Pillar 02 · SEO & digital marketing

Search visibility you can explain to a board.

SEO has a reputation problem, and much of it is deserved. What actually moves a site is unremarkable: clean technical foundations, pages that answer a specific question better than what currently ranks, and enough internal linking for search engines to work out which page matters for what. That is the work.

  • Three phases, reviewed monthly
  • Reporting on enquiries
  • No ranking guarantees

3 phases

Found, compete, compound

Monthly

One-page report on enquiries

No guarantees

On rankings, ever

In practice

Three phases, in this order, for a reason.

Nothing here is clever. It is ordered: a site that cannot be crawled will not be saved by better copy, and better copy will not convert if the page takes six seconds to load.

01

Found — weeks 0–4

Crawl, index, fix. Redirect chains, duplicate URLs, sitemaps, canonicals and anything important hidden behind JavaScript get sorted before we ask a search engine to trust the site. Slow templates get rebuilt, not decorated. Outcome: a site that can be crawled, rendered and understood.

02

Compete — months 1–4

One page per buying intent, written properly, with the internal links pointing at whichever page is supposed to win. This is where pillar pages and the detail pages underneath them are built and wired together. Outcome: pages that answer a specific question better than what currently ranks.

03

Compound — month 4 onwards

The narrow questions get their own pages, the pillar pages get refreshed, and paid search captures the demand that organic has not reached yet — measured on cost per enquiry, not clicks. Outcome: growth that accumulates instead of resetting each month.

The work

How the work runs.

Every stage below is part of the scope, in this order.

01

The technical foundation

Before content, we check that search engines can crawl, render and index the site properly: server responses, duplicate URLs, canonical tags, pagination, redirect chains, sitemaps, and whether anything important is hidden behind JavaScript. We check Core Web Vitals too, because a slow site loses rankings and enquiries at the same time. None of this is exciting. All of it is cheaper than the alternative.

  • Crawl and indexation audit
  • Site architecture and internal linking
  • Core Web Vitals
  • Structured data
02

Matching pages to intent

We map what people search for against what they are trying to do — research, compare, buy, fix a problem — and give each intent a page. One topic gets one primary page, with supporting articles for the narrower questions. That hierarchy is what people mean by a pillar page: a comprehensive page on the subject, linked to and from the detail pages underneath it.

03

Content that deserves to rank

We write and edit pages for the reader first: specific answers, examples, real constraints, and the detail competitors skip. We do not publish for volume. A site with twelve useful pages outperforms one with ninety thin ones, and it is far easier to keep accurate.

04

Paid search, where it earns its place

Google Ads is not a substitute for SEO, but it is often the fastest way to learn which terms actually convert while the organic work matures. We set up conversion tracking before any spend, structure campaigns by intent rather than by product name, and report on cost per enquiry rather than clicks.

05

What you get each month

One page, in plain English: what changed, why we think it changed, what we are doing next, and the enquiries or sales that came from search. If a month's work moved nothing, we say so.

Deliverables

What a retainer covers.

  • Technical SEO audit and fixes
  • Keyword and intent map
  • Pillar and cluster content plan
  • Page briefs and editing
  • On-page optimisation and internal links
  • Structured data implementation
  • Google Ads setup and management
  • Monthly reporting on enquiries

Before we start

What lands on your desk each month.

One page. If a month’s work moved nothing, it says so — that is more useful than a chart that can be read four different ways.

01

Visibility for the terms that matter

Impressions and positions for the handful of searches tied to revenue, compared with the previous month. Not one average position for the whole site, which tells you nothing.

02

Enquiries, by source

Form submissions and calls from organic and paid, with the pages they arrived on. If tracking is broken, fixing it takes priority over any optimisation.

03

What was changed

The task list, closed items, and the things we tried that did not work. Experiments that failed get written down so nobody repeats them.

04

What happens next

Two or three priorities with the reasoning, and anything blocked on your side. One page, readable in five minutes.

Straight answers

Honest answers about SEO.

Proposal

Start with an audit, not a retainer.

Tell us the domain and what you sell. We will come back with what we would fix first and what we would leave alone.

No sales call before we understand the problem. If we are not the right studio for the job, we will say so and, where we can, point you somewhere better.

01 — About you

02 — The project

The people you need it to win over.

Where you are now, what is not working, and anything already tried.

03 — Outcomes and scope

Numbers help if you have them — enquiries, sign-ups, search visibility, launch date.

Rough is fine. We will shape it into a scope.

04 — Budget and timing

A range is enough — we scope to it rather than past it.

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