A search programme that put a SaaS product first for 25 commercial terms

The product was good and nobody could find it. Almost every visit came from paid search or from sales outreach, which meant growth cost money in direct proportion to how much of it there was.

The site had the usual symptoms of a startup that had grown by adding pages: near-duplicate feature pages competing with each other, a blog written for the founders' peers rather than for buyers, and no page at all for the comparison and alternative queries the sales team heard on every call.

We split the work into a foundation phase and a programme phase, and did not start the second until the first was measurably done.

The foundation phase consolidated the competing feature pages into one canonical page per job the software does, fixed internal linking so the money pages were actually reachable, and cleaned up the technical layer: indexation rules, templates, structured data, page speed on the templates that mattered.

The programme phase was editorial. We mapped the questions buyers ask at each stage, from "what is this category" through to "how does it compare with the incumbent", and published against them on a fixed cadence with subject-matter input from the client's own team. Coverage earned links. We did not buy any. Every piece was briefed with a target query, an internal linking plan, and a definition of what a good result would look like, written before the piece was.

By the end of the programme:

• first position for more than 25 commercial keywords
• organic traffic up 300%
• leads up 250%

The gap between the traffic figure and the lead figure is the interesting one. Traffic rose faster than leads because the top-of-funnel explanatory content pulls in people who are not buying yet, which is the point of it, as long as the comparison and pricing pages are there to catch them later.