increase · 6 months
gains · 12 months
new users
goal completions
Who is Bean Ninjas
Bean Ninjas is an Australia-based online bookkeeping services company founded by Meryl Johnston. The business serves small business owners across Australia, the United States, and the United Kingdom — helping them get clarity on their finances and take control of their numbers.
As a small business owner herself, Meryl understood that marketing decisions need to be right the first time. There is no budget for expensive mistakes. She had worked with SEO agencies before and knew exactly what she was looking for — and what she wanted to avoid.
What Meryl Was Looking For
Bean Ninjas came to Digital Dominator with a clear brief. They would only work with an agency that:
- Practised white-hat SEO — no shortcuts, no manipulation, nothing that could be undone by a Google update
- Could manage the technical backend: webmaster tools, sitemaps, redirects, and site speed
- Was fluent in both on-page and off-page SEO with the ability to grow traffic internationally
- Was transparent, hands-on, and didn't over-promise
"The presentation of the strategy and process, if well presented, really makes a big difference. If we can implement something once and it works, then we are happy."
From the initial conversation through to the audit and strategy presentation, Meryl was confident that Digital Dominator understood what Bean Ninjas needed and could execute on it. The data-driven approach and the quality of the technical audit sealed the partnership.
The Problem
Bean Ninjas had something most businesses don't — genuinely good content. Meryl and her team wrote well. The problem was that good content without technical SEO and proper on-page structure rarely ranks. The content existed but wasn't working as hard as it should have been.
Specifically:
- The site structure wasn't organised in a way that helped Google understand topical relationships between pages
- On-page signals — title tags, heading structure, internal linking — weren't optimised for the keywords that mattered
- Site speed and crawlability issues were limiting how much of the site Google was indexing effectively
- The keyword strategy wasn't connected to thematic clusters — content existed in silos rather than as a coherent authority signal
The Strategy
Technical Foundation First
Before any content work, we fixed the technical foundation. Site speed, crawlability, redirects, sitemaps, and siloing. A site that Google can't crawl efficiently won't rank regardless of how good the content is. This is the unglamorous work that separates agencies that get results from agencies that get reports.
Making Existing Content Perform
Bean Ninjas already had strong content. Our role was to make it visible. We worked with the team to improve landing pages, blogs, and podcast content — not rewriting from scratch, but optimising on-page signals and building the thematic keyword structure that search engines needed to rank the content correctly.
Bean Ninjas had a content problem that looked like an SEO problem but was actually a structure problem. The words were right. The signal architecture wasn't. Fixing the architecture — how pages related to each other, how keywords clustered, how internal linking supported authority flow — unlocked the existing content.
International Keyword Strategy
Bean Ninjas operates in three markets. The keyword strategy was built to grow visibility in Australia, the US, and the UK simultaneously — targeting terms with commercial intent in each market and building content that ranked across time zones. This is technically more complex than a single-market campaign and requires a different approach to keyword clustering and hreflang configuration.
Educating the Team
Meryl's time is limited. Rather than creating dependency on Digital Dominator for every content decision, we trained the Bean Ninjas team in on-page and content SEO. This meant the team could contribute to the campaign with minimal friction — and that the SEO gains would compound rather than stall between agency check-ins.
The Results
In six months the campaign delivered what Bean Ninjas came for. Over twelve months the compounding effect of a properly structured campaign produced results across every metric.
The US market expansion also delivered positive results in both traffic and keyword growth — Bean Ninjas was ranking and attracting visitors in a competitive English-language market against established international competitors.
Why This Result Holds Up in 2026
This campaign ran in 2018–2019. The fundamentals that drove the results — technical site health, content structure, topical authority, and user intent alignment — are the same fundamentals that drive rankings and AI citations in 2026. The tactics evolve. The principles don't.
What has changed is the addition of AI Overview as a visibility layer on top of organic rankings. Bean Ninjas built the right foundation in 2018. A site with that level of content quality and structural integrity, rebuilt today with proper schema markup and FAQ schema, would be a strong candidate for AI Overview citations alongside its organic rankings.
The Bean Ninjas campaign predates Google AI Overview. The same content quality and site structure that drove 400% organic traffic growth in 2019 is exactly what AI systems look for when selecting sources to cite in generated answers. Good SEO in 2019 and good AI visibility in 2026 are built on identical foundations.