A project management SaaS burning £12,000/month on Google Ads had virtually zero organic presence. Nine months later, organic accounts for 41% of all trial signups at a £18 CAC vs £94 from paid.
Streamline (name changed) is a UK-based B2B SaaS platform for distributed teams — project tracking, time logging, and client reporting in one dashboard. By the time they came to us, they were doing £1.1M ARR and spending £12,000 a month on Google Ads just to keep trial signups ticking over.
The problem: they had almost nothing in organic search. Their homepage ranked for their brand name and little else. Three of their most commercially valuable keywords — “project management software UK”, “team task tracker”, and “client reporting tool” — were sitting on pages four and five. Their closest competitor had 40,000 monthly organic visitors. Streamline had fewer than 900.
Their paid CAC was £94 per trial. Their average conversion from trial to paid was 18%, meaning they were spending over £520 to acquire each paying customer from ads alone. The founders knew this was not sustainable.
We spent the first three weeks on a full technical and content audit before touching a single piece of content or building a single link. What we found:
We structured the engagement across three parallel workstreams running from day one through month nine.
Fixed crawl waste by canonicalising filter URLs and consolidating duplicates. Rebuilt the internal linking architecture with a pillar-cluster model: one authoritative pillar page per core topic, supported by tightly linked cluster content. Reduced LCP from 5.8 seconds to 2.1 seconds through image compression, lazy loading, and render-blocking JavaScript deferral.
Produced four long-form pillar pages (3,500–5,000 words each) targeting the core commercial terms, plus two to three supporting cluster articles per pillar per month. Every piece was built from first-principles keyword research — search intent mapped, SERP analysed, competing content benchmarked. Each article reviewed by a specialist before publication.
Ran a pure editorial link building campaign — no link farms, no directories, no paid placements. Pitched contributed articles and original data studies to SaaS, productivity, and HR publications. Secured placements on sites including TechRadar Pro, Sifted, and several niche SaaS review hubs. Built 74 referring domains at an average DR of 58 over nine months.
Measured at nine months from kick-off against the same period the prior year:
The client reduced their Google Ads spend by £4,000 per month in month eight once organic velocity was clearly self-sustaining. That saving is now being reinvested into a second content vertical targeting enterprise procurement keywords.
Two things. First, we fixed the technical issues before creating content — most agencies skip this step and wonder why new content does not rank. Second, we built links that actual editors chose to publish, which means they carry real authority. There is no shortcut for either. Both take time and craft, which is exactly what most agencies are not willing to provide.