How incident.io closed the gap on PagerDuty and grew organic meetings 22%

Where we started

Six months into the engagement, the picture was familiar. incident.io’s product had outgrown its organic footprint, the team had shipped four major releases since their last positioning refresh, and search was still anchored to “incident management.” A category where PagerDuty held a 12-year lead in domain authority and link equity.

The play wasn’t to fight for that head term. The play was to redraw the perimeter.

The bets we made

1. Move the perimeter, not the front line. We mapped 217 long-tail queries around incident response, SRE workflows, and post-mortem practice, queries with intent the product actually served, but where PagerDuty’s content was either thin or generic. Each became its own landing-page brief.

2. Lead with primary research. Editorial without proprietary data in this category is noise. We commissioned three small studies (sample sizes between 80 and 240) on incident response cadence, post-mortem adoption, and on-call burnout. Each study generated 12-15 referencable data points we seeded across the new pages.

3. Editorial cadence over volume. Four pages per month, every page co-authored with an incident.io SRE. No syndication, no AI drafts, no “comprehensive guides.” Each page targeted exactly one intent and ended in a single CTA.

4. Citation hygiene. Every claim got a source link inline, every internal page got a Schema.org mainEntityOfPage, and every published post got submitted to Google + manually pinged on Reddit’s r/sre and r/devops within 24 hours.

What shipped

Over Q3 and Q4 we shipped 32 new pages, refreshed 18 existing ones, and retired 41 that were diluting topical authority. The retire-list was the harder conversation, half of those pages had inbound links that needed redirect mapping. We did the 301 work over two weekends to avoid surprising the SRE team during business hours.

“We expected this to take a year before we’d see anything resembling movement. The first long-tail rankings appeared in week six. By week twenty we were the default answer for half the queries we’d prioritized.”

What worked, and why

Three things compounded. First, the long-tail queries each had real buyer intent, a director searching “post-mortem template SRE” is already three steps deep into the consideration funnel. Second, the primary research kept getting cited externally; by month nine, 41 external pages were linking to our cadence study, including two Substack newsletters with 50k+ SRE readers. Third, the editorial team stopped publishing anything they couldn’t defend in a customer call.

The 22% lift in organic meetings booked is a quarterly average, the last month of the engagement saw a 31% lift, suggesting the curve was still steepening when we handed off.

What we’d do differently

The retire-list should have shipped in month one, not month three. Every week those low-quality pages were live, they were diluting topical authority and confusing crawl budget. Lesson logged for the next engagement in a category with deep historical content debt.