NUOPTIMA Shortlisted at the US Search Awards 2026 for Best Use of Search – B2B (SEO)

NUOPTIMA has been shortlisted at the US Search Awards 2026 in the Best Use of Search – B2B (SEO) category. The entry is our work with Cortavo, a US managed IT provider: $403,330 in contracted sales value from $88,500 invested over 12 months, a 4.6x return, with every dollar attributed in the client’s own sales system rather than modeled from traffic.

Nine entries made the shortlist in the category. Winners are announced at the Edison Ballroom in New York on October 7. Before then, here is what the work actually was.

Who we are

NUOPTIMA is a growth agency for business-to-business (B2B) companies, working out of London and New York. Over the last three years we have narrowed our focus to one corner of the market: managed service providers (MSPs) and cybersecurity companies. Our programs combine search engine optimization (SEO), content, digital public relations (PR), and visibility in artificial intelligence (AI) search tools such as ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, and Perplexity, which is where a growing share of technology buying research now happens.

The work we entered

Cortavo sells managed IT services to small and mid-sized businesses. Like most of its market, it had grown almost entirely through referrals. When we started, the website drew 261 organic visitors a month, and companies actively searching for a new IT provider rarely found it.

The program was built around buying intent rather than traffic volume. We mapped the queries a company types when its current IT provider has just failed it, built content and landing pages against them, fixed the technical foundation, and earned the links that make the pages rank. In parallel we treated AI search as its own channel, structuring Cortavo’s content to earn citations when a buyer asks a tool like ChatGPT or Perplexity about managed IT providers.

Twelve months in, the numbers looked like this:

• $403,330 in contracted sales value from organic search, against $88,500 invested, a 4.6x return
• 8 new clients signed and 75 qualified leads generated
• Organic traffic up from 261 to 10,000 visitors a month within 9 months
• 4x more citations in ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, and Perplexity than Cortavo’s closest competitor

Tiffany Bloomsky, Cortavo’s Chief Executive Officer (CEO), put it this way: “You usually don’t see SEO results until month six, seven, nine into a campaign. We were seeing wins within the first few months, and it kept compounding from there.”

Why we entered with this work

Award juries in search see a lot of traffic charts. Sessions up, impressions up, rankings up. What they see far less often is what closed, because most agencies never get deep enough into a client’s sales data to know.

That is what made this entry worth writing. Every figure in it comes out of Cortavo’s customer relationship management (CRM) system: signed contracts, sourced to organic search, with the dollar value attached. The 4.6x is not an estimate of what the traffic might be worth. It is the ratio of two numbers Cortavo can pull straight out of its own systems.

Alexej Pikovsky, NUOPTIMA’s founder: “Most award entries are traffic stories. Ours is eight signed contracts in the client’s own system, next to what they paid us. I am happy to be judged on that.”

Third time in this category

This is NUOPTIMA’s third appearance in Best Use of Search – B2B (SEO), and the first on the US side of it. We won it at the UK Search Awards in 2022, in the small-agency tier of the category. In 2023 we were shortlisted again, with cybersecurity client Microminder. In 2026 the entry is an MSP.

The trophies are the smaller part of that story. The progression is the point: a generalist entry in 2022, a cybersecurity client in 2023, a managed IT provider in 2026. Each time the client got narrower, and each time the results got easier to attribute, because deep specialization in one buyer means you already know which queries carry revenue and which only carry sessions.

Saba Gül, NUOPTIMA’s Head of Client Delivery, who led the entry: “We tracked every lead and every deal for twelve months, so writing the entry was mostly copying numbers out of Cortavo’s CRM. For the delivery team, that is what makes this shortlist feel earned.”

What happens next

The winners will be announced on October 7 in New York, and we will be in the room. Whatever the result, the entry has already done something useful: it forced us to write down, end to end, what a revenue-attributed search program for an MSP looks like. The full breakdown, including the month-by-month traffic curve and how the AI search channel was built, is in the Cortavo case study.

NUOPTIMA is on LinkedIn at linkedin.com/company/nuoptima.