A second channel,
built from scratch.
They came to us with two markets live and SEO as one person’s part-time job. Lean team, focused on product. A few hundred organic visits a day in the top market.
This is one of the most expensive verticals to buy a click in. Paid is the main growth engine here: it works super well, and it’s our bread and butter. SEO runs alongside it as a second channel that cuts the cost of growth. Every organic visit is a click we did not need to buy. At this volume, it makes a real difference.
They brought us in to build that second channel from scratch.
Worked for users.
Invisible to Googlebot.
The site was a single-page app. SPA SEO is hard even when done well. This one had grown fast, the SEO work had not kept up.
The prerenderer was queuing URLs for up to 28 days before serving them to Googlebot. Schema and Open Graph data needed a full rebuild. Both trailing-slash and non-trailing-slash versions of every URL were indexed. Canonicals were pointing at the wrong targets. Modal popups were generating their own URLs and breaking canonicals across the whole site. Category pages were firing multiple page IDs at the same time. SEO text was not being served to crawlers. Localized metadata was leaking to the wrong domains.
The site worked well for users. For Googlebot, most of it was invisible.
Content, internal linking, the backlink profile: all secondary to product. Forty referring domains in the top market. That is normal at this stage. The cost shows up when paid hits its ceiling and there is nothing else to carry the load.
We took the wheel.
Fix the foundation first. Ship quick wins so the client sees progress. Then go deeper.
Technical first… nothing else works if the site cannot be crawled. Metadata and schema next, high leverage and low dev cost. Then content. Then links. Then the next market. Then the next.
We did not rebuild the site. We did not try to fix everything at once. We did not go after rankings we could not yet win. The order mattered as much as the work.
Six streams. One direction.
Technical SEO
Full URL structure rebuild. Fixed the trailing-slash duplication. Restructured the prerenderer so the top 100 pages refreshed every 48 hours instead of every four weeks. Fixed canonicals, including a sitewide bug caused by modal URLs. Fixed page ID conflicts that had been hurting rankings for months. Cleared soft 404s. Crawl budget got managed instead of wasted.
International SEO
Six markets, six languages, three continents. Each market gets its own competitor analysis, content gap audit, and link building work. Each market is treated as its own problem to solve.
Performance
INP got 3-6× faster on slow devices. In markets where mid-range Android is the norm, that is not a vanity metric
Content
SEO text on category pages, main pages, and other inventory pages. Content gap analysis per market. In regulated markets, every piece goes through compliance review before it goes live.
Links
Guest posts, PR, contextual placements. Every link checked by our team lead personally. Forty referring domains became 2,600 in the top market.
Metadata and schema at scale
We built a short code templating system {brand}, {category}, {market}, {pageName} so titles and descriptions could be generated across thousands of pages from a single YAML file. New schema rolled out across the full site. Six languages covered as we expanded.
We made mistakes.
This is the honest part.
Dev capacity is always the bottleneck. SEO work waited behind product features, and some of our biggest wins came later than they should have.
A few brand decisions went the client’s way, not ours. That is fine. They own the brand.
We also made mistakes. Some content bets took longer to pick up than expected. One schema type experiment we had to roll back. A long-term partnership will have those. Ours did.
Numbers from our client’s
top performing market:
Organic changed
the economics.
Sep 2025 → Mar 2026 · $130k/mo replaced from Google PPC
3.5x From non-branded organic
7.5x Revenue-Qualified lift
The one we are most proud of: top three organic for the most competitive head term in the entire SEO world, reached in 24 months. The CPC for that term is high enough to hurt. We rank for it without paying for it. We have also hit top two for the same type of head term in two other markets we expanded into.
Two years in.
Not finished.
Two years in and the technical work is not finished. We just delivered a 50-page audit: indexing gaps, rendering edge cases, schema depth, internal linking, performance items still in the dev queue. The team is working through it one ticket at a time.
The bigger move underneath all of it is full server-side rendering. Every fix we shipped so far: the prerenderer logic, the metadata templates, the canonical cleanup was a workaround. SSR removes the constraint instead of routing around it. When it lands, everything else gets stronger.
We are not done. That is the point.
Two markets to six.
Still expanding.
Two markets when we started. Six now, still expanding.
Organic changed the economics. Paid became more efficient because organic takes a share of the volume. Brand search grew alongside it. The full channel mix works better than before.
The scope grew too. We now run paid media, creative work, and other channels for this client. That did not happen because we asked for it. It happened because the work built trust over 2 years.
Long retainers
are rare in this industry.
Long retainers are rare in this industry. Most companies move on within a year. Patience runs short and agencies overpromise.
We are 2 years in with more workload than when we started. The people who work in this industry know what that means.
We are still the only marketing function on this account. We earned that.
Vertical does not matter.
Vertical does not matter. The work is the same everywhere: find what is broken, fix it in the right order, build what grows, stay long enough to see it happen.
