How did you prioritise keywords for a compliance niche?

We built a keyword matrix scoring each term on search volume, keyword difficulty, commercial intent, and alignment with the product's buyer journey. We deliberately targeted lower-difficulty, high-intent long-tail terms first to generate early wins and build domain authority before attacking competitive head terms.

How did you generate original data for E-E-A-T?

We surveyed compliance professionals (via the client's existing customer base and LinkedIn) to generate a proprietary compliance report. This became the most linked asset in the campaign — earning backlinks in its first month.

When did traffic start to move?

Month 2 after we fixed Core Web Vitals and submitted the restructured sitemap. We saw Google begin re-crawling and re-indexing at a higher frequency. The first major ranking movements came in Month 3, with the full compounding effect visible by Month 5.

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Digital Marketing

Case Study · Digital Marketing

Building an SEO System Foundation First.

How we rebuilt a B2B SaaS platform's organic search architecture — fixing the technical layer before publishing a single article, then structuring content as intent-mapped clusters.

Service

Digital Marketing

Location

New Zealand & Australia

Duration

6 months

Year

2026

Industry

B2B SaaS

Project Overview

A B2B SaaS company selling compliance management software to professional services firms had been buying search traffic for over a year while their organic presence stayed close to non-existent. Almost all of their acquisition depended on paid search, so a rising cost-per-click translated directly into a rising cost per lead. They needed an organic channel that would compound instead of resetting each month.

Key Insight: Structure Beats Volume

Structured topic clusters built around a narrow subject area are a stronger foundation for search authority than a larger number of scattered, unrelated articles. The internal link architecture is what makes the difference: when every cluster article links up to a pillar page and the pillar links back down, crawlers find new content through existing indexed pages rather than waiting to discover orphans. The corollary is that the technical layer has to come first — publishing into a site with crawl errors, missing canonicals and a stale sitemap means the architecture you designed is not the architecture a crawler actually sees.

The Challenge

The Problem

The site was small, had almost no earned authority, and its blog had never been used. Core product pages were thin and written without a specific search intent in mind, so they competed for nothing in particular. Competitors were ranking organically on the very keywords this company was paying to appear against.

Acquisition almost entirely dependent on paid search, with no organic diversity

Minimal earned domain authority

Core product pages were thin and carried no semantic depth

A blog existed but had gone unused for over a year

No internal linking architecture — page authority was not distributed

Core Web Vitals: LCP 5.8s, CLS 0.42 — failing across all metrics

Our Solution

Our Approach

We built an integrated SEO system: technical foundation first, then content at scale, then authority building. Nothing was published until the technical architecture could support it.

Technical SEO Foundation

Fixed all crawl errors, implemented canonical tags, rebuilt XML sitemap, restructured URL architecture, and optimised Core Web Vitals — LCP from 5.8s to 1.6s, CLS from 0.42 to 0.03.

Keyword & Intent Architecture

Mapped keywords across intent stages (awareness, consideration, evaluation, decision). Built topic clusters with pillar pages targeting high-volume commercial terms.

Content Production at Scale

Produced 2 pillar pages and 6 cluster articles per month — all structured for featured snippet targeting, People Also Ask, and AI Overview citation. Every piece used E-E-A-T signals.

Link Acquisition

Earned links over six months through original research published as downloadable assets, HARO responses and targeted outreach, rather than bought placements.

Execution Timeline

Our Step-by-Step Process

Month 1

Technical SEO Audits

Resolving redirect chains, rewriting sitemaps, and correcting Core Web Vitals errors.

Month 2

Intent Mapping

Analyzing search intent and clustering high-volume commercial terms.

Months 3-5

Content Scale Build

Writing pillar pages, assembling metadata schemas, and publishing cluster topics.

Month 6

Link Acquisition Campaigns

Writing reports, launching HARO pitches, and building external page authority.

Tech Stack

Ahrefs
Google Search Console
Screaming Frog
SurferSEO
Semrush
Google Analytics 4
Looker Studio
Google Tag Manager
Hotjar

Results

Measurable impact — verified outcomes

6 mo

Engagement duration

Technical audit through link acquisition, run as four sequenced phases

4 stages

Intent architecture

Keywords mapped across awareness, consideration, evaluation and decision

Pillar + cluster

Content topology

Cluster articles link up to pillar pages, distributing authority through internal links

Gated

Publication sequencing

No content shipped until crawl, canonical and sitemap architecture could support it

Retrospective

Lessons Learned & Refinements

E-E-A-T Signal Depth

Adding verified compliance lawyer quotes and legal citations to articles reduced search indexing time.

Core Web Vitals Impact

Optimizing website load speeds was the catalyst for early keyword rank jumps.

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