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Brain Station 23 SEO Case Study — Top Three in Bangladesh, Then the UAE

Software development and IT services · Bangladesh, UAE and Malaysia · In-house role, not a client engagement · From August 2025; the percentages cover the eight months after the rebuild

2 September 2026 · re-measured 2026-09-03 · 4 min read

Measured 2026-09-03 · Ahrefs Site Explorer

43xInbound pipeline, eight months
+270%Organic users
+1,088%Sessions referred from ChatGPT
131Keywords in Google’s top three (Ahrefs)

Internal analytics, published as percentages and multiples only, plus Ahrefs

The scoreboard

Before and after, with the dates on it

The same scoreboard we keep for every client: where Brain Station 23 stood when the campaign started on the left, and where it stood when we finished on the right.

$ cmbd audit --compare --before --after

▲ before · AT CAMPAIGN START

Inbound pipelinebaseline: less than one mid-size deal
Qualified leads (BANT)baseline
Organic usersbaseline
Organic users, Bangladeshbaseline
Organic users, internationalbaseline
Sessions referred from ChatGPTbaseline
Keywords in Google’s top three (Ahrefs)17
Referring domains (Ahrefs)about 600
Ahrefs Domain Rating68

▲ after · AT CAMPAIGN END

Inbound pipeline43x
Qualified leads (BANT)+341% (4.4x)
Organic users+270% (3.7x)
Organic users, Bangladesh+257% (3.6x)
Organic users, international+341% (4.4x)
Sessions referred from ChatGPT+1,088% (11.9x)
Keywords in Google’s top three (Ahrefs)131
Referring domains (Ahrefs)2.8K
Ahrefs Domain Rating71

In-house work led by our founder, who leads inbound growth at Brain Station 23, with support from members of the Brain Station 23 team. Internal results are published as percentages and multiples only, by agreement: no lead counts, no user counts, no pipeline values. The Ahrefs figures can be reproduced with any Ahrefs account, and Ahrefs positions trail the live SERP by roughly two weeks. The aim from here: first in global search for software development, then every other service line, and the US market next.

Brain Station 23 is one of Bangladesh’s largest software companies, selling development and IT services into Bangladesh, the UAE, Malaysia and further afield. Our founder joined on 1 August 2025 to lead inbound growth, and still holds that role — so this is in-house work with the support of the Brain Station 23 team, not an agency engagement, and every number below comes from Ahrefs rather than any internal dashboard. You can reproduce all of it with your own Ahrefs account.

Where it started

A large site that had been published to for years, with the usual consequence: a lot of pages competing for attention, plenty of them not earning any. Rankings existed but sat outside the top three for the phrases that actually bring buyers, and almost all of the visibility was domestic.

What was done, in order

The order is the whole method. Each step made the next one cheaper.

1. Technical clean-up first

Before a single new word was written, the site was cut back. Pages that served no search purpose were set to noindex; some were removed entirely. On a site this size, that is not housekeeping — it decides which pages Google spends its attention on.

2. The existing service pages, rewritten and optimised

The pages that already described what the company sells were rebuilt for search rather than replaced. This produced the largest single jump of the whole programme, and it cost no new content at all — the pages were already there, they were simply not built to rank.

3. New content, aimed where competitors were already winning

Only after the foundations were sound did new pages start. The targets were not guesses: they were the topics where competing firms were visibly gaining traffic. Those pages now sit among the site’s highest-traffic URLs.

4. Bangladesh first, then abroad

The domestic service terms and the blog were taken to the top of the Bangladeshi results before any international push began. Only then did the focus move country by country — the UAE first, then further.

5. Links, continuously

Good-quality referring domains acquired steadily throughout, not in a burst. Ahrefs shows the referring-domain count roughly four and a half times what it was two years ago.

Where it stands today

Read from Ahrefs on 2 September 2026, comparing against two years earlier:

  • 131 keywords in Google’s top three, up by 114.
  • 322 organic keywords ranking in total.
  • Domain Rating 71, with about 2.8K referring domains — up roughly 2.2K over the same window.
  • Organic traffic up several times over, with Bangladesh at about three-quarters of it and the UAE at roughly a fifth — the international phase showing up in the split exactly as planned.

Positions that hold today

Bangladesh: #1 for best it company in bangladesh, tech companies in bangladesh, bangladesh it company list and top it firm in bangladesh; top three for software company in bangladesh, it company in bangladesh, top software company in bangladesh and best software company in bangladesh.

United Arab Emirates: #1 for mobile app development company in dubai, best it companies in dubai, it solutions company in dubai and top it companies in uae; top five for a long tail of Dubai and UAE service terms.

The highest-traffic pages after the home page are the competitive listicles built in step three — the Bangladesh software-company roundup, and the Dubai IT and mobile-app roundups.

Whose work this is

This is in-house work, not an agency engagement. Our founder leads inbound growth at Brain Station 23 and has done since August 2025. It has not been a solo effort — members of the Brain Station 23 team supported this work throughout, and the results above are shared with them.

The vision behind it

The goal was never a keyword list. It is to make Brain Station 23 the software company that global search returns first — in Google, and in the AI answers that increasingly sit above it — and then to take every other service the company sells to that same position, one line at a time.

Our founder’s own stated ambition runs alongside it: to earn a place among the top one per cent of SEO practitioners by actually doing this, on a company this size, in public where the rankings can be checked. Both of those are aims, not achievements — everything above is what has been done towards them so far.

What is deliberately not in this case study

No lead counts, no pipeline values, no revenue figures, no analytics screenshots. Those belong to Brain Station 23, not to us. Everything above is visible to anyone with an Ahrefs subscription, which is the point: a case study you cannot check is a claim, not a case study.

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