How We Helped Applaud Grow Their Organic Presence in the US Market

Applaud is a HR SaaS platform built for medium to large enterprises, giving them a single, intuitive interface that brings together multiple HR services in one place. Headquartered in the UK, Applaud works with companies across the globe — but when it came to organic growth in the United States, the numbers told a different story to the rest of the business.

Traffic from US search engines was significantly lower than their UK equivalent. More importantly, registrations and sign-ups from North America were not growing at the same pace, despite the product being well suited to the market. The audience was there. The demand was there. The visibility was not.

The challenge was clear. Applaud needed to build meaningful organic presence in a competitive market where they were starting from a weaker position, without diluting the momentum they had already built at home.

Building a foundation the search engines could follow

The first thing we addressed was technical. Having a single version of core web pages trying to serve both a UK and a US audience creates an unclear signal for search engines. They struggle to understand which content is intended for which market, and in competitive search landscapes that ambiguity costs rankings.

We created country-specific versions of Applaud's highest priority pages, each properly structured with the correct language and regional tags to give search engines an unambiguous signal about the intended audience. It sounds straightforward, but getting the architecture right is the difference between content that ranks in the right market and content that competes with itself.

Finding the right voices in the right market

Organic search is not purely a technical exercise. Authority matters, and in a market where Applaud was less established, building that authority required more than well-optimised pages.

Applaud already had a strong programme of round-tables and webinars, which gave us a natural vehicle. We identified US-based influencers and industry voices whose audiences closely matched Applaud's target buyers in North America. Bringing those voices into Applaud's content programme did two things simultaneously. It extended reach into audiences that were already warm and engaged, and it built the kind of credible third-party association that strengthens a brand's standing in a new market faster than owned content alone.

Content built around what US buyers were actually searching for

The final piece was territory-specific content, developed using a combination of website analytics, competitor research, and direct feedback from Applaud's sales team about the conversations they were having on the ground in the US.

Sales teams are one of the most underused sources of SEO insight in B2B SaaS. They hear the language buyers use, the objections that come up repeatedly, and the questions that keep surfacing before someone is ready to commit. That intelligence, combined with keyword and competitor data, gave us a clear picture of where the content gaps were and what we needed to create to fill them.

The result was a targeted content programme built around the specific terms and topics that US buyers were searching for — not a generic adaptation of the UK content strategy, but something built from the ground up for that market.

Working with a market where your brand is less established requires a different approach to one where you already have momentum. If you are looking to grow your organic presence in a new territory, we would be happy to talk through what that looks like for your business.

Get in touch with the Webdog team.