Type of SaaS
Financial (FinTech)
SERVICES PROVIDED
Initial 90-day on-site SEO and CRO sweep. Conversion-first site audit, page-load remediation, conversion-path recovery via 404 redirects, and home page realignment to commercial-intent search.
Results Window
Q1 2026
The Situation
The client is a FinTech SaaS platform serving financial services firms. Buyers in this vertical research vendors hard, compare alternatives line by line, and decide based on what the home page answers in the first scroll. This was an initial onboarding activity with a 90-day window to deliver quick wins and lay the foundation for everything that came next.
The site had two problems feeding each other. On the on-site SEO side, the home page was ranking for adjacent informational terms while the bottom-funnel commercial-intent searches their buyers were entering went to competitors. On the CRO side, the page itself wasn’t built to convert anyone who did find it: render-blocking scripts dragged mobile load into double digits, image assets sat uncompressed, and average engagement time per user sat at 20 seconds. Buyers were landing and leaving before the page could resolve.
Pre-engagement baselines: Mobile Page Speed Performance at 27 and Desktop at 58, both well below Google’s reward thresholds. 51 URLs returning 404s in Search Console, having accumulated quietly as the site evolved. The home page was ranking in the Top 3 for 27 keywords as of December 2025. Demo requests had been hovering in the low double digits month over month, with no consistent trend line to build forecasting against.
Key Results
| METRIC | BEFORE | RESULT |
|---|---|---|
| Home page avg engagement time per user (Q1 vs Q4) | 20s | 3m 25s (+881%) |
| Demo requests (Feb YoY) | 19 | 23 (+19.4%) |
| Home page organic sessions (Feb YoY) | 3,160 | 4,138 (+31%) |
| Home page Top 3 commercial-intent keyword rankings | 27 (Dec 2025) | 47 |
| Mobile Page Speed Performance score | 27 | 50 |
| 404 errors flagged in Search Console | 51 | 10 remaining (80% resolved) |
What We Did
Triaged the highest-leverage on-site SEO and CRO fixes for the 90-day window.
An onboarding sweep is a prioritization exercise. We audited the site across both lenses simultaneously. The on-site SEO lens: keyword targeting, page-level content alignment, URL health, internal-link structure. The CRO lens: page-load experience, conversion paths, on-page engagement signals. We scored each issue by impact-per-effort and sequenced the work so the highest-leverage fixes ran first, before any copy work touched the site.
Fixed page-load fundamentals: the rare move that wins on-site SEO and CRO at the same time.
Slow pages don't convert, regardless of what they say. We stripped unneeded scripts, right-sized and re-compressed image assets, and deferred non-critical loads. Mobile Page Speed Performance moved from 27 to 50, and Desktop from 58 to 86. The mobile gain matters most. A home page that loads slowly on mobile loses the session before any conversion logic kicks in, and the home page is the primary entry point for this site's traffic.
Recovered 41 conversion paths that had been dying at 404 errors.
Every broken URL was a conversion buyers couldn't complete. We paired each one with an intent-matched redirect, sending the buyer to the live page closest to what the original was trying to do, rather than blanket-routing them to the home page. The work recovered conversion paths that had been dying at dead ends, preserved link equity, and gave Google a clean crawl path back through the site.
Rewrote the home page to win commercial-intent search AND convert the buyer on arrival.
SEMrush data showed the home page drifting toward adjacent informational terms while the commercial-intent product searches that drive demos were going to competitors. We rewrote the home page's on-page elements to lead with that operational language, and structured the page to hold buyer attention long enough to convert. Two outcomes from one rewrite: Top 3 commercial-intent keyword count jumped from 27 in December 2025 to 47 by February 2026 (a 74% lift in two months), and average engagement time per user moved from 20 seconds to 3 minutes 25 seconds (an 881% lift).
What The Data Tells Us
This was a 90-day sweep that hit both sides of the conversion equation. The on-site SEO side drew the right buyers in: 27 Top 3 commercial-intent keyword rankings became 47 in two months, meaning the home page started showing up for the bottom-funnel product searches that signal a buyer is ready to choose a vendor, not the top-funnel informational searches it had been ranking for. The CRO side held those buyers once they landed: home page average engagement time moving from 20 seconds to 3 minutes 25 seconds (an 881% lift) is the difference between a page buyers bounce off and a page they actually read. Demo requests rising 19.4% YoY is what happens when both layers fire together.
The deeper story is what 90 days bought: both the quick wins and the foundation underneath them. The quick wins are the metrics above. The foundation is what those metrics now enable. A home page that ranks for commercial-intent buyer searches and holds attention long enough to convert. A site fast enough to compete on mobile. A clean crawl path routing traffic through recovered conversion routes. Each subsequent optimization, whether a new landing page, a content cluster, or a CRO test, now lands on a site that can carry the gain rather than absorb it.
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Bay Leaf Digital on SEO Strategy
We open SaaS engagements with a 90-day on-site SEO and CRO sweep that gets the right buyers to your site and converts them on arrival, so you see compounding wins inside the first quarter and a foundation that carries the next ones.