PROBLEM
Paid channels got pricier while organic stayed too small
The company was buying growth on Google Ads and comparison sites, but CAC kept climbing as CPCs rose in finance terms. Organic signups were low, the site lacked topic depth, and the brand was absent from AI Overviews on high-intent money queries buyers now used before booking demos.
✕CAC had climbed to £214 while paid search CPCs were up 37% year over year;
✕Organic delivered only 19 signups per month against 80+ from paid channels;
✕Just 6 commercial keywords ranked in top-10 and only 3 in top-3;
✕Zero presence in AI Overviews despite buyers searching 23 target invoicing and cash-flow queries;
SOLUTION · 8 MONTHS
Topic authority for Google, structured answers for AI
We rebuilt the organic acquisition engine around real SME finance questions. The strategy combined commercial content clusters, citable data assets and on-page answer formatting so the site could rank in classic search and surface in AI-generated results.
WEEKS 1–2
Technical foundation
Fixed crawl waste, internal linking gaps and duplicate template issues; deployed Schema.org for Organization, SoftwareApplication, FAQPage and Article across key page types.
WEEKS 3–8
Content clusters
Built 4 pillar pages and 32 supporting articles around invoicing, late payments, cash flow and VAT; added comparison, pricing and use-case pages with extractable facts.
WEEKS 9–16
Digital PR assets
Produced a UK SME late-payment report with proprietary data, pitched finance media and earned 34 new referring domains from business publications and niche industry sites.
WEEKS 17–32
GEO/AEO layer
Added concise answer blocks, source-backed statistics, entity reinforcement and llms.txt; optimized 23 priority pages to improve inclusion in AI Overviews and LLM citations.
RESULT · 8 MONTHS
Organic became a scalable acquisition channel
| METRIC | BEFORE | AFTER | CHANGE |
|---|---|---|---|
| Organic signups / month | 19 | 80 | ×4.2 |
| Keywords in top-3 | 3 | 58 | +55 |
| AI Overviews appearances | 0 | 23 | NEW VISIBILITY |
| Customer acquisition cost | £214 | £83 | −61% |
| Organic sessions / month | 3,400 | 11,900 | +250% |
“We expected better rankings. We didn’t expect organic to cut CAC by 61% and start showing our brand inside AI Overviews for money queries that actually convert.”