Published
Feb 14, 2026
Category
SEO
Industry
Oil & Gas SaaS
Success Story – Oil & Gas SaaS Platform
Introduction
Trellis, a leading SaaS provider for the oil and gas industry, faced significant visibility challenges despite offering a high-demand platform. Partnering with SEOJetty for an 18-month engagement, the company sought to overcome technical debt and a fragmented content strategy. By prioritizing technical remediation and executing a high-authority backlink and content campaign, SEOJetty helped Trellis double its organic traffic and achieve dominant top-page rankings for highly competitive industry keywords, effectively repositioning their digital presence to match their market authority.
Client Overview
Trellis operates at the intersection of energy and technology. As a mid-market SaaS company based in the USA, they provide critical data management and transaction solutions for the oil and gas sector. Their suite of products—including Trellis Inform, Connect, Transact, and Datastore—digitizes the complex supply chain of natural gas and energy trading.
- Industry: Oil & Gas SaaS
- Target Audience: Energy infrastructure companies, gas marketers, and utility providers.
- Key Challenge: Translating complex, technical value propositions into search-friendly signals.
The Challenge
The primary friction point for Trellis was a disconnect between their product sophistication and their digital footprint. While their platform was industry-leading, their organic search presence was nearly nonexistent for non-branded terms.
The challenges were threefold:
- Technical Debt: The website suffered from underlying technical issues that hindered search engine crawlers from effectively indexing core product pages.
- Competitive Saturation: The energy SaaS sector is dominated by legacy players and agile startups. Trellis was losing market share on SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages) for high-intent keywords to competitors with inferior products but superior SEO strategies.
- Content Gap: The existing content was highly technical but lacked the strategic keyword targeting required to capture top-of-funnel traffic.
Goals & Success Metrics
The mandate was clear: transform the website from a digital brochure into a primary lead acquisition channel.
SMART Goals:
- Traffic: Double total organic traffic volume within 18 months.
- Visibility: Achieve Page 1 rankings for agreed-upon competitive industry keywords (e.g., “natural gas transaction management,” “energy data solutions”).
- Technical Health: Resolve critical site audit errors to achieve a Site Health Score of 90+ within the first 6 months.
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Strategy
To navigate the complex B2B energy landscape, SEOJetty avoided generic “volume-chasing” tactics. Instead, we deployed a “Technical-First, Authority-Second” strategy.
The Big Moves:
- Technical Foundation over Content Velocity: We hypothesized that producing new content would be futile if the site’s architecture couldn’t support it. We prioritized a heavy technical audit to clear “crawl budget” waste before drafting a single blog post.
- The “Power Page” Approach: Rather than churning out thin blog posts, we consolidated topic clusters into high-value assets. In the oil and gas sector, decision-makers require depth. We focused on long-form, authoritative content that could serve as link magnets.
- Surgical Link Acquisition: We targeted backlinks not just for domain authority (DA), but for topical relevance—securing mentions in energy trade publications and industrial tech journals to signal expertise to Google.
Execution
Phase 1: Diagnostics & Technical Remediation (Months 1–3)
The project began with a comprehensive marketing analysis and technical audit.
- Deliverables: Full Technical Audit, Backlink Profile Analysis, Competitor Keyword Gap Analysis.
- Action: We identified and fixed broken links, resolved duplicate content issues caused by improper canonical tags on product pages, and optimized site speed. We established a direct line of communication with Trellis’s internal dev team to prioritize these fixes in their sprint cycles.
Phase 2: Strategic Content Framework (Months 4–9)
With the technical foundation stable, we moved to content.
- Deliverables: Content Calendar, Keyword Research Strategy, 10 Core “Pillar” Pages.
- Action: We restructured the Trellis Insight and product pages. We rewrote metadata for all core product pages (Inform, Connect, Transact) to align with high-intent search queries. We launched a series of technical articles addressing specific industry pain points (e.g., “NAESB contract management compliance”).
Phase 3: Authority Building & Optimization (Months 10–18)
The final phase focused on velocity and authority.
- Deliverables: ongoing link-building campaigns, monthly performance reporting, CRO (Conversion Rate Optimization) suggestions.
- Action: We executed a targeted outreach campaign to earn backlinks from reputable energy sector directories and news outlets. Simultaneously, we monitored SERP volatility and adjusted on-page density for keywords that were hovering on Page 2, pushing them to Page 1.
Measurement & Attribution
Success was measured strictly through data-driven attribution models, ensuring we separated brand-search growth from non-brand growth.
- Tools Used: Google Analytics 4 (traffic volume and user behavior), Google Search Console (clicks and impressions), SEMrush/Ahrefs (keyword rankings and backlink health).
- Attribution Note: We tracked “Organic Traffic” specifically excluding branded terms (e.g., “Trellis Energy”) to ensure our strategy was capturing new market demand, not just returning visitors.
Results
Over the course of the 18-month collaboration, the data confirmed the strategy’s efficacy.
- Organic Traffic: Doubled (100% increase) compared to the baseline period.
- Keyword Rankings: Secured Top 3 positions for high-value terms related to “gas transaction software” and “energy logistics platforms.”
- Market Penetration: Significant increase in visibility for Trellis Transact and Trellis Connect product pages, moving them from Page 4+ to Page 1.
- Technical Health: Reduced critical crawl errors to near-zero, ensuring rapid indexing of new content.
The Turning Point
Around Month 6, progress stalled. Despite technical fixes, rankings for “energy transaction management” were stuck on Page 2.
The Pivot: We realized that while the technical SEO was sound, the user intent signal was weak. The existing pages were too sales-heavy and lacked the informational depth Google prefers for complex B2B queries.
We pivoted the strategy to create “Bridge Content”—comprehensive guides that explained the problem (transaction complexity) before selling the solution (Trellis). We worked with Trellis’s subject matter experts to inject real industry data into these guides. Within 60 days of publishing this enriched content, the primary keywords broke into the Top 5.
Lessons Learned
- Dev Team Alignment is Non-Negotiable: In SaaS, marketing cannot work in a silo. Success was only possible because we integrated SEO tickets into the engineering team’s Jira sprints.
- Relevance Beats Volume: In the Oil & Gas niche, 100 visitors from high-intent searches are worth more than 10,000 visitors from broad searches. Narrowing our keyword focus actually improved lead quality.
- Patience Pays in B2B: The “stalled” period in Month 6 is normal for competitive industries. Reacting with panic would have ruined the strategy; staying the course with a content pivot yielded the long-term win.
What’s Next
With the organic traffic goal met, the next 90 days focus on conversion optimization and expansion.
- CRO Audit: Analyzing user behavior on high-traffic blog pages to increase “Book a Demo” click-through rates.
- New Clusters: Expanding content coverage into adjacent verticals, specifically focusing on renewable energy transition data management.
- Retaining Authority: Initiating a “link reclamation” project to ensure all external mentions of Trellis point to the correct, updated product URLs.
About SEOJetty
SEOJetty is a premier B2B digital marketing agency specializing in turning complex SaaS platforms into market leaders. We don’t just drive traffic; we build the technical and content infrastructure that powers sustainable growth.
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