What the client had
A US-based SaaS platform serving independent and multi-location retailers. Its cloud POS is built for retail workflows - inventory, multi-store operations, barcoding, integrated payments - rather than adapted from a hospitality or general-purpose platform. Launched in late 2025, the site was effectively invisible across both traditional search and the AI answer layer, in a category dominated by names with a decade of authority behind them.
What we did
The pattern this campaign was built on: when a buyer asks an engine what the best retail POS system is, the engine does not evaluate platforms. It reads a ranked list from a publication it already trusts, and returns what that list says. So the work was to be in those lists.
Placements on best-of lists already ranking for the category
“Best of” placements on high-authority retail and ecommerce publications, where the client was positioned on merit.
On-site content written for the question, not the keyword
Each money keyword received a page built for capture: question-format headings, comparison tables, FAQ schema, and an opening paragraph that matches the phrasing of the query it answers.
Anchored authority transfer
Every external placement carried two contextual links, one to the homepage and one to the relevant cluster page, so the authority landed on the pages designed to convert rather than on the domain in general.
What moved
The same placements moved the Google position
Because the pages carrying the citations are published pages with real organic traffic in this exact niche, the links in them pass authority to the product and cluster pages. The core money keyword went from the position below to the top of page one, with eleven further commercial variations now ranking between four and seventeen.
ChatGPT brand visibility, from nothing
The brand went from being named in none of the tracked ChatGPT answers to being named in 25% of them. On the highest-intent prompts - cloud retail POS system comparison, and top cloud-based POS systems for retail stores with inventory management - it is named in every response.
And the rest of the search footprint
Seventeen high-intent retail POS terms ranking on page one or two. Eighty-one further keywords newly ranking from nothing. Average position across the tracked set improved by 26.4 places. Monthly organic traffic up to 137 sessions on the cloud POS cluster, and traffic value up to $1,300 a month from zero in the same window.
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