Toronto SEO
B2B SaaS · Toronto, ON · serves North America · 9 months (ongoing into year two)

Founder, Toronto-HQ B2B SaaS firm (Series A, ~30 employees)

A Toronto B2B SaaS Series A had lost an estimated 40% of organic-sourced trial signups over two years following a vendor-led rebuild and a Google core update. We led a nine-month organic recovery program covering technical foundation, comparison-content rebuild, and AEO infrastructure.

Editorial note: Anonymized per our editorial policy. No fabricated client names or quotes. All metrics are directional and qualified with attribution; client-reported figures are labelled.

Service & engagement

Service
Organic recovery + AEO program
Engagement length
9 months (ongoing into year two)

The challenge

Pre-engagement, the marketing site shipped without comparison or alternatives content, with weak schema coverage, and with a URL structure that orphaned roughly 60 indexable pages. A March 2025 core update compounded the structural weaknesses; organic-sourced trials by month nine were down materially from peak. The internal team had no senior SEO lead and no in-house comparison-content workflow. The board was about to redirect SEO budget to paid acquisition.

Approach

  1. 1
    Ran a 4-week diagnostic covering technical foundation, on-page, schema, and AEO posture. Documented all blocking issues in a written audit shared with the board.
  2. 2
    Rebuilt the technical foundation in weeks 5–10: fixed canonical and indexation issues, consolidated the URL structure, implemented Article + FAQPage + BreadcrumbList schema across 80+ pages, and re-allowed ChatGPT-User, OAI-SearchBot, PerplexityBot, and Anthropic crawler in robots.txt.
  3. 3
    Built out the comparison and alternatives content workflow over months 3–6: 12 'X vs Y' pages and 4 'X alternatives' pages with transparent methodology, published in a steady editorial cadence rather than a launch.
  4. 4
    Set up monthly AI engine citation share tracking from month 2 onward, against the top three category competitors. Reported the trend every month alongside classical rankings.
  5. 5
    Established a quarterly content-refresh sprint covering the top 20 traffic pages — first sprint completed in month 4, second in month 7.

Outcomes

approx. +180%
Estimated organic-sourced trial signups (M9 vs M0)
Client-reported, attribution model: GA4 + first-touch CRM
12 of 16
Comparison/alternatives pages ranking page 1 for primary query
as of month 9 review
From near-zero to top 3
AI engine citation share (category-defining queries)
measured monthly across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Google AIO
approx. 25–35%
Estimated reduction in CAC blended across paid + organic
client-reported, board-tracked metric

Reflection

The lever here was sequencing: technical foundation in months 1–3, comparison-content in months 3–6, AEO infrastructure built in parallel from month 2. Programs that try to do everything at once typically deliver none of it; programs that sequence the foundation work before content investment compound earlier and harder. The board did not redirect budget to paid; the engagement is now in year two with expanded scope.

SaaSAEOTorontoRecoveryComparison Content

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