Outranking a government-backed competitor

If you googled “elektroninis parašas”, for years the #1 position belonged to gosign.lt, an e-signature platform that has hundreds of backlinks from a single government domain. Add links from the Lithuanian government portal, the e-Government Authority, several ministries, and partnerships with every major telecom in the country, and you get a structural advantage that seems almost impossible to close.

That was the SEO problem we walked into when Dokobit, another e-signature platform, asked us to take over their organic growth in July 2025.

Ten months on, the picture looks different.

Dokobit’s non-branded organic clicks in Lithuania grew 56% in the first five months. Through Q1 2026, the numbers kept climbing. And in May 2026, Dokobit reached #1 for both “elektroninis parašas” and “elektroninis parasas”, the two highest-volume e-signature keywords in the country. Against a competitor that hadn’t slipped to #2 even once in the previous two years.

Here’s how we got there.

The client and the market

Dokobit runs an e-signature platform across the Baltics, with smaller footprints in Norway, Iceland, and Georgia. In Lithuania, their main competitor is gosign.lt, which is effectively positioned as the country’s “official” e-signature, because it’s a product of Registrų centras, the government registry authority.

That positioning shows up in the backlink profile. Government authority links signal to Google that gosign.lt is the default solution, which is nearly impossible to overcome through SEO alone. gosign.lt was ranking #1 for “elektroninis parašas” (5,700 monthly searches) and holding 100 keywords in top 3 positions when we started.

We had two goals

1. Achieve a TOP2-4 position with generic keywords currently sitting in TOP5-20 positions.
2. Achieve and consolidate #2 positions for “elektroninis parašas” and “elektroninis parasas” (because #1 seemed impossible).

Our SEO strategy: more focus on off-site

When you audit a site that already has reasonable on-page work done, the constraint is rarely “fix the H1s.” It’s almost always authority. Dokobit had the foundation in place. The next layer was building the external signals that tell Google a domain deserves to compete on commercial head terms.

We knew #1 was a long shot. So we planned for both: push for the top position while building a broader base of surrounding keywords that gosign.lt wasn’t targeting.

The off-site side went into outreach articles in Lithuanian and Latvian, each written from scratch, then translated and published live with backlinks pointing to Dokobit’s most important commercial pages.

The on-page side was narrower: cleaning up technical issues that were quietly costing rankings, tightening content that already had traction, and looking for CTR wins where rankings were close enough to matter.

Phase one: the first 5 months (July–November 2025)

The number we care about is non-branded clicks. We focus on non-branded because branded traffic (people Googling “Dokobit”) doesn’t really tell you whether SEO is working – those visitors were going to find the site anyway. Non-branded is different: someone Googling “electronic signature” and ending up on Dokobit instead of somewhere else.

In Lithuania, Dokobit’s non-branded clicks grew 56% year-over-year over the same 4-month window (2025.07.21 to 2025.11.18 vs 2024). The single keyword “elektroninis parašas” tells the story most clearly:

10 clicks in 2024 isn’t a typo. Dokobit was sitting on page 2 of Google for one of the most valuable e-signature keywords in the Lithuanian market.

Moving from position 16.4 to 3.8 isn’t a gradual improvement. Almost nobody clicks past the first page – so that jump moved Dokobit from invisible to actually in the running.

The same pattern of growth shows up across the rest of the top non-branded keyword set:

Latvia behaved similarly, even though we’d expected a slower curve there. Non-branded keywords climbed faster than we’d modelled.

Ahrefs domain rating, a rough proxy for overall site authority, also tracked the work. It sat at 60 in September and moved to 63 by mid-November – a 3-point jump in two months.

Phase two: Q1 2026, the work compounds

In SEO, the test isn’t whether you can move numbers once. It’s whether the movement holds and whether it builds on itself.

Through Q1 2026, both happened. Non-branded growth continued at a meaningful pace. Average positions on the keywords we’d moved into mid-page-1 kept tightening upward. Domain rating held steady at the new baseline, which is what you want to see: the November jump wasn’t a spike. Top 25 non-branded keyword clicks grew ~79% quarter-over-quarter.

The compounding part matters more than any single number. SEO results that arrive once and then plateau usually mean a one-off algorithmic win or a temporary visibility boost. Results that keep building tell you the underlying authority position has actually shifted.

Not everything moved up. Some metrics shifted between channels in expected ways, and one market had a noisier quarter than the others. We track these openly with the client rather than burying them.

Phase three: hitting #1

Then, earlier in May 2026, the screenshot moment arrived. gosign.lt is a government product with links from various ministry websites, basically the “official” e-signature platform, and everyone (us included) said #1 was out of reach. We had split our focus 50/50: pushing for the top spot while building out the surrounding keywords. Then one morning, the rankings said otherwise.

Search positions move, they can drift back down, then up again. But the conditions that made #1 possible – a domain rating that’s now competitive on this keyword set, a backlink profile that’s no longer a structural disadvantage, and on-page work that closed the small gaps – are the parts that don’t reverse overnight.

Against a competitor who’d held the position uninterrupted for two years, it’s the kind of moment that earns a screenshot.

If you’re in the same boat

When you’re up against a dominant competitor with a structural advantage you can’t close, focus your SEO budget on the share of the search market they don’t yet own. Sometimes you’ll take their #1 spot, sometimes you won’t, and either way the surrounding keyword universe is where most of the real growth comes from.

Working with an entrenched competitor in your market? If you’re trying to figure out where SEO effort actually pays back when the leaderboard already has a winner, that’s exactly the kind of challenge we like working on. Get in touch.