A Series A B2B SaaS was publishing solid content into a void. The problem was never the content. It was a JS-heavy SPA that crawlers couldn't render, broken Core Web Vitals, and a sitemap that indexed 30% of submitted URLs. Eight months later: 3× organic traffic and Channel #1 by acquisition.
organic traffic growth
8 months, zero paid spend
Client
Series A B2B SaaS, ~80 employees
Timeline
8 months (3 month migration + build + 5 months active optimization)
Team
3 engineers, 1 SEO strategist, 1 designer
Engagement
Audit → migration → ongoing optimization retainer
A well-funded Series A B2B SaaS had a strong content team that was producing consistently good material — buyer guides, comparison content, deep technical posts. None of it was performing. Organic traffic had been flat for 18 months. The marketing team was being asked hard questions by the board and was preparing to argue for a 5× content budget increase to 'force the issue.' The actual problem was technical, not editorial.
We started with a hard rule: nothing gets shipped that we cannot measure the impact of. Every change had a hypothesis attached and a tracked metric. The order was — fix rendering first, fix performance second, fix discoverability third, fix architecture fourth.
01
Two weeks of audit work: log file analysis, render diff against Googlebot, Lighthouse CI baseline, Search Console crawl-stats deep-dive, sitemap-vs-index reconciliation. Output: a prioritized backlog ranked by impact / effort with explicit success metrics for each item.
02
Migrated the entire frontend to Next.js. Marketing pages and blog posts as SSG (cached at the edge), authenticated app shell as SSR. Component-by-component migration over 12 weeks with no marketing-page outage. New build pipeline with Lighthouse CI as a deploy gate.
03
Image and font optimization pipeline (next/image with AVIF, font subsetting, preconnect for third-party fonts). JS bundle splitting and route-based code splitting. Removed three third-party scripts that were costing ~800ms of LCP each. Result: LCP 1.1s, CLS 0.04, INP 180ms.
04
Schema.org JSON-LD across the site: Organization + WebSite globally; Article + BreadcrumbList on blog posts; Product + FAQPage on feature pages; SoftwareApplication on the homepage. Anchored on stable @id references so the entity graph stayed connected.
05
Sitemap restructured by content type (marketing, blog, docs). Removed 800+ thin/duplicate URLs from the index. Implemented canonical strategy for tag/category pages. Submitted via Search Console and Bing Webmaster — within 6 weeks indexation rose from 30% to 92%.
06
Re-architected internal linking around 14 topic clusters identified from search demand. Each cluster has a pillar page with a defined supporting set of long-tail posts. Removed roughly 40% of legacy 'cross-link everything' anchor text in favor of topically-relevant links. This was the biggest single ranking driver in months 4–8.
organic traffic growth
25K/mo → 78K/mo in 8 months
sitemap indexation
up from 30%
keywords ranking in top 10
up from 47
LCP improvement
4.2s → 1.1s
drop in blended customer-acquisition cost over 12 months
By month 6, organic became the largest acquisition channel by signups, displacing paid social. By month 9, it overtook paid search on revenue-attributed accounts. The content team's output stopped decaying — pieces published in months 1–3 of the engagement were still picking up new long-tail traffic 12 months later, because the topical clusters compounded instead of competing.
The board conversation flipped. The budget increase request was withdrawn, replaced with a request to invest in the systems that were already working — better analytics, expanded topical coverage, and an investment in their first-party Search Console data warehouse so future content decisions could be data-driven.
We continue to support the SEO work on a quarterly retainer. The technical foundation is stable; the ongoing work is content-strategy advisory and quarterly technical hygiene reviews.
01
Technical audit
Render diff, log file analysis, Lighthouse baseline, sitemap reconciliation, prioritized backlog.
02
Next.js migration
Component-by-component rebuild, hybrid SSR/SSG, build pipeline with Lighthouse CI as deploy gate.
03
Performance + schema
Image/font pipeline, JS bundle work, comprehensive schema implementation, third-party script audit.
04
Indexation cleanup
Sitemap restructure, canonical strategy, thin-content removal, Search Console + Bing resubmission.
05
Topical cluster architecture
Cluster identification from search data, pillar page creation, internal-link re-architecture, anchor-text cleanup.
09
Technical SEO that engineers understand. Core Web Vitals, structured data, indexing audits — and the PPC and analytics work to back it up.
Learn more10
Get recommended by ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini, and Google AI when buyers ask for companies like yours. Entity clarity, structured data, AI-readable evidence, third-party validation.
Learn more01
End-to-end web applications — from API design to deployment pipelines. React, Next.js, Node.js, and the rest of the stack you'll actually run in production.
Learn moreDTC brand spending $5M+ across four agencies, ROAS deteriorating, attribution opaque. We brought paid media in-house, built first-party analytics, and automated inventory-aware ad serving.
Strangler-fig migration from a PHP monolith to a Node.js microservices platform on Kubernetes. p95 latency dropped from 1.8s to 320ms, PCI-DSS audit passed, transaction headroom 4×.
Most engagements start with a 30-minute discovery call. No pitch deck, no NDAs on day one — just an honest conversation about your situation.
Schedule a Call