Qlero

Founder Emil Soujeh knew that would not scale. He wanted music labels to find Qlero independently when searching for a better way to manage royalties.

Six weeks after starting with Okara, they are.

• 8.5× more impressions on Google Search
• 168 new non-brand searches that surface Qlero, up from zero
• 14 of 20 tracked AI answers citing Qlero, up from four

Stuck on referrals

Qlero is a royalty accounting platform that helps music labels, distributors, and publishers manage and pay artist royalties.

Its early customers came through personal introductions. That works for the first few deals, but every new customer required another warm lead to pursue.

Emil wanted to build an inbound channel: buyers searching for royalty software and discovering Qlero.

The gap was clear. In May, Qlero only appeared on Google when someone searched for its name.

Why Qlero chose Okara over Ahrefs and Semrush

Emil looked at the usual SEO tools first. Ahrefs and Semrush are built for larger marketing teams—and priced accordingly.

As a startup, Qlero needed several capabilities at once: technical SEO, content creation, backlink management, and visibility in AI search. Okara covered them in one place at a price that made sense for a six-month-old company.

The deciding factor was clarity. Okara does not just report on Qlero’s website. It tells the team exactly what to do next.

How Qlero uses Okara

Every morning, Emil refreshes the agent feeds and works through their recommendations.

The SEO Agent identifies technical fixes and helps Qlero maintain a clean backlink profile.

The Writer Agent helps the company create content around topics its prospective buyers are searching for.

The GEO Agent helps Qlero improve its visibility in ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews.

When a recommendation needs to be implemented, Emil asks Okara AI CMO to guide him through it step by step.

The results

Qlero compared four weeks in May with four weeks in September using its own Google Search Console and Analytics data.

Google Search impressions increased from 565 to 4,826, representing approximately 8.5× growth. Clicks from Google Search also rose by 87%.

More importantly, the new visibility is coming from people who did not already know Qlero. The company now appears for 168 searches that do not include its brand name, including terms such as “record label royalty statements.”

AI visibility improved too. Across the buyer questions Qlero tracks, the company went from being cited in 4 of 20 AI answers on September 3 to 14 of 20 on October 2.

Visitors are also staying longer. Average time on site per visitor more than doubled, increasing from 37 seconds to 82 seconds.

Make search your inbound channel

If your startup still relies on warm introductions for growth, Okara AI CMO can help you build the next channel.

It brings SEO, AI-search visibility, and content production together in one place, is priced for startups, and tells your team exactly what to do next.

Start growing with Okara AI CMO