The Challenge
An established HR software company with DR 52 that launched three new features, but couldn’t get the new pages to rank despite the solid on-page optimization. A case where the overall domain was healthy, the problem was specific to the new content.
The problem was an authority mismatch; years of backlinks pointed to their old product pages. The new feature pages had no backlinks, so Google has no reason to trust or rank them, even on a domain with decent overall authority.
BambooHR, Gusto, and Rippling had comparable features and existing publisher relationships to accelerate link building. They were already accumulating backlinks to their versions of the same pages.
The marketing team established 4-6 months before competitors locked down the page 1 for these keywords. After that, breaking in would require 2-3x more effort and time.
The Strategy We Used
We recommend link insertions specifically because the HR technology already has abundant content on platforms that cover the topics. Hundreds of articles about AI in hiring, HR compliance, and employee engagement already existed on HR industry blogs, SaaS review platforms, and business technology publications.
- Link insertions into existing HR technology articles, HRIS comparison posts, workplace technology roundups, and HR compliance guides with DR 45–70.
- Each insertion targeted articles that were contextually relevant to the specific feature, such as AI hiring content for the resume screening page, compliance articles for the compliance page, etc.
- Target pages: 3 new feature landing pages + 6 supporting blog posts in the content cluster.
- We used 35% branded, 30% feature-descriptive, 25% partial-match, and 10% exact-match anchors.
- 15–20 insertions, with higher allocation to the AI resume screening page based on keyword value analysis.
The Results
Link insertions proved especially effective for new feature pages because they leveraged existing content authority. The AI resume screening page received insertions within articles that had been accumulating authority for years. This transferred not just PageRank but topical trust signals that a brand-new guest post on a new page could not replicate.
The client beat their 4–6 month competitive window. By month 3, all three feature pages had reached page 1, establishing positions before competitors could entrench. The marketing team estimated that achieving the same results through guest posting alone would have taken 8–10 months.
AI visibility was strong for the new feature pages, with the highest AI citation counts across all the link insertion case studies. The AI resume screening page appeared in 16 Google AI overview panels, reflecting the surge in AI-related HR technology queries. ChatGPT cited the client in 11 responses to questions about AI hiring tools or resume screening software, a critical discovery channel, as HR professionals increasingly use AI to research vendor options during procurement cycles. Perplexity delivered 13 citations concentrated in HRIS comparison queries, where the client’s feature pages were now embedded in the comparison articles that AI models referenced. The link insertion strategy effectively placed the client’s brand within the source material that AI systems used to generate recommendations, creating a dual visibility advantage that compounded across both traditional search and AI discovery.
