Link building SaaS startup
Outreach Beast
A bootstrapped startup built a real SEO engine for 70% less
Outreach Beast had ambition, a product people liked, and almost no marketing budget. Instead of one expensive US generalist, they hired a dedicated SEO Specialist and a dedicated Link Builder through Hire SEO Team — a full two-person engine for less than half of a single local salary.
The challenge
- The founders were writing blog posts between support tickets and sales calls — output was inconsistent and nothing was keyword-mapped.
- A single mid-level in-house SEO in the US quoted $85K base. With benefits and tools the real number was closer to $120K — more than their entire annual marketing budget.
- Freelancers came and went. Every handover meant re-explaining the product, the ICP and the backlog from scratch.
- Their backlink profile was thin: 41 referring domains against competitors sitting at 600+.
What we put in place
We split the workload the way an agency would, but with dedicated people: one SEO Specialist owning on-page, technical and content briefs, and one Link Builder owning outreach and digital PR full-time.
Both hires joined the founders' Slack, worked US-overlapping hours, and attended the Monday standup — they operated exactly like in-house employees.
The included 10 hours of monthly senior SEO strategy set the roadmap so two mid-level hires executed against a senior-level plan.
All HR, payroll, replacement cover and Time Doctor time tracking sat with us. The founders reviewed timesheets, not contracts.
The work
Technical clean-up
Fixed indexation bloat from 2,100 thin tag pages, rebuilt the internal linking model and cut LCP from 4.1s to 1.6s.
Keyword architecture
Mapped 240 commercial and informational keywords into 9 topic clusters with a clear money-page hierarchy.
Content cadence
8 keyword-mapped long-form pieces per month, each briefed, written, optimised and internally linked before publishing.
White-hat link building
Personalised outreach at 400 prospects/month, plus two data-led digital PR studies that earned coverage in industry newsletters.
The results
- Organic sessions grew 312% in nine months, from 3,400 to 14,000 per month.
- 184 new referring domains at an average DR of 41 — no PBNs, no paid placements.
- Demo requests from organic went from 4 to 47 per month, becoming the startup's number-one acquisition channel.
- Total annual cost of both hires stayed below what one US SEO specialist would have cost, freeing budget for product.
We were choosing between one expensive hire and no hire at all. Hire SEO Team gave us two dedicated people, a senior strategist on top, and zero HR admin — for less than half the price of hiring locally.