From 8,000 to 42,000 organic visitors in 14 months

The challenge

A Dutch SaaS scale-up with a B2B HR software platform had a strong product but was entirely dependent on Google Ads for new customers. The organic channel delivered barely 8,000 visitors per month — hardly relevant for the 20+ commercial search terms they wanted to rank for.

The CAC via paid had risen to EUR 1,200 per customer. Management wanted to reduce their dependency on paid and build sustainable organic growth.

The analysis

After an in-depth audit, we identified three main problems:

1. Technical blockers The site had serious crawlability issues. Important landing pages were not being indexed due to duplicate canonical tags and a flawed sitemap configuration. Google was indexing less than 40% of the relevant pages.

2. Flawed content architecture Blog content targeted top-of-funnel topics with no connection to commercial pages. There was no pillar-cluster structure — each blog post stood in isolation. Internal linking was minimal and unstructured.

3. Weak authority in the core domain The site had barely any external links on relevant HR-tech terms. Competitors had 3-5x more referring domains.

The approach

Months 1-2: Technical foundation

We resolved the indexing issues, rebuilt the sitemap and implemented canonical tags correctly. We rewrote the robots.txt and ensured correct hreflang tags for the Belgian market extension.

Result: within 6 weeks, Google was indexing 94% of the relevant pages.

Months 3-4: Content architecture

We designed a completely new content architecture based on the search landscape in HR-tech. Five pillar themes, each with 8-12 cluster articles planned. We prioritised by search volume and conversion intent.

Months 5-12: Systematic content production

We produced 6-8 new pages per month: a mix of pillar updates, new cluster articles and optimised service landing pages. Every piece of content was fully optimised for search intent, not just keywords.

Link building

In parallel with content production, we ran a link building campaign targeting HR trade publications and business media. Through thought leadership placements and three original research reports, we built 47 new high-quality referring domains.

The results

Metric	Start	After 14 months
Organic traffic/month	8,000	42,000
Organic keywords in top 10	34	312
Referring domains	89	136
Organic leads/month	12	94
CAC via organic	N/A	EUR 280

The most impactful outcome: the client was able to reduce their Google Ads budget by 40% while total lead volume increased. The CAC via organic (EUR 280) is 77% lower than via paid (EUR 1,200).

What we learned

The combination of technical SEO, content architecture and authority building delivers more than any of the three in isolation. Most SEO projects that fail focus too heavily on a single dimension.

For SaaS companies there is an additional factor: the buyer journey is long. Content must guide visitors through multiple sessions. Internal linking and retargeting are essential for this.

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Does this situation sound familiar? Schedule a call to discuss what organic growth could mean for you.