Published
Feb 12, 2026
Category
SEO
Industry
SaaS (Cybersecurity platform)
Success Story – Cybersecurity SaaS
Introduction
Between August 2021 and August 2022, SEOJetty partnered with Balbix to overhaul their organic search visibility. Despite housing valuable industry resources, the cybersecurity SaaS company suffered from stagnant organic traffic that limited pipeline growth. By executing a phased technical SEO audit, an expert-driven content optimization strategy, and highly targeted B2B link-building, we achieved our primary objectives within the 12-month timeline. The campaign resulted in a 100% increase in organic traffic and secured top-tier search rankings for highly competitive, high-intent cybersecurity terms.
Client Overview
- Client Name: Balbix
- Location: San Jose, California, USA
- Company Size: Mid-market (100-250 employees)
- Industry: SaaS (Cybersecurity platform)
- Business Model: B2B
- Target Audience: Enterprise and mid-market companies (specifically Chief Information Security Officers and IT Directors) requiring advanced cybersecurity risk management.
Flagship Product: Balbix Security Cloud, a platform dedicated to cybersecurity risk quantification and proactive posture management.
The Challenge
The B2B cybersecurity market is fiercely competitive, dominated by legacy brands with massive digital footprints and high domain authority. In August 2021, Balbix possessed a well-designed website and a repository of highly valuable, technically accurate resources. However, their search visibility remained disproportionately low.
The internal marketing team was struggling to boost organic presence, creating a bottleneck for revenue opportunities. The primary obstacles included:
- Technical Suppressions: Underlying infrastructure issues were preventing search engines from properly crawling and indexing the site’s most valuable pages.
- Content Complexity: Balbix’s product is highly technical. Generic SEO content would not resonate with an audience of CISOs. The content needed to be expert-level, yet optimized effectively for search algorithms.
- Market Saturation: Ranking for core cybersecurity terms required overcoming established competitors with significantly larger marketing budgets and historical backlink profiles.
Goals & Success Metrics
The engagement was driven by strict, SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, Time-bound) objectives designed to impact the bottom line directly.
- Primary Goal 1: Double overall organic website traffic within exactly 12 months (August 2021 to August 2022).
- Primary Goal 2: Achieve top search engine positions (Page 1) for a targeted basket of highly competitive, high-intent cybersecurity terms.
- Success Metrics: * Organic user sessions (measured via GA4).
- 1. Keyword ranking positions for primary commercial terms.
- 2.Domain authority growth (measured via backlink acquisition rate).
Strategy
Our strategy was rooted in a fundamental SEO principle: never build an acquisition engine on a broken foundation. We sequenced our approach to prioritize immediate technical roadblocks before scaling content and authority.
The “Big Moves” & Rationale:
- Move 1: Infrastructure Overhaul Before Content Scaling. * Tradeoff: We delayed the launch of new content by four weeks to focus strictly on technical SEO.
- Rationale: Pumping new content onto a site with crawl errors and duplicate pages yields diminishing returns. Fixing the technical foundation ensures every new piece of content has maximum ranking potential from day one.
- Move 2: Subject Matter Expert (SME) Driven Content Optimization. * Tradeoff: We opted for lower-volume, high-quality content production rather than high-volume, generic content.
- Rationale: In B2B cybersecurity, trust is paramount. High-volume, shallow content might generate low-quality traffic, but it fails to convert enterprise decision-makers. We focused on optimizing existing, highly technical assets and creating in-depth, expert-level resources that match the search intent of a CISO.
- Move 3: Quality-First Link Building. * Tradeoff: We prioritized securing a handful of links from high-authority cybersecurity and tech publications over mass directory submissions.
- Rationale: Search engines weigh relevance and authority heavily in the cybersecurity niche (Your Money or Your Life – YMYL guidelines). High-quality contextual links move the needle on competitive terms far more effectively than sheer volume.
Execution
The 12-month campaign was divided into distinct, measurable phases to ensure steady progress and allow for agile adjustments.
Phase 1: Diagnostic & Quick Wins (August 2021 – September 2021)
- Quick Wins Audit: We conducted a surface-level analysis to identify immediate roadblocks. This included fixing broken internal links and optimizing meta titles for high-impression, low-click pages.
- In-Depth Technical Audit: We ran comprehensive crawls to diagnose structural issues.
- Deliverables: Resolved extensive 404 error loops, implemented canonical tags to consolidate duplicate pages, and optimized XML sitemaps to prioritize the Balbix Security Cloud product pages.
Phase 2: Strategy Formulation & Keyword Mapping (October 2021 – November 2021)
- Advanced Keyword Research: We moved beyond high-difficulty vanity metrics, identifying long-tail, high-intent queries (e.g., “cybersecurity risk quantification software” rather than just “cybersecurity”).
- On-Site Strategy: We mapped specific keywords to existing product and resource pages, ensuring no keyword cannibalization occurred across the domain.
Phase 3: Content Optimization & Creation (December 2021 – April 2022)
- Historical Optimization: We took Balbix’s existing “valuable resources” that were buried in search results, restructured their headings, improved keyword density naturally, and updated the technical data to reflect 2022 standards.
- Net-New Content: Our writers collaborated closely with Balbix’s internal product team to produce high-quality, long-form content addressing the specific pain points of mid-market IT directors.
- Deliverables: 12 comprehensive technical guides and optimized landing pages for core platform features.
Phase 4: Off-Site Authority Building (Ongoing: January 2022 – August 2022)
- Link-Building Strategy: We launched targeted outreach campaigns to authoritative industry blogs, tech news outlets, and cybersecurity hubs.
- Deliverables: Secured high-impact contextual backlinks pointing directly to the newly optimized Balbix Security Cloud product pages, significantly boosting domain authority.
Phase 5: Monitoring & Iteration (Ongoing)
- Performance Monitoring: Conducted bi-weekly reviews of Google Analytics 4 (GA4) and rank tracking tools. We adjusted meta descriptions and internal linking structures based on real-time click-through rate (CTR) data.
Measurement & Attribution
Data integrity was crucial for validating the campaign’s ROI to Balbix’s leadership team.
- Primary Tracking: We utilized Google Analytics 4 (GA4) to track organic session growth, user engagement, and traffic sources.
- Keyword Monitoring: Enterprise-grade SEO tools were used to monitor daily fluctuations in search engine results pages (SERPs) for our targeted keyword clusters.
- Attribution Limitations: The B2B cybersecurity sales cycle is notoriously long (often 6–12 months) and involves multiple touchpoints (dark social, direct sales, organic search). While we could accurately track the surge in organic traffic and lead-capture events (demo requests, whitepaper downloads), attributing closed-won revenue to a single organic search interaction requires complex multi-touch attribution models, limiting 1:1 revenue reporting in the short term.
Results
The 12-month engagement strictly met its defining goals, turning a technically constrained website into a high-performing organic acquisition channel.
| Metric | Baseline (August 2021) | Result (August 2022) | Impact |
|---|---|---|---|
| Organic Traffic | Baseline established | Doubled (+100%) | Significantly expanded the top-of-funnel pipeline. |
| Keyword Rankings | Low visibility for core terms | Top positions secured | Achieved Page 1 rankings for highly competitive cybersecurity risk terms. |
| Brand Visibility | Underperforming | High | Streamlined website architecture drove sustained traffic growth. |
| Pipeline Revenue | Long B2B sales cycles limit immediate closed-won attribution reporting. |
The Turning Point
By month four (November 2021), we experienced a critical turning point that accelerated our timeline. The in-depth technical audit revealed that duplicate content and extensive 404 errors were severely diluting Balbix’s crawl budget. Search engines were essentially getting lost before they could index the high-value content.
Once we deployed the technical fixes (canonicals and 404 resolutions), we noticed an immediate, dramatic spike in SERP impressions for Balbix’s existing resources. Because the technical roadblocks were removed, the search engines finally recognized the value of the historical content. This allowed us to pivot our strategy: instead of waiting for net-new content to gain traction, we shifted resources to aggressively optimize and interlink the newly indexed historical assets, doubling organic traffic weeks ahead of our initial projections.
Lessons Learned
- Technical Debt Suppresses Great Content: Even the most authoritative, expert-level content will fail to rank if the website’s underlying technical architecture prevents search engines from crawling it efficiently.
- Subject Matter Expertise is a Moat: In the cybersecurity SaaS space, generic content is a wasted investment. Combining SEO best practices with deep subject matter expertise is the only way to rank for YMYL (Your Money or Your Life) topics.
- Historical Optimization Yields the Fastest ROI: Updating, restructuring, and technically optimizing existing assets often drives traffic faster than creating new pages from scratch.
- Alignment Speeds Up Execution: Close collaboration with Balbix’s internal product team ensured technical accuracy in our content, reducing revision cycles and accelerating time-to-market.
What’s Next
With the foundational traffic goals achieved, the next 90 days will shift focus from top-of-funnel traffic generation to bottom-of-funnel conversion.
- Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO): We will analyze user behavior on the highest-traffic pages to optimize calls-to-action (CTAs), aiming to increase the percentage of organic visitors requesting a Balbix Security Cloud demo.
- Content Gap Analysis: We will target secondary keyword clusters related to emerging cybersecurity compliance regulations to capture niche, high-intent traffic.
- Internal Link Sculpting: Further refining the site’s architecture to funnel newly acquired domain authority directly toward high-converting landing pages.
About SEOJetty + CTA
SEOJetty is an award-winning digital marketing company specializing in B2B search engine optimization. We partner with mid-market and enterprise SaaS companies to build predictable, data-driven organic growth engines that outpace the competition. We don’t rely on guesswork; we rely on technical rigor, deep industry research, and measurable execution.
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