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.

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.

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, as 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.