HR & Payroll SaaS Company SEO Case Study
164% Increase in Keywords Ranking in the Top 3
88%
Increase in organic users
164%
Increase in keywords ranking in the top 3
82%
Increase in average pages per session
Challenges
Great Word of Mouth—But Limited Organic Traffic
At the time SureOak started working with the client, they had no trouble with word-of-mouth sign-ups: seemingly everyone who used the service recommended it to a friend or colleague at a different company. Among HR professionals, their reputation was sterling. But you can’t build a business on word-of-mouth buzz alone, and this is where our expertise came in. Put simply: the client needed more organic traffic and leads. They needed to ensure that when HR decision makers at SMBs went hunting for an all-in-one HR service, theirs was one of the first companies that showed up. This would be one of our biggest challenges.
Limited On-Site Content Offerings
For most of its history, the client had given limited attention to the actual content on its pages: they were (understandably!) more focused on optimizing their services and providing the best in HR solutions for their clients. But if they wanted to increase conversion rates on their site—a persistent problem—they would need to totally revamp their content offerings. Essentially every aspect of their website required overhauling at the time SureOak started working with them—from their content strategy to their individual service pages. Getting these into shape would be a major lift.
Website In Need of a Redesign
When we began work with the client, their website was, at best, functional. The relevant information was there, but it was sometimes hard to find, and its overall design left something to be desired. Again: our client is among the best in the business when it comes to HR solutions. But in the world of SEO—which is to say, the world of business—an incredible product can only get you so far: it needs to be packaged properly, too. Redesigning their website and branding would accordingly become central to SureOak’s overall SEO and marketing strategy for the client.
Solution
We started simple, with the basic building blocks of any digital awareness campaign: SEO, link building, and content creation.
On the SEO end, we put our heads down to find just the right keywords to focus on—ones for which our client would have a realistic chance of rising in the rankings—and then worked relentlessly to optimize the client’s website for those terms.
Then we came to the link building. Link building, of course, is one of the most reliable tools out there for building a client’s credibility and increasing its visibility in the search rankings—it sends unignorable signals to Google that your company is known, respected, and worth boosting. Leveraging our relationships with prominent HR and workplace websites—and working proactively to develop new ones—we quickly undertook a robust link building campaign for the client.
But the content was crucial here, too. Given the range of services offered by our client—from payroll to recruitment to employee lifecycle management—the range of potential content was almost unlimited. The blog we helped the client build out was precision-engineered to attract HR decision-makers, providing lengthy and genuinely informative explainers on evergreen HR topics. At one and the same time it increased their authority in the space and significantly increased the range of daily visitors to their website.
We might’ve ended there, but things were going so well that the client wound up expanding our remit—to the point that we wound up not just redesigning their entire website but also updating their branding and even their UX and navigation. What had once been a bit diffuse and disorganized became, after our renovation, sparklingly clean—everything in its right place, just waiting to be found by the right HR rep.
Results
The results were better than we could have hoped. In the space of just two years, the number of organic users—the main metric the client had been concerned with—increased by 88%, while organic sessions increased by 72%.
Meanwhile, for keywords ranking in the top 3, the client saw a staggering 164% increase, and a 157% increase in total keywords ranking.
Keywords Ranking in Top 3
And just as we’d hoped, our website redesign led potential customers to spend much more time on the site—average pages per session increased by 82%, significantly increasing the chances of conversion.
Time Spent on Site
About the HR & Payroll SaaS Company
This client—a well-known all-in-one HR solutions company—offers everything and does it all well. They give their all to each component of their modern HR setup, from payroll to benefits administration to time tracking to recruitment and beyond.
Many things distinguish them from their competition, but two are worth flagging here. The first is their niche: they’ve carved out an enviable reputation for themselves in a coveted market segment, namely medium-sized companies with one to five hundred employees. The second is their unusual commitment to customer service: while their technology can be easily spun up without dedicated technical knowledge, the company’s representatives also work directly with their customers to create custom conversion schedules, unique training plans, and more. Their staff is perennially on hand to make sure their customers get the most out of their product.