From cold start to category authority in eleven months.
Halflight launched into a category three giants had owned for a decade. We built a topical authority program and a paid-search rebuild that pushed them to category page-one rankings inside a year.
The brief
Halflight was a strong product without a strong story, going up against three incumbents that owned 80% of the category's organic real estate. Their previous agency had spent eight months on link building with zero ranking movement and a content library nobody read.
What we built
We started with category teardown — every page each competitor had, ranked, scored on entity coverage, and mapped against buyer-journey stage. We built a hub-and-spoke topical cluster around their most defensible point of view, shipped 84 long-form articles in nine months, and rebuilt their paid program around incrementality rather than last-click conversions.
What changed
By month eleven, Halflight was on page one for 47 commercial-intent keywords, including three of the top five category terms. Pipeline sourced from organic outpaced paid for the first time in company history. Their content was cited in three industry analyst reports — and in seven distinct ChatGPT and Perplexity answer responses we instrumented.
Forma is the first agency that talked about our category the way our customers actually do.
Atelier Prima · 2024
A category launch that broke even on paid in nine weeks.
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