Case study
Eleven months building and running a full marketing function — strategy, execution, systems, and the operational coordination behind five product and pricing rollouts.
Semper Incolumem turns open-source information into analyst-written intelligence for corporate security teams, executive protection professionals, and public safety agencies — a field where credibility is the purchase driver and buyers dismiss vendor marketing on contact.
When I started there was no keyword map, no content program, no measurement, and no consistent presence anywhere a buyer looks. I built the function and ran it. The comparison below is month one against month eleven.
Two matched 28-day windows: 1–28 October 2025, my first month, against 1–28 August 2026, my last. Same site, same measurement, no paid spend in either.
| Measure | Oct 2025 | Aug 2026 | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| Search queries the site ranks for | 26 | 201 | +673% |
| Search impressions | 227 | 1,779 | +684% |
| Pages earning search impressions | 94 | 143 | +52% |
| Organic search sessions | 10 | 48 | +380% |
| Organic search engagement rate | 70% | 77% | +7 pts |
| Organic social sessions | 7 | 32 | +357% |
| Email subscribers | ~20 | 58 | +190% |
| LinkedIn followers | 4 gained | 120 total | 100% organic |
| LinkedIn engagement rate | — | 9.3% | 2–5% benchmark |
| Published pages and articles | 0 | 34 | built |
Search figures from Google Search Console, subscriber-only intel reports excluded from both windows. Sessions from GA4. Email from Mailchimp — three unsubscribes across the full engagement. LinkedIn: 118 of 120 followers organic, zero paid promotion.
In October 2025 the site ranked almost entirely for news curiosities pulled in by current-events reporting. Eleven months later it ranks for the terms its actual buyers type. Only three queries appear in both windows.
October 2025 · most-seen queries
August 2026 · most-seen queries
Corporate security and executive protection were the stated growth priority. Those are now the site’s largest sources of search visibility, and the pages behind them — Protective Intelligence, Executive Protection Intelligence, Physical Security Intelligence — are the three most-surfaced pages on the site. Impressions shown are for the 28-day window.
Rankings for the pages carrying the priority terms, tracked monthly against a fixed keyword map.
| Page | Target term | Position | Quarter change |
|---|---|---|---|
| OSINT Training | intelligence analysis training | 34 | +18 |
| OSINT Resources | osint resources | 29 | +9 |
| School & Campus Security | school safety solutions | 64 | +8 |
| Advance Site Survey Tool | — | 28 | +7 |
| Corporate Security Intelligence | corporate security intelligence | 20 | new |
| Touchstone OSINT AI | osint ai | 9 | new |
Positions recorded 20 August 2026. The last two entered the rankings within weeks of publishing — the domain had accumulated enough authority for new pages to place on their own. The homepage, Strategic Intelligence, About, Who We Serve, and the Intelligence Journal all hold top-six positions.
One deliberate reversal sits inside these numbers. Subscriber-only intelligence reports had been indexed and publicly readable — they drove traffic, but from readers who would never buy, and they gave away what paying subscribers were paying for. I had them de-indexed. Raw traffic took the hit; the visibility that replaced it is commercial.
Twenty-plus pages across every service line and audience vertical, plus fourteen Intelligence Journal articles that demonstrate analytic methodology rather than describe it — the firm’s strongest credibility asset, because it shows buyers how the analysts think.
Segmented Mailchimp campaigns and automated flows, including the pricing-tier restructure sequence that carried existing subscribers through a price increase — three unsubscribes across the entire engagement. Forty-eight consecutive weeks of LinkedIn publishing across the company page and founder profile.
Brand guide and refreshed identity, two sales brochures, a services flyer, and two lead-generating assets — an OSINT resources library and an advance site survey tool — both of which now rank on their own.
A living keyword map with monthly position history, a full site audit, and a prioritized technical punch list — so every decision about what to write or re-optimize next was made against evidence.
A single-person marketing function in a company shipping product every quarter only works if someone holds the operating system together. That was the larger half of the job.
Built and maintained the master project tracker — every task with an owner, target date, status, and notes, covering both my work and the founder’s. It was the shared reference for what was moving, what was blocked, and what was landing next, and it kept a two-person operation coordinated without standing meetings.
Stood up the operational stack: Google Tag Manager, GA4, and Search Console; Mailchimp from empty account through branded templates, audience import, segmentation, and automated flows; a Zapier integration syncing new paid subscribers into the email system automatically; service-specific intake forms; and the member-area gating page that controls what each subscription tier sees.
Sourced and onboarded the graphic designer, and ran the search for a social media manager — scoping the roles, evaluating candidates, and briefing them.
Ongoing triage and maintenance: broken signup links and pop-ups, footer rebuild, site-speed work, 301 redirects through a URL restructure, and reindexing after every significant change. Unglamorous, and the reason nothing quietly broke.
Built the plan for scaling threat assessments into a request-based service line, and rebuilt the custom intelligence report template subscribers receive — work on the product itself rather than the marketing around it.
A monthly SEO and position review for the founder, a formal six-month performance audit, and at close a complete transition brief — systems, access, recurring maintenance, work in flight, and a prioritized roadmap — so the function could continue without me.
Each arrived on a date set by the product, not the content calendar. I ran the operational side of all of them — sequencing the work, aligning timing across web, email, and social, and making sure the pieces landed together rather than trickling out.
| Rollout | What I ran |
|---|---|
| Threat Assessment service | Dedicated service page, intake form, launch campaign, sales brochure, and social sequence — a new service line taken from nothing to sellable. |
| Tripwire | Analyst-voice explainer on how the scoring works, coordinated site updates, announcement emails to subscriber and non-subscriber segments, and launch banners. |
| Touchstone | Platform page, pricing page, member-area gating page, Journal explainer, and three separately targeted announcement emails — all live on the same day. Largest month of audience growth in the engagement. |
| Training course | Course landing page, inquiry form, and the announcement program introducing a new revenue line to an existing audience. |
| Pricing and tier restructure | The full communication sequence, including grandfathering terms that carried existing subscribers through a price increase. Three unsubscribes across the entire engagement. |
The Touchstone and pricing rollouts shipped together on 20 July. I sequenced the existing-subscriber email to land before the public announcement, not after — no one paying for the product should learn about a price increase from a public post. That ordering was the difference between a clean launch and an avoidable support problem.
Specialized B2B search authority takes about twelve months of concentrated publishing to compound. I forecast that at the outset, and the results landed on it — while absorbing rollouts on dates I didn’t set. Every one shipped with the content, email, and social behind it, on time.
Where I had discretion, I spent it on the pages closest to the buyer — corporate security and executive protection — and held their keyword targets steady rather than re-pointing pages as positioning evolved, since each re-pointing restarts a page’s accumulation from zero. The rankings above are what that discipline produced.
I closed the engagement with the roadmap that continues it: five pillar articles already specified and briefed, the keyword map to hold stable, and association relationships as the route to authority in a market that doesn’t reward paid directory listings. The next person doesn’t start from a blank page.
Turned an amateur operation into a professional organization.
Matt Helmkamp, Founder — Semper Incolumem
This is the kind of engagement I take on — a function that needs building, running, and eventually handing back.
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