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Programmatic SEO case study with each contract valued at $10k+
Want to know the details of this case study? Check it out in the recent post of our client, founder of the Venture Capital Consulting company Waveup, Igor Shaversky.
The Journey to 250 B2B Leads per Month
We purchased a new domain two years ago and decided to do SEO.
It was a crazy ride that resulted in 10K organic visitors + 250 leads per month.
When your average contract value is above $10k – selling is hard as f*ck. You need a solid flywheel of leads. Ads don’t cut it. PR is a gamble. Word of mouth doesn’t scale.
For us, SEO has proved to be the most measurable path to consistent conversions. It wasn’t like this at the start.
I was shocked to see that 1 year ago, after 12 months of doing SEO we were still close to 0.
Things that worked and things that didn’t
Tech was the main problem. Google totally ignored us until we redesigned the whole thing on a custom CMS and started using Pagespeed for performance tweaks.
The first 30-40 blog posts we’ve created never got to the first pages of Google rankings. That felt stupid. Deep keyword & ranking research – if you skip those, SEO won’t work.
I didn’t see much success paying for guest posts. It helped to build backlinks at scale but ended up being a money-waster. Two things that worked – partnerships and PR. One TechCrunch publication is worth months of tedious backlink building.
For us, 10% of pages generate 90% of traffic. General takeaways from this:
- Do more
- Ship fast, see what works, and double down on SEO edits.
Your niche matters. We had this crazy idea to cover 100+ industries we work with. Turns out, if you do VC consulting for Healthtech, doing a page on Healthtech will not help you to get the volume of Healthtech searches – there are 100+ companies that do actual Health and will be ranked first.
Initially, we were targeting low-volume searches with clear intent to buy our service. It ended up being a lot of work for a minuscule growth. Later we switched to high-volume info searches. Growing traffic got easy, but this traffic hardly converted. In retrospect, I think neither approach is correct. You have to hunt specific keywords, not implement SEO strategies.
Brainstorming with SEO experts moves the needle, but make no mistake—SEO cannot be fully outsourced. Without a team who gets the business deep into the process, growth is not evident. Shoutout to Bogdan Ianatiev and Daniel Dramshev who helped us a lot.
Programmatic SEO and AI
We’ve built a VC platform that helps us & clients to find & reach out to investors worldwide. I was surprised that 3,000 pages without human input or unique text could generate a few hundred organic visitors in the first month. AI content works poorly with Google search, but human-curated pieces with the use of GPTZero and humanizers like Phraisly work as good as human-written stuff.
I can see that almost 10% of our current leads come from ChatGPT and Perplexity. Looks like the next big thing.
Organic search is not an overnight miracle.
However, two years later – 50% of our net revenue comes organically. Seeing other websites in the domain with 10x traffic gives an idea of just how big you can grow this thing.
Source: Igor Shaversky on LinkedIn.
