Case study — SEO strategy and content
Remote People
Keywords in Google's top three grew from 95 to 1,025 in six months, and Google's AI Overviews now cite the site more than 900 times.
Remote People helps companies recruit, hire and pay remote talent in 150 countries. The brief was to grow rankings and organic traffic in a way that turned into leads. The category is expensive to buy: advertisers pay up to $111 a click for country-level employer-of-record searches. I built the content strategy and optimised the existing content, improved internal linking and site structure, fixed technical errors, worked on conversion, and built the authority and topical relevance the site needed to compete.
- Industry
- Global HR and employer of record
- Project type
- SEO strategy and content
- Site
- Country, salary, pricing and tool pages serving an international B2B audience
- Focus
- SEO strategy, Content, Site architecture
- Keywords in Google's top three, United StatesMarch → September 2025
- 95 → 1,025
- Keywords ranking #1 on GoogleSame period
- 14 → 321
- Estimated monthly organic traffic in six monthsAbout 6,500 → 24,000 · Ahrefs
- 3.7×
- Google AI Overview citations+292 in three months · Ahrefs
- 902
Results
What changed.
In six months the site went from 718 first-page rankings in the United States to 3,416, on the searches this business is built on. Keywords in Google's top three multiplied more than tenfold, the number ranking first went from 14 to 321, and organic sessions in the client's own analytics rose from under a thousand a day to around three thousand. The same pages became sources for AI answers: Google's AI Overviews cited the site 902 times, alongside citations in ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Copilot.
Keywords in Google's top three, United States
951,025Mar 2025 to Sep 2025
| Month | Keywords in the top three |
|---|---|
| Sep 2024 | 1 |
| Oct | 4 |
| Nov | 3 |
| Dec | 13 |
| Jan 2025 | 40 |
| Feb | 56 |
| Mar 2025 | 95 |
| Apr | 151 |
| May | 303 |
| Jun | 519 |
| Jul | 712 |
| Aug | 960 |
| Sep 2025 | 1,025 |
Employer-of-record searches now in the top three
BeforeAfter
- employer of record albania$111.49 per click6 → 1
- employer of record agreement$31.83 per click8 → 1
- how much does an employer of record cost$33.64 per click4 → 1
- kenya employer of record4 → 1
- employer of record tanzanianew → 1
- employer of record hong kong$28.44 per click21 → 3
- employer of record turkey$65.00 per click9 → 3
- employer of record uruguay9 → 3
- employer of record mauritius$77.00 per clicknew → 3
Salary data, payroll tools and provider pricing
BeforeAfter
- china average salary19 → 1
- average salary in argentinanew → 1
- average salary in greecenew → 1
- average salary in turkeynew → 2
- paycom cost$17.45 per clicknew → 1
- paycom pricing$20.00 per click14 → 3
- w2 generator10 → 3
Where AI assistants cite the site
- Google AI Overviews192 pages cited
- 902
- Gemini
- 70
- Perplexity
- 47
- ChatGPT
- 42
- Copilot
- 15
In short
- Keywords in Google's top three in the United States rose from 95 in March 2025 to 1,025 in September, and those ranking first from 14 to 321, measured in an index independent of the client's tools.
- Total ranking keywords grew from 8,147 to 22,562 over the same six months.
- Organic search sessions in Google Analytics rose from under 1,000 a day in January 2025 to around 3,000 a day by August.
- Ahrefs' estimate of monthly organic traffic grew about 3.7 times in six months, from roughly 6,500 to 24,000.
- Employer-of-record searches worth up to $111 a click in Google Ads moved into the top three, including #1 for Albania, Kenya, Tanzania and "how much does an employer of record cost".
- The site became a source for AI answers: 902 Google AI Overview citations across 192 pages, plus 70 in Gemini, 47 in Perplexity, 42 in ChatGPT and 15 in Copilot. A year later, 651 Google AI Overviews still cite it.
Ranking positions, AI citations and traffic estimates come from Ahrefs and Google Analytics, on the dates shown. Monthly top-three and #1 counts were measured independently with DataForSEO, as was the September 2026 AI Overview count, so they can be re-checked. Daily session figures are read from the Analytics chart and given as approximate. Traffic estimates from Ahrefs are modelled, not counted.
The challenge
What was wrong.
- A site with real expertise and very little search visibility: in September 2024 it held a single keyword in Google's top three in the United States.
- A category where the searches that matter commercially are expensive and contested, from country-level employer-of-record queries to provider pricing comparisons.
- Demand spread across many countries and many page types, with no structure making it clear which page answered which search.
- Content that existed but was not organised around what buyers search for, internal linking that did not connect related pages, and technical errors holding pages back.
- An authority profile that needed to grow alongside the content for the new pages to compete with established HR platforms.
Approach
How I worked it out.
- Mapped demand by the kind of question a buyer asks at each stage: what it costs to employ someone in a given country, how an employer of record works, and how providers compare on price.
- Treated each country as a cluster rather than a page, so employer-of-record, salary and hiring content for the same market reinforce one another through internal links.
- Prioritised searches with commercial intent over raw volume, using cost per click as a proxy for what a visitor is worth to the business.
- Ran content, structure and authority work in parallel, so new and improved pages had the internal links and the domain strength to rank as they went live.
The work
What was done.
- 01Content strategy
- Built the content strategy around the searches that bring leads: country-level employer-of-record and hiring pages, salary data for each market, provider pricing reviews, and free payroll tools.
- 02Content optimisation
- Reworked existing pages to answer the search directly and completely, with clear headings and answer-first sections. That structure is what made the pages quotable in AI Overviews as well as rankable.
- 03Internal linking and site structure
- Organised the site into country and topic clusters, and linked related pages so that authority and topical context flow to the commercially important pages instead of pooling on the homepage.
- 04Technical fixes
- Found and fixed the technical errors holding pages back from being crawled, indexed and ranked, so the content work was not undermined by the platform underneath it.
- 05Conversion optimisation
- Improved how organic landing pages lead a visitor towards an enquiry, so the growth in traffic turned into growth in leads rather than only in sessions.
- 06Authority and topical relevance
- Built authority alongside the content. Referring domains grew by 547 in three months to around 1,500, with Ahrefs Domain Rating at 70.
Key takeaways
What this project demonstrates.
- 01Growth compounds when content, structure and authority move together. The steepest months came once the three were running at the same time.
- 02Cost per click is a better guide to what a page is worth than search volume. A 70-search-a-month query at $111 a click can matter more than a 5,000-search one.
- 03Pages built to answer the question directly rank and get quoted. The same structure earned both the top-three positions and the AI Overview citations.
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