The challenge
In 2021 PayHOA was a startup with no marketing infrastructure, in a category that didn't really have a name. Most HOAs kept their books in QuickBooks, and PayHOA had to show that self-managed associations needed more than accounting software.
A few years in, PayHOA ranked at or near the top for nearly every core term in its category. That's when it got harder. Once you own the keywords that define your market, growth has to come from somewhere else.
What I did
I started small. There was a five-page website and four blog articles a month, enough to get going while PayHOA's team built the product. The early keywords were high-intent and low-volume, aimed at the few people actively searching for a solution.
From there I built the library on a hub-and-spoke model. Pillar pages claimed the core terms, article clusters fed authority back to them, and lead-generation downloads turned readers into contacts. Production quadrupled, backed by quarterly keyword planning, an editorial calendar and regular tracking of rankings and analytics.
Once the category was won, competitors arrived and we couldn't rely on the core terms alone. So my team opened four new fronts. We built a glossary for volunteer board members who'd inherited terms they'd never had to use. We also wrote state-by-state legal guides for 15+ states. My team made four video case studies with dozens of testimonial shorts, and ran link building at about nine placements a quarter.
Results
Organic traffic grew more than tenfold over the engagement. PayHOA went from zero Top-10 rankings to 33 keywords in the top three. It now draws more organic traffic in a month than it did in the year before the work began.
The glossary went live in mid-2025 and placed 55 terms in the top 10 within months. Domain authority rose from 19 to 33, and PayHOA has since built its own marketing team.