SmartSuite is an industry challenger in the project management industry with its all-in-one work management solution.
The platform stands out with its modern interface, collaboration capabilities, and best-in-class templates.
When the brand entered the market, it had to compete against established players, such as Monday.com, Asana, ClickUp and Smartsheet, who have been investing in marketing for years.
In this case study, I’ll walk you through how we managed to build SmartSuite a revenue engine that consistently gets them demos from both SEO and AI search.
When we started working with SmartSuite, they had already established a name in the industry, with thousands of branded searches a month.
However, this was also one of their issues in SEO: they relied too much on branded search (i.e., people specifically looking for SmartSuite), and were essentially gaining 95%+ of their traffic from branded queries.
SmartSuite needed to find a way to generate leads from inbound, instead of relying on word of mouth, social media, and other paid acquisition channels.
We started by writing competitor alternatives guides, where we positioned SmartSuite as the best alternative to a competitor, as well as pricing guides, going over whether a competitor's pricing structure is worth it and what makes SmartSuite a better option.
Next up, we worked on ‘’best of’’ product listicle keywords to target people searching for a specific solution:
And, finally, we worked on 3-way comparison guides against industry giants to capture demand from people looking to compare 2 giants against one another:
The reason why we always start with bottom-of-the-funnel content is that we want to focus on prospects who know about their problems and are actively searching for a solution.
➡️ Starting from such bottom-of-the-funnel (BOFU) content will help you get results much faster, giving you the confidence to continue investing in SEO.
After this, we decided to make a strategic shift from project management to GRC and ITSM to better align with our product goals.
Our team started working on competitor alternatives content as well as pricing guides, where we started comparing SmartSuite's modern solution and flexibility against the industry's giants.
Considering the nature of these tools, often expensive to the point where only enterprises can afford them, an outdated user interface, and a steep learning curve, there is a serious switch intent from users on the market.
With our bottom-of-the-funnel SEO sprints covering a big portion of the competitors in ‘’alternatives’’ and ‘’pricing’’ content, we managed to generate thousands of clicks from users looking to switch or looking to evaluate different vendors.
We then combined that with visitor identification software to see who is visiting these guides so that SmartSuite’s sales team can go after them, such as executive directors.
As a result of our large-scale BOFU content marketing efforts, we were able to capture page 1 rankings for competitor-related content in the project management, GRC, and ITSM industries, such as:
However, the real win for SmartSuite's organic search has been seeing an almost 4x increase in non-branded clicks over the last 3 months compared to the same period of time in 2024 and 2x the impressions.
SmartSuite has also been getting more and more popular across platforms like ChatGPT and Perplexity, with a 92.5% increase in LLM sessions quarter-on-quarter when comparing Q1 to Q2 2025.
In terms of the performance of AI search, we could see that SmartSuite is getting recommended for the best:
SmartSuite is also #1 across the 30 prompts we track:
