SaaS / B2B
-41% CPL, +18% MRR contribution
Professional Services
+340% organic traffic in 6 months
Meridian Advisory — +340% organic traffic via SEO
The challenge
Meridian Advisory had a well-regarded practice and a growing referral base. Their Google Ads account was working in the narrow sense — calls were coming in — but the cost per lead had crept up 60% over 18 months as their target keywords got more competitive. The managing partner knew the reliance on paid search was a structural risk and had been meaning to "do something about SEO" for two years.
When we ran the initial audit, the site was a seven-year-old WordPress installation with 22 pages and a domain authority sitting at 31 — genuinely competitive for a specialist accounting practice. The technical picture was mixed. Core Web Vitals were failing on mobile, driven by an unoptimised hero image served without lazy loading or modern format compression. Crawl coverage was patchy: the site had a robots.txt disallowing several directories that contained indexable content, and the XML sitemap hadn't been regenerated since a URL migration 18 months prior, so it was referencing 404s.
The bigger issue was structural. The service pages were each 200-300 words of generic copy — the kind of text that describes what the service is without ever engaging with the specific questions a prospective client would have before making contact. There was no blog, no FAQ content, no resource library. The site had a few inbound links from directory listings and a single media mention from 2022, but nothing systematic.
AI Overviews had begun appearing for a handful of Meridian's target queries, which the principal had interpreted as a reason to give up on SEO. We took the opposite view: AI Overviews typically pull from pages that rank well organically and have strong structured data. If you're not ranking, you're not being cited. The play was to rank first, then show up in the Overview.
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What we did
Technical work ran for the first three weeks in parallel with content planning, because there's no point publishing new content to a site Google can't crawl properly.
The crawl audit identified 34 indexation errors, including a mix of soft 404s (pages returning 200 status with "no results" content), redirect chains of three or more hops inherited from past URL changes, and a canonical tag misconfiguration that was telling Google the homepage was the preferred URL for several service pages. We worked through the fix list in priority order: canonical tags first (highest impact on existing pages), then redirect chain cleanup, then the robots.txt amendment, then sitemap regeneration.
Core Web Vitals work was handled in a focused sprint: hero images converted to WebP and served with explicit width/height attributes (CLS fix), lazy loading enabled on below-fold images, and a caching layer added that had been missing entirely. LCP on the homepage moved from "failing" to "passing" in Google's assessment.
Content strategy was built around a gap analysis against the 40+ topic clusters we'd mapped. The existing service pages became the pillar layer — each was rewritten to 1,200-1,800 words, incorporating the specific questions and language patterns we found in keyword research. Supporting articles (600-1,000 words each) were planned around long-tail queries: "what to expect from a business accountant", "how much does an accounting firm cost in Sydney", "bookkeeper vs accountant — which do I need". These intercept the research phase of someone who is six weeks away from making a buying decision.
Each supporting article linked back to its pillar page using anchor text built from the primary keyword cluster. We also added breadcrumb navigation site-wide and implemented BreadcrumbList schema, which strengthens the URL hierarchy signal Google uses when crawling.
Schema was implemented in two passes. First pass: LocalBusiness + ProfessionalService at the site level, FAQPage on each service page (using real FAQs drawn from the client's intake process). Second pass: Person schema for the three named advisors on the team, each with a sameAs link to their LinkedIn profile.
Link earning ran on a six-week cycle: identify a newsworthy angle from Meridian's actual work (an emerging tax rule change, a trend affecting SMB cashflow), pitch regional business and industry media, deliver a bylined piece or expert comment, secure a dofollow link from the publication. Over the first quarter, six placements landed from relevant, authoritative domains. That's how this works.
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The results
Month one and two were quiet, which we'd told Meridian to expect. Technical fixes get crawled and re-indexed on Google's schedule, not ours. Month three, the first cluster of service-page rankings moved into the top ten. Month four, two pillar pages broke into the top three for their primary commercial terms. Month five, the phone rang from someone who had found the firm through organic search — no referral, no ad.
By month six, the full picture:
Organic sessions had grown from roughly 2,400/month to 8,400/month — a 340% increase. Meridian now held 14 top-three rankings for commercial-intent queries (up from 1 at the start of the engagement, which was their own brand name). Paid search spend was reduced by 28% because a meaningful portion of the enquiry volume that had been coming through Google Ads was now arriving organically at zero incremental cost per click. In month six, we were able to attribute $47,000 in new client revenue directly to organic-search-initiated enquiries, tracked via the contact form's hidden UTM capture.
By month five, two of Meridian's service pages were being cited in AI Overviews for their primary commercial queries. Getting cited isn't guaranteed and we don't promise it — but ranking well and having clean structured data is the prerequisite, and those were now in place.
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> "We'd been told SEO takes 12 months to show anything and not to expect much. What actually happened was we started ranking for things our clients actually search, and by month five we were getting enquiries we couldn't attribute to anything else — no referral, no ad. That was new for us." > > — Claire B., Managing Partner, Meridian Advisory ---
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