SEO, Google Ads, paid social and email — reported on what they brought in and what each enquiry cost, including when the honest answer is to spend less.
Impressions, reach and follower counts are easy to grow and easy to mistake for progress. The number that decides whether marketing is worth its budget is how many people contacted you, where they came from, and what each one cost.
That is what we report. It also means we will sometimes tell you a channel is not earning its money and should be cut — including when the channel is one we are being paid to run.
Technical fixes, page structure and content aimed at the searches that actually precede a purchase, rather than at high-volume phrases nobody buys from.
Search and shopping campaigns, negative keyword work, landing pages that match the ad. Most wasted ad spend is a mismatch between those two.
Meta and other platforms, with audiences and creative built for the platform rather than a resized version of the same banner everywhere.
Sequences to people who already know you — the cheapest audience you have and the one most businesses ignore.
Google Business Profile, consistent listings and local structured data. For a business serving one city this often outperforms everything else.
Analytics, Search Console and your own enquiry records before any spending decisions. Half the time something is already working and is under-funded.
There is no point sending traffic to a page that loads slowly or buries the contact form. Sequence matters.
Campaigns with conversion tracking configured properly, so cost per enquiry is a real number rather than an estimate.
A monthly report leading with enquiries. Whatever is not paying gets changed or stopped.
We would rather say so now than three meetings in.
A monthly retainer, quoted against the work rather than a share of your ad spend — a percentage model pays us more when you spend more, which is the wrong incentive. Ad budget is yours and paid directly to the platform.
Technical fixes can move things within weeks. Ranking for competitive commercial phrases takes months, and anyone promising otherwise is either buying links or selling you traffic that will not convert. Paid search is the honest answer when you need enquiries this quarter.
Ads while SEO builds, usually. They also inform each other — the search terms that convert in a paid campaign tell you exactly which pages are worth optimising, which is far more reliable than keyword research alone.
Access to your analytics, ad accounts and Search Console, and honest enquiry numbers — including the ones that came by phone. Without those last ones the reporting measures the wrong thing.
Describe the problem rather than the solution. We will tell you what it takes — including when the answer is smaller than you expected, or when digital marketing is not what you need at all.
The thinking behind the work, at more length.
Most technical SEO advice is written for sites with fifty thousand pages. If you have thirty, a much shorter list gets you almost all of the benefit.
Read moreWhat is happening in this corner of the industry right now.
An agency performance team lists twelve gaps in Reddit's ad platform, drawn from limits they hit on live campaigns: privacy-safe reach for anonymous users, B2B and intent audiences, reliable retargeting, exclusions, forecasting, self-serve incrementality, CRM integrations, native formats and an ad library.
Read moreA TransUnion survey of 100 senior marketing and technology leaders finds 89% planning to increase AI spend while only 36% rate their data and processes as ready. The visibility gap it describes covers AI search too — which changes how SEO teams should pitch it.
Read moreA fraudulent DMCA complaint pulled Search Engine Land and Press Gazette out of Google worldwide within 48 hours. The mechanics are structural — Section 512 rewards speed over verification and puts the burden on the accused. Here is how a counter-notice works, what evidence to hold, and what Section 512(f) offers.
Read moreWebsites and web applications built front-end to back-end — designed around what a visitor needs to do, and built so the next developer can pick them up.
What this involvesInternal tools, dashboards and integrations built around how your business actually runs — starting with the smallest version that removes the most pain.
What this involvesAndroid apps from a first version that proves the idea to the release handling logins, payments and notifications — with the yearly platform updates that keep it published.
What this involves
