We get asked what we actually do, so here it is. Twelve SEO and digital marketing plays. The same twelve we run on a $4k/mo plumber and a $25k/mo SaaS, in slightly different order. No paywall. No gated PDF. If you want to run these yourself, go run them. We won't even put you on a list.
Fig. 01 · The source"A ranking strategy is a system. Systems are debuggable."PLAYBOOK 04These eight pillars organize every engagement. The exact recipe shifts by industry, but the bones don't move: technical foundation, topical authority, editorial depth, distribution, measurement. Skip a pillar, the whole thing tilts.
01FOUNDATIONWe don't pick keywords. We pick clusters. A topical map covers a category from anchor term to long-tail: the head term, every supporting subtopic, and every adjacent query a real human types at 11pm with a glass of wine in hand.
02TECHNICALMost ranking problems are technical problems wearing a content costume. We fix LCP, CLS, INP, crawl waste, broken canonicals, and rogue parameters before a single new article goes near the queue.
03AUTHORSHIPBriefs that include the angle, the source list, the internal links to use, and the headline-A-vs-B test plan. Drafted in your brand's voice, not the generic 'as we all know' tone that haunts every category blog.
04GEOGRAPHYGoogle Business Profile pruning, citation cleanup, geo-anchored landing pages, and a review velocity engine that asks happy customers nicely (without turning your front desk staff into part-time marketers).
05SCHEMAStructured data is the difference between Google understanding you and Google guessing. We mark up articles, FAQs, products, events, and the LocalBusiness entity tree end to end. The crawler stops squinting.
06AUTHORITYWe don't buy links. We pitch stories. Real ones. To industry trades, regional outlets, and category newsletters. The kind of mentions that age well and survive a Google quality update.
07PAIDPaid search for the queries you can't rank for organically yet. Paid is the bridge AND the keyword research lab for your next six months of organic priorities. Then we sunset the spend.
08EMAILWelcome, abandoned cart, post-purchase, win-back, and segmentation work. The cheapest channel in your stack, and the only one whose ROI improves with time instead of budget.
The exact order we run them. Plays 1 through 4 land in the first month. 5 through 8 land in months two and three. 9 through 12 are the recurring monthly rhythm. Nothing improvised.
Crawl with Screaming Frog, log file pull, Core Web Vitals, schema, canonicals. Delivered in plain English. No jargon dump that takes a translator to read.
120 to 240 queries, grouped by intent and pillar. Tagged by difficulty, opportunity, and how they fit your funnel. Not just a giant CSV of keyword volumes.
Service pages, product detail pages, and the homepage. Rewritten for the queries that drive revenue, not the ones that look pretty in a slide.
A live doc. 48 pieces planned, prioritized, and slotted. Briefs land 14 days before the writer starts. Never the night before.
Long-form articles or service pages, written in your voice, edited twice, internally linked at publish, tracked from day one.
JSON-LD for Article, FAQ, Product, LocalBusiness. Internal links re-cast to point at money pages. Sorry, About page, you don't need any more juice.
Categories, services, attributes, photos, posts, Q&A. Citation cleanup across 60+ directories. Text-based review velocity engine wired in.
20 story pitches a month to industry trades, regional outlets, and category newsletters. Placement and pass-through traffic tracked, not bragged about.
Bid against queries we can't rank for organically yet. The paid data feeds the next quarter's content sprint. Two birds, one budget.
Welcome series, abandoned cart, post-purchase, win-back, win-anniversary. Segmentation gets built from the analytics layer, not from gut feel.
Weekly tests on the pages that matter. Hypothesis written first, sample size set first. No peeking at results, no fishing for significance.
60 minutes. One page of metrics, one page of misses, one page of the next 90-day thesis. We renew, we adjust, or we wind down honestly. No corporate dance.
SEO has a vanity-metric problem. Impression counts, position averages, and "estimated traffic value" are real numbers. None of them pay your invoices.
We measure four things, in this order: revenue-qualified sessions, lead-shaped events, top-10 ranking keywords with buyer intent, and brand search volume. Position averages and impression totals still get reported. They don't get to drive decisions.
Every Friday you get a one-page PDF with those four numbers and a one-paragraph note on what moved, what didn't, and what we're testing next week. Most clients read it on their phone in the school pickup line.
We use first-party analytics. Server-side tagging when third-party blockers wreck attribution. A Looker dashboard you log into directly. No proprietary "agency tool" that vanishes the day you stop paying us.
We don't use "AI-generated content quality scores," "domain authority gains," or any other vendor's proprietary metric as a primary KPI. They're useful inputs. They are not the work.
And if a campaign isn't earning, the report says so out loud. We've ended retainers because the search demand we promised wasn't there. We'd rather lose the work than the trust.
30-minute discovery call. No deck, no pitch, no upsell on a hosted CRM platform. We listen, we ask the awkward questions, and we tell you whether we're the right shop. Usually inside 48 hours.