Five Campaigns. Five Shortlists. One Long Rebuild

Another year, another shortlist? Not quite.

Zeal’s five nominations at the 2026 APAC Search Awards aren’t just recognition for clever campaigns. They’re the result of something deeper: a quiet rebuild that began in 2023 and reshaped the way we think, work, and deliver.

This isn’t a highlight reel. It’s the story of how we started over, by choice, and what changed because of it.

The Rebuild Started Before the Storm

By late 2023, we could see the cracks forming across the entire SEO industry. Sites weighed down by plugins. AI content mills flooding the SERPs. Performance gaps widening under Core Web Vitals pressure. Google experimenting harder with AI-driven search.

We rebuilt before the ground shifted. Not to keep up, but to clean up. To make clarity the default across tech, content, and in how we make decisions.

We stripped our systems back to the bones, rebuilt our site from scratch, rewired our processes, and aligned everything, design, code, content, with one question: Does this make things clearer for the user? Because if it didn’t, we let it go.

That rebuild became our new standard. And every campaign we delivered this year carried the imprint of that clarity-first mindset.

The Campaigns That Carried the Change

1. Mix & Grind – Best Low Budget Campaign (SEO)
Mix & Grind wasn’t just selling appliances. It was serving heritage, trust, and comfort food nostalgia in stainless steel. In a low-budget SEO campaign, with no media spend, this campaign delivered in ways larger budgets couldn’t. We rewrote everything, from schema to metadata to internal logic, to reflect how South Asian home cooks actually search. Lived language replaced generic e-commerce copy. Culture replaced keywords. Technical SEO met cultural fluency.

Results: 478,785 tracked events (up from 196,168). That’s a +282,617 increase driven entirely by SEO.

Turns out, speaking your audience’s language still beats shouting with budget.

2. Condell Park Produce – Best SEO Campaign
Condell Park Produce was a decades-old wholesaler stepping online for the first time. For years, their business ran on long-term relationships, phone orders, and hand-filled invoices. There was no e-commerce site. No plugins. No automation. No dev retainer. We built a clear, crawlable site with stable infrastructure, one that could rank, convert, and keep both retail buyers and wholesalers in the loop. What emerged was a second revenue stream and a digital presence built not on shortcuts, but on precision.

It had to perform within a lightweight CMS, without plugins or third-party AI. Every decision, from page speed to structure, was shaped by Core Web Vitals, live search data, and real-world buyer psychology.

Results: 461,431 events recorded (up from 98,050) in 16 months.

Turns out, when you build for clarity over convenience, even the most traditional businesses find a new lane to grow.

3. Penrith Pit Bikes – Best Low Budget Campaign (SEO)
Penrith Pit Bikes isn’t a global motorsports brand. It’s Western Sydney grit built for riders who get their hands dirty. In a low-budget SEO campaign, in a hardware-heavy niche with no paid channels and no developer support, we rebuilt their category logic, embedded guides into templates, and rewrote metadata using real rider terminology. Everything we did was grounded in user behaviour.

Results: Revenue from organic search rose from $89k to $125k while impressions peaked at 2.2M.

Turns out, when you build like a rider, the SERPs respect it.

4. Fine Pebble Aquarium – Most Innovative Campaign
Fine Pebble Aquarium wasn’t just selling fish and aquarium supplies. They were solving real emergencies.

“Why is my fish dying?” “Cloudy tank fix?” “Safe algae eater for shrimp tank?” We mapped these high-intent, crisis-driven queries and used AEO principles to surface precise, trustworthy, fast-loading answers. One wrong recommendation could mean a lost customer, a prized collection, or a pet. So we built for care, not just clicks.

Results: Total revenue hit $119K, with no media spend, a conservative SEO budget, and a 3-person team.

Turns out, when you speak fluent fishkeeper, the algorithm listens.

5. Best Large SEO Agency – That One Was Us
Our fifth nomination wasn’t for a campaign. It was for the foundation. For the way we rebuilt from the inside out. For the systems that made the work possible, and the strategy that made the difference.

Once we understood the true cost of technical debt, we made it a rule: Every campaign must be audit-ready, update-resistant, and user-first.

That’s where our innovation lives.
 Not in flashy tools, but in how we:

• Blend topical authority with natural language search trends.
• Use AI to assist, but never replace, human insight.
• Test and adapt against real-world volatility, not static checklists.

This wasn’t about scaling faster. It was about scaling smarter. And then building the kind of team that could do both.

We Used AI. We Didn’t Replace People.

AI at Zeal isn’t a replacement. It’s a tool, a powerful one, but only when paired with human judgement, care, and insight. Our strategy wasn’t about building “AI content engines.” It was about making room for thoughtful output, faster experimentation, and more personalised campaign strategy, all while preserving the things machines still can’t replicate: curiosity, accountability, and creative instinct.

A good example?
Our SEO onboarding process now includes training on ethical AI use in SEO campaigns, prompt-writing and AI quality-control training, with juniors learning how to spot hallucinations and rewrite for brand tone. It’s not a copy-paste system. It’s human-augmented from start to finish.

Looking Forward

This is our third consecutive year making the shortlist.

That still feels surreal.

And yes, we’re a little louder this time.

Because behind those five nominations is a team that did everything together, from backend rebuilds and AI experiments to foosball matches that got way too competitive, an archery tournament where our aim was so bad it became legend, and every cultural celebration in between. We moved early, built lean, and faced the shifts without padding or pretence because comfort rarely leads to change.

And in 2026? We’ll keep building the kind of work and the kind of team we’re proud to belong to.