What Made SEO Finally Work For This B2B Firm

Background: a pipeline problem, not a traffic problem

In this case study, the client is a B2B cybersecurity consulting firm serving mid-market and enterprise IT teams across the US, Canada, and the UK. Average contract value was about $80k per year, sales cycles ran 4-7 months, and marketing leaned heavily on outbound, paid LinkedIn, and a handful of industry events.

Revenue sat in the ~$80k-$120k MRR band for almost a year. Paid budgets kept climbing, but pipeline did not rise with them. What was at risk was not just growth - it was confidence in marketing as a predictable lever.

“We tried SEO before, and it never tied back to revenue.”

This time, the CEO wanted the opposite of a black box: clean reporting, clear ownership, and a visible line from SEO work to CRM outcomes - without creating extra operational work for his team. (If you are building similar leadership reporting, Board-ready dashboards: what to include and why is a useful reference.)

Results at a glance (12-18 months)

A few points matter for interpretation. “Revenue influenced by organic” reflects closed-won deals where organic search was recorded somewhere in the journey (first-touch or assist, depending on the opportunity’s tracked touchpoints in the CRM). It is not the same as saying SEO “caused” every deal, but it does show organic becoming a consistent contributor to pipeline and revenue.

The biggest shifts were:

• Organic sessions grew ~216% in 12 months
• Organic-sourced opportunities increased about 3.4x
• Blended cost per lead dropped as paid spend was reduced and the mix shifted

The approach: scaling SEO without scaling chaos

Before this project, growth depended on three levers: outbound SDRs, paid social, and events. Over time, cost per opportunity crept up each quarter, and the team felt exposed to auction volatility and channel saturation. The goal was not “rank for more keywords.” It was to build an inbound engine that would grow without ballooning CAC or adding internal workload.

I anchored the program around three pillars, all framed in operational terms (what changes, who it helps, and how it shows up in pipeline):

1) Technical foundation for protection and quick wins

I prioritized crawl accessibility, speed, indexation hygiene, and measurement gaps so existing demand capture was not leaking - and so improvements could show up quickly on high-intent pages. For teams that want a practical framework for tying content and SEO work to pipeline outcomes, Measure content’s impact beyond last-click pairs well with this step.

2) Revenue-focused content mapped to the sales cycle

Instead of chasing volume, I mapped page priorities to real sales conversations: service pages, industry pages, and objection-handling content that sales teams repeatedly revisit in calls. This is the same logic behind Next-Gen SEO Content Planning & Keyword Matrix - A Free Airtable Template, which helps keep execution organized as the footprint grows.

3) Authority built from real expertise (not generic promotion)

I elevated consultant-led insights, real incident patterns, and use-case depth - because in cybersecurity, credibility is part of conversion, not just ranking. On the enterprise side, the same principle shows up in broader programs like SEO strategies for enterprise-level engagements, where expertise and trust signals have to scale alongside content.

This structure also reduced friction with leadership. It made it clear what would happen first, what would compound later, and which metrics would confirm the strategy was working.

Traffic growth that meant something: intent buckets and pipeline impact

Traffic only mattered here if it arrived with commercial intent - or if it reliably assisted conversion in long deal cycles. To keep focus, I tracked performance through three intent buckets aligned to how buyers searched.

Bottom-of-funnel service pages (for example, “managed SOC services,” “incident response retainer,” “PCI compliance assessment”). These pages produced a disproportionate share of demos relative to their traffic. Over 12 months, service-page traffic lifted significantly and drove roughly 62% of organic demo requests. If you are optimizing for booked conversations (not just form fills), this ties closely to seo for b2b product demos.

Solution and industry pages (for example, “cybersecurity for healthcare providers,” “cloud security for SaaS platforms”). These tended to be the first touch for larger accounts and buying committees, especially when internal teams were researching vendors before contacting sales. (For a deeper breakdown of how these pages are structured, see b2b industry pages seo strategy.)

Problem-aware guides (for example, “how to respond to a ransomware attack”). These posts did not always convert on the first visit, but they supported assisted conversions - especially when paired with strong internal linking to service and industry pages. In practice, long-tail and low-volume queries did a lot of the heavy lifting here, which is why How to Work With Zero Search Volume Keywords - A Process for Finding & Leveraging Low to No-Volume SEO Keywords is often relevant in B2B services.

What made the difference was not just publishing more pages. It was fixing discoverability and internal paths so high-value pages were easier to reach (for both humans and crawlers), then building topic depth so the site earned visibility across clusters instead of isolated keywords. (If you want the operational system behind that compounding effect, b2b topic cluster strategy maps it out clearly.)

Lead quality improvements (the part most case studies skip)

Volume was only half the story. Lead quality improved in measurable ways that changed how sales viewed inbound.

Before SEO, about 38% of inbound leads matched the sales team’s target definition (industry fit + company size). After 12 months, about 71% of organic leads met that ICP definition. That shift mattered because it reduced time wasted on poor-fit demos and improved late-stage conversion.

Organic also correlated with stronger deal economics. Average deal value across all channels sat around ~$76k per year, while average deal value from organic leads rose to about ~$102k per year after Month 12. Close rate from organic SQLs was ~29% versus ~18% from outbound, and sales cycles for organic deals ran about ~15% shorter on average - largely because prospects arrived better educated (and had often read multiple pages before converting).

Two patterns kept repeating in CRM notes: prospects referencing specific pages in calls and internal sharing of guides before the first meeting. In a high-trust category like cybersecurity, that pre-sale education function is often what turns “interest” into “a real buying process.”

Timeline: what the CEO saw, and when

The question I hear most from B2B leaders is about timing - less “how SEO works” and more “when will I see proof it’s working?”

Here’s how it unfolded in phases:

The key expectation-setting point: early wins came from fixing and strengthening what already existed (high-intent pages with latent demand). Compounding growth came later from depth, coverage, and authority. Operationally, this is easiest to maintain with a continuous improvement cadence, similar to The Agile SEO Framework - Building a Continuous Improvement Machine for SEO.

What held up after 18-24 months

This story did not stop at Month 12. By Month 18 and beyond, the system stabilized rather than reverting.

By the ~24-month mark, the site sustained ~30k+ monthly organic sessions while keeping lead quality high. Organic continued to contribute around half of new opportunities, and ICP-fit stayed above ~70% of organic leads even as the company tested slightly smaller segments.

The team also made strategic moves that built on the same foundation: expanding location and regional pages for new markets (starting with the UK and DACH), publishing deeper incident and research-style assets that attracted references, and implementing structured data on key pages to improve how listings appeared in search.

Operationally, the biggest downstream effect was budget flexibility. Underperforming paid campaigns were reduced, and the company was less exposed to auction swings and event calendar variability. For additional proof points outside this cybersecurity example, Big Leap’s Case Studies hub is a solid reference, including B2B conversion-focused wins like 104% Increase in Conversions and security-adjacent growth like 105% Increase in Organic Sessions.

What I’d take from this if I ran a B2B service company

• Pipeline attribution beats rankings-only reporting. I only trusted progress when demos, opportunities, and closed-won motion showed up consistently in the CRM - alongside clear definitions of what “influenced” meant.
• High-intent pages do most of the revenue work. Blog growth helps, but service and industry pages typically carry the highest conversion leverage in high-ticket B2B.
• Quick wins come from removing friction, not chasing shortcuts. Fixing technical barriers and strengthening proven pages produced earlier proof than net-new content alone.
• Lead quality is a strategy choice. Targeting ICP problems and industries intentionally changed who raised their hand - not just how many did.
• SEO will not fix a broken offer, but it can stabilize growth. When the fundamentals are strong, SEO can turn search from a guessing game into a durable, compounding demand channel.