Cybersecurity Company SEO Case Study
92% Increase in Conversions
18%
Increase in organic sessions
92%
Increase in conversions
2X's
Increase in conversion rates
Challenges
An Industry in Perpetual Flux
Few industries change at a faster rate than cybersecurity. It’s built into the field: solutions that work one year might be outmoded by the next, as cybercriminals refine their methods, seek out new vulnerabilities, and force leaders in the cybersecurity field to rapidly seek out new defensive measures. Accordingly, any external agency that works with a cybersecurity company has to get used to changing at the same pace. Where SEO for a mattress or menswear startup might stay relatively stable over time, cybersecurity SEO requires constant, intensive research—you need to stay vigilantly on top of the conversation and maintain a deep understanding of what exactly IT departments are worried about and what exactly they’re searching for, solutions-wise. To properly service our client, we would have to be willing to jettison old approaches if and when they stopped working and to quickly formulate new ones.
An Ultra-Competitive Market
The relentless increase in cybercrime ushered in by the pandemic has been terrible for affected businesses—but it has also, inevitably, led to a boom in cybersecurity solutions. There are, right now, more cybersecurity products on the market than ever: any IT buyer seeking the right solution for their company will find themselves inundated with potential options, and trying to figure out what distinguishes one from another can feel impossible. Our client’s offerings really are unique, but differentiating their service in a crowded marketplace—and conveying their value-add to IT buyers—was among our most pressing challenges.
Implementing a Full-Court SEO Plan
Sometimes, we’ll work with a client who only wants help with one aspect of their SEO—say, a more robust back-linking campaign or better-optimized website content. This client, by contrast, was after the full range of our services, from content development to link-building and beyond. Developing a 360-degree SEO game plan wouldn’t be easy—but we felt more than up to the task.
Solution
Part of the fun of working in SEO is immersing yourself in a brand new field—learning its special codes, its jargon, its ins and outs. And as mentioned, if we were going to help this client, we were effectively going to need to become cybersecurity experts. So, that was the first step here: immersing ourselves in everything having to do with cybersecurity and getting a system in place whereby, day by day and week by week, we could stay on top of developments and shift strategy accordingly. Of course, this required an unusually close degree of collaboration between Sure Oak and the client’s marketing department.
Once all that was in place—once we’d mastered the material and developed collaboration protocols with the client’s team—we set about conducting an SEO Game Plan. That meant, first, taking a deep dive into the competition, and developing a firm grasp of what our client offered that they didn’t. It also meant running a technical audit, researching their current backlink profile, etc.
From there, the next step was determining where the client’s team needed us most, and then kicking off an ongoing SEO program. For three years now, we have helped the client with things like on-page optimization, content development, strategic link-building, tracking and measurement, conversion rate optimization, SEO campaign management, and more. Again: no one strategy has stayed stable for long. In the world of cybersecurity, you have to think on your feet. But all that hard work has paid off.
Results
In the last year alone, following focused efforts on the part of Sure Oak, organic sessions for targeted pages have increased dramatically. ‘Application Penetration Testing’ for instance—a crucial page—has seen an increase of 522.8%, while the client’s ‘Threat Modeling’ page has seen a staggering increase of 1,525%.
Organic Traffic
That’s an extremely significant increase in the B2B world because—assuming you’ve got an adequate SEO program in place—it’s also a reliable indicator of increased conversions. And indeed, that has very much been the case for our client—in the very same time period under discussion, our client’s conversion rate more than doubled, from 0.56% to 1.16%.
Organic Conversions
Organic Impressions & Positions
About the Cybersecurity Company
This client—a leader in the cybersecurity space—takes an aggressive approach to perimeter defense: it focuses on prevention, not reaction. In an unprecedentedly dangerous threat landscape, with ransomware and other attacks on a continual rise, this client grants its customers a rare peace of mind by illuminating their entire external attack perimeter—ensuring that they’re not operating in the dark. Potential threats are made visible long before they can become a serious problem, and active threats can be flagged and promptly dealt with.
Where many cybersecurity companies have automated almost every aspect of their business, our client is distinguished by its human touch: it employs a dedicated team of ethical white-hat hackers who continually test customers’ systems for vulnerabilities, which can then be flagged and promptly remediated. Meanwhile, instead of overwhelming customers with a never-ending stream of warnings (99% of them, inevitably, false positives) our client’s tools surface only high-risk vulnerabilities. The classic “boy who cried wolf” syndrome—all too familiar from other cybersecurity solutions, which flood IT departments with hundreds of notifications per day—is here eliminated, allowing IT personnel to focus on the things that actually matter.
