Sunset – Niche Topical Pages and Thought Leadership

Sunset, a platform that helps founders navigate startup shutdowns, used programmatic SEO to quickly become a thought leader in a specific niche. In partnership with an SEO agency, Sunset created over 1,450 pages focusing on keywords around startup closures and layoffs (e.g. “Peloton layoffs”, “[Startup] shutdown”). Each page provided details or commentary on a particular company’s layoff news or shutdown scenario.

By targeting these specialized, newsy queries, Sunset rapidly built topical authority in the startup ecosystem. The results were striking – going from zero to 27,000+ monthly organic visitors in just four months. This traffic included entrepreneurs, investors, and employees searching for information on high-profile or recent company struggles, who then discovered Sunset’s resources and services for handling such situations.

Programmatic SEO tactics:

Dynamic news/topic pages generated for each relevant company or keyword. Rather than manually writing dozens of articles, Sunset likely used a template to input known information (company name, layoff dates, etc.) and some analysis, creating pages at scale for each event.

This gave Google a comprehensive index of content on “startup layoffs” topics, signaling authority. By covering hundreds of companies’ scenarios, Sunset ensured that anyone searching those terms would find their site.

Complementary strategies:

Given the sensitive topic, Sunset buttressed its SEO push with thought leadership content – possibly blog posts or reports giving deeper analysis on startup failure trends (positioning themselves as experts). They also engaged in community building, perhaps through a newsletter or forum for founders facing shutdown, which can drive word-of-mouth.

Additionally, some PR coverage or discussion on social platforms (e.g. Hacker News, LinkedIn) about “Sunset’s layoff tracker” could have amplified awareness. All these efforts helped Sunset not only rank in search but also gain trust in a domain that values credibility, thereby supporting its product-led growth in offering services for struggling startups.