Cookies managing
Cookie Settings
Cookies necessary for the correct operation of the site are always enabled.
Other cookies are configurable.
Other cookies are configurable.
Services: SEO, GEO, Link Building, Technical SEO
How We Grew a B2B Image & Video API Platform’s Organic Traffic 2.5X and Impressions 3.5X in 6 Months
B2b SaaS CASE STUDY
by Dennis Lazard · July 04, 2026
3.5X
+10 DR
Domain Rating uplift
2.5X
Growth in monthly organic clicks
Growth in Google AI Overviews brand share
-
About The Brand
The Brand is the B2B developer platform of a major consumer creative-technology company – a globally recognised image and video editing app with a vast worldwide user base. The B2B platform exposes the same image and video editing technology as a set of APIs and SDKs for developers and product teams. It’s a real B2B business with a real B2B challenge: a different audience, a different search landscape and a different growth engine to the consumer side – built from scratch on a separate domain.
ESA Digital worked with the platform’s B2B team on a 6-month SEO engagement from August 2024 through January 2025. The brief was to build the organic search engine for the B2B side of the business from the ground up – auditing the platform, structuring the product and use case page layer, producing the content to fill it, building authority through link building and pushing the site’s underlying technical foundation into shape. The engagement concluded after January 2025 with the work handed over to the in-house team to continue.
-
About The Brand
The Brand is the B2B developer platform of a major consumer creative-technology company – a globally recognised image and video editing app with a vast worldwide user base. The B2B platform exposes the same image and video editing technology as a set of APIs and SDKs for developers and product teams. It’s a real B2B business with a real B2B challenge: a different audience, a different search landscape and a different growth engine to the consumer side – built from scratch on a separate domain.
ESA Digital worked with the platform’s B2B team on a 6-month SEO engagement from August 2024 through January 2025. The brief was to build the organic search engine for the B2B side of the business from the ground up – auditing the platform, structuring the product and use case page layer, producing the content to fill it, building authority through link building and pushing the site’s underlying technical foundation into shape. The engagement concluded after January 2025 with the work handed over to the in-house team to continue.
-
The Challenges
When the engagement started, the B2B platform was a relatively small property living in the shadow of the much larger consumer brand. A few specific challenges shaped the approach:- The site was at the early stage of its B2B journey. Despite the parent brand’s global reach, the platform was generating only 3.94K monthly organic clicks and 321K impressions, with an average Google position of 15.9 – meaning most ranking pages were sitting well outside the click-worthy top of page 1.
- The product page and use case layer was thin. The B2B platform offers dozens of API endpoints and SDK capabilities (image editing, background removal, vectorisation, upscaling, video editing, text-to-image and more) but most of those capabilities didn’t have dedicated landing pages built to capture relevant search demand.
- The keyword set in TOP-10 was small. Only 25 queries ranked in the top 10 of Google when the engagement started, and visibility was concentrated in a handful of clusters – nowhere near the breadth needed to drive sustained growth.
- Domain authority needed lifting. A starting DR of 46 with 236 referring domains was respectable but not enough to compete in the developer-tool category, where competitors had stronger backlink profiles and more content depth.
- The blog had effectively zero organic presence. New content was being published but wasn’t pulling in meaningful traffic, suggesting both authority and on-page execution needed attention.
-
The Challenges
When the engagement started, the B2B platform was a relatively small property living in the shadow of the much larger consumer brand. A few specific challenges shaped the approach:- The site was at the early stage of its B2B journey. Despite the parent brand’s global reach, the platform was generating only 3.94K monthly organic clicks and 321K impressions, with an average Google position of 15.9 – meaning most ranking pages were sitting well outside the click-worthy top of page 1.
- The product page and use case layer was thin. The B2B platform offers dozens of API endpoints and SDK capabilities (image editing, background removal, vectorisation, upscaling, video editing, text-to-image and more) but most of those capabilities didn’t have dedicated landing pages built to capture relevant search demand.
- The keyword set in TOP-10 was small. Only 25 queries ranked in the top 10 of Google when the engagement started, and visibility was concentrated in a handful of clusters – nowhere near the breadth needed to drive sustained growth.
- Domain authority needed lifting. A starting DR of 46 with 236 referring domains was respectable but not enough to compete in the developer-tool category, where competitors had stronger backlink profiles and more content depth.
- The blog had effectively zero organic presence. New content was being published but wasn’t pulling in meaningful traffic, suggesting both authority and on-page execution needed attention.
Strategic Approach
We built a six-track strategy designed to compound across the engagement – every track feeding into the others:
-
Step 1: Site audit and SEO checklist
We started with a full website SEO audit and built a structured checklist of technical and on-page items requiring fixes – everything from crawlability and indexing through to schema, internal linking and template-level on-page elements. The checklist became the source of truth for the engagement, updated monthly and worked through systematically alongside the content programme. -
Step 2: Semantic research and content clustering
We built out the platform’s B2B semantic core from scratch – researching keywords across all the relevant API and SDK categories (image editing, background removal, upscaling, text-to-image, video, photo filters, image enhancement and more) and clustering them into product and use case groupings. This research became the foundation for every page brief that followed. -
Step 3: Product and use case page production at scale
We delivered roughly 7-8 technical specifications per month for new product and use case pages – complete page briefs covering URL structure, content blocks, headers, copy direction and supporting schema. Across the engagement that meant ~40-50 new pages of structured content built into the site, covering high-intent product pages (Image Vectorizer, Video SDK, JavaScript Image Editor, Pattern Generator, Texture Generator, Blur Background, Logo Maker, T-shirt Design Tool, Custom Hoodie Designer, Product Design Tool) and a deep use case layer around Print-On-Demand verticals (phone cases, water bottles, mugs, magnets, t-shirts, hoodies). -
Step 4: Blog and informational content programme
Alongside the product layer we built out the blog with developer-focused informational content – guides like “How to resize an image in HTML”, “How to resize images in JavaScript”, “Blur Effect with CSS”, “Python image resize with Pillow and OpenCV” and others – designed to capture top-of-funnel developer search demand and route it into the product pages through structured internal linking. -
Step 5: Link building
We ran a continuous link building programme across all six months – preparing technical briefs for guest post placements and crowd links, identifying thematic placement opportunities and managing the outreach pipeline. The work was specifically designed to lift Domain Rating and grow the referring domain base in a way that supported the new content layer. -
Step 6: Competitor link and traffic analysis
Every month we ran a fresh competitor analysis – tracking where the platform’s category competitors were winning backlinks, what their organic traffic looked like and where the gaps in our placement strategy were. This fed directly into the link building targets and helped surface new content opportunities.
The Results:
Result 1: Organic clicks grew 2.5X in 6 months
Monthly organic clicks grew from 3.94K in August 2024 to 9.79K in January 2025 – a 2.5X increase across the engagement. The growth was steady and compounding, with each month building on the last rather than spiking on a single launch.
Result 2: Organic impressions grew 3.5X in 6 months
Monthly organic impressions grew from 321K to 1.13M across the same window – a 3.5X increase. Impressions growing faster than clicks reflects the wider keyword coverage being built across the new product and use case pages, with the click-through ratio set to follow as those pages climbed the rankings.
Result 3: Average position improved by 7.4 positions
Average Google position improved from 15.9 in August 2024 to 8.5 in January 2025 – a +7.4 position uplift across the engagement. That move took the average ranking page from the bottom of page 2 to the bottom of page 1 of Google, where click-through rates start meaningfully climbing.
Result 4: Domain Rating climbed from 46 to 56
Domain Rating grew from 46 to 56 across the engagement – a +10 point lift driven by the link building programme. The standout was December 2024, when DR jumped 8 points in a single month off the back of a concentrated batch of high-authority placements. Referring domains grew from 236 to 257 across the same period, reflecting the quality-over-quantity link building approach.
Result 5: The about-to-rank pipeline grew from a handful to 39 queries
By the end of the engagement, the B2B platform had 29 queries ranking in the top 10 of Google – up from 25 at the start – and a further 39 queries sitting on pages 2-3, primed to break into the top 10 next. That about-to-rank pipeline didn’t exist as a tracked group when the engagement started, and it became one of the strongest signals that the content and link building work was set to compound well beyond the close of the engagement.
Result 6: Branded traffic grew nearly 4X
Branded organic clicks grew from 1.67K to 6.5K (3.9X) and branded impressions from 186K to 913K (4.9X) across the engagement, with month-on-month gains every single month: +8% in September, +69% in October, +24% in November, +33% in December and +17% in January. Average position on branded queries improved from 7.5 to 6.4 over the same window, and new brand-adjacent keywords broke into the top 10 of Google during the engagement.
Result 7: 1.5X more growth after handover
The 6-month engagement closed in January 2025, but the SEO foundation we’d built kept compounding long after we handed it over. Sixteen months later (May 2026), the in-house team had taken the platform from 9.79K to 14.3K monthly organic clicks – a further 1.5X lift on top of the 2.5X growth we delivered during the engagement. Domain Rating climbed from 56 to 60. Referring domains grew from 257 to 773 (3X). The platform broke into the top 3 of Google for 183 keywords. And the content and authority foundation we’d built proved durable enough to win on AI search surfaces that didn’t even exist when the engagement began – 24 pages cited in Google AI Overviews, 18 mentions in ChatGPT, 54 in Grok and 11 in Perplexity.
Working with ESA Digital has been fantastic! They bring deep industry knowledge and used it to build a strategy that delivered exceptional outcomes for our mobile app and our wider expansion. Their data-driven approach and excellent client service mean they consistently go above and beyond to meet our specific requirements. We've accomplished so much together and couldn't be happier with the results!
Andrew Bondarenko
CPO & Co-founder, Noji (Exit to DelightRoom)
CPO & Co-founder, Noji (Exit to DelightRoom)
“I met Dennis and his Google team, when they pitched their startup Smartsub. We accepted them to our accelerator program in 2017, Batch 9 and they successfully passed through it. Within a short period of time they managed to develop MVP of their product, design and implement go-to-market strategy launching the product on the US market. Their broad digital business experience and data-driven approach allowed them to make things done.”
Cristobal Alonso (www.startupwiseguys.com)
CEO at SWG (funded Smartsub in 2017)
CEO at SWG (funded Smartsub in 2017)
“ESA team with their Google Ads skills, growth mindset and natural ability to mentoring are able to bring a lot of value to startup ecosystem with so many tech companies in their growth stage and businesses struggling with Google online advertising.”
Monika Synoradzka (www.hugething.vc)
CEO at HugeThing (funded Smartsub, 2019)
CEO at HugeThing (funded Smartsub, 2019)
ESA team had outperformed my expectations working with one of our main SEO clients. They delivered X2-times organic traffic growth for 12 client’s websites, working with technical, content and link-building SEO optimisation in Google, website structure, navigation, technical code and conversion rate optimisation.”
Maria Kristalinskaya (www.bbdo.com)
Head of Retail Media at eBay (GE), Techstars Startup Mentor, ex-BBDO
Head of Retail Media at eBay (GE), Techstars Startup Mentor, ex-BBDO
