Turning fragmented content into a durable organic system

Turning fragmented content into a system that compounded over time

The context

When I started doing what eventually became “rebuilding the organic growth engine,” organic growth already existed at Nulab.

There was:

  • blog content

  • some ranking pages

  • scattered SEO wins

  • multiple products competing for attention

  • content created by different teams at different times for different reasons

Traffic was growing, but unevenly. Some pages performed well, others ranked accidentally, and a lot of content existed without clear purpose or support.

What didn’t exist yet was a system:

  • no unified organic strategy

  • no consistent topic model

  • no clear prioritization by business value

  • no shared definition of what “good” organic content looked like

Growth was happening — just not deliberately.

How the work actually started

This didn’t begin as a greenfield rebuild or a big strategic reset.

It started as cleanup.

Early work focused on:

  • auditing existing content

  • identifying duplication, overlap, and decay

  • spotting high-performing pages that weren’t supported by surrounding content

  • clarifying which content belonged to which product

  • pruning or consolidating low-value pages

  • improving internal linking and navigation paths

Most of this work was incremental and iterative. There was no single launch moment — just steady improvement.

How a system emerged

Over time, patterns started to show up.

Content performed better when:

  • related pages were grouped around a shared user intent

  • articles addressed full questions instead of isolated keywords

  • strong pages were supported instead of left alone

  • internal linking made discovery easier

That’s when topic clusters and the Learn hub began to take shape — not all at once, but gradually.

As content was grouped and refined:

  • topic ownership became clearer (e.g. collaboration, project management, strategy)

  • editorial standards became more consistent

  • decisions about what to create next became repeatable

What eventually looked like an “engine” was really the result of repetition.

How SEO and content decisions worked together

SEO wasn’t a separate function handing requirements to content.

In practice, I was making the tradeoffs directly:

  • choosing topics based on search demand and product relevance

  • shaping content around real user questions

  • balancing educational depth with evaluation and conversion intent

  • adjusting based on performance over time, not launch metrics

SEO decisions were content decisions, and vice versa.

The structure that stabilized over time

As the work matured, a clearer structure emerged:

  • Blog for company updates, announcements, and brand storytelling

  • Learn hub for evergreen education, search discovery, and product activation

  • Solutions and examples for use cases, evaluation, and commercial intent

This structure clarified:

  • where content belonged

  • how users moved from discovery to understanding to product exploration

  • how content could support both acquisition and adoption

The Learn hub became the foundation — not because it was declared so, but because it consistently performed.

Decisions that shaped long-term performance

Several practical decisions had an outsized impact over time:

  • removing SEO-driven content from the blog to prevent dilution

  • avoiding a generic “Resources” section in favor of purpose-built hubs

  • prioritizing scalability and clarity over short-term traffic spikes

  • treating content as something that needed maintenance, not just launches

These weren’t flashy moves, but they made the system easier to grow, govern, and sustain.

How results accumulated

There was no moment where growth suddenly flipped on.

Performance improved because:

  • more content aligned to real intent

  • existing winners were supported instead of isolated

  • internal linking improved discoverability

  • content decay was addressed instead of ignored

Over time, those changes compounded.

Today, the Learn hub is the primary driver of Nulab’s non-branded organic discovery, reaching approximately:

  • ~56K monthly organic visits

  • ~9.6K ranking keywords

  • ~3.4K top-3 keyword positions

  • ~1.6K referring domains

  • Domain Rating: 74

The content has also surfaced consistently across AI-driven discovery experiences, including Google AI Overviews and large language models — a byproduct of structure, depth, and usefulness rather than optimization for those surfaces specifically.

Why this still matters

Search has changed a lot — especially with AI-driven interfaces — but this work reinforced something I still believe strongly:

Organic growth compounds when content is treated as a system, not a collection of pages.

This project wasn’t about predicting every shift. It was about building something sturdy enough to adapt as the rules changed.

What this shows about how I work

This case study reflects how I approach content strategy in practice:

  • I start with what exists, not with idealized frameworks

  • I improve systems through iteration, not one-time redesigns

  • I’m comfortable working in ambiguity before clarity exists

  • I focus on compounding improvements rather than launch moments

The “engine” wasn’t built in a sprint. It was built by paying attention, fixing what didn’t work, and repeating what did.

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Owning organic growth systems — and documenting the risk when ownership ended

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Making organic search more useful during evaluation