How Canva’s international programmatic SEO strategy drives 38M+ visits to Canva every month

How Canva’s international programmatic SEO strategy drives 38M+ visits to Canva every month

Thenuka Karunaratne•1 Mar 2025

In just over a decade, Canva, an online graphic design tool, has become a global household name. What started as a small startup in an apartment in Sydney Australia has grown to become a powerful platform serving 170 million active users across more than 190 countries.

Canva’s impressive rise is attributed, in part, to its programmatic SEO (pSEO) strategy which drives more than 38 million organic, bottom-of-funnel visits to Canva’s platform every month. By creating over 24,000 templated pages in English and translating them into dozens of languages, Canva scaled its search-optimized content to reach a global audience.

Canva’s product-led growth strategy

At the heart of Canva's success lies a dedication to understanding and addressing user needs, a cornerstone of the company’s go-to-market approach.

Canva differentiates itself by providing simple, user-friendly design tools and a large library of customizable templates. With Canva, users with limited design skills can leverage design templates to create professional-looking visuals.

Canva’s focus on product-led growth is paying off. The product is considered a must-have tool among amateur designers who return again and again to Canva to solve their design-related needs. According to SEMrush, Canva’s direct traffic accounts for 71% of their overall traffic — a strong signal that users benefit from the platform.

Canva’s pSEO templates

Canva’s user-first ethos extends to its content and SEO strategy. The company creates product-led content that helps searchers solve their design problems using Canva’s tools.

This content is templatized, enabling Canva to scale the production of thousands of dedicated solution pages. These pages, called programmatic SEO (pSEO) pages, are broken into three core categories or subfolders on the Canva domain.

  1. **Template pages

    [include /template in the URL]:** these pages cater to searchers who want to “discover” design ideas for specific use cases. For example, they may be looking for a resume design template or a certificate design template. Here is an example.

  2. **Create pages

    [include/create in the URL]:** these pages are built for searchers who want to “do” something; they rank for keywords like “design a certificate” or “create a resume.” Here is an example.

  3. **Feature pages

    [include/feature in the URL]:** these pages cater to searchers who are looking for specific design tools and solutions. For example, they are searching for tools to remove the background from a photo or a tool to generate AI images. Here is an example.

The majority of these pages have been translated into dozens of different languages. In this way, Canva can create single templates for different search queries and replicate them across languages without needing to create language or country-specific templates.

Template page structure

All template pages use the same URL structure: Canva.com / templates/[category]. Each template category (e.g. “resumes”) and sub-category (e.g. “minimalist resume”) is then housed as a sub-category page that uses the same URL structure: canva.com/ templates /[category]/[sub-category]. This approach creates a massive longtail that helps Canva capture longtail keywords and improve SEO.

All template pages are housed within Canva’s template library to create a web of interlinked pages that help search engines like Google crawl Canva’s content.

Template page design

Canva’s template pages follow a simple, easy-to-scan format, enabling users to quickly browse options for the visual they want to create. See an example of a template page here.

Users then scroll through visual thumbnails of different template options and select their choice. They can also click “create a blank [category],” which leads them to a blank design sized to the appropriate dimensions.

At the very bottom of the page is a long-form description of the template category. While it’s unknown how Canva produces this text, the SEO team likely creates search-optimized text for each category using AI.

How Canva could improve its template design with daydream

The daydream team works with LLMs and generative AI to produce high-quality, informative content at scale. The long-form content at the bottom of the template pages could be greatly enhanced with daydream’s generative AI capabilities.

A closer look at Canva’s create page structure and design

Create page structure

Like the template pages, all “create” pages are indexed within a broader library. The “create” library houses Canva’s entire catalog of design options using the same URL structure: Canva.com / create /[category].

Create page design

Canva’s create pages help searchers solve their specific design challenges right away providing an appropriately-sized template for their needs. See an example create page here.

  1. At the top of the page, the header prompts the visitor to “start designing [category]” with a button that clicks to a blank canvas and prompts the user to sign up for an account.
  2. Section one offers a longer-form description of how users can design their desired visual using Canva tools.
  3. Section two aims to rank for “how-to” related keywords and offers users a video and written steps that show them how to achieve their desired visual on Canva.
  4. Section three details Canva’s benefits and unique value proposition (customizable, free, easy-to-use) and links to relevant template pages and feature pages.
  5. Section 4 offers a brief FAQ on using Canva and provides a testimonial quote to encourage conversions.
  6. At the bottom of the page, Canva includes thumbnails of other design options available on Canva.

How Canva could improve its create page design with daydream

With daydream, Canva could programmatically create high-value, long-form “how-to” guides.

A closer look at Canva’s feature page structure and design

Feature page structure

Just like the template and “create” pages, all “feature” pages are indexed within a broader library. The “feature” library houses Canva’s entire catalog of design features using the same URL structure: Canva.com / features /[feature name].

Feature page design

Canva’s feature pages are designed to convert searchers looking for specific design capabilities and functions, such as removing a photo's background or converting an image to a PDF. Here is an example of a feature page.

The feature pages follow a simple, conversion-focused template that includes the following elements:

  1. At the top of the page, visitors are prompted with a context-specific headline and CTA.
  2. Section two highlights the benefits of the feature and emphasizes Canva’s value proposition using phrases like “easy-to-use” and “effortless” to encourage conversions.
  3. Section three provides an overview of other Canva features.
  4. Section four aims to rank for “how to” keywords by providing an FAQ and brief tutorial.
  5. At the bottom of the page, Canva includes links to additional resources and Canva templates to improve interlinking

Canva’s pSEO pages draw in millions of organic visits each month

Canva’s pSEO pages consistently draw in millions of monthly organic visits. Below is a breakdown of Canva’s pSEO page types and traffic numbers.

Canva’s pSEO results are amplified with a localization strategy

Canva’s mission is to “Empower the World to Design” and the company has taken ambitious strides since its beginnings to bring the product to as many languages as possible. More than 65% of Canva users are non-English speakers and the product is available in more than 100 languages.

To meet the needs of a global audience, provide a localized experience, and improve SEO, Canva uses subdomains for each geography. This strategy improves SEO by ensuring users find relevant content in their language.

Canva’s localization strategy also amplifies the performance of its pSEO pages which have been translated into dozens of languages.

Bonus pSEO pages drive an additional 1 million top-of-funnel visits each month

A substantial number of Canva’s monthly organic visits (about 1.1 million visits) are derived from another category of pSEO pages— its color pages. These pages differ from Canva’s other pSEO pages because they aren’t transactional, product-led pages (i.e. they aren’t designed to capture individuals looking for Canva’s solution). Rather, the color pSEO pages are designed to attract top-of-funnel visitors for high-ranking keywords relevant to Canva’s offering.

Canva’s color-meaning pages

Canva has created 124 color pages which generate about 995,000 organic visits per month.

Canva’s color palette pages

Each of the color-meaning pages links to a color palette library which includes dozens of related color palette options.

How Canva stays on top of trends to capture new opportunities quickly with pSEO templates

With pSEO templates, Canva can monitor keyword opportunities driven by current events and quickly build pages to attract potential traffic.

For example, in response to the shift to remote work during COVID-19 and the need for video conferencing, Canva created Zoom background templates which now draw in about 85,000 monthly organic visits.

The Zoom background pages were also referenced among media outlets with high domain authority during the peak of COVID-19.

Canva’s Zoom template pages continue to receive backlinks from high-domain authority websites. In total, the Zoom pages are backlinked more than 780 times across the web.

How Canva’s pSEO pages feed its backlinking machine

Canva has more than 25 million backlinks to its site, further boosting its SEO performance. Many of these backlinks lead to Canva’s pSEO pages — likely because they are solution-oriented and work well as reference points for “how to” content across the web.