Victorious earned a Silver certificate in Best Use of Search – B2B (SEO) at the Global Search Awards 2026 for “Tipping the Scales for Finance SaaS,” with judges praising its innovation and adaptability.

The night before Victorious’s onboarding call with this client in January 2025, their marketing manager found a problem with the company’s brand-new website. The page metadata hadn’t carried over in the migration, which wiped out the ranking signals their existing pages had built.

Victorious ran eight independent site crawls on launch day to find any other migration issues. The team then set up biweekly technical sweeps and cleared each high-priority issue within days of it being flagged. That technical foundation supported the rest of the campaign, including the content that later earned the client a steady flow of AI Overview citations.

“A highly forward-thinking campaign that demonstrated a strong understanding of the evolving search landscape… Turning a regulatory challenge into a strategic content opportunity, while achieving outstanding visibility results, highlights a highly effective and agile approach.”

Global Search Awards 2026 judges

Optimizing for three search entities

This company sells two B2B SaaS products. Instant Pay is an earned wage access (EWA) platform for employers, and Instant Tips is a digital tipping solution for restaurant operators. At the start of the engagement, both products had near-zero organic visibility, and each competed in its own category against well-funded incumbents.

Victorious treated each product as a separate search entity and added a third entity for restaurant payroll services. Victorious built the plan around how each product’s audience evaluates vendors:

• HR directors evaluating Instant Pay want proof of compliance and evidence that earned wage access improves employee retention.
• Restaurant operators considering Instant Tips want operational details like POS integration, reliable daily payouts, and tip pooling compliance.
• Buyers searching for restaurant payroll services care most about compliance risk, particularly tipped wage calculations and state overtime rules that generic payroll platforms don’t handle.

Combining those audiences under one content cluster and set of keywords would have diluted the topical authority each product needed to rank. Each entity got its own keyword themes, content roadmap, link profile, and link acquisition cadence. A quarterly roadmap and biweekly performance reviews kept the three strategies on track.

Building for AI answers and rankings together

When AI Overviews started driving measurable traffic, Victorious built an answer-targeting framework into every content brief. Each brief mapped the question clusters that AI systems pull citations from alongside traditional ranking signals, so every page was built to perform in both channels.

Over the course of the campaign, Victorious created eight new audience-specific demo request pages, updated five existing ones, and published 24 blog posts. One of the strongest assets started as an internal sales battle card. The team restructured it into a tip management software comparison guide that reaches buyers while they’re actively evaluating vendors.

Moving fast on a regulatory ruling

On December 23, 2025, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau issued an advisory opinion stating that certain earned wage access products aren’t loans under federal lending rules. The client flagged the ruling on the first call after the holidays. Victorious published a response within days, drawing on coverage from Thomson Reuters, Payments Dive, and American Banker.

In regulated financial news, early movers earn citations and rankings before slower competitors can respond. The fast response positioned the client as an authority on the ruling while the news cycle was still active.

The results

The campaign beat every target it set:

• Keywords ranking in the top three positions grew from 214 to 354, against a goal of 321.
• Non-branded organic traffic grew from 669 to 1,694, a 153 percent increase, against a goal of 1,003.
• AI Overview citations grew from 10 to 151, against a goal of 100.
• Organic form submissions rose from an average of 168 to 196 per month, against a goal of 193.

The client also earned all three citation positions in Google’s AI Overview for “electronic tips,” a high-intent product term.

About Victorious

Victorious is a San Francisco-based search agency that helps brands grow their visibility in organic search and on AI platforms, including ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI surfaces. The Global Search Awards recognition adds to more than 75 industry awards Victorious has earned since 2018.

“This B2B Financial SaaS came to us with two products in two different markets and a category where every claim gets scrutinized. The team built a separate strategy for each product and optimized for AI answers before anyone knew what good performance looked like there. We’re proud to see that work recognized by the Global Search Awards judges.”

Michael Transon, Founder and CEO, Victorious

Find out more about Victorious at victorious.com.

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