Campaign context
- High-ticket service - roughly $10K revenue per client.
- Competitive space - DA55 to DA75 sites held the top spots.
- Consistent output - 12 placements published monthly.
Case Study
Increase Organic & AI Visibility
Six months of flat organic growth and no AI search visibility. A 12-month authority campaign delivered top Google rankings and AI search citations.
Campaign Snapshot
B2B Career Development Brand
Authority campaign run over a full year.
Contextual backlinks secured through monthly placements.
Average Moz Domain Authority across placements.
Monthly Google organic visits increased from 7,000 to 25,000.
Tracked AI answer prompts referenced the brand by Month 12.
Monthly organic conversions increased from 68 to 186.
Case Narrative
The campaign brief in context.
Client Profile
A B2B provider with untapped organic demand.
The client is a mid-sized B2B provider of bespoke career development services. Their site was well designed, conversion-focused and technically optimised, but they relied mainly on referral partners and PPC before the campaign.
Objective
Lift organic and AI search visibility.
With organic growth flat for six months and no AI search visibility, the campaign was provisioned to lift organic sessions to the sales page by at least 200%, generate consistent AI answer-engine citations and produce more enterprise demo requests.
Strategy
Sustain a monthly authority cadence.
Rank Engine published 12 relevance-matched placements each month, featuring fresh industry insights and contextual brand mentions. High-authority sites with strong traffic and clean link profiles were prioritised, using a 30-day drip-feed schedule.
Research Foundation
Evidence behind the campaign.
Princeton GEO Findings
Princeton's GEO research found that adding expert quotations, statistics and authoritative citations can materially improve AI-search visibility, with a reported 37% uplift on Perplexity.ai.
SERP Correlation Study
Ahrefs analysed one million US keyword SERPs and found referring-domain count still correlates with rankings, with a reported Spearman rho of about 0.255.
Backlinks' Monthly Gain vs. Ranking
Search Engine Land reported that top-ranked pages acquire 5-14% more followed backlinks per month than lower-ranked pages, reinforcing consistent acquisition velocity.
Order Setup
Turn campaign direction into a clear brief.
Rank Engine turned monthly campaign planning into one focused order. Audience filters, content exclusions and Smart Select criteria kept research, content and site selection aligned with the client's positioning.
Branded
The brand was integrated as a real-world example within editorial and thought-leadership articles.
30-day drip-feed
A slower cadence gave high-authority publishers time to accept and publish while Google discovered links week by week.
Primary market context
News, facts, statistics and quotes were focused around the client's area of operations.
Clear brand positioning
Excluded contexts prevented brand confusion and kept mentions aligned with the client's enterprise market.
Smart Select™
Relevance, traffic, backlink health and authority were balanced to support rankings and visibility rather than a DA number alone.
Global TLD mix
Authoritative .com sites were balanced with niche .us placements where they supported relevance.
Editorial Strategy
The editorial strategy behind the campaign.
The campaign needed a varied mix of articles that could attract attention on publisher sites, reinforce topical relevance and give search and AI systems clearer third-party context about the brand.
Problem-led articles
Start with buyer pain
Angles focused on career-growth problems, leadership decisions and enterprise talent challenges where the brand could appear as a relevant example.
Market trends
Tie the brand to live demand
Industry change, workplace trends and hiring-market shifts gave the articles timely context beyond a static service description.
Expert commentary
Add citable perspective
Quotes, practical viewpoints and experience-led commentary helped the content read like a source, not a generic placement.
Comparison topics
Clarify category choices
Comparison-led angles helped readers understand options, tradeoffs and evaluation criteria while keeping the brand mention natural.
Informational guides
Build topical association
Guide-style articles supported category relevance around the target pages without making every placement a direct sales story.
Campaign strategy
Make each placement support the outcome.
The campaign built authority at two levels: strengthening the domain as a whole while directing more support towards the commercial pages with the greatest ranking opportunity.
Publisher relevance
Place links where the brand belonged
Publisher prospects across business, HR, leadership, workplace and career-development publications were assessed for relevance alongside traffic, authority and backlink health. This kept placements credible to readers and connected each backlink to the client's subject area.
Domain foundation
Build a site-wide authority base
Branded homepage anchors established natural domain-level support and distributed authority beyond a single sales URL. This gave the wider site a stronger foundation as the campaign progressed.
Commercial priority
Back the highest-value service page
The primary service page received a larger share of links because it faced the strongest keyword competition and offered the clearest commercial upside.
Portfolio balance
Support secondary targets proportionately
Secondary and third-priority pages received support according to their value and competition. This avoided spreading links evenly across every URL or concentrating the entire campaign on one page.
Placement logic
Make authority compound across the site
Over 12 months, branded homepage links strengthened domain context while targeted links supported the pages most likely to generate qualified traffic and conversions. The balance kept the backlink profile natural without diluting effort across every URL equally.
Results
The outcome in measurable terms.
Over 12 months, monthly organic traffic increased from 7,000 to 25,000 and monthly conversions rose from 68 to 186. AI visibility shifted from zero tracked citations to being referenced in 88% of tracked AI search prompts.
Key Takeaways
What the campaign proves.
Sustained visibility momentum
Strategic, relevance-led link building delivered a 257% traffic increase and secured Top 3 rankings for key product pages.
AI search visibility surge
The brand moved from absent in AI-generated results to cited in 88% of tracked queries.
Commercial impact delivered
Conversions grew from 68 to 186 per month, proving the traffic was commercially valuable.
Start a Campaign
Build visibility that search and AI systems can cite.
Set the campaign direction and Rank Engine manages the placements that help your brand become easier to find, trust and recommend.
