Grapelight was approached by a B2B software platform that was referred to us. They were operating in the competitive SaaS market and were struggling to reach their early-stage buyers that were in the research stages of their purchasing journey. Their paid campaigns were generating leads, but their visibility was limited when it came to branded terms, with only a small number of feature-based keywords. With more buyers relying on voice and comparison-based searches, influenced by AI-generated summaries, the business was desperate to boost their discovery during the research and evaluation stages, while reducing their reliance on paid advertising to reduce their marketing budget.

Our team conducted a comprehensive audit to identify what our client needed. It was clear that a blended SEO and GEO strategy that would improve early-stage discovery, while boosting long-term visibility. Our team focused on restructuring their web pages to clearly explain problems solved, implementation considerations, and business outcomes, while aligning with how buyers research software solutions online. 

We also created comprehensive comparison and alternative content, which helps to capture evaluation searches. We then improved their internal linking structure to connect these pages to core solution hubs, improving user navigation, while making it easier for search engines to discover all their pages. While working on this, we focused on improving their technical SEO, ensuring that search engine crawlers could crawl their pages efficiently, indexing their content at scale, all within their crawl budget.

We then focused on their GEO with content being refined to improve semantic clarity, and improve its potential for summaries. We restructured their pages with clear explanations and concise definitions, combined with contextual framing, and implementing schema markup to boost visibility. This helped to improve their suitability for AI-generated summaries and answers. 

We constantly tracked their online visibility for traditional rankings and AI-driven discovery, measuring their performance through assisted conversions and brand discovery, rather than relying on click attribution only. 

Results were seen within eight months, as the platform started achieving improvements in visibility and high quality leads. The client's organic visibility increased by close to 70% with many pages achieving first page rankings for comparison queries. There was also a significant improvement in their organic website traffic, which increased by over 65%, which was predominantly driven by high quality, and comprehensive evaluation-stage content. 

At the same time, the client saw improvements from assisted conversions from organic search, which increased to just shy of 60%. This indicated that SEO was contributing much earlier in the buyer journey, rather than being a last-touch interaction. There were also reports from the platforms sales teams, who were reporting that leads were high quality and had a clear understanding of their products uses and fit.

The implementation of GEO showed improved brand references in AI-generated summaries for software comparisons, which supported their discovery, helping the client remain visibility in today's zero-click search landscape.

With an improvement in organic visibility, paid advertising costs were reduced without impacting volume. They experienced a 25% reduction in blended cost per lead, saving them money, while ensuring they continued to acquire high quality leads that they could convert. This strategy positioned this B2B software platform for continued and sustainable growth, as AI-driven search becomes more established.

Overall, this case study demonstrates that a blended strategy of SEO and GEO is effected in boosting visibility in the early-stage of a buyers journey when it comes to B2B software platforms.