International SEO · SaaS SEO · Link Building

PocketSmith - from #29 to Top 5 in the US for ‘personal finance software’

Taking a New Zealand SaaS into the world’s most competitive finance market and outranking Apple, Microsoft and Intuit on their home turf.

PocketSmith

International SEO · SaaS SEO · Link Building

The Challenge

PocketSmith, starting from home base in Dunedin, were already dominant in search rankings in New Zealand and steadily gaining ground in Australia. The challenge they came to me with was establishing the same foothold in organic rankings in international markets, particularly the US. This required making smart use of their SEO budget to catch up to and ultimately outrank results from websites like Apple.com, Microsoft.com, Intuit.com and Reddit.

+30k

Monthly Organic Visitors

Between May 2023 and May 2024

In a 12 month period PocketSmith’s organic search traffic grew by approximately 30,000 visitors per month - a roughly 60% increase on a well established baseline.

Top 5 US

On ‘personal finance software’ Globally

Despite tough, long-term entrenched competition with substantial budgets, we were able to reach the top 5 for ‘personal finance software’ in the US market.

333:1

Ratio Of Organic Traffic Value To SEO Spend

PocketSmith’s total organic traffic value is currently 333x higher than their SEO management fee.

"Tom was recommended to us by another New Zealand tech company, and we’re thrilled to have chosen Premium SEO to boost PocketSmith’s organic discoverability. Over the past three years, Tom has helped us refine and optimise our keyword and link-building strategy across all our major markets - New Zealand, Australia, the USA, and the UK. We create personal finance software for a global audience, and with Tom’s help, we continue to reach our target users effectively online."

Dora Yip

PocketSmith, Chief Marketing Officer

The Process

I knew from day one that brute force tactics were not going to be an option here. Creativity with the budget was going to be required in order to get a foothold competing with some very big, entrenched and well-resourced names in the ultra-competitive personal finance software industry. As it happened, by coincidence I was already a customer of PocketSmith before they reached out, so I knew the product and was able to use that to inform a strategic approach that emphasised the product’s relative strengths.

80/20 keyword research and selection

We knew we had to pick our battles and chase a realistic number of keywords with a realistic competition level relative to the site’s starting position, in order to make meaningful wins in the short to medium term while building up to big, long-term wins on major US keywords.

Long term planning, planting seeds early for big wins later

This campaign illustrates the importance of long-term strategy vision when chasing keywords that may literally take years to win. Building rankings like the top 5 ‘personal finance software’ ranking in the US required a long period of base-building, steadily closing link profile and domain authority gaps with major competitors over time.

Careful monitoring and maintenance to protect past wins

In the rush for growth, maintenance and defending ground that has already been won is often forgotten, but it’s critical. At the end of the day growth means building new traffic on top of the old - there is no point in dedicating all your resources to new traffic acquisition if competitors are raiding the hen house while you’re not looking.

The campaign really sums up why it’s critical to be able to game out and visualise what is expected to happen across different keyword sets and pages on different timelines, years into the future. If the budget is rolled entirely into chasing keywords that are far too hard relative to the starting position, the campaign never reaches the level of payback needed to sustain itself. This is why 80/20 thinking and ‘quick wins’ are necessary early on. But at the same time, part of the budget needs to be dedicated to planting those long term seeds right from the start - otherwise they never sprout.

No flash-in-the-pan gimmicks or quick fixes - just strategy and tactics aligned to building stable, long-term performance, the bedrock of solid business growth.

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