Two software brands,
one forensic playbook
SD Worx and Oleeo sell payroll, HR and recruitment software to demanding UK buyers. We found the searches those buyers make, built the pages that answer them, and the traffic followed.
01
The clients
Both brands sell software and services into crowded categories where buyers research long before they speak to sales. Organic search is where that research starts, so that is where we went to work.
SD Worx UK
Oleeo
02
What the evidence showed
We started where we always start: a forensic look at the site, the keywords and the competitors, before a single page was touched.
SD Worx: pages built to be found were switched off
The audit found 31 pages, including Pensions and the Glossary, blocked from search engines by a robots tag. Valuable pages were invisible to Google by accident.Oleeo: three gaps, one plan
We crawled all 1,135 URLs at kick-off and found three gaps: site hygiene, content and backlinks. The category terms buyers use, from applicant tracking to candidate relationship management, needed pages of their own and the authority to hold them.03
What we did
SD Worx
- Audited the site and removed what was blocking key pages from Google
- Ran a six-month content plan, with blog topics agreed with SD Worx's marketing team
- Published payroll calendar and payslip law content aimed at high-volume searches
- Mapped each priority keyword to a target page, from outsourced payroll to global payroll
- Built links to the homepage and payroll services pages
Oleeo
- Ran a Search Space Analysis across keywords, competitors, technical health, content and links
- Wrote optimised content for product and industry pages, from ATS and candidate CRM to public sector, retail and virtual recruiting
- Supported the product terms with blogs and glossary content
- Built outreach articles and citations to close the authority gap
- Prepared the site for the US market, with US spellings, language tags and a market plan
04
The results
Oleeo’s organic traffic rose 65% year on year, and the pages we optimised grew fastest. SD Worx grew organic sessions 37% in a month against the same month a year earlier, and two new content pages delivered more than 5,600 sessions on their own.
| Organic search traffic | Against a year earlier | Against the previous period |
|---|---|---|
| Whole site (11,203 to 18,472 sessions) | +65% | +32% |
| Applicant tracking software page | +746% | +34% |
| Police sector page | +258% | +31% |
| Hiring pool page | – | +119% |
| Homepage | +21% | +6% |
Oleeo also gained four new keywords in Google UK's top three and four new keywords in the top ten over the period. Source: Google Analytics, organic search, 1 September 2022 to 31 March 2023 against 1 September 2021 to 31 March 2022; Maratopia Oleeo final review, April 2023.
| Measure | Before | After |
|---|---|---|
| Organic sessions, one month year on year | 20,284 | 27,752 |
| Monthly organic sessions from two new content pages | 0 | 5,643 |
| Non-brand terms at #1 on Google UK | – | 6 |
| Non-brand terms in the top 10 on Google UK | – | 24 |
Want the same forensic look at your search space?
Every case here started with a Search Space Analysis of keywords, competitors, technical health, content, links and AI visibility. It’s free, and it’s yours to keep.
