B2B agency website — from zero SEO to Top-2 in niche

1,000+ keywords ranked, peak Top-2, beating competitors with 5+ years of head start — in under a year.

Freelance Full Stack Engineer + SEO lead·2024 — present·B2B agency (under NDA)

Long-running engagement with a B2B agency client: full-stack PHP/Laravel platform plus a complete SEO strategy built from zero. Brought the site from a baseline of essentially no organic visibility to Top-2 across the most contested queries in the niche, beating competitors who had been on the market for 5+ years.

Stack

  • PHP
  • Laravel
  • Gulp
  • SEO
  • GEO/AEO (Generative Engine Optimization)
  • Custom SEO Crawler
  • Analytics
  • Google Analytics
  • Yandex Metrica
  • Google Tag Manager

Context

A B2B agency in a single-country market with strong, long-established competitors. Site was new, organic traffic close to zero, and the team had no in-house SEO or technical lead.

Engagement scope: build the site, build the SEO from zero, run the analytics, validate everything end-to-end. No hand-off to other vendors — I own the technical and SEO stack.

What I built

  • Multipage PHP/Laravel platform — fullstack, no off-the-shelf CMS. Custom admin, content models, page templates.
  • Complete on-page SEO foundation: semantic core (1,000+ keywords), topic clusters and content cocoons, internal linking architecture, sitemap, structured data.
  • Analytics layer: Google Analytics + Yandex Metrica + a Google Tag Manager configuration that captures arbitrary events without hardcoding them inside the codebase.
  • GEO/AEO strategy: locale-targeted ranking for the country in question + visibility inside LLM answers (Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity) — making sure the brand gets cited when AI systems answer relevant queries, not just ranked on classic search.
  • "White-net" growth strategy: which secondary platforms and social channels the brand should occupy to compound visibility around the core site.
  • Custom in-house SEO crawler used for all technical audits — surfaces issues across the whole site faster than off-the-shelf browser extensions.

Toolkit

  • Screaming Frog — full-site technical crawls and audits.
  • Google Search Console + Bing Webmaster + Yandex Webmaster — index coverage, search performance, indexing diagnostics across all three engines.
  • Semrush + Ahrefs + Ubersuggest — keyword research, backlink analysis, competitor intelligence.
  • Custom in-house crawler — built specifically for the kinds of issues these tools miss or surface too slowly.
  • Plus a long tail of small purpose-built extensions and helpers for the day-to-day.

Hardest problems

  • Outranking competitors with a 5+ year head start in under 12 months — the technical baseline had to be perfect and the content/topical strategy had to compound aggressively.
  • Designing a GTM setup that the client team can extend with new events themselves, without touching the codebase or shipping releases for every new tag.
  • Owning every layer of the stack as a solo engineer — backend, frontend, SEO, analytics, deployment — without dropping balls.

Results

  • Keywords ranked1,000+
  • Peak positionTop-2
  • Top-3 / Top-5 coverageMost priority queries
  • Average CTR10%+
  • Time to topple competitors< 1 year
  • Competitor head start beaten5+ years

Want similar results?

I take long-running engagements where one engineer owns the full vertical: site, SEO, analytics, deploy. Reach out via the contacts on my home page.