the format range, and shift the editorial positioning without disrupting the traffic that was already working.

THE APPROACH: We approached the migration in deliberate phases. A US pilot came first, allowing us to validate the new architecture and content model before extending to other markets. Australia and the UK followed once the pilot demonstrated stable search performance.

The Bottom Line was built to support a much wider range of content — traditional articles, serialised content, collections, podcasts, and video — giving Square the flexibility to engage a broader range of businesses and build genuine authority across topics, not just keywords. The platform was rebuilt on WordPress and integrated with a Content Marketing Platform, Welcome, streamlining production and editorial governance across the expanded team.

THE RESULTS:

• Triple-digit increase in conversion rates post-launch

• Quadruple-digit increase in lead form submissions

• Double-digit improvement from Marketing Qualified Lead to Sales Accepted Lead

• No meaningful loss in organic search rankings or traffic across US, Australian, or UK migrations

PROJECT DETAILS

Brand:Square

Format: Brand publication — articles, series, podcasts, video, collections

Year: 2023

Link: The Bottom Line, a publication by Square