Deputy makes workforce and shift management software: scheduling, real-time attendance, last-minute shift changes, team announcements, and payroll integrations for businesses that run on hourly staff. When they came to us in September 2019 they were already an established brand, with offices in the US, UK, and Australia and a solid domain built on years of industry content. They had worked with other agencies before, with mixed results. The brief was plain: scale link building and move specific product pages up the rankings, with the US market as the priority.
Deputy sells into dozens of industries, and each one has its own product page. So we worked in quarterly cycles: pick an industry, agree with the client on the product pages and keywords worth targeting, then earn coverage that pointed at them. When a publisher’s guidelines did not allow a link to a product page, we linked to the supporting posts and service pages that also needed to rank. We let real events steer the focus. In the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic we shifted from retail to healthcare and placed guest posts on managing a workforce and easing pressure on the hospital floor.
Relevance mattered more than volume. Through personalized outreach we earned placements on established sites across HR, healthcare, retail, and manufacturing, among them Qualtrics, Workable, HR Daily Advisor, Chain Store Age, and Zenefits. For the UK and Australian coverage we linked to Deputy’s local domains so the signal stayed relevant to each market. Over the engagement we built more than 300 links at an average domain authority of 49.
The rankings followed. Deputy reached the first page, and then the top of it, for the transactional product-page keywords that mattered: the ones with modest search volume but clear buying intent. Monthly organic traffic grew from 166,000 to 218,000 visitors, up 31% across roughly 40 months of continuous work.
The same editorial coverage that grew that organic traffic is the kind of source AI assistants like ChatGPT, Claude, and Google AI Overviews now read and cite.