Apporto has a strong product, a real customer base across universities and enterprises, but when we started collaboration their organic search presence was contributing almost nothing to their pipeline.
Every deal was coming through outbound, partnerships, or paid acquisition. Content existed on their site, but there was no real system behind it, and the numbers made that obvious.
If I’m being honest: a lot of SaaS companies are in exactly this position. Revenue is real, the business is growing, and organic is the channel everyone agrees should be part of the picture but never quite gets the attention it needs. Apporto wasn’t doing anything wrong but just hadn’t built the system yet.
When we pulled the data at the start of the engagement, here is what we were looking at:
The impressions number is worth pausing on. 2.66M impressions means Google was showing Apporto’s pages to a lot of people. The problem wasn’t invisibility, it was that the content wasn’t positioned well enough to earn the click once it showed up.
That was a strategy problem and throwing more content at it without fixing the strategy first would have made very little difference.
Apporto needed someone to take over the content operation entirely. Not to consult on what they should do and leave them to figure out the execution but to own it.
That meant building the keyword and content strategy from scratch, running the full production system from brief to published piece, aligning every piece of content to where their buyers actually are in the decision process, and layering in AI search optimization to build a presence in the places their buyers are increasingly looking before they ever reach a search results page.
Before we wrote anything, we audited what existed, mapped out how Apporto’s buyers actually research and make decisions, and built a keyword architecture around three layers: awareness, consideration, and decision.
Most of the content that was already on the site was either too generic to rank for anything meaningful or too product-focused to reach a buyer who didn’t already know Apporto existed. There was almost nothing in between, which is exactly where the most valuable content lives.
Getting the architecture right before touching production is the part most agencies skip, or rush through because the client wants to see output. It is also the part that determines whether the content that follows compounds or just accumulates.
Every piece was written to a brief, optimized before it went live, and built with internal linking in mind so the authority we were building in one place could flow to the pages that mattered most. We also went back to existing content that had ranking potential but wasn’t performing, and fixed it rather than leaving it to sit while we only worked on new pieces.
This is the part most SaaS companies are not thinking about yet, and honestly, the window to get ahead of it is still open but it is not going to stay open indefinitely. Buyers are asking ChatGPT questions before they open a browser tab.
They are reading Google AI Overviews before they click a single result. We structured Apporto’s content to show up in those answers across ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, AI Mode, and Gemini. That is not something that happens automatically from good SEO. It requires thinking about content differently from the start.
Here is what the data looked like after six months, compared to the six months before we started:
| Metric | Before | After | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| Total Clicks | 16,800 | 35,000 | +108% |
| Total Impressions | 2.66M | 5.58M | +110% |
| Average Position | 27.3 | 10.5 | Page 3 to Page 1 |
| AI Search Mentions | 0 | 517 | New channel built |
| AI Cited Pages | 0 | 1,100+ | New channel built |
Clicks more than doubled. Impressions more than doubled. Average position moved from page 3 to page 1. And Apporto now has 517 AI search mentions and over 1,100 cited pages across the major AI platforms, while most of their competitors have not started building for that channel yet.
The position improvement is probably the number that matters most here, because it reflects a structural change rather than a temporary spike. Moving from an average position of 27 to 10 means the content is consistently showing up in places where people actually click, not just appearing somewhere on page 3 and getting ignored.
Organic went from a channel that existed in name only to one that is actively generating inbound traffic and building pipeline contributions without requiring additional paid spend. This change does not happen from publishing more content but from building the right system first and then running it consistently.
“[Awaiting quote from Mike, Head of Marketing at Apporto]”
