In October 2023, IBM’s explainer pages, the “what is” articles on topics like AI, cloud, and data science, brought in about 742,000 monthly visits from US Google search, by Semrush’s estimate. By September 2026, after IBM moved them into its Think hub, the same library was pulling in about 5 million a month, traffic Semrush values at $26.3 million in ads.
If you’re working out what SEO could do for your SaaS company, and what to build first, the systems behind results like IBM’s are a good place to start. Each one is repeatable, and most have a part a smaller team can copy.
This roundup covers 16 SaaS SEO case studies. Eight are SEO systems that software companies built for themselves, five are agency campaigns with pipeline numbers, and three are my own results. I’m a content strategist at Breaking B2B and a B2B SaaS writer who has written for Zapier and Softr, and every case comes with its source and its timeframe.
How I chose these case studies
Every company here sells software, runs a repeatable SEO system rather than a one-off hit, and has public evidence behind its results. Traffic figures for the company stories are Semrush’s estimates for US Google search, pulled in October 2026, so treat them as directional rather than exact. Agency results are as reported by the agencies on their own case study pages, and each one is labeled that way.
SaaS SEO case studies at a glance
| Company | SEO system | Result | Source |
| IBM | Explainer hub of “what is” pages | About 742K to 5M monthly US visits (Oct 2023 to Sep 2026) | Semrush |
| Atlassian | Agile education hub | About 275K monthly US visits, worth $1.3M a month in ads | Semrush |
| Wise | Currency converter pages built on live rates | About 3.5M to 7M monthly US visits | Semrush |
| Zapier | App and app-pair pages | 38,612 pair pages earning 299K monthly visits (2023) | Ahrefs, by a former Zapier writer |
| Canva | Templates as landing pages | About 263K to 993K monthly US visits, peaking at 1.65M | Semrush |
| Notion | Template gallery its users fill | About 219K monthly US visits from 30,000+ templates | Semrush, Notion |
| Gumloop | “Best X” roundups on its own blog | Near zero to 77K monthly US visits in two years | Semrush |
| Zapier | “Best X apps” roundups | About 1M to 1.5M monthly US blog visits, peaking at 2.9M | Semrush, Ahrefs |
| Loom | Product-led growth, so the product does the SEO | About 285K monthly visits, up 27% year over year | Semrush |
| RB2B | Non-branded buyer searches | +77% non-branded traffic in 6 months | Breaking B2B |
| Proposify | High-intent and comparison pages | #1 for “proposal software,” +91% AI search visitors | Breaking B2B |
| Cyera | Topic clusters and glossary pages | $7.9M qualified pipeline in 12 months | Powered by Search |
| Smartling | Business-buyer keywords only | $3.7M pipeline from organic search | Omniscient Digital |
| Gladia | AI search plus SEO | 7x sales-accepted leads in four months | Discovered Labs |
| Softr (mine) | Bottom-of-funnel software roundup | About $139K a month in traffic value at its peak | Semrush |
| Agency roundup (mine) | One listing in a “best agencies” roundup | $36K ARR deal in 10 days | Founder’s email |
Explainer and education hubs
IBM Think: 5 million monthly visits from “what is” pages
IBM sells enterprise software through a sales team, and its SEO system feeds that team at the very top of the funnel. Its Think hub publishes long “what is” explainers on the topics its buyers are learning about, such as artificial intelligence, data science, natural language processing, and blockchain. Each one carries a named author, a published and updated date, and links into IBM products. The AI explainer, for example, sends readers to a free trial of watsonx Orchestrate, IBM’s Granite models, and gated buyer’s guides.
The hub runs like a newsroom. IBM’s Content Director for Inbound and SEO directs a team of more than 20 writers creating “search-optimized content” on AI, data, security, and IT automation. Kevin Indig’s deep dive on IBM’s organic growth found that its topic pages rank #1 for many competitive keywords and attract over 23% of the site’s backlinks.
Not all of that 5 million is new. The old ibm.com/topics pages were already pulling in about 742,000 US visits in October 2023, before IBM moved them into /think in early 2025, so I count the growth from that combined starting point. Measured that way, the hub still grew almost sevenfold, to about 5 million monthly visits by September 2026. Its biggest page is “What is ChatGPT,” at about 1.4 million visits, which says something about how far an explainer hub can drift from what IBM sells.
What you can copy. Pick the concepts your buyers have to understand before they can buy, and give each one a definitive explainer with a named expert, a date, and a clear next step into your product. Measure which explainers lead to trials or demos, not just which ones get the most visits.
Atlassian: an agile guide that teaches the job Jira does
Atlassian’s agile hub teaches the working methods its products are built for, from scrum and kanban to sprints and backlogs. The “What is Agile?” page opens with key takeaways, explains the methodology in plain language, and offers a free Jira scrum template right at the top. A reader who arrives to learn a method leaves with a way to run it in Jira.
Semrush estimates the hub at about 275,000 monthly US visits in September 2026, with a peak of about 587,000 in April 2026. It values that traffic at $1.3 million a month, which reflects how commercial these searches are for project management software.
What you can copy. Teach the method your product supports, not just your product. Then put a template or trial at the exact point where the reader is ready to try the method.
Pages built on data the company already owns
Wise: a converter page for every currency pair
Wise’s currency converter pages answer searches people repeat constantly, such as “USD to EUR.” Each page shows the live mid-market rate, a converter, a historical chart, common conversion amounts, a comparison with what banks charge, and a “Send money” button already filled in with an amount. The rates come from Wise’s own business, which makes each page more than a template with a currency name swapped in.
Semrush estimates the US converter pages alone grew from about 3.5 million monthly visits in October 2023 to about 7 million in September 2026, with a peak of about 9.1 million in July 2025.
What you can copy. Look for data your product already produces that people search for, such as rates, benchmarks, integrations, or templates. A page template filled with data only you have is much harder to compete with than a blog post.
Zapier: a page for every app, and every pair of apps
Zapier’s app directory is the best-known example of programmatic SEO in SaaS. People don’t search for “automation software” nearly as often as they search for the two tools they want to connect, so Zapier built a page for each app it supports and a page for each pair, like Gmail and Slack.
Matthew Guay, who was a senior writer at Zapier from 2014 to 2019, described the system in a 2023 breakdown on Ahrefs. The pages started thin, with a few dozen preset sentences, and the team added short software walkthroughs and automation templates to give each page something useful. At the time of that piece, 4,403 app pages and 38,612 pair pages were bringing in over 299,000 monthly organic visits.
The directory hasn’t held its ground in US search. Semrush estimates /apps/ at about 171,000 monthly US visits in June 2023 and about 66,000 in September 2026, while Zapier’s blog grew over the same period.
What you can copy. If your product connects to other tools, an integration page for each one meets buyers at the moment they’re searching for both. Give every page a working example or template, because templated pages with nothing unique on them are the first to lose rankings.
Templates as landing pages
Canva: templates that match what people search to make
Canva’s template pages target what people want to make, like resumes, flyers, presentations, and Instagram posts. Each template opens straight into the editor, so the landing page is also the first step of using the product.
Canva treats this as a product, not a content calendar. Its job listings include a product manager for programmatic SEO, responsible for large-scale page generation across 40+ languages. Semrush estimates Canva’s /templates/ section grew from about 263,000 monthly US visits in October 2023 to about 1.65 million in early 2026, before easing to about 993,000 in September 2026.
What you can copy. If your product has templates, give each one an indexable page built around what the searcher wants to make, and let them start using it from that page.
Notion: a template gallery its users fill
Notion’s template gallery is written mostly by its users. The gallery lists more than 30,000 templates across 349 categories from over 22,000 creators, and anyone can apply to become a creator and publish their own. Each template gets its own page, so every new submission is another chance to rank for a specific search like a habit tracker or a client portal.
Notion moved its site from notion.so to notion.com in late 2024, so Semrush’s history for the gallery starts there. In September 2026, it estimated the gallery at about 219,000 monthly US visits, with a traffic value of about $597,000 a month.
What you can copy. If your users build things in your product, give them a way to publish those builds as public pages. Each one shows the product working and targets a search your marketing team would never have found.
Bottom-of-funnel roundups
Gumloop: from near zero to 77,000 monthly visits in two years
Gumloop, an AI automation platform, grew its organic traffic mostly through “best X” roundups on its own blog. Its biggest page, “15 best AI apps I can’t live without,” is written in the first person by Omid Ghiam, who says the picks come from testing 70 AI tools over three years. Other roundups cover AI workflow automation tools, marketing automation platforms, and agentic AI tools, the categories Gumloop competes in.
Semrush shows the site at almost no organic traffic in May 2024 and about 77,000 monthly US visits in September 2026, with a traffic value of about $877,000 a month. The best AI apps roundup alone brings in about 44% of it. Gumloop did this early, with a growth marketer job post describing the company as having a “great product, organic love, zero-person marketing team.”
What you can copy. Write the roundups your buyers read when they’re choosing a tool in your category, include your own product honestly, and write them from real use. A first-person list from someone who has tested the tools reads very differently from a list compiled from other lists.
Zapier’s blog: “best X apps” roundups at scale
Zapier’s blog runs on in-depth roundups of the apps its users connect, like CRMs, to-do list apps, and project management tools. In the 2023 Ahrefs breakdown, 171 live “best of” posts were bringing in about 1.1 million monthly organic visits. The team also chose not to write roundups of automation tools, including its own category, to keep the lists credible.
Semrush estimates the blog at about 981,000 monthly US visits in June 2023, a peak of about 2.9 million in January 2025, and about 1.5 million in September 2026, with a traffic value of about $8.2 million a month. I wrote one of those roundups, Zapier’s best authenticator apps, which reached #1 and saves the company more than $20,000 a year in ad spend.
What you can copy. Roundups of the tools your users already use bring in buyers who are adjacent to your product, and a clear rule about what you won’t review keeps them credible.
When the product does the SEO
Loom: branded search from a product people share
Loom grew through its product. Every shared video link showed the product to someone new, and those people searched for Loom by name. In my breakdown of Loom’s SEO, the site was getting about 285,000 monthly visitors in April 2026, up more than 27% year over year, while many B2B SaaS sites were losing traffic. About 63% of those visits came from branded or direct search.
For a product that spreads itself, SEO’s job is to catch the searches the product creates. Loom gives each feature its own page and URL, so people who search for a specific capability land on a page about it.
What you can copy. If your product is shared outside your customer base, check how much of your traffic is branded. Then build feature and use-case pages for the searches that branded traffic turns into.
Agency-led campaigns with pipeline numbers
RB2B: non-branded traffic up 77% in six months (Breaking B2B)
RB2B, an identity resolution platform, had no SEO channel when it started working with Breaking B2B. The agency mapped the non-branded searches RB2B’s ideal customers use to evaluate vendors, built content and technical foundations around them, and ran a monthly plan. In Breaking B2B’s case study, published April 29, 2026, non-branded organic traffic grew 77% in six months, and search became a third acquisition channel alongside LinkedIn and cold email.
What you can copy. Start with the searches buyers make when they compare vendors, not the ones that bring the most traffic.
Proposify: #1 for “proposal software” (Breaking B2B)
Proposify, a proposal software company, swapped a traffic-focused playbook for high-intent blog posts, landing pages, template pages, and refreshes of its best performers, and rebuilt content to be cited in ChatGPT, Perplexity, and AI Overviews. Breaking B2B reports that Proposify now ranks #1 in the US for “proposal software” and “quoting software,” with 68% more clicks from comparison pages and 91% more AI search visitors. The case study doesn’t say how long that took.
What you can copy. Track whether buyers mention AI tools in your “How did you hear about us?” answers. Proposify uses that field to watch AI discovery grow month by month.
Cyera: $7.9 million in pipeline in 12 months (Powered by Search)
Cyera, a data security company, had almost all of its organic traffic flowing through its homepage. Powered by Search spread that relevance across topic clusters on data security, made the content easier for AI models to parse, and published glossary pages for definitional searches, many of which ranked #1 quickly. In the agency’s case study, new organic users grew from 35,509 to 56,365 in a year, and SEO-driven traffic contributed to more than $7.9 million in qualified pipeline over 12 months.
What you can copy. If your homepage carries most of your organic traffic, one ranking change can cut off your pipeline. Glossary pages for the terms your buyers learn first are a fast way to spread it.
Smartling: $3.7 million in pipeline from fewer, better keywords (Omniscient Digital)
Smartling, a translation management platform, had been ranking for consumer translation searches that its business buyers never typed. Omniscient Digital refocused the content on lower-volume, high-intent keywords for business buyers. Omniscient’s case study reports $3.7 million in pipeline from organic search and a 31,250% increase in blog conversions from August 2022 to January 2024. It also admits the shift caused blog traffic to plateau and even dip, as consumer rankings fell away.
What you can copy. Be ready for traffic to fall when you stop chasing searches your buyers don’t make, and report conversions alongside it so leadership sees why.
Gladia: 7x sales-accepted leads in four months (Discovered Labs)
Gladia, a speech-to-text API company, worked with Discovered Labs on SEO and AI search together. The agency audited Gladia’s visibility in ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, and AI Overviews, built a 90-day plan of topic pillars, wrote content structured for AI retrieval, and ran Reddit marketing alongside link building. Discovered Labs reports that monthly sales-accepted leads grew 7x in four months, with 93% of AI-referred leads coming from LLM search. Gladia’s head of marketing put it plainly: “Our sales-accepted leads have multiplied by seven at least, and growing actually.”
What you can copy. Track AI visibility and AI-referred leads from the start, so you can tell whether AI search or Google is producing your pipeline.
Three results from my own work
Softr: $139,000 a month in traffic value at its peak, then a drop
I wrote Softr’s knowledge management software roundup, published in February 2026. By July 27, Semrush estimated it at 3,400 monthly visits and $139,400 a month in traffic value. It didn’t hold. By October, traffic had fallen to almost nothing, possibly because a second Softr page competes for the same searches. How I wrote that roundup, and what I’d change covers the structure that made it climb and the checks that would have protected it.
Zapier: #1 for “best authenticator apps”
My best authenticator apps article for Zapier reached #1 for its target search and saves Zapier more than $20,000 a year in ad spend for the same visitors. It started as a gap I spotted during a refresh, a short list inside another article that readers clearly wanted expanded. How I wrote it walks through the research and structure.
A $36K ARR deal from one roundup listing in 10 days
On July 4, 2026, I added an SEO agency to the SaaS SEO agencies roundup on my site. Ten days later, the founder emailed to say a buyer who found them through the roundup had converted into a $36K ARR deal. In those ten days, the page earned only 20 clicks from Google. The full case study shows what was in the roundup and why it worked.
What the strongest SaaS SEO systems have in common
The company stories share one move. Each turns something the company already has into pages that match a search people already make. Wise turns its exchange rates into converter pages, Canva and Notion turn templates into landing pages, Zapier turns its integrations into app pages, and IBM turns its expertise into explainers. Competitors can copy the format, but not the asset behind it.
They also lead somewhere. A Wise converter ends in “Send money,” a Canva template opens in the editor, and an IBM explainer offers a trial. The agency campaigns add the other half, measuring signups, demos, and pipeline rather than traffic. Smartling’s traffic plateaued while its pipeline grew, and that trade is the one worth making.
How to judge a SaaS SEO case study
If you’re reading case studies to choose an agency or to plan your own program, check five things.
- A baseline. A percentage means little without the starting number.
- A timeframe. “+300%” over six months and over five years are different stories.
- A business metric. Signups, demos, or pipeline beat traffic and rankings.
- The source. Agency-published results are claims, and the strongest come with a named client or a quote.
- An honest miss. A case that admits something didn’t work, like Smartling’s traffic plateau, is usually more trustworthy than one that doesn’t.
Want an SEO system built on what your company already has, instead of another blog calendar? Book a call with me.
