The brand couldn't decide if it was an incumbent or a challenger.
Penti's early branding was torn between looking like a large, established firm and being what they actually are: the disruptor in a market of old-school incumbents. Their real story, being the Uber in a world of taxis, was getting lost in a visual identity that mumbled.
We ran workshops, competitor research, and persona development, then helped leadership make the call: stop trying to look mature and lean all the way into being the agile, relentlessly helpful challenger. From there we built the system around that decision, including typography and an illustration style that turns abstract security concepts into something a human can actually picture.
Penetration testing is a world of blue. We had to look different without looking alien.
Every competitor in B2B pentesting reaches for the same palette. Blue reads as secure, technical, and trustworthy, and buyers in this category expect to see it. Walking away from it completely would have made Penti look like it wandered in from another industry.
So we didn't walk away. We built a palette that still sits inside the category's visual language, close enough that a security buyer registers "this is a security company" in the first second, then pushed it far enough from the exact blues every competitor uses that Penti stops blending into the lineup. Familiar enough to trust. Different enough to remember.
The engine transplant: off WordPress, onto Webflow.
With the identity settled, we moved them off a clunky, restrictive WordPress setup. We armed the marketing team with a component library built on the new design system, so they could assemble on-brand pages in hours. Then we handed over a custom CMS with collections for the blog, features, solutions, partners, and case studies, with automated redirects and structured SEO fields baked in from day one.
Their security fortress was blocking their own marketing.
As a cybersecurity company, Penti's standards are understandably sky-high. Their team had engineered custom hosting layered with CDN distribution and enterprise-grade security policies. Excellent for security. A nightmare for marketing. The fortress was keeping out Google Tag Manager, analytics, and the meta tags SEO depends on, which meant a new website risked being invisible to their marketing team and to Google at the same time.
We didn't fight it. We worked alongside their engineers to learn the CDN process, then built new QA protocols and deployment workflows so that everything we shipped in Webflow reached their secure production environment intact. Analytics, SEO tags, and all.
Then the timeline collapsed to three weeks.
Midway through development an urgent event landed on the calendar, and the carefully planned multi-page launch was scrapped. The new order was to launch something, anything, in three weeks. That meant gutting the scope and redirecting dozens of existing blog posts and pages to the homepage, which created a serious SEO cleanup job from day one.
We shipped the core homepage in three weeks. Penti hit the deadline and the quality held. Brand identity, website design, and the full migration to Webflow came in under four weeks total.
18 months of SEO on an early-stage startup budget.
Penti is early stage, so the SEO budget is real but tight. That constraint shaped the entire program. We couldn't buy our way to volume, which meant every single piece had to earn its place.
We started with strategy rather than output: a full competitive analysis, their ICP mapped properly, and their positioning as the agile challenger built into what we chose to target and how we talked about it. That produced a content plan aimed at the searches their actual buyers run, instead of the keywords with the biggest numbers next to them.
We write the briefs. A cybersecurity specialist writes the words.
Security content falls apart when a generalist writes it. A CISO can tell inside a paragraph, and once they can tell, the credibility is gone.
So we pair detailed SEO content briefs, covering the target keyword, search intent, structure, internal links, and technical requirements, with an expert freelance copywriter we've worked with for years who knows cybersecurity cold. We own the strategy and the SEO. They bring the subject-matter credibility. Penti gets content that ranks and that their buyers actually respect.
3 MQLs a month became 150.
Eighteen months into the SEO program, Penti went from roughly 3 marketing qualified leads a month to 150. Organic traffic is up 500%. All of it on a budget that never pretended to be enterprise scale.
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