Canva – Template Library and Design Tools for Every Keyword (100M+ Visits via pSEO)

Graphic design platform Canva achieved astronomical organic traffic (over 100 million visits/month) by leveraging its product assets – like templates and design tools – as SEO content on a global scale. Canva’s programmatic SEO strategy revolves around three types of pages: Templates, “Create” design pages, and Feature pages, plus some innovative extras:

Template Pages (~21,000 pages)

Canva offers thousands of design templates (for resumes, social media posts, flyers, etc.). Each template category has a landing page (e.g. “Resume Templates”), and often subcategory pages (like “Modern Resume Templates”), all following a uniform structure. These pages showcase template thumbnails, filtering options (style, color, theme), and a call-to-action to start designing a blank or chosen template. At the bottom, Canva programmatically adds a long-form SEO description about that template type (often ~300-500 words). By doing this for every category of design (from business cards to Instagram stories), Canva captures searches like “free birthday invitation template”, “Facebook cover templates”, etc. According to analysis, about 21,000 template pages generate ~13.1 million organic visits monthly. These pages target users who are close to engaging (looking for a design to customize), which means high conversion to sign-ups.

“Create” Pages (~2,000 pages)

These are similar to templates but focused on keywords like “create [design type] online” (e.g. “create logo”, “make a collage”). Each follows a pattern: it encourages the visitor to “Start designing a [design type]” with a direct editor link, then provides a mini how-to guide with steps and a video, highlights Canva’s value props (easy, free, etc.), an FAQ section for SEO, and links to related template categories.

Essentially, Create pages are funneling people who search how to design something straight into Canva’s editor with minimal friction. These ~2k pages drive about 6.4 million monthly visits and rank for many “how to make X” queries that have strong intent. Canva even localizes the URL for these (e.g. using subdomains like es.canva.com/crear/... for Spanish) to maximize global reach.

Feature Pages (~700 pages)

Canva also programmatically built pages around specific product features or tools – like “Background Remover”, “PDF to JPG Converter”, “Collage Maker”. These feature pages are conversion-focused: they describe the feature, show an animated GIF of it, list benefits, and crucially include a “How to [use feature]” section with an FAQ to capture “how to” searches.

There’s usually a CTA to try that feature on Canva. Roughly 700 feature pages contribute ~3.2 million organic visits/month. Many rank for DIY tutorial queries (like “how to remove background from image”) – Canva’s page both answers the query and offers their tool as the solution.

Color and Trend Pages

Beyond the core three, Canva didn’t stop. They created “Color Meaning” pages for colors (e.g. “Blue Color Meaning”) – 124 of those pages yield ~995,000 visits a month – and Color Palette pages (nearly 1,900 pages of palette combinations) adding ~83,000 more visits. These are clever top-of-funnel assets catching artists or marketers searching about colors, then linking them into Canva’s color picker or design ideas.

Canva also rapidly responds to trends: e.g. when Zoom virtual backgrounds were trending, they spun up a Zoom background template page which quickly amassed ~85K visits/month and earned media backlinks from high-authority sites (Popular Science, The Sun) linking to Canva. Another example: as AI art got hot, Canva launched an “AI Image Generator” feature page that now ranks #1 for that term and draws ~340K visits/month. By seizing timely opportunities, Canva’s SEO stays ahead of the curve.

International and Link Strategy

Canva amplified all this via mass localization. Over 65% of Canva’s users are outside English-speaking markets, so Canva translated its pSEO pages into dozens of languages using country subdomains (like canva.com/fr_fr/ for France). These translated pages add another ~15.5M monthly visits on top of the English traffic.

Furthermore, Canva’s content naturally attracts backlinks – e.g. bloggers or journalists referencing a free template or the Zoom backgrounds. Canva proactively does outreach to secure links too, with a team that contacts sites mentioning design topics to link to Canva as a resource. As of 2023, Canva’s domain had 25 million+ backlinks, including ~1.2 million links to its Create pages and ~200K to template pages. This huge link equity, spread across its thousands of pages, boosts its Google rankings across the board.

Results

Canva’s pSEO efforts are off the charts – in total, Ahrefs estimated Canva gets over 38 million monthly organic visits on the English pages alone, and much more globally. Others have cited even higher numbers (100M+). Importantly, these are not just empty visits: because many visitors come looking for a template or tool and can start designing immediately without log-in, Canva achieves an 18% conversion rate of visitors into registered users via these interactive pages (far above the ~0.5% from static blog content).

The programmatic content thus feeds directly into user growth, which then turns into revenue through Canva’s subscriptions and upsells. In short, Canva exemplifies how to turn one’s unique data or product (templates) into an SEO machine. By covering every keyword from “flyer template” to “remove image background” in a structured, localized way, Canva ensured it’s the top-of-mind (and top-of-search) solution for creators worldwide – all achieved with a smart blend of automation, great UX, and continuous improvement as trends emerge.