Where they started
The client was a mid-sized email-marketing SaaS with a competent site: a decent blog, a handful of feature pages, and a pricing page that read like a legal document nobody wanted to write. They ranked for their own brand and a few generic “email marketing tool” terms, but nothing near the buying decision. Then the category leader announced a price increase, and within days their own sales inbox filled with the same question worded a dozen ways: is there something cheaper that does the same thing. The intent had moved into search overnight (“[leader] pricing increase”, “[leader] alternatives”, “cheaper than [leader]”), and the client had no page that answered any of it. The whole engagement was a race against a demand curve we could already see forming.
What we did
- Shipped a pricing-transparency page in the first sprint: a plain, honest breakdown of every tier with no fake “contact us” gate, so evaluators comparing costs had a real number to land on. This is what caught the “how much does X cost” branch of the wave.
- Built an honest alternative page (“the category leader” only, never named): a straight feature-and-price comparison that admitted where the client lost, which is exactly why it converted the people who felt oversold elsewhere.
- Published inside 19 days, before the peak: the entire value was arriving while the searches were still climbing; a month later the same pages would have caught a receding tide.
- Earned 20 links in the same window from marketing newsletters and review platforms already writing about the price change, which pushed the new pages into the top five while the topic was hot.
The chart tells the honest version: a sharp climb through months one to three as the wave crested, a small settle as the news cooled, then a plateau well above where they started. News-driven demand fades by nature, but pages that answer a permanent buying question keep working after the headline is gone. They kept about 95% of the peak, which is the part we actually cared about.