Case study · Marketplace · Hospitality
Gathar — Spike, Index, Compound
Now in year four of their startup journey, Gathar — Australia's largest marketplace for booking private chefs and caterers — recognised the impact SEO had on their early success. Organic was already their biggest traffic driver and highest-converting channel. They engaged Earned Media for a 6-month engagement to identify where the next wave of organic growth would come from — and to lift Domain Rating through off-site link building.
The challenge
Gathar already had strong organic foundations and an "always-on" SEO retainer with Earned Media. But the leadership team wanted to compress the next stage of organic growth into a defined 6-month sprint — identifying technical and architectural areas where the platform could earn the next traffic spike.
In parallel, an off-site mandate: lift Domain Rating from a baseline of 33–35 to a 2021 EOY target.
The approach
The 6-month project was broken into clear milestones, delivered jointly by Nick Brogden and Shawn:
- Architecture review — full audit of Gathar's custom-built platform, mapped against the highest-opportunity query clusters.
- Keyword research at depth — building a transactional query map across cities, occasions and chef types.
- Roadmap of actionable recommendations — handed off to Gathar's CTO with technical SEO specs.
- Post-action review — measuring the impact of each shipped change so the team learned what compounded.
- Off-site programme — concentrated link building to lift Domain Rating into the target band.
The results
Gathar exceeded both targets. Domain Rating closed the year at 40 — past the original 33–35 ambition. The platform began indexing for 105,000 additional monthly searches, with over 500 brand-new queries ranking after the recommendations went live.
Most importantly: the spike held. The engagement set up the architecture for compounding growth, not a one-off bump.
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