Digital marketing and SEO
Impressions are not a result. Sessions are not a result. The only number worth reporting is the one your finance team also recognises, and the fastest way to tell a good agency from a bad one is which number appears at the top of the report.
What we do before quoting
We pull the query data. Not a keyword-volume export from a tool, but your actual Search Console data — what you already rank for, on which pages, at which positions, and where the impressions exist without the clicks. That last category is usually the cheapest win available and it is invisible from the outside.
Then we look at whether the queries you want are commercially reachable at all. Some are dominated by aggregators and marketplaces that will not be displaced by a services firm’s blog post, however good it is. Saying so up front costs us work occasionally, and it is still the right thing to do — the alternative is taking eight months of retainer to arrive at the same conclusion.
Technical SEO is a build problem
Most technical SEO problems are decided in the architecture: rendering strategy, URL structure, canonical handling, pagination, faceted navigation generating a million crawlable combinations. These are engineering decisions, and an agency without engineers can only file tickets about them.
That is the useful thing about a firm that builds software as well: when the fix is "this route needs to be server-rendered and the facets need canonical treatment", we can do it rather than describe it. Core Web Vitals fall into the same category — they are a build constraint, not a report.
Content that has a reason to exist
The market is saturated with content written to a keyword rather than to a question. It ranks briefly, converts nobody, and is now competing with a language model that can produce a hundred variants of it before lunch. The content that still works is the kind that contains something only you know — how the work is actually done, what it really costs, what goes wrong and why.
So our content engagements start with interviews of your technical and operational people, not with a keyword list. The keyword list decides the ordering; it should never decide the substance.
Paid, when it is the right instrument
Paid search is for demand that already exists and needs capturing now. It is measurable within days, which makes it the right tool while SEO is still compounding, and the wrong tool if the underlying economics do not work — no amount of bid management rescues a cost per acquisition that exceeds your margin.
We will model that before spending anything, and if the numbers do not work we will say the budget is better spent elsewhere.
What this actually covers
Technical SEO
Crawlability, rendering strategy, canonical and pagination handling, structured data and Core Web Vitals — fixed, not just reported.
Search strategy
Real Search Console analysis, intent mapping and an honest read on which queries are commercially reachable.
Content
Written from interviews with the people who do the work, so it contains something only you could publish.
Local SEO
Google Business Profile, local landing pages and citation consistency for businesses with a service area.
Paid search
Campaigns modelled against your actual margin before any spend, then managed against cost per acquisition.
Analytics and attribution
Conversion tracking that survives consent mode and ad blockers, reporting to revenue rather than to sessions.
The sequence
Same shape on every engagement, so you always know what week you are in and what happens next.
Read the data first
Search Console, analytics and the existing site. Before anything is proposed we establish what already works, what nearly works, and what is not reachable at all.
Fix the technical floor
Crawlability, rendering, structured data and Core Web Vitals. Content published onto a broken technical base is money spent on a page nobody will index properly.
Build the content that only you can write
Interviews with your operational and technical people, turned into pages that answer a real question. Keyword research sets the priority, never the substance.
Measure against revenue
Monthly reporting that leads with pipeline and revenue. Rankings and impressions appear further down as diagnostics, which is what they are.
Handed over, in your accounts
Not a demo and a login. These are the artefacts you keep, and they are what makes leaving us possible.
- A technical audit with issues ranked by traffic impact against effort to fix
- A query and intent map built from your own Search Console data, not from tool estimates
- Structured data implemented and validated, generated from page content rather than hand-maintained
- Content briefs sourced from interviews, with the internal link plan for each
- Analytics and conversion tracking verified end to end, including the offline steps
- A monthly report that opens with revenue and pipeline, not with impressions
Typically built with
- Google Search Console
- GA4
- Looker Studio
- Schema.org
- Google Ads
- Screaming Frog
- PageSpeed Insights
The selection principle is deliberately dull: largest hiring pool, longest support window. See why we choose these.
Digital Marketing & SEO, answered
The things people ask on the first call, written down so you do not have to.
How long does SEO take to work?
Technical fixes can move things within weeks, because you are removing an obstacle rather than building an asset — pages that were being crawled badly start being crawled properly. Content and authority take longer: three to six months before a trend is readable, and nine to twelve before a competitive term moves. Anyone promising first position in thirty days is either targeting a term nobody searches for or is about to do something that will cost you the domain.
Do you guarantee rankings?
No, and we would be cautious about anyone who does. Rankings depend on competitors who are also working, on algorithm changes nobody controls, and increasingly on AI summaries that answer the query without a click. What we do commit to is the work being visible: you see the query data, the technical fixes, the content and the measurement, and you can judge the trajectory yourself rather than trusting a summary of it.
Can you fix SEO on a site you did not build?
Yes, and it is most of what this service does. Because we also build software, the technical recommendations come with an offer to implement them rather than a ticket for someone else — which matters, since the highest-impact SEO fixes are usually architectural: rendering strategy, canonical handling on faceted URLs, pagination, and internal link structure. If your development team prefers to implement them, we will write the specifications and review the result.
What about AI search and AI Overviews?
The same things matter, weighted differently. Content that states a clear, self-contained answer near the top of a page is easier for a summarising system to quote; structured data helps it identify what the page is about; and being cited elsewhere matters more than it did. What has genuinely changed is that thin content aggregating what others already said has stopped working entirely, because a language model does that better and instantly. Content with first-hand specifics is the part that survives.
Should we do SEO or paid ads?
Usually both, for different jobs. Paid captures demand that exists today and is measurable within days, which makes it right while SEO compounds — but only if your cost per acquisition sits comfortably inside your margin, which we model before spending anything. SEO is the compounding asset with a slower start and a far better long-run cost per lead. If the budget only stretches to one, the answer depends on your sales cycle and your margin, and we will show you the arithmetic rather than assert a preference.
What usually comes with this
- BuildE-commerce DevelopmentStorefronts, B2B ordering portals and multi-vendor marketplaces, including the catalogue and pricing rules that make them specific to you.Read more
- BuildWeb Application DevelopmentDashboards, portals and internal tools that hold up under real data volumes — not a prototype that falls over at ten thousand rows.Read more
- GrowUI/UX DesignProduct design and design systems. Usually the first thing that turns out to be wrong, and the cheapest thing to fix.Read more
- GrowAI & AutomationLanguage models pointed at the two or three tasks where they actually beat a rule — and kept away from the ones where they don’t.Read more
Thinking about digital marketing & seo?
Start with a call rather than a brief. Thirty minutes, no deck, and an honest answer about whether we are the right people for it.