- 5 stages
- stage one stands alone
- 4–6 weeks
- to first roadmap
- 90 days
- first formal review
How we work
No twelve-month strategy document before anything ships. We diagnose, size the opportunity in revenue terms, then work through the roadmap with your team — and review honestly at ninety days.
- The sequence
- Each stage has a defined output. You can stop after any of them.
The five stages
Diagnostic and technical audit
4–6 weeks · fixed fee · standalone
We look before we plan. Everything downstream depends on knowing what is actually wrong, and on large sites that cannot be established from a dashboard.
Depth scales with the site. A single-location business gets a focused review of listings, on-page and local signals. A retail catalogue with faceted navigation gets full crawl segmentation and log file analysis, because the problem is almost certainly in how URLs are generated.
Opportunity sizing
1–2 weeks · included in diagnostic
An audit that lists two hundred issues is not a plan. This stage models each finding for traffic and revenue impact against the effort and dependencies to fix it.
Most of the audit gets deprioritised here, and that is the point. The output is a short list you can defend in a budget meeting, not a complete list that guarantees nothing gets done.
Roadmap and sequencing
1 week · then ongoing
Recommendations that ignore your release process never ship. This stage converts the shortlist into work your team can actually take into a sprint.
We write in your ticketing format with acceptance criteria your developers can implement without asking an SEO to translate. Sequencing respects your release calendar, freeze periods and dependencies between fixes.
Implementation
Ongoing · retained capacity
How this runs depends on your capacity. With an in-house development team we work alongside them — joining stand-ups, reviewing pull requests on SEO-critical changes, validating deploys. For smaller sites we handle implementation end to end.
If you have no development capacity at all, we tell you at diagnostic stage. We would rather lose the retainer than bill monthly for recommendations that will never be built.
Measurement and review
Monthly · formal review at 90 days
Reporting is tied to revenue or qualified leads, with crawl, index and technical health metrics underneath for anyone who wants them. You can open the dashboard whenever you like rather than waiting for a monthly send.
At ninety days we review against the forecasts from stage two. If we are materially behind we go through why — wrong diagnosis, stalled implementation, or a market shift — and either change course or end the engagement. We report the months where something did not work, because an agency that only reports wins is not reporting.
- What we need
- Access requests, listed up front.
What we need from you
Listed here so nothing arrives as a surprise mid-engagement. We are comfortable working under whatever your security team requires, including read-only access and sampled data exports rather than live credentials.
Always
- Google Search Console access, ideally at domain property level
- Analytics access, read-only is fine
- A named contact who can get decisions made
For technical and enterprise work
- Server log files, or a sampled export covering a defined period
- Staging environment access ahead of any migration
- A route into your development team's backlog
- CMS access, or a developer who can implement template changes
Helpful when available
- Conversion values or average order value, for revenue modelling
- Previous audits, so we do not re-diagnose known issues
- Your release calendar and freeze periods
Missing several of these is not a blocker. It does change what we can promise, and we would rather adjust the scope than proceed on assumptions.
- Not for everyone
- Where this approach is the wrong fit.
When we're not the right choice
Said plainly, because discovering it three months in wastes your money and our time.
- You need guaranteed rankings or guaranteed traffic. No one can honestly promise this. Agencies that do are either misleading you or planning to game a metric.
- You want results inside a month on a large site. Technical fixes take four to eight weeks to register, and authority work considerably longer.
- You have no capacity to implement anything. We will diagnose the problem, but a roadmap nobody can build is an expensive document.
- You want volume link building or content at scale on price. There are firms that do this cheaply. We are not one of them.
- You want a single vendor for everything including design and development. We do search and the channels around it. Full-service shops exist and may suit you better.