// case study 01 · Talent assessments · US / Anglo-Saxon
0 → 1.2M organic users a year. On $7k of backlinks.
We built Gyfted's organic engine from scratch: programmatic SEO at scale, fused with free, ungated psychometric tests that answer the search. Google clicks went from 230 a month in January 2022 to 126,824 in January 2024, and passed a million in twelve months, on $7k of backlinks.
1.2M
Organic users a year (GA peak)
127k
Google clicks in the best month (GSC, Jan 2024)
1.0M
Google clicks in the 12 months to Mar '24 (GSC)
$7k
Total backlink spend
// the curve: monthly organic traffic
- May '23: the explosion
- peak Jan '24: 126.8k
// the receipts: unedited screenshots
The chart above is ours. These are the tools it was drawn from, exactly as they print it. Every shot says which window it covers, and the caption says what it proves and what it does not.
1.01M clicks · 45M impressions · 2.3% CTR · avg. pos. 19.2
The twelve months behind the headline, straight out of Search Console: 1.01 million clicks from Google on 45 million impressions. The 1.2M figure on this page is Google Analytics organic users at peak, a different tool over its own window, and both are reported as the tool printed them.
Google Search Console, gyfted.me property · Open full size ↗
124K clicks · 4.13M impressions · 3% CTR · avg. pos. 16
Thirty days at the top: 124,000 clicks. January 2024, the best calendar month on the curve above, reached 126,824. Ahrefs put the same peak at roughly 42,600 visits a month, about a third of it. On a site that is mostly long-tail programmatic pages, third-party estimates can be out by a factor of three, which is why the curve is drawn from Search Console.
Google Search Console, gyfted.me property · Open full size ↗
801K clicks · 37.8M impressions · 2.1% CTR · avg. pos. 19.9
Someone outside the project wrote the growth up on his own blog, with his own reading of where ordinary SEO stopped and the programmatic work began. We did not write this one, and the chart is his screenshot of the same Search Console property.
Product Positioning Blog by Artem Chetverykov, product marketing consultant · Open full size ↗
// the brief
A psychometric-assessment platform with open-access tests. The job: own the enormous US long tail of career and self-knowledge searches (how to become a psychiatrist, is public utilities a good career path, what are my values) at a scale no editorial team could hand-write.
// the play
- [→]Programmatic at scale: structured data → LLM rewrite → indexed fast.
- [→]Templates per career, per US state and per industry. "How to become a psychiatrist" alone surfaced 69 different state pages in Search Console.
- [→]Product-led: free, ungated tests that are the search answer.
- [→]90/10: 90% research and targeting, 10% generation. About $7k of links in total.
This play is what our programmatic SEO services and product-led SEO services deliver.
// proof: ranking wins (google search console, Apr 2023 to Mar 2024)
| Query | Position | CTR | Clicks |
|---|---|---|---|
| netflix tagger | 5.2 | 4.4% | 7,112 |
| how to become a psychiatrist | 4.4 | 6.1% | 5,390 |
| what are my values quiz | 2.4 | 16.3% | 3,320 |
| personality type tinder | 3.8 | 6.2% | 2,781 |
| is public utilities a good career path | 9.4 | 8.0% | 2,100 |
// what the data actually says
8.6x
in three months: 10,550 Google clicks in April 2023, 90,748 in July. The fifteen months before it had taken the site from 230 clicks a month to 10,000.
16.3%
CTR at position 2.4 on "what are my values quiz". The landing page is the free test, so the result that answers the query is the product itself.
$7k
of backlinks sat under a 126,824-click month. The lever was supply of indexable, intent-matched pages. Most startups overpay for backlinks 6×. Ahrefs put the peak at ~42.6k visits a month, about a third of what Search Console counted: third-party tools estimate from a keyword sample, and a long programmatic tail sits mostly outside it.
// takeaways you can steal
- 01 Spend 90% on research & targeting, 10% on generation. AI makes pages cheap; knowing which pages to make is the whole game.
- 02 Free & ungated beats gated when the product itself is the search answer. Don't put a form in front of the intent.
- 03 Budget for the slow year. Gyfted took fifteen months to reach 10,550 clicks a month and three more to reach 90,748, so judge a programmatic build on quarters of data.
// is this play right for you?
works if
- You have templatable supply: data, profiles, locations, SKUs.
- Your product can fulfil the search intent itself.
- You can wait for compounding, measured in quarters.
skip it if
- You have no proprietary or structured data to template from.
- Your intent is purely one-off / transactional.
- You need overnight results. This is a compounding game.