Situation
Adaptist Consulting runs under PT Accelist Lentera Indonesia. The website went live in January 2024 with zero traffic and zero leads. Three months before I started in December 2025, someone tried to fix the SEO from within the company. It was a non-SEO person, and the results were worse than before.
I came in with a team as part of a restructure of our SEO operations at Accelist. The site had no leads from search, Domain Rating 3, and a content strategy that nobody in-house understood. Adaptist needed an acquisition channel. At the time, organic search produced nothing.
What I found
The content was the problem. The site had roughly 100–200 pages, all generated by ChatGPT and published without editing or any review. Topics were random — pages targeted queries unrelated to what Adaptist offers or who buys it. Domain Rating sat at 3, meaning there were no external votes pointing to the site.
What I changed
The archive was the first thing I tackled. I deleted thin and off-topic pages — about half the site came down. What stayed got rewritten from scratch, brief by brief, with actual editing instead of raw model output.
Then I did keyword research against competitors who ranked where Adaptist should have. I built a content map around topics those competitors captured but Adaptist missed, prioritizing keywords with buying intent. Buyers search for product names and comparisons. Browsers type broad questions like "how to choose". Different queries call for different pages, so I wrote both.
For links, I ran outreach to relevant sites in our space. We published guest posts with partners whose audiences would find the content useful. The brand started appearing on LinkedIn and larger platforms through mentions and contributions. Over six months, Domain Rating moved from 3 to 26.
I managed and trained the non-SEO people on the team. As the workload grew across Accelist's other websites, I built AI-assisted tools to keep their content aligned with SEO best practice without me reviewing every line.
The stakeholders wanted Adaptist mentioned by AI search. Page-level optimization alone does not achieve this. I proposed publishing original opinions, analysis, statistics, and data on the site. Search engines reward experience and expertise for E-E-A-T. AI engines cite sources that carry original data. So we needed material nobody else had.
What happened
Organic search grew from almost nothing to 1,000–1,500 monthly organic clicks within six months. Adaptist now brings in 8–12 qualified leads per quarter from a channel that previously produced none. The rebuilt content ranks for keywords we targeted, and visibility extends across Google, Bing, and AI search results.
What I'd do next
The gap in the strategy is the data itself. The opinions, analysis, and statistics we publish today lean on third-party numbers. Non-commodity content only earns real weight when the data belongs to you. So the next move is first-party research from Adaptist's own work.
I also want to overhaul the service pages. The current ones are thin and confusing — they were put up with minimum optimization effort and nobody reviewed them since. Visitors looking for what Adaptist actually does often leave without understanding the offering. I asked to rewrite them but was told no. Next time I'll bring performance data to show why it matters and push again.