+72% organic clicks, +143% page-1 keywords — how content-led SEO opened up a niche B2B category.

The starting point: a working business with a brand awareness ceiling

PREO had won real enterprise accounts through outbound and direct sales. The product worked, the economics worked, the references were strong. What didn’t work was inbound: the niche-product problem capped organic demand because procurement teams weren’t Googling “used software licences” — they were Googling the problems used licences solve. Our brief: turn organic search into a second growth engine, sustainably, without short-cuts.

The discovery: content has to do the educating

The intensive on-boarding made one thing obvious. In a category where the buyer doesn’t yet know the category exists, SEO cannot be a keyword-volume game. It has to be an education game. The content has to teach procurement and IT decision-makers what a used licence is, when it’s legal, how it works in practice, what the savings actually look like — and only then does the “buy from PREO” query become possible.

So the strategy became: regular, genuinely high-quality content that respects the buyer’s starting point, paired with a keyword strategy that ladders from broad educational queries to commercial intent.

The mechanic: content + keyword structure, working as one

• Deep keyword research mapped the buyer’s real journey — from “how do used software licences work” to “is buying used Microsoft 365 legal” through to bottom-of-funnel commercial queries.
• A content programme built around that map — long-form pieces, comparison pages, legal explainers, savings calculators — each tied to a specific search intent rather than a generic “blog cadence”.
• Site copy rewritten to deploy target keywords deliberately, in service of clarity for the reader — never stuffed.
• Continuous testing through our tooling so we could see which content patterns were compounding and which weren’t, and reallocate effort monthly.

The technical layer: the foundations that let content compound

None of the content work pays back without clean foundations. Ongoing technical SEO: fixing errors and warnings, internal-linking architecture so authority flowed to the commercially valuable pages, schema, crawlability, page speed. Layered with a quality backlink programme from sources that matter in the German B2B software landscape. Boring, deliberate, monthly. The kind of work that doesn’t make a slide but moves the chart.

The result: clicks, positions, and a category footprint

• +72.2% organic clicks YoY — not vanity impressions, actual visits from people researching the category.
• +17.7% average position — structural ranking lift across the tracked keyword set.
• +143% page-1 keywords vs prior year — the category footprint grew, not just the ranking on existing terms.
• 132 keywords on page 1, 41 in the top 5, 25 in the top 3 — defensible positions on the commercial queries that actually drive enquiries.