Wiz – Multi-Pronged Content and PR for Explosive Growth

Cloud security startup Wiz (founded 2020) became the fastest company ever to $100M ARR, in part by combining aggressive programmatic SEO with strong brand and community tactics. As a newer cybersecurity player, Wiz knew it needed to dominate search for cloud security topics and leverage its research for marketing. Here’s how Wiz did it:

Wiz Academy Content Hub

Wiz created a content hub (often dubbed “Wiz Academy”) featuring high-quality articles on cloud security concepts and best practices. With a lean team, Wiz published ~152 Academy pages that target valuable keywords like CSPM (Cloud Security Posture Management), CNAPP, SBOM, CIEM, etc..

Each page is thorough (often written by in-house experts like product managers), and follows a structured template: definition of the term, why it matters, common challenges, and how Wiz’s platform addresses it. By covering these acronym keywords systematically, Wiz captured thousands of mid-funnel visitors researching cloud security solutions. In fact, the Academy section became the top organic traffic driver – those 152 pages generate about 16,000 visits/month, ~43% of Wiz’s site traffic.

Automated “Best [X]” Pages via Data

Wiz also leveraged programmatic SEO for comparison and directory pages. For example, Wiz’s site has pages listing “Top Cloud Security Tools” or “Kubernetes Security Best Practices” which compile data or vendors (with Wiz included) in a template format. These pages target searches like “best container security tools”.

By automating the gathering of tool names, brief descriptions, and integrating Wiz’s own product as a comparison, Wiz tapped into bottom-of-funnel intent. Similarly, Wiz created content around cloud provider-specific keywords (like securing AWS, GCP, Azure) using templated structures to scale across providers. This allowed a small team to produce content that blanketed their keyword space without writing each page from scratch.

Newsworthy Research = Backlinks

A cornerstone of Wiz’s SEO advantage came from its security research PR. Wiz’s research team frequently discovers high-impact cloud vulnerabilities and publishes reports. These reports get picked up by outlets like The Hacker News, which has cited Wiz’s findings hundreds of times (over 118,000 backlinks from HackerNews).

While many of these links are nofollow, they establish Wiz’s authority and drive targeted referral traffic of security professionals. For instance, Wiz’s report on an Azure bug was the primary source in news articles, which embedded Wiz’s diagrams and credited Wiz Research. This level of exposure not only builds brand trust (positioning Wiz as an industry leader) but also indirectly boosts SEO (through brand searches and some follow links).

Wiz essentially turned its research output into an SEO asset, as each report lives on its site (often as a PDF or blog post) and garners links that raise the domain’s overall ranking power.

Rapid Traffic Growth and Multi-Channel

The results of these efforts were striking. In a 6-month span, Wiz’s site traffic jumped 72% (from ~226K in Nov 2023 to ~390K by Apr 2024). Organic search alone drives ~26% of traffic (~25K visits/month from search) – traffic worth over $100K/month if bought via ads. Notably, this organic traffic is highly qualified (e.g. cloud security engineers reading about CSPM are likely to request a demo).

Wiz also complemented SEO with heavy paid search on high-value terms it didn’t yet rank for (like “cloud security platform”), and with an employee-driven social media strategy that brought in another ~7% of traffic via LinkedIn/X.

This diversified approach – field events for brand, pSEO for scale, paid for gaps, social for community – created a marketing machine. But programmatic content was a keystone: for example, simply adding 535 automated pages for U.S. cloud regions and services could systematically capture long-tail searches.

Wiz’s ability to coordinate these tactics (supported by a large, specialized marketing team) is how it dominated mindshare so quickly. The payoff: by 2024 Wiz reached a $12B valuation and was even rumored (mistakenly) to be Google-acquired – a testament to how effective its growth strategy was in outrunning far older competitors.