"There are clients out there that would probably love to work with us, but many of them don't know we exist."
Jonathan Bell, Founder and Chief Executive Officer (CEO), WANT Branding, describing the "information asymmetry" problem on the kickoff call, May 7, 2026
TLDR
- Who: WANT Branding, a 26-year-old boutique branding and naming agency with a Fortune 100 client roster, competing for high-value branding engagements across the United States (US) and internationally.
- The play: an Organic + AI Search program, combining search engine optimization (SEO) with visibility in artificial intelligence (AI) assistants, built around how buyers now research branding agencies: ten content pieces a month combining high-intent agency-ranking listicles with authority-building guides, backlink placements on sites rated Domain Rating (DR) 40-plus, technical and schema work for AI retrieval, and a fixed ten-prompt visibility matrix tracked across ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude and Perplexity.
- The numbers: organic clicks doubled in five full months, WANT's top-50 keyword footprint grew 3.3x, page-one rankings grew 4x, all four tracked AI engines now cite the site, Google's own AI features served the site 56.5K impressions in six months, and WANT surfaces in more AI answers than any of the four competitors it named.
- The outcome: in the first 12 days of October, WANT logged 10 new-business inquiries whose contact form said they found the agency through a large language model (LLM), against a pre-program baseline of two or three booked calls a week from all channels.
At a glance
| Client | WANT Branding (wantbranding.com). Business-to-business (B2B) branding and naming agency, New York and Miami, founded 1999. |
|---|---|
| Industry | Professional services: brand strategy, naming and identity for B2B companies with $50 million to $1 billion in revenue. |
| Services | Organic + AI Search program: SEO content, generative engine optimization (GEO) and answer engine optimization (AEO), backlink placements, technical and schema work, monthly AI-visibility tracking and reporting. |
| Dates | Contract signed April 30, 2026. Kickoff call May 7, 2026. First articles live in May. Results measured April 2026 (baseline) to September 2026 (last full month), with October 2026 as an interim read. |
| Team | NUOPTIMA account strategist with the content, editing and link-building teams; on the client side, Jonathan Bell (Founder and CEO), John Downey and WANT's web developer, who publishes. |
| Deliverables | 50 articles May to September (10 a month, a further 10 delivered in October), 26 backlink placements June to September at DR 40 to 78, llms.txt and Organization, WebSite and Breadcrumb schema, monthly performance deck, quarterly business review, keyword intent split. |
Executive summary
WANT Branding came to NUOPTIMA with what CEO Jonathan Bell described as an "information asymmetry" problem. The agency had worked with around a third of the world's top 100 brands and 41 of the Fortune 100, yet its search visibility did not reflect that track record. A 2025 website refresh had removed much of its service content, inbound from existing channels had thinned, and AI answers for terms like "best branding agency" were dominated by global networks WANT does not directly compete with.
The timeline: WANT signed on April 30, 2026; the kickoff call was May 7; the first articles went live in May; the results below run through September 2026, the last full month, with October 2026 as an interim read. From June onward, every month set a new 12-month high for organic clicks. Average position had improved from #31 a year earlier to #21 at kickoff and held around #20 while the number of ranking keywords more than tripled, so the growth came from a much broader search footprint rather than a few existing terms moving up.
| Metric | Baseline (April 2026) | Result (September 2026) | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| Organic clicks per month | 242 | 481 | +99% |
| Search impressions per month | 82,959 | 138,643 | +67% |
| Keywords ranking in Google top 50 | 1,506 | 4,905 | 3.3x |
| Keywords on page one (positions 1 to 10) | 444 | 1,795 | 4.0x |
| Non-brand keywords in the top 10 | 433 | 1,786 | 4.1x |
| Pages earning impressions | 146 | 217 | +49% |
| Click-through rate | 0.29% | 0.35% | +0.06 pts |
| AI prompt tests naming WANT | April spot check: brand prompts only, 0 of 20 commercial. May, first full matrix: 12 of 40, incl. 2 of 20 commercial | 16 of 40, incl. 6 of 20 commercial | Commercial prompts 2 to 6 of 20 |
| AI engines citing wantbranding.com | April spot check: 0 of 4. May matrix: 3 of 4 | 4 of 4, in every run since July | ChatGPT first cited in July |
| Ahrefs Domain Rating | 32 (April 1, 2026) | 39 (September 1, 2026) | +7 |
| Inbound new-business inquiries | Two or three booked calls a week, all channels incl. referrals | 10 inquiries reporting LLM discovery, October 1 to 12 | About 2 to 3x the weekly inbound rate |
The inquiry baseline and result are different units: the baseline is booked calls from every channel, including referrals, as described by the client; the result is contact-form submissions where the buyer picked "LLMs" in WANT's "how did you hear about us" dropdown. Ten in 12 days is about 5.8 a week against two or three, which is why we say 2 to 3x rather than a precise multiple.
Methodology
| Search data | Google Search Console, property sc-domain:wantbranding.com, full calendar months (April 2026 baseline vs September 2026). Keyword counts are distinct queries grouped by average position on the query dimension; page counts use the page dimension. "Non-brand" excludes any query containing "want branding", "wantbranding" or "want brand". |
|---|---|
| AI visibility | A fixed matrix of ten prompts run on ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude and Perplexity through DataForSEO live LLM responses (40 answers per run). Commercial (5): "Best B2B branding agency 2026", "Best brand naming agency 2026", "Best branding agency for tech companies 2026", "Best corporate rebranding agency 2026", "Top branding agencies for enterprise companies". Learning (3): "How much does B2B branding and naming cost?", "How do you rebrand without losing brand equity?", "What does a brand naming agency do?". Brand (1): "What is WANT Branding and what do they offer?". Comparison (1): "WANT Branding vs Catchword vs Lexicon". Each answer is scored on whether WANT is named and whether wantbranding.com is cited. Runs: April 2026 spot check, May 2026, August 3 (July), August 31 (August), October 1 (September); no June run. The competitor benchmark scored the same October 1 answers for Catchword, DeSantis Breindel, Tenet Partners and Taillight, a set named by WANT. |
| Google AI features | Search Console Generative AI features report (beta): impressions inside AI Overviews and AI Mode on Google Search, last 6 months (May 18 to October 18, 2026), web search type, daily values and top pages read from the client's property on October 20, 2026. |
| Authority | Ahrefs monthly history for wantbranding.com, Domain Rating read on the first of each month. Backlink placements counted from the NUOPTIMA deliverables log. |
| Leads | Client-reported contact-form data from Jonathan Bell and John Downey. WANT does not share customer relationship management (CRM) data or contract values, so no revenue or return on investment (ROI) figure is claimed. |
Goals and targets
On the kickoff call Jonathan Bell asked what WANT should expect in 180 days. NUOPTIMA's answer set the targets below.
| Objective set at kickoff (May 7, 2026) | Outcome by September / October 2026 | Status |
|---|---|---|
| Achieve page-one rankings across a broader set of target keywords | Page-one keywords 444 to 1,795. "brand development agency" #20.7 to #5.5; "branding company" #21.1 to #9.8 | Met |
| Increase organic search impressions significantly | +67% (83K to 139K per month), 98% of them non-brand | Met |
| Drive a substantial increase in organic clicks | +99% (242 to 481); October pacing roughly 590 on the first 13 days | Met |
| Strengthen overall domain authority | 26 vetted backlink placements at DR 40 to 78; Ahrefs DR 32 to 39 (+7) | Met |
| Improve visibility and citation frequency across LLMs | Commercial-prompt presence 2 to 6 of 20; 4 of 4 engines citing the site since July; more AI appearances than any competitor in the benchmark set | Met |
| Increase weekly lead volume by approximately 3 to 4x | From two or three booked calls a week to 10 inquiries reporting LLM discovery in the first 12 days of October (about 2 to 3x the weekly rate, different units, client-reported) | Early signal |
The challenge: a great reputation that AI could not see
About the client
WANT Branding is a B2B branding and naming agency founded by Jonathan Bell, who spent a decade at Interbrand before launching the firm. Based in New York and Miami, WANT deliberately keeps its team small, offering what Bell describes as "that big agency product in a smaller fee range" for companies that cannot justify the $750K-plus fees charged by firms such as Interbrand, Landor and Siegel+Gale.
Its credentials are strong: around a third of the world's top 100 brands, 41 of the Fortune 100, a TED Talk by Bell with more than three million views, over 150 Clutch reviews, and a 2026 book, The Sixth Power. The ideal client is a B2B company with $50 million to $1 billion in revenue at an inflection point (a merger, a new chief marketing officer (CMO), a new category, pressure from AI) buying a rebrand, refresh or naming project delivered over two to four months.
The starting position
- Buyers had shifted to LLMs, and WANT was largely invisible. As Bell explained in September, prospects were using LLMs to build agency shortlists, draft RFPs and compare proposals. In the April 2026 spot check, WANT only appeared when the agency was named directly. For commercial prompts such as "best B2B branding agency", it was absent across every engine tested.
- The website had become too thin after a 2025 refresh. Most service and process content had been removed, leaving no service or industry pages and an inconsistent blog. Ahrefs showed 62 organic keywords and around 700 estimated monthly visits, most of it on the homepage for "branding agency".
- Organic growth had stalled. Google Search Console clicks had stayed between 141 and 268 per month for the six months before kickoff. Average position had improved to around #21 by March, but rising impressions were not translating into more clicks.
- Authority had plateaued. Ahrefs Domain Rating had been 32 for roughly a year, while live referring domains fell from 341 in October 2025 to 278 by April 2026.
- Inbound had thinned. Review platforms that had driven leads since 2019 were delivering less, and inbound had settled at two or three booked calls a week across all channels, including referrals.
The buyer we had to win
Bell and John Downey described a marketing decision-maker rather than a founder: a CMO at larger companies, a vice president (VP) or director of marketing in leaner teams, the CEO only at the smaller end. That buyer researches in three places at once: Google ("branding agency", "healthcare branding agency"), AI assistants for shortlists ("best B2B branding agencies for financial services") and review platforms for validation.
The strategy: four bets
- Build the shortlist pages buyers and LLMs actually use. Agency-ranking pages such as "Best B2B Branding Agencies in 2026", "Top Naming Agencies" and "Best Healthcare Branding Agencies", built around the prompts buyers actually ask, with stated selection criteria and genuine competitors covered on their merits. These pages give AI engines a clear, citable source where a traditional agency homepage gives them nothing to extract.
- Build topical authority beyond listicles. Supporting guides on brand architecture, brand extensions, taglines, brand voice, naming and rebranding, so that Google and LLMs read WANT as a hub of branding knowledge and the commercial pages sit inside a stronger internal content network.
- Measure AI visibility as a real key performance indicator (KPI). The fixed ten-prompt matrix described in the methodology, scored on whether WANT appears and whether wantbranding.com is cited, with the client-named competitor set benchmarked on the same answers from the September run.
- Increase authority at a steady cadence. Backlink placements on DR 40-plus sites with a balanced mix of branded and non-branded anchors, supported by llms.txt and Organization, WebSite and Breadcrumb schema so that search engines and AI systems can interpret the site.
The strategy avoided chasing broad traffic: WANT needed senior marketing buyers, not volume, and a DR 32 site was not going to win "branding agency" from DR 70-plus incumbents in six months. Long-tail commercial searches and industry verticals came first. When more content volume was discussed in September, we declined; ten pieces a month were working, so the next step was precision rather than volume.
What we did: four phases
Phase 1: Foundation (May 2026)
Checked and connected Google Analytics 4 (GA4), Search Console and Tag Manager, reviewed indexation after the 2025 refresh, built the Business Intelligence and ideal customer profile (ICP) brief, mapped the first 30 content opportunities (approved within a week), set up the Notion client hub and shared Slack channel, and published the first ten articles.
Phase 2: Content engine (June to July 2026)
Ten pieces a month, with June shifting toward commercial listicles such as Best Branding Agencies in NYC, Top Naming Agencies and Best Branding Agencies for PE Portfolios. The first six backlink placements landed at an average DR of 52.7, and llms.txt and schema went live. We also advised on WANT's own site expansion (a services hub, industry pages, one blog hub) with a shared topic list to prevent cannibalization with the summer intern's posts.
At the July quarterly review (Q2 2026, April to June, against Q1, January to March) impressions were up 68.5% and average position had improved from 27.3 to 19.7. The latest AI matrix at that point was the May run, 12 of 40 with three engines citing; the July run, scored on August 3, reached 16 of 40 with all four citing.
Phase 3: Clusters and authority (August to September 2026)
Topic clusters replaced isolated articles: rebranding, brand strategy consulting, positioning and identity, measurement and reputation, storytelling. On the like-for-like monthly read (September 1 to 28 against August 1 to 28) the rebranding cluster moved "rebranding agency" from #61.8 to #38.5; on full calendar months April to September the same term reads 49.9 to 42.7 in the table below.
September added five vertical agency rankings (software as a service, manufacturing and industrial, B2B, tech, banks and credit unions) and buyer guides such as How to Choose a Branding Agency. Six dofollow placements landed in August at DR 41 to 71 and eight in September at DR 42 to 72. We classified 5,801 ranking keywords by intent and industry into an 84-keyword tier-one list, with healthcare, financial services and tech as the priorities.
Phase 4: Precision and conversion (October 2026 onward)
Head-to-head WANT-versus-competitor pages for the "help me choose" queries buyers ask LLMs; healthcare, financial services and tech first; a brand-development service cluster to capture the 213 keywords and roughly 9,600 monthly impressions landing on the homepage without a relevant page. The core engine continues at ten pieces and at least five placements a month with monthly reporting and quarterly reviews.
Scope of services
| Component | What was delivered |
|---|---|
| Setup and infrastructure (month one) | Audit, tracking infrastructure (GA4, Google Search Console, Google Tag Manager), Business Intelligence report and ICP strategy, content plan |
| Content (10 pieces a month) | Agency-ranking listicles and deep-dive guides, fact-checked against the live site and competitor sites, formatted and delivered publish-ready in the client's Google Docs; 50 pieces May to September, a further 10 in October |
| Backlinks (5 a month, DR 40-plus) | 26 placements June to September at DR 40 to 78, all dofollow, branded and non-branded anchors |
| Technical and AI readiness | llms.txt, Organization, WebSite and Breadcrumb schema, indexation checks after publishing |
| Reporting and tracking | Monthly SEO and AI-search performance deck, quarterly business review, keyword intent split, six-month progress review, Notion client hub |
| Communication | Shared Slack channel, monthly call plus quarterly strategy review |
Performance and results
Organic clicks: flat for six months, then a new high every month
Clicks moved between 141 and 268 a month in the six months before the engagement. The first NUOPTIMA articles went live in May; from June every month set a new 12-month high and September closed at 481. October is pacing ahead again, with 249 clicks in the first 13 days.
Visibility: more impressions at better positions
Impressions rose from 83K in April to 139K in September while average position held at #20 against #31 a year earlier. The site is earning more visibility at better placements rather than piling up low-ranking impressions, and 98% of those impressions come from non-brand queries.
Ranking footprint: 3.3x more keywords, weighted toward page one
The footprint grew from 1,506 keywords in April to 4,905 in September. Growth is concentrated in the bands that earn clicks: positions 4 to 10 grew from 221 to 1,183 and the top three from 223 to 612. August's new keywords entered at positions 11 to 50 and a large share climbed onto page one in September.
| Commercial keyword (non-brand) | April 2026 position | September 2026 position | September impressions |
|---|---|---|---|
| brand development agency | 20.7 | 5.5 | 1,295 |
| branding company | 21.1 | 9.8 | 428 |
| brand consultant | not ranking | 16.3 | 995 |
| brand agency | 26.2 | 18.6 | 556 |
| brand positioning agency | 23.5 | 18.6 | 1,800 |
| branding agency nyc | 69.9 | 20.2 | 181 |
| brand strategy firm | 40.0 | 20.5 | 522 |
| branding agency | 22.5 | 20.8 | 5,942 |
| brand identity agency | 23.8 | 22.0 | 1,016 |
| brand strategy agency | 26.0 | 22.7 | 1,823 |
| rebranding agency | 49.9 | 42.7 | 1,186 |
The NUOPTIMA article cohort carries 64% of the clicks
Eighty-seven URLs with no impressions in the twelve months before the engagement earned impressions in September. Forty are NUOPTIMA articles published May to August: 307 of the site's 481 September clicks (64%) and 87K impressions. Thirty-one are WANT's own new or restored service, industry and case-study pages (2 clicks, 7.8K impressions), and 16 are URL variants of existing pages (no clicks).
September's ten articles went live late in the month and had no September impressions yet. The pages figure does not simply add up because 38 of April's 146 pages dropped out while 109 URLs entered: 108 plus 109 gives September's 217.
| NUOPTIMA article | September clicks | September impressions | Avg position |
|---|---|---|---|
| /brand-extension-examples/ | 102 | 3,016 | 5.4 |
| /house-of-brands-examples/ | 30 | 1,758 | 7.5 |
| /branding-case-studies-b2b-strategy/ | 26 | 4,519 | 14.1 |
| /personal-branding-examples-founder-case-studies/ | 22 | 4,015 | 10.2 |
| /brand-tagline-examples/ | 18 | 4,411 | 9.2 |
| /best-brand-strategy-consulting-firms/ | 14 | 13,633 | 18.8 |
| /famous-logos/ | 14 | 4,267 | 24.2 |
| /top-branding-agency-nyc/ | 10 | 6,188 | 29.3 |
| /brand-architecture-guide/ | 9 | 2,022 | 9.3 |
| /b2b-brand-strategy-examples/ | 9 | 1,511 | 12.8 |
| /product-naming/ | 8 | 2,019 | 12.8 |
Brand Extension Examples overtook the homepage (95 clicks) as the most-clicked page on the site in September. The agency-ranking listicles earn the most impressions and are the pages AI engines cite.
AI search visibility: commercial prompts and citations are the story
Across all 40 prompt tests, WANT's appearances have been flat since July (16, 15, 16), so we do not claim growth there. The progress is on the commercial prompts and on citations: presence on the five "best agency" prompts rose from 2 of 20 engine tests in May to 6 of 20 in September, and citing engines went from 3 of 4 to 4 of 4 from July, when ChatGPT cited wantbranding.com for the first time.
In the September run ChatGPT, which had never named WANT on a commercial prompt, named and cited it on "best B2B branding agency 2026", as did Gemini. The pages cited are the agency-ranking listicles from Phases 2 and 3.
Google's own generative AI features: 56.5K impressions in six months
Google reports this one itself. Search Console's Generative AI features report (beta) counts the impressions a site earns inside AI Overviews and AI Mode on Google Search. For wantbranding.com it shows 56,523 impressions between May 18, 2026, when the report begins, and October 18, 2026.
The daily line rose from an average of about 80 a day in the first week to about 750 a day across the first half of October, with a peak of 985 on October 6. The pages Google surfaces in those AI features are the same ones the LLM matrix cites: nine of the top ten are NUOPTIMA articles.
| Page | Impressions in generative AI features | Author |
|---|---|---|
| / (homepage) | 5,251 | WANT page |
| /best-brand-strategy-consulting-firms/ | 4,748 | NUOPTIMA article |
| /top-branding-agency-nyc/ | 3,522 | NUOPTIMA article |
| /best-private-equity-branding-agencies/ | 3,240 | NUOPTIMA article |
| /best-branding-companies/ | 2,947 | NUOPTIMA article |
| /best-brand-positioning-agencies/ | 2,613 | NUOPTIMA article |
| /famous-logos/ | 2,305 | NUOPTIMA article |
| /brand-extension-examples/ | 2,184 | NUOPTIMA article |
| /top-naming-agencies/ | 2,130 | NUOPTIMA article |
| /best-rebranding-agencies-b2b/ | 2,120 | NUOPTIMA article |
Competitor benchmark: the same 40 answers, five firms
The competitor benchmark was a separate scoring pass on October 1, 2026, applied to the same 40 September answers for all five firms. WANT was named in 16 of 40 and cited in 12, and it is the only firm whose website was cited by all four engines.
Catchword was named in 10 and cited in 6, mostly on naming prompts and the head-to-head comparison. DeSantis Breindel was named in 3 and cited in none; it entered the "best B2B branding agency" answers in September, where WANT is now named and cited by ChatGPT and Gemini. Tenet Partners and Taillight were not observed in this 40-answer test.
Authority: Domain Rating and backlink placements
Ahrefs Domain Rating had been 32 for a year. On dated snapshots it read 32 on April 1, 2026 and 39 on September 1, 2026, a gain of seven points. The program placed 26 dofollow backlinks between June and September (six in June, six in July, six in August, eight in September) on sites rated DR 40 to 78, averaging about DR 53, with a further eight placed in October to date.
Ahrefs' estimate of WANT's organic keywords rose from 62 to 140, with top-three keywords from 10 to 56.
Key takeaways from this B2B agency SEO and GEO case study
- Established brands can gain search visibility quickly once their authority becomes indexable. WANT already had 26 years of experience, major client proof, a TED Talk and 150-plus reviews, but very little content Google or LLMs could use. Publishing ten pieces a month turned that existing credibility into a 3.3x larger ranking footprint within five months, within the original scope. This is the core of our SEO and content work.
- Shortlist pages built around real buyer prompts create a direct route to LLM-sourced inquiries. Buyers ask questions such as "best B2B branding agencies for X". Publishing a useful answer with stated selection criteria helped wantbranding.com become a cited source across all four tracked engines and contributed to the October inquiries. That is the method behind our AI-search and GEO services.
- AI visibility needs a fixed benchmark, not anecdotal checks. Running the same prompt set against named competitors made progress measurable: WANT could see where ChatGPT lagged, when citations arrived, and how it compared with its competitor set. Authority was built in parallel through link building and digital PR rather than volume.
Working with NUOPTIMA: the growth roadmap
| Stage | What happens |
|---|---|
| Month 1: Foundation | Tracking and indexation audit, Business Intelligence and ICP brief, content plan approved, AI-visibility baseline run, client hub and shared channel set up. |
| Months 2 to 3: Content engine | Ten fact-checked pieces a month, first backlink placements, llms.txt and schema shipped, first monthly report with the AI matrix. |
| Months 4 to 6: Clusters and authority | Topic clusters, vertical and buyer-stage pages, competitor benchmarking on the same AI answers, keyword intent split, quarterly business review. |
| Month 7 onward: Precision and conversion | Comparison and service pages, industry focus, conversion work on the pages that already rank, and a lead-funnel review with the client. |
More results we have driven: Cortavo ($403,330 in contracted sales value at a 4.6x return on the SEO investment in 12 months, CRM-attributed), Eden Data (11.6x organic traffic and 3,000 ranking keywords built in six months) and Bleuet (a full SEO and GEO program for a direct-to-consumer brand, Domain Rating up from the 30s to the 70s). The Cortavo program earned NUOPTIMA a Silver at the US Search Awards 2026 in Best Use of Search - B2B (SEO). Outcomes vary by starting position, category and market. If you want AI assistants and Google to put your firm in the consideration set, book a strategy call.