Case Study
From Bootstrapping to Thriving: The Hive19 Story
The Challenge
Hive19 is Brighton-based link building agency with a strong reputation for high quality results. For companies in need of specialized link building services, Hive19 has quickly established itself as a major player in the industry. Their expertise, particularly in the areas of Fintech and SaaS, and their unique creativity and analytical approach sets them apart from other SEO agencies.
Founded in 2020, right in the middle of the Covid-19 pandemic, Hive19 faced multiple challenges in addition to the usual uphill battle of bootstrapping a young agency. Despite the challenges, Managing Director Aaron Thomas knew that bespoke, quality link building was valuable, and with the right tools and processes, could be scalable.
“We knew that we needed to make the right decisions early. We knew Pitchbox was going to be the core of how we run our product delivery.”
With nearly 15 years of industry experience including first-hand experience with manual outreach, Aaron had a full sense of the reasons why many agencies struggle with link building or choose to outsource the process altogether. Without the right tools and processes, link building is too labor-intensive and time-consuming.
The Solution
By choosing Pitchbox as their link building platform from day one, Hive19 has been able to establish a scalable and efficient process immediately. With Pitchbox handling the heavy lifting involved with prospecting, contact discovery, outreach and follow-up, the Hive19 team was able to focus more time on the quality review process, making sure that the websites they reach out to have the right metrics and relevancy of content.
“We’re doing 12x the volume of outreach now than we were this time last year. We’ve built links on household brands, on globally recognized companies.”
By having a full lifecycle link building platform and CRM, Hive19 has been able to measure success, extract key insights and leverage important data from their outreach campaigns.
“It’s all about the process, software, and data. With Pitchbox, we have a top overview and the ability to manage a pipeline. Having clear oversight for our campaigns has really helped us.”
The Bottom line
In just two short years since coming into being, Hive19 has earned a stellar reputation for high quality links and has seen significant growth.
By taking a data-driven approach and focusing on software and processes, they have been able to take on more clients, deliver consistent results, and raise the bar for quality of placements.
“On average, for our clients, we’ve managed to raise DR by 20% and increase their organic traffic by an average 36%.”
Hive19 is proof that with the right systems in place, a small but dedicated team with expertise can compete with larger teams with greater resources.
“Pitchbox has saved us between eight and ten full time employees.”
