Atlys

In July 2022, Atlys was a fast-growing visa-tech startup hitting an SEO ceiling: 35,000 monthly organic visits, 1,500+ duplicate-canonical pages flagged in Search Console, no master keyword research, and a single back-end developer as the chronic execution bottleneck. Over a 9-month engagement (1 July 2022 to 10 April 2023), NMG Digital ran a 6-pillar visa-vertical playbook: master keyword research across 18 source-country markets, a low-hanging-fruit content sprint that lifted targeted-page traffic 165% in seven days, programmatic locale-aware page templates, a paid + outreach link-building dual-track, and a curated-report digital-PR methodology. By April 2023, atlys.com was at 220,194 monthly organic visits (+393%), 3,914 keywords ranking in positions 1-3 (4.63x / +363%), and Domain Rating 51 (up from 37). Three years after the engagement closed, the SEO foundation we built was still compounding.

Atlys is the category-defining visa-tech company. Founded in 2021 by Mohak Nahta, a former Pinterest software engineer who had personally needed five different visas for a single work trip, Atlys built a mobile-first platform that handled application paperwork, document upload, government API submission, and status tracking for visas to dozens of destinations.

The founding insight was deceptively simple. Visa procedures differ across countries; the underlying documents don't. A platform that consolidated documentation once and surfaced it across destinations could compress a six-week, paperwork-heavy ordeal into a single mobile flow. Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) led the seed round in October 2021, with Pinterest co-founders Ben Silbermann and Evan Sharp, the Chainsmokers' Mantis VC, Long Journey Ventures, South Park Commons, and Ari Emanuel's Endeavor all participating. The thesis was the founder's lived experience as the edge.

By July 2022, when NMG's engagement began, the product had clear product-market fit: a polished iOS and Android app, a solid web experience, and ~35,000 monthly organic visits. The core ICP was the Indian middle-class traveller, with Dubai and Singapore corridors leading demand. What the company didn't have was an SEO foundation that could keep up with Mohak Nahta's growth ambitions. The founder's stated north-star: 50,000 organic clicks per day.

Why this engagement was harder than average

Three structural challenges made Atlys's SEO problem unusually difficult:

• Google policy hostility. Visa services live under 'government services' in Google's policy. Even on the organic side, Google's quality team scrutinises pages that imply government authority. Atlys had to write every page knowing reviewers would read it sceptically.
• The 18-country footprint problem. Atlys's audience was India-to-the-world. The 18+ destination markets each needed locale-specific content, and the source-country localisation (visa-for-Indians, visa-for-Britons, visa-for-South-Africans) doubled the surface area again.
• Single-developer execution capacity. Atlys ran lean on engineering. One back-end developer carried the full weight of CMS migrations, programmatic page templates, schema implementation, the airline-partnership integration, and bug-fixes, all simultaneously.

That last constraint shaped almost every tactical decision in the engagement. We could plan and brief work faster than the team could ship it, so picking the right work to brief became more important than the brief itself.

Why this matters: case studies are sharper when you can see the work in the context of the company's full trajectory. NMG's 9-month engagement sat between Atlys's seed round and Series A. The compounding evidence stretches from there to a $36M Series C and a B2G spinoff. Here's the timeline.

Product & business milestones

• NMG's engagement ended in April 2023; five months later, Atlys raised Series A. The SEO foundation we built was visible in due-diligence data rooms.
• Three years and three funding rounds after the engagement closed, atlys.com's organic-traffic engine continued operating at 250k-550k monthly visits. Foundation work that compounds independently is the hardest credibility point in any agency case study.
• The Skylane B2G launch in 2025 demonstrates that the consumer brand NMG helped scale gave Atlys the platform strength to spawn a second product line.

The case for any SEO claim falls apart without primary-source data. We've structured the results around four time horizons, each with independent verification, to show what changed during the engagement and how the foundation kept compounding for years afterward.

Layer 1: after 14 days (the low-hanging-fruit lift)

Pages updated 13 July 2022, indexed by 14-15 July, measured 21 July: +165% page-set traffic in seven days. 38 new keywords ranking on the target page set. The Dubai Visa page picked up 46 ranking keywords from zero. Specific high-volume gains documented: 'Visa for Dubai from Indian price' moved from position 45 to 27 in three days; the UAE 5-year multiple-entry tourist visa page indexed and started ranking immediately.

+69.84% organic traffic and +70.37% conversions across the 12-page LHF set (3,461 to 5,878 sessions; 189 to 322 conversions). Dubai visa-on-arrival lifted +190%, Singapore work-permit +172%. The two flat rows, dubai-work-visa-for-indians and the COVID-era Thailand page, are the honest misses we keep in the record. (The one-week GA4 comparison read as high as +165% on the fastest-moving pages.)

Layer 2: after 30 days (the 3x inflection)

Targeted-page sessions: 5,337 to 14,000 (~3x in 30 days). Last-30-day clicks across the full target set: 18,000+. Page 1 keyword count: ~300, up from ~100 at baseline. Top-3 position keywords on the target set: 54.

The standout page was the UAE 5-year multiple-entry tourist visa, which captured a high-intent niche query that the in-house Atlys team hadn't realised had volume. Singapore work permit requirements grew +300%. Dubai tourist visa for Indians went from zero to real traffic. The two underperformers, Dubai work visa for Indians (intent mismatch) and Thailand pass for Indians (a COVID-era page in structural decline), were honest about the limits of the playbook.

Layer 3: after 9 months (the engagement-end snapshot)

By 10 April 2023, the engagement-end snapshot read:

Where Atlys went from buried to bold

Domain-level numbers tell the headline story. Position-level numbers tell the credible one. The table above shows exactly which buckets the keywords moved into during the 9-month engagement.

Read the math: top-3 keywords compounded 4.6x during the engagement, faster than top 4-10 (3.0x), faster than the long tail (1.9x). We ranked for more keywords, and we ranked HIGHER for the ones that mattered. Top-3 keywords carry roughly 10x the CTR of position 11+, so the distribution shift is what drove the traffic compounding.

Layer 4: after 3+ years (the compounding legacy)

This is the layer that's hardest to fake and therefore the most credible. The NMG engagement ended on 10 April 2023. Three years later, the SEO foundation we built is still compounding:

• Peak organic traffic: 553,208 monthly visits in September 2023 (Ahrefs)
• Sustained organic traffic (Apr 2026): 332,917 monthly visits
• Domain Rating (Apr 2026): 66 (up from 50 at engagement end)
• Referring domains (Apr 2026): 4,073
• SEMrush Authority Score (Apr 2026): 49

Not all of that growth is NMG attribution; Atlys's own team continued shipping content for three years after we wrapped. But the keyword-research workbooks, programmatic templates, schema patterns and link-building DBs we built were the foundation that compounded. When we tell prospects 'we built the SEO scaffolding that helped Atlys grow into a category-defining brand,' this is the data behind the claim.

The 9-month deliverables, counted

• 6 phases and 20 weekly meetings across the engagement
• 40+ deliverables shipped
• 18 source-country keyword research workbooks, 200+ qualified keywords each
• 12 paid link placements for ~$1,955 (~$163 average per link)

Page-level evidence: the specific URL wins

Domain-level numbers tell the headline story; page-level numbers tell the credible story. These are the specific URLs where the 6-Pillar Framework moved the needle, with the before/after recorded in transcripts, GA4 and Ahrefs.

989K clicks, 33.4M impressions, average position 12.8. The clicks-and-impressions curve bends up week over week through the engagement, and average position keeps improving (14.8 to 12.8). This is the compounding, visible in the client's first-party data, not an agency estimate.

Competitor benchmark: how Atlys positioned against the SERP

Atlys didn't grow in a vacuum. The visa-tech SERP was crowded with state.gov / usembassy.gov / vfsglobal.com / tripadvisor.com / VisaHQ / Sherpa / Lonely Planet. Today (May 2026), here is the SERP-intersection map: where Atlys ranks alongside its top competitors.

• NMG built Atlys's foundation against a SERP dominated by .gov sites, OTAs (TripAdvisor / Lonely Planet) and the most established direct competitors. Outranking VFS Global on every query was never the play. The play was carving the niche where Atlys's mobile-first UX had a category advantage.
• The 6-Pillar Framework's bottom-of-funnel focus (Low-Hanging Fruit → page-1 transactions → source-magnet authority) was specifically engineered to side-step .gov dominance and own the high-commercial-intent layer.

The foundation at full tilt: 1.87M clicks and 56.6M impressions over a rolling 90-day window, CTR up to 3.3%, and average position through 11.8, from 14.8 at the start. Against a SERP owned by state.gov, VFS Global and TripAdvisor, Atlys carved the high-intent commercial layer the 6-Pillar Framework was engineered to win.

The Ahrefs headline blends all locales. Split it by market and the story sharpens: the US market roughly tripled, but India, Atlys's core ICP, went vertical. Here is the month-by-month SEMrush record for both databases across the engagement.

US at engagement end: 81.4K keywords, 138K organic traffic, $76.0K traffic cost. A market that funds a real growth engine.

India at engagement end: 172.4K organic traffic, up from 8.5K nine months earlier. The core market that started smallest finished biggest.

The year-over-year picture: India, from a standing start

SEMrush's own Growth Report for the India market frames the compounding in annual terms. In 2021 the India engine barely existed (177 organic visits). By 2022 it was at 122K; by 2023, 208K, with the backlink profile up nearly 9x.

2021 vs 2022: from 177 to 122K organic visits. Organic keywords +1,896%, referring domains 386 to 2.2K. The market NMG inherited in mid-2022 was mid-take-off.

2022 vs 2023: organic traffic 122.1K to 208.5K (+70.8%), keywords +67.1%, and backlinks 16.4K to 163.9K (+898.8%). The link-building dual-track landing in the data.

• The US market gave Atlys scale and traffic value (peak ~$110K/mo in Jan 2023). India gave it a 20x trajectory in the exact segment the product was built for.
• India overtook the US market on raw organic traffic by Q1 2023, a direct result of the India-locale Low-Hanging-Fruit refresh and the source-country content templates.
• Two independent SEMrush databases, moving together off one set of on-page + link work, is the multi-source verification a sophisticated buyer looks for.

The single highest-velocity tactic in our 9-month engagement. 165% page-set traffic uplift in seven days. Replicable on any site with at least 50+ keywords already ranking in the top 100.

The 5-step process

• Pull a position-6-to-20 keyword list. From Search Console (last 28 days) or Ahrefs Organic Keywords filtered by position. Sort by impressions descending; high impressions with low clicks is the perfect candidate.
• Map keywords to existing pages. One keyword per priority page. If multiple keywords map to the same page, group them and pick a primary + secondaries.
• Update the on-page SEO. Title tag rewritten with primary keyword; H1 if not already; one H2 with the keyword; first paragraph mentions the keyword naturally; FAQ schema with at least one Q+A using the keyword; one internal-link target paragraph; alt text on images.
• Submit to Google for re-indexing. URL Inspection in Search Console → Request Indexing.
• Wait 7-14 days, then measure. Pages tend to move 7-15 positions on average; ~30-40% land in the top 5.

The Atlys-specific result

The Atlys low-hanging-fruit batch was published on Wednesday 13 July 2022, eight days into the engagement, and indexed by 14-15 July. By 21 July, the targeted page set was up 165% in organic traffic. Dubai Visa specifically picked up 46 new ranking keywords. The page that generated the most surprise was the Dubai 5-year multiple-entry tourist visa, which had been buried in a programmatic folder and started outranking some of Atlys's earlier-built marketing pages within two weeks.

'Dubai visa for Indians': before and after the LHF refresh

Position movement on this single keyword: 14 to 3 in 38 days. Above-the-fold visibility took Atlys from ~0.7% CTR to ~7-10% CTR, a ~12x click-through gain on a single high-intent commercial query.

+163% clicks on the India locale in a single 28-day window (3.52K to 9.26K), impressions 200K to 436K, average position 15.8 to 14.3. The Low-Hanging-Fruit refresh hit hardest exactly where Atlys's core ICP lives: the Indian traveller.

What didn't work

Two pages in the LHF batch never recovered. Dubai work visa for Indians had a content/intent mismatch (the page was about employment law; the keyword was searched by jobseekers looking for visa applications) and required a fresh page rather than an LHF refresh. Thailand pass for Indians was a COVID-era artefact in structural decline; no on-page change was going to revive it. The honest takeaway: LHF works when the page genuinely matches intent. When it doesn't, the page needs to be rewritten or replaced, not updated.

Where this play fits

• Sites with 50+ keywords ranking in positions 6-20 are the strongest fit. Below that, the technique is too thin to move the needle.
• Plan for a 7-14 day delay between update and measurable lift. The lift compounds over 30-60 days as Google revisits and re-evaluates.
• Don't update everything at once. Batch in groups of 10-15 pages so you can attribute lift to specific changes.

The single most valuable IP that came out of the engagement. We shipped this methodology across 18 source-country markets, generating 200+ qualified keywords per country and the content briefs to ship against them.

The 8-step pipeline

• Seed keywords. 5-10 head terms that anchor the niche. For Atlys-Singapore: 'Singapore visa', 'Singapore visa for Indians', 'Singapore tourist visa', etc.
• Existing rankings. Pull every keyword the site already ranks for from Ahrefs Organic Keywords + GSC Performance.
• Competitor keywords. Identify primary competitors (visa aggregators) and secondary competitors (insurance, finance, travel info; they cite each other in the visa space). For Atlys: yatra.com, dubaivisa.net, akbartravels, makemytrip, musafir.com, plus secondary sources like GoDigit, Tata AIG, U.AE, Bank Bazaar, Care Insurance, Travel Triangle, ANI News.
• Content gap analysis. Pull the keywords competitors rank for that you don't.
• Keyword expansion. Use Ahrefs Keywords Explorer Matching Terms, related terms, search suggestions to expand the seed set.
• Aggregation & cleaning. Dedupe, lowercase, remove branded terms (unless you want them), strip locations that don't match scope.
• Intent grouping. Tag each keyword as top-of-funnel (awareness: 'what is a Singapore visa'), middle-of-funnel (comparison: 'Singapore visa vs Singapore work permit'), or bottom-of-funnel (transaction: 'apply Singapore visa online'). Bottom-of-funnel is the money zone.
• Sitemap generation + content briefs. Cluster keywords into pages, then generate per-page content briefs with primary keyword, secondary keywords, recommended H2 outline, FAQ schema questions, internal-link targets.

The Atlys-specific result

We ran this pipeline for 18 source-country markets between July 2022 and February 2023. The first three (Dubai, Singapore, Thailand) shipped fastest because the content briefs went straight to the LHF workflow. The remaining 15 markets were briefed for the Atlys content team to ship against during the engagement and beyond. The output decks are still in NMG's institutional library, available for any future visa-vertical engagement.

19 source-country markets researched (3 priority shipped + 16 briefed). 200+ qualified keywords each. Source-country localisation doubled surface area (visa-for-Indians / visa-for-Britons / visa-for-South-Africans / etc.).

The single most valuable individual finding from this work was the 'UAE visit visa' exact-match query: a high-volume keyword the Atlys team hadn't been targeting because they thought of it as 'UAE tourist visa'. The keyword research surfaced it; Atlys's PPC team adopted it into their negative-keyword and bidding strategy within a week.

The 18-market output: measured, not asserted

The master-keyword pipeline wasn't a slide. Here is what every source-country market Atlys ranked in actually did over the engagement window, pulled directly from the DataForSEO Labs API (organic keywords + estimated traffic value, ranked, July 2022 to April 2023).

Where this play fits

• Sites entering a new market or vertical: master keyword research is the single highest-return 2-week investment.
• Established sites that don't have a keyword discipline: the pipeline almost always surfaces 20-40% of viable opportunities the in-house team has missed.
• Plan 200-400 keywords per market as the qualified-output target. More than that is rarely actionable; less is usually too thin.

The methodology we got wrong the first time, then refined into a playbook. Curated industry reports as backlink-magnet content, with publisher pre-engagement built into the research phase. Reference success benchmarks: Dubai Tourism Statistics 2022 (123 referring domains earned), Dubai Population stats (172 referring domains earned).

The 5-phase methodology (refined version)

• Topic selection via reverse engineering. Pick a topic that already has a successful source-magnet published by a competitor. Pull the referring-domains list of that page from Ahrefs. If 20+ unique publishers cite the page, the topic is validated. (Example: Dubai Tourism Statistics 2022 has 123 referring domains; strong validation.)
• Publisher alliance phase (the part we missed the first time). Before any content is written, identify 10-20 publishers who write about the topic. Reach out positioning them as contributors: share early data, ask for one quote per publisher, give them visibility credit on the final asset. This converts publishers from passive recipients of outreach into active amplifiers.
• Research and aggregation. Compile the existing publisher data into a single asset. Add original visualisations (infographics, charts) that publishers can re-use. Format for embed-ability.
• Coordinated launch. Publish; ping every contributing publisher with a 'your contribution is now live' note; offer them an exclusive on a follow-up angle in exchange for a launch-day mention. Stack social amplification.
• Long-tail outreach. Once organic citations begin, pitch the asset to second-tier publishers writing about adjacent topics. Different angles per outlet (e.g., 'Indian tourism trends' for Indian publications, 'Dubai economic indicators' for finance publications).

The Atlys-specific result

Our first attempt at this, a Singapore travel statistics curated report, ranked organically but generated zero publisher backlinks. The post-mortem was honest: we'd skipped the publisher-alliance phase. The content was good; the distribution was passive. By the time we'd refined the methodology in March 2023, the engagement was wrapping. The refined version was applied to subsequent NMG engagements and is now standard playbook for any client with link-building goals.

What didn't work (and why)

Three failure modes we identified:

• Publishing before publisher engagement. The single biggest miss. Publishers have to be motivated to amplify; that motivation has to be built during research, not after launch.
• No infographic / shareable asset version. Publishers need a visual hook. A 3,000-word essay won't get embedded; a 1-page infographic with the same data will.
• 'Publish and pray' distribution. Even great content needs an outreach push. The asset doesn't market itself.

• The honest version of every agency engagement includes work that didn't pay off. We're including this not because it failed, but because the failure became the playbook.
• If you're hiring an SEO agency, skip 'have you ever failed?' and ask 'what did you learn from the times you failed?' This is our answer.

The Atlys engagement ran 2022-23: pre-ChatGPT-as-search, pre-AI Overviews, pre-Perplexity-at-scale. The framework still works in 2026, but four things have evolved. If we ran the same engagement today, here's what we'd add.

1. Master keyword research now includes AI-citation queries

The original 8-source pipeline built around Google search volume. The 2026 version adds a 9th source: AI-citation queries. Tools like Ahrefs Brand Radar, Profound, and Perplexity Pages reveal which queries trigger AI engines to cite competing brands. We now capture 200-300 of those per market alongside the volume queries; they have lower search volume but higher business-impact when you win them.

2. Programmatic templates now include answer-engine formatting

The original template-based content was Google-optimised: H2 with primary keyword, FAQ schema, internal-link cluster. The 2026 version adds: declarative-definition opening paragraphs (LLMs preferentially extract these), source-of-truth tables (extracted with high fidelity), 'key takeaway' boxes after every section (citation magnets), and FAQPage + HowTo + DefinedTerm Schema.org markup in addition to standard FAQ + Article schema.

3. Source-magnet PR now targets entity associations

The original source-magnet methodology earned backlinks. The 2026 version earns entity associations: getting Atlys mentioned alongside the entities AI engines already trust (state.gov, embassy sites, government tourism boards). Co-citation and entity proximity matter more than raw backlink count for AI Overview inclusion. We now run a parallel 'entity-association campaign' alongside link building.

4. Tracking now includes AI-search visibility metrics

The original engagement tracked Ahrefs/SEMrush/GSC. The 2026 version adds AI-search visibility tracking: brand mentions in ChatGPT responses, citation rate in Perplexity searches, presence in Google AI Overviews, share of voice in Gemini answers. Tools: Ahrefs Brand Radar, Profound, Otterly, AthenaHQ.

What stays, what changes

• The 9-month engagement structure stays the same. The 6 pillars stay the same.
• What changes: AI-citation keyword research (Pillar 01 expanded), answer-engine formatting on programmatic templates (Pillar 04 expanded), entity-association PR alongside link building (Pillars 05+06), AI-search visibility tracking added to the reporting suite.
• Expected uplift on the same engagement budget: ~30-50% additional AI-search visibility on top of the same Google-search outcomes.

The 6-Pillar Framework applies well beyond visa-tech, beyond a16z-funded companies, and beyond India-centric brands. It's the underlying playbook NMG runs for any business with real traction that's hitting an SEO ceiling.

It works for: SaaS · marketplaces · e-commerce · travel · fintech · regulated services · D2C consumer · lead-gen B2B · publishers · agencies · startups Seed → Series C · enterprise · global brands · India / GCC / SEA / US / UK / EU markets.

What matters is less the industry than the shape of your site. The shape we found at Atlys: real traction, capped by technical SEO mess, no keyword discipline, or no link infrastructure.

NMG Digital is a specialist digital marketing agency. We're the team behind the Atlys engagement and a portfolio of similar high-velocity SEO + content + link-building campaigns for venture-backed and enterprise brands.

What we do

• SEO: master keyword research, technical SEO audits + remediation, programmatic page templates, content layering, low-hanging-fruit content sprints, schema markup, Core Web Vitals, locale-aware internationalisation. The 6-Pillar Framework you just read about.
• Content: pillar architecture, programmatic content at scale, source-magnet digital PR, editorial briefs, content auditing, AI-search-optimised content (definition paragraphs, source-of-truth tables, key-takeaway boxes).
• Link building: paid placement campaigns, outreach DBs, source-magnet methodology, anchor-text strategy, broken-backlink reclamation.
• PPC: Google Ads, programmatic, paid social, performance tracking. Often runs alongside SEO for our larger engagements.

Who we work with

We've worked with venture-backed startups (a16z, Peak XV, Elevation, DST Global portfolio companies), enterprise brands across India, GCC, SEA, and the US, and India-headquartered category-defining companies. Our reference engagements span travel-tech, visa-tech, fintech, marketplaces, D2C consumer, and regulated services.

Why prospects choose NMG

Three reasons consistently come up in our discovery calls:

• 1. Operational discipline. We run engagements like instrumented engineering sprints: Trello cards per task, weekly call cadence, daily Slack on link-building. Our clients consistently cite this discipline (Mohak Nahta on the 29 Jul 2022 call: 'I think you guys are doing a fantastic job').
• 2. The 6-Pillar Framework. A named, replicable playbook tested across 18+ source-country markets at Atlys and adapted for every subsequent engagement. We customise an established framework rather than reinventing strategy per client.
• 3. Three-year compounding evidence. The Atlys foundation is still operating at 290k+ monthly visits three years post-engagement. Most agency engagements decay; ours compound.