PayEasy
In 2020, two human resources professionals, Lindiwe Khumalo and Mark de Villiers, had an idea to solve some of their clients’ pain points around HR and payroll processing and compliance. PayEasy was founded as a Johannesburg-based software as a service (SaaS) platform for small and medium businesses in South Africa to take the stress out of payroll, compliance, onboarding and talent management processes and help SMBs focus on growth.
PayEasy now powers over a dozen industries, is integrated with over 20 third-party platforms, and has secured 123 client reviews, all of which praise the platform and its services.
The South African HR software market is worth $2.57 billion as of 2025. This is largely in response to SMBs’ increased need for intelligent, compliant and efficient HR, payroll and onboarding solutions in a post-COVID climate.
After PayEasy was founded, the team got in touch with us at EcoSEO. They were looking for help with SEO so they could get more eyeballs on their platform and more importantly, convert more eyeballs into actual leads. EcoSEO’s SEO services enabled them to grow organic new leads by 200%.
Lead Time: 8 Months
Sector: Software as a Service (SaaS)
Target Type: B2B
Demographic: Small and medium-sized business owners and HR managers, aged 30–55
Website Goal:Increase organic traffic and generate high-quality leads for HR software
Services: Technical SEO, Content Strategy, On-Page SEO, Internal Linking Optimization, Local SEO (Localized Content Creation)
2X
Organic Leads in 8 Months
The Challenge
PayEasy was strong in one key growth area: they had built a loyal base of clients already. Their website, however, was quietly suffering. Semrush revealed the concerning truth: PayEasy received just under 3,000 visitors per month in organic traffic – without logging in or signing up. That’s akin to hosting a cocktail party where 50% of the invitees walk past the hors d’oeuvres table and never say hi.
Their rankings weren’t exactly high, either. Keywords they were driving traffic with, such as “South Africa payroll software” or “HR compliance solutions”, were all lower priority or long-tail ones. In other words, the people that were searching for PayEasy online: they were passing them by.
Here’s where we saw the opportunity:
- Thinly-stretched, small marketing team: SEO was squeezed into a total of 15 working hours per week. We knew that it was a minuscule amount of time to compete against other SaaS providers in a content-driven, keyword-targeted field.
- Site migration issues: They’d updated their site recently and had inherited a whole host of broken links and indexing issues, tripping Google’s bots up at every turn.
- Content gaps: They were not communicating on the current, most relevant HR topics in the market. The universal struggle: How to manage remote work policies, flexible hours and all of the pain points that real small and medium businesses are going through in the “new normal.”
- Chaotic internal linking: The navigation system was confusing for the users and the search engine bots. It wasn’t helping.
- Local and regional neglect: South African SMBs would search for these key phrases, but find themselves on bigger, less targeted US or European sites.
By April 2024, Lindiwe and Mark knew the time had come to enlist our help. The goal was to disrupt the market, increase organic exposure, and start pulling in leads that convert — in a world where every SaaS company is screaming for attention.
Our SEO Strategy | SEO Plan Breakdown
Don’t panic — we didn’t just stab at the problem. Rather, we devised a customized SEO strategy for PayEasy.
To start, we conducted in-depth technical audits of South African and international HR software competitors to understand how others in the space are performing. Next, we strategized a combination of six tactics to increase brand visibility and target qualified leads that matter.
Site Migrations: From Technical Mess to Optimization
Site migrations can cause havoc with SEO if not managed effectively — link rot, page disappearances and Google asking, “Hold on, what’s going on?” We conducted a Screaming Frog audit of PayEasy’s recent site migrations to identify broken links and analyze which legacy pages are performing.
Instead of leaving 60 outdated and duplicative pages underperforming in the background, we consolidated and optimized the content into 40 lean and efficient pages. Redirects were fixed with the help of Google’s URL Inspection Tool.
Semrush’s Site Audit also confirmed the crawl errors were down by 25%, while the domain authority improved from 20 to 26. Minor tweaks, but effective in cleaning up the migration.
Content Optimization: Data-Driven Content That Speaks to Readers (And Search Engines)
We then wanted content that not only spoke to human readers, but to search engines as well. To do so, we used Semrush’s Keyword Magic Tool to extract the common phrases being typed into search engines and identify questions like, “South Africa remote work compliance” and “payroll tax solutions.”
Then, with the help of Yoast SEO, we created 30 new blog posts and articles targeting the popular and timely post-COVID topics such as “B-BBEE compliance for SMBs” and “managing hybrid teams without losing your mind.”
Sharing these articles via LinkedIn and Twitter placed them in front of the right audience, too. Google Analytics reported a 20% lift in page engagement for these articles. This is momentum that we can all get behind.
Optimizing Internal Linking & Localized Content
Make internal linking navigation better.
Straightening Out the Links Jungle. Crawling PayEasy’s internal links through Screaming Frog was kind of like untying a knot of spaghetti. Messy. Annoying. And a little bit satisfying, once you see everything coming together. A few of the core pages didn’t link to any others. So what’s the next step? Google doesn’t know. Neither does the user.
We drew up a plan to interconnect things. A “Payroll Solutions” page links to a step-by-step guide on payroll. Anchor texts no longer pointed to random or placeholder text — we optimized them with Yoast SEO, so they all made sense, and they all link to relevant pages.
The Result: Crawl bots take 15% less time crawling the website, and visitors aren’t bouncing around in a loop. Finding information just made sense.
Create localized content for South African SMBs.
Act Local, PayEasy. It’s easy to get generic with content. After all, what SMB owner doesn’t want better HR software? We decided to get as local as possible with the content for this client. Which led to a dive into Semrush’s Keyword Magic Tool, looking for what Johannesburg and Cape Town businesses were actually searching for — “Johannesburg payroll software” or “Cape Town HR compliance”, for example.
We created 15 localized guides and case studies with the local regulations these SMBs faced in mind, B-BBEE included.
The Result: Local search traffic increased by 22%. The visits? Quality ones, from leads actually searching for PayEasy’s products.
Optimize On-Page SEO with meta tags.
Meta titles and descriptions were snooze-fests. They were short, they were dull, and they really weren’t getting any clicks. We optimized them using keywords that related to what PayEasy actually offered: “HR software for South African SMBs” was what the new titles and descriptions said.
Result: Google Search Console shows a 12% increase in CTR. Clicks are up, and so are conversions, just from a few words in their meta tags.
Automate their reporting to save time.
Get More Bang for Your Report Buck. Reports. Every agency has ’em. We don’t like spending hours creating them in Excel, either. So we created automated dashboards in Google Data Studio to house all of their key data on organic traffic and leads.
We set up reporting so the entire team gets the reports every week in their inbox. E-mail, open, done. Roughly 8 hours a week for the entire team is saved. Which means that time can be spent on writing content, following up leads, or just enjoying life and work a little more.
The Results
It had been 8 months since the work started. The metrics were not modest:
- Organic traffic doubled — from 3K to 6K monthly unique visitors (not logged in).
- Net new organic leads tripled — from 50 to 150 leads a month (not all leads are “false positives”).
- Keyword rankings multiplied x20 — 3,200 total rankings with 200 ranking on page 1 and 50 ranking on page 1 in the top 3.
- Lead-to-demo conversion increased by 10%.
- Domain authority increased from 20 to 26, the product of targeted technical improvements and 8 quality new backlinks.
- Bounce rate decreased by 12%.
The star content piece? The page on “B-BBEE Compliance for Small Businesses”, which generates 600 visits a month, is localised and features effective meta tags.
EcoSEO delivered, but it is not about the numbers; we did so by making careful, targeted improvements to the technical side and aligning SEO initiatives with the brand’s goal: to serve South African SMBs better.
It involved optimising the content with the help of tools like Screaming Frog, Semrush, Yoast SEO, but also using Google Data Studio to visualise results and guide content updates with Google Search Console, SEMrush and Screaming Frog.
The end result: more visitors, more quality leads and a more authoritative online presence in a competitive HR software market.
Technical Tools:
Semrush, Yoast SEO, Ahrefs, Google Search Console, Google Data Studio and Google Analytics
SEO Services
Technical SEO, Conversion Optimisation, Press Release, Link Building, Conversation Rate Optimisation, Mobile Optimisation, Website Speed Optimisation
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