SEO Case Study: 77 Articles, 14 Keywords. What Is Holding Billee Back?
This is my second SEO case study. In the first one, I worked on a startup that had almost no content. This time I wanted the opposite problem: a SaaS company that has already written a lot and still gets almost nothing from search.
I picked Billee, a SaaS company that handles utility billing for apartment buildings in the US. I gave myself a brief, as if Billee had hired me: grow the number of organic keywords and the organic traffic.
Here is what made me stop. Billee has 77 long, detailed articles on its site. It ranks for 14 keywords and gets about 58 organic visits a month.
My thesis: Billee does not need more content. It needs the content it already has to be findable, to answer the questions buyers type into Google, and to be backed by a presence outside its own site.
Let me walk you through how I got there.
What Billee does, and who it is for
Billee takes over utility billing for multifamily properties. Multifamily means a building or a complex with many apartments that are rented, not sold, and owned by one company or investor. The owner pays the water, sewer and trash bills for the whole building and then bills each resident for their share. When that is done badly, the owner loses money every month.
Billee sells software plus a dedicated team that does this work. Their homepage says it in one line: “White-glove service meets powerful technology”.
Then I had to get the people right. The contact form on the site lists residents, property managers and partners, and it is tempting to treat all three as the audience. But residents receive the bill; they don’t buy the service.
So I split it like this:
- The user is the property manager or the accounting team. They deal with utility billing day to day.
- The buyer is the building owner, the head of a property management firm, or the CFO. They sign the contract.
- The conversion is the “Get a demo” button.
One detail matters later. The same form also receives messages from residents, so a form fill only counts as a lead when it comes from a manager or an owner.
What the numbers say
I opened Ahrefs to see where Billee stands today.
Billee ranks for 14 keywords and gets about 58 organic visits a month. The traffic number is an Ahrefs estimate, not a count of real visits, but it tells me the scale. The Domain Rating is 29.
Then I looked at which keywords those 14 are.
These three things stood out.
Four of the 14 keywords are versions of the brand name, like “billee”, and “bilee”. Those searches come from people who already know the company, and some of them are probably residents looking for their bill.
The best position belongs to “water submetering systems”. Billee is first for it, and it gets about 50 searches a month.
And the keyword that describes the whole business, “multifamily utility billing”, ranks second. That sounds good until you see which page ranks: an article about RUBS rules in Illinois.
The main keyword lands on the wrong page
I checked what Google shows for “multifamily utility billing” in the US.
The pages around Billee are mostly companies presenting their billing service, plus a couple of guides on how to choose a provider. So the person typing this is shopping for a provider. Billee answers with an article about one state’s law.
Billee does have a page for this. It is called /utility-billing. Screaming Frog counted only 169 words of text on that page, and its meta title and description were copied from the homepage. The page that should carry the main keyword is almost empty.
Is it a technical problem?
Before blaming the content, I wanted to rule out a technical cause. I crawled the site with Screaming Frog and I found 95 working pages: 13 main pages, 5 blog listing pages and 77 articles.
Then I found the problems.
The site links to 17 of its own pages that return a 404 error. One more link redirects to a page that is also a 404.
None of the 77 articles have an H1. The article title is marked as an H2 in the template, so every article starts without a main heading. The good part: this is one fix in the template, and it repairs all 77 pages at once.
Additionally, none of the 77 articles have a meta description, and 53 of them have titles too long to show in full.
The last finding explained a lot. Most articles get only 2 to 4 internal links, and those come from the blog listing pages. The product pages get around 94. The articles cover the same topics from many angles, like RUBS rules state by state, submetering, and compliance, but they do not link to each other. For Google, each one stands alone.
None of these alone keeps a page out of Google. Together they show a site that nobody has tuned for search.
Do people even search for this?
Technical problems explain part of it. But I also had to ask a harder question: is anyone searching for what these articles cover?
I started small. I took one article, about water billing rules in Texas, and typed its exact phrases into Ahrefs. None of them had measurable volume. But one article and a handful of exact phrases is too small a sample to judge a whole topic.
So I moved up a level and tested whole topics. I picked the three that match Billee’s products and most of its articles: RUBS ( a way to split a utility bill between apartments by a formula, without meters), submetering, and vacant cost recovery.
“Rubs utilities” gets about 1000 searches a month in the US, with a Keyword Difficulty of 0. Two years ago it was around 600. “Water submeter” gets about 600, also with a difficulty of 0. The demand is there, and it is easy to compete for.
Billee has articles on all of this. I checked the six main keywords across these topics, and Billee is not in the top 10 for any of them.
So I looked at who is.
Splitdue has one article that explains RUBS. It ranks first for “rubs utilities”, and that single keyword brings it about 218 visits a month. That is almost four times what Billee’s whole site gets.
The pattern repeated on every topic. The winners were short explainers and service pages. One glossary page that simply defines RUBS ranks for 24 keywords and gets about 310 visits a month. Billee’s articles run from 2000 to 6000 words and are written for an operator who already knows the subject. The people searching are asking a simpler question.
I also ran a Content Gap report against three competitors: submeter.com, Synergy, and Conservice. I collected 55 relevant keywords they rank for. Billee ranks for none of them.
Who is typing matters more than how many
One finding changed my plan. Vacant cost recovery is one of Billee’s products, and the keywords around it have volume. But when I opened the results, they were written for residents asking why there is a fee on their bill. Residents do not buy billing software. So, I scored every keyword by who searches it, and a few with decent volume dropped to zero.
Billee’s words and the buyer’s words
The last piece was language. I read threads in r/PropertyManagement to see how managers talk about this. Nobody says “vacant cost recovery”. They say the vacant units are “eating” the cost. They say “bill back”. And Billee’s own page for submetering is titled “Hardware & Maintenance Services”, while buyers search for “submetering services”.
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The product names are Billee’s. The search terms belong to the buyer.
Five causes, not one
So why do 77 articles bring only 58 visits? There are five smaller reasons, and each has its own fix.
Four of them live on the site. The fifth one, the presence outside the site, I will come back to after the plan.
The plan
The plan follows from the causes. Almost everything in it is a fix to something that already exists.
First, the technical fixes. Redirect the 17 broken URLs. Add the H1 to the article template. Write meta descriptions. Rebuild /utility-billing into a real service page for “multifamily utility billing”. And link from the homepage to the priority pages, because that is where almost all of Billee’s external links point: 833 referring domains go to the homepage, and only one article on the whole site has an external link.
Then the pages, in this order:
- RUBS guide. The biggest demand, the lowest difficulty, and the pages already exist. I would merge two overlapping RUBS articles into one strong guide and redirect the weaker one. On a real project, I would first check in Search Console that both articles get impressions for the same queries. The “RUBS vs submetering” article stays separate. I would also add a short RUBS section to the new /utility-billing page, because Synergy ranks for RUBS terms with a service page.
- Submetering service page. People who search “submetering services” are looking for a vendor, so this is the closest to a demo request. Billee already has the page. It needs the word “submetering” in the title and the H1, one clear line that connects installation, monitoring, and billing, and proof. Billee has a case study with a result of $220,800 a year that belongs here.
- Water submetering explainer. More searches than the service page, but further from a purchase. The article exists. It needs a short, plain answer at the top.
- Conservice comparison. Conservice is the name that comes up most in the Reddit threads I read, which managers talk about leaving. Ahrefs has no data for “Conservice alternatives”, so I would measure this page by AI mentions and not by rankings. Those Reddit threads also told me what the page has to answer: managers are afraid of switching, the decision sits with the owner, and they want proof, not claims.
- Master-metered vs submetered. No measurable demand, so no new page. Billee links to a URL for this topic that returns a 404. I would redirect it to the existing article on how submetering works.
- Mobile home park submetering. Small demand, about 50 searches a month, and the article already exists. It is built around the term “manufactured housing communities”, while owners search for “mobile home park submetering”. I would put the searched words in the title, the H1, and the opening lines, and link the article to the submetering service page.
- Gas submetering. The only new page in the plan. Competitors rank for it, and Billee has nothing on it yet.
One thing I left out on purpose: resident questions about vacant cost recovery fees. The volume is real, but those readers will never book a demo call.
Billee outside its own site
A website is only one of the places where a company exists online. Buyers check reviews. AI tools build their answers from what other sites say about you. So I looked at Billee from the outside, in four places.
Links first. Ahrefs shows 872 referring domains, which looks strong next to a Domain Rating of 29. Then I sorted the top 50 followed links. About 32 looked like spam, about 12 were startup directories, and about 6 came from the industry, such as RealPage, Engrain, Inovonics, and the dallas apartment association. Most of the spam appeared in August and September 2026. I do not know where it came from, and Google mostly ignores links like that. My point is only that the big number hides a small base of relevant links.
Social profiles. The Linkedin page describes Billee as a “comprehensive SAAS platform” built on automation and machine learning. The website leads with software plus a dedicated team. The team is the thing that sets Billee apart, and it is missing from Linkedin. I also noticed that the CEO’s personal posts get 127 to 141 reactions, while the company page gets 13 to 47.
Review sites. Billee has no profile on G2, Capterra or TrustRadius, so its clients have nowhere to leave a review on those sites.
Third-party lists. Billee has its own “alternatives to Conservice” article, where it lists itself first. On lists written by other people, I did not find it.
AI answers. I asked ChatGPT a simple question: “What is Billee?” and it did not name the company. It asked me which Billee I meant.
Then I asked Google a question that Billee covers in two of its articles: “Does TCEQ regulate apartment water and wastewater billing in Texas?”. The first page showed government sites and articles from submeter.com, vitality.io and Bynry. Billee was not there.
The good news is that Billee has real things to show. Their own Linkedin posts mention a finalist spot for an innovation award, a conference sponsorship and an integration with Engrain. None of it sits where buyers and AI tools look.
What I would do:
- Write one description of Billee- software plus a dedicated team- and use it on the site, on Linkedin and on every profile.
- Open profiles on G2 and Capterra and ask current clients for reviews.
- Ask partners and the authors of existing lists to include Billee.
- Publish the expert topics from the CEO’s own profile, because that is where the reach is.
How I would measure the result
I do not have access to Billee’s Search Console, Analytics and Tag Manager today. On a real project, I would ask for it on day one. So this part describes what I would track once I have it, and when.
I split the signals in two, because they arrive at different speeds.
Early signals, checked every month:
- Position and impressions for the priority pages, in Search Console and Ahrefs Rank Tracker. One main keyword per page, so the report stays readable.
- A list of 18 questions that I would ask ChatGPT and Google every month. None of them contain the brand name. For each one, I note two things: is Billee mentioned, and is Billee.ai cited as a source.
- A fresh crawl to confirm the technical fixes are still in place.
The 18 questions come in three groups. Nine are informational, like “What is a RUBS utility billing system, and how does it compare to installing physical submeters?” Seven ask for a provider, like “Which utility billing providers should the owner of a 500-unit apartment portfolio shortlist?” Two come from a manager who is unhappy with the current vendor, like “How to switch multifamily utility billing companies without interrupting monthly revenue recovery?”
Late signals, reviewed at three and six months:
- Organic traffic to the priority pages.
- Demo requests that came from organic search. I would check that the form is tracked as a conversion through a Google Tag Manager tag, and that the tag also passes the role the person selects. That way, messages from residents can be filtered out, and only managers and owners count.
- One extra field on the demo form: “Where did you hear about us?” Even with full access, Analytics cannot show that someone first heard of Billee in an AI answer or from a colleague. People do not always remember exactly, so I would read this field as a hint and keep it next to the Analytics data.
On timing, I would be careful with promises. The first two months are usually quiet. Around month three, the first rankings and first AI citations are realistic. Around month six, traffic and demo requests. I treat these as checkpoints for review, not as predictions.
What this study cannot prove
Four limits, so you know how far to trust it.
The traffic and search volume numbers are Ahrefs estimates, because I do not have access to Billee’s own data. The AI checks are single tests, and I saw for myself how much the answers move: ChatGPT gave me two different answers to the same question on the same day. And this is a proposal. Nothing here has been implemented, so I have no results to show yet. The five causes are my reading of data that anyone can see from the outside. With Search Console I could tell which of them weighs the most.
And at the end, what I learned
The biggest lesson: more content is not always the answer. Seventy-seven articles looked like an asset, and they are. But the first question was never “what should Billee write next”. It was “why is the existing work not being found?”
The second lesson is to check who is typing. A keyword with volume means nothing if the person behind it is a resident looking at a fee on a bill.
The third lesson is about words. Billee names its pages after its own products, and buyers search with their own words. A page can be good and still stay invisible when it is titled in the company’s language.
That is it for this case study. Thank you so much for reading. If you find it useful, I would love to hear your thoughts.
