The Situation
A Series-B SaaS platform was acquiring customers almost exclusively through paid channels. Organic traffic had plateaued for 14 months — flat despite a content team publishing four articles a week. Search Console showed thousands of impressions but click-through rates well below category benchmarks, and a deep crawl revealed indexation chaos: 4,200 pages, 1,800 of them either canonicalised away or blocked at the robots.txt layer without intent.
Diagnostic Phase
We ran our full 200+ point audit across technical health, on-page coverage, content depth and the backlink profile. Log-file analysis surfaced the deepest issue — Googlebot was burning 60% of its crawl budget on parametrised URLs that should never have been crawlable. Schema markup existed but was malformed on 84% of templated pages. Internal linking was almost entirely dependent on the global navigation; orphan pages numbered in the hundreds.
Strategy
A three-pillar topical map was built around the platform's core jobs-to-be-done. Crawl budget was reclaimed through robots directives, canonical consolidation and parametrised URL parameter handling. The schema was rewritten as a JSON-LD graph linking Organization, SoftwareApplication, Product, FAQ and BreadcrumbList. Internal linking was rearchitected around the topical clusters with editorial cross-linking embedded into the brief workflow.
Execution
Technical fixes shipped across the first six weeks alongside a refreshed content production pipeline. 84 deep-dive articles were commissioned across the three pillars over the following six months, written with SME interviews and validated against SERP analysis. An editorial outreach programme placed 38 contextual links in DR60+ publications.
Outcome
By month nine, organic traffic was up 312%, the page-1 keyword count had increased by 87, and — most important — organic had overtaken paid as the largest source of qualified pipeline. The CAC blended across acquisition channels dropped 26%.