Client
A major sports league company
Service
Strategy
location
Atlanta, GA
Two organizations in dramatically different industries faced the same underlying problem: they offered valuable services, but Google did not yet associate their websites strongly enough with the subjects and search terms most important to their businesses.
For an IT operations consultancy, the challenge was competing for short, highly competitive two- and three-word search queries in a specialized B2B technology market. The company had substantial technical expertise, but its website lacked the depth of interconnected content and external authority needed to compete consistently for those searches.
For a multi-city social sports organization, the challenge was both national and local. The company needed greater visibility across its markets while also competing directly against an established rival that dominated important searches in its Atlanta home market.
The objective was to build topical authority around the subjects each organization needed Google to associate with its brand.
The Challenge
I developed content ecosystems around each organization's highest-value topics rather than publishing disconnected articles simply to target individual keywords.
For the IT consultancy, I produced approximately 20 targeted articles surrounding its core IT operations offerings. These articles supported the company's commercial service pages through internal linking and created clusters of related information designed to establish greater topical depth.
That content strategy was paired with extensive backlink development, strengthening external authority alongside the site's growing topical relevance.
For the sports organization, I developed a considerably larger content program consisting of 62 targeted articles built around the sports, markets, services, and search concepts the organization wanted to own.
I also leveraged the company's existing email lists to drive relevant audiences into newly developed content, helping generate early traffic and engagement while reinforcing associations between the website, its audience, and the subjects we wanted the brand to become associated with in search.
The strategy therefore combined:
Content depth + internal relevance + existing audience signals + external authority.
The Approach
Conducted keyword and competitor research
Identified valuable two- and three-word search queries
Mapped content around core commercial topics
Developed topic clusters designed to increase topical authority
Produced ~20 SEO articles for the IT consultancy
Produced 62 SEO articles for the sports organization
Connected informational content with relevant commercial/service pages
Built strategic internal-linking structures
Conducted extensive backlink development for the IT consultancy
Optimized titles, metadata, headings, and page structure
Improved service-page targeting and website organization
Leveraged existing email audiences to accelerate exposure to new sports content
Monitored ranking movement and adjusted content strategy over time
Built SEO around business-relevant searches rather than traffic volume alone
The Outcome
Both organizations made substantial progress for the short, competitive searches their businesses actually cared about.
The IT operations consultancy reached Google's second and third pages for several targeted two- and three-word search queries, establishing meaningful visibility in categories where the company previously struggled to compete. The broader SEO program also contributed to an increase in organic discovery and inbound opportunities.
The social sports organization achieved first- and second-page visibility for targeted searches, including successfully overtaking its primary competitor for an important search position in the company's Atlanta home market.
That Atlanta result was particularly important because it had been established as a concrete competitive objective at the beginning of the project—and the targeted improvement was achieved within approximately six months.
More broadly, the projects demonstrated the effectiveness of deliberately building topical authority, rather than treating SEO as a collection of isolated keywords and articles.
Case Studies
