Customer story
How Papermark cleaned up its SEO and won back rankings on expensive keywords
SaaS / Data rooms An SEO-led SaaS that had already gone deep on organic brought us in to fix the gaps, repair its backlink profile, and recover visibility on Google and in LLMs.
Your particular strength is how thorough and detailed the analysis was. I never saw anything like that, and it was super relevant. We're in a very particular niche, and I kept thinking, how did they get so deep in there?
The challenge
Papermark is a data room provider, offering document sharing and analytics, and the number one alternative to DocSend. Unlike most companies that come to us, Papermark was not starting from scratch. Co-founder Iuliia Shnai had run SEO from the very beginning, and it was one of the main pulls for new customers.
The problem was quality rather than absence. Building new things was easy. Cleaning up, improving, and closing the gaps was where they were stuck.
“I felt we didn’t have it clean. There were bad backlinks, something dropping here, something dropping there. Developing new things was easy, but improving, cleaning, and covering the gaps was the problem.”
What we changed
We started with the diagnosis they had not been able to get anywhere else: a clear overview of what was not working and why the results had stalled. From there the work focused on quality and recovery rather than volume.
| Priority | What it looked like in practice |
|---|---|
| Deep, niche-specific analysis | Thorough research tailored to a very particular niche, not a generic SEO audit |
| Backlink cleanup | Repaired the profile, removing the bad links that were dragging performance |
| Recover Google visibility | Addressed the drops so the site regained the rankings it had lost |
| Rank the money keywords | Improved rankings on the heavy, high-value keywords that matter most |
| AEO and LLM visibility | Structured the work to grow citations and pull from AI search |
The outcome
The clean-up is showing. Papermark recovered visibility on Google after the drops, the backlink profile is healthier, and rankings on the expensive, high-intent keywords that are the core goal have improved. The team is already seeing pull from LLMs, with citations increasing and a clear path to more traffic.
Iuliia is realistic that SEO is not an overnight channel. What stood out to her was the depth and relevance of the work in a niche that is hard to understand from the outside.
“For SEO, quality matters. It’s better to pay more and get the better quality, because it’s always about time. The faster you fix it, the faster you see results.”
For an already advanced team, the value was in the parts that are hardest to do well: the cleanup, the quality, and the gaps nobody else had spotted.
