From brand-only search to organic as the leading pipeline source
Meridian ranked for its own name and almost nothing else. Fourteen months later, organic outperformed paid — on a smaller total budget.
- Industry
- Fintech
- Year
- 2024 – 2025
- Duration
- 14 months
Client
Meridian Payroll
- Total organic sessions
- +184%Total organic sessions
- Non-brand keyword coverage
- 3.9×Non-brand keyword coverage
- Pipeline source by month 7
- #1Pipeline source by month 7
- Paid media spend over the same period
- −22%Paid media spend over the same period
Where they were starting from.
A 2022 platform migration had left 1,100 pages behind a set of malformed canonical tags. Non-brand organic traffic was effectively zero, and the team was compensating with an ad budget growing 18% per quarter. Meanwhile three smaller competitors with weaker products owned every comparison query in the category.
Four decisions that shaped the outcome.
- 01
Fix what was suppressing the site
The canonical audit alone recovered 780 indexable pages. Core Web Vitals and internal linking followed before a single new word was written.
- 02
Map intent to pages, not keywords to posts
Every term tied to a decision stage and a single owning page, eliminating the cannibalisation between eight near-identical blog posts.
- 03
Publish what only Meridian could publish
An annual payroll compliance dataset drawn from anonymised platform data earned 94 referring domains in its first quarter, including two trade publications.
- 04
Report against pipeline
Search Console joined to CRM data in BigQuery, so every keyword cluster carried a revenue figure rather than an impression count.
Organic overtook paid as Meridian's largest source of qualified pipeline in month seven and has widened the gap every quarter since, while total acquisition spend fell.
Built with
- Ahrefs
- Screaming Frog
- Search Console
- BigQuery
- Looker Studio
- Schema.org
Eleven months in, organic is our largest pipeline source. It overtook paid in month seven and the gap keeps widening — and our ad spend went down, not up.
Search Engine Optimisation
Technical foundations, content that answers real intent, and authority built the slow way — because that is the way that lasts.
Tell us where it hurts.
If any of this sounded familiar, the call is free and the advice is honest — even when the honest advice is that you do not need us.
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