An honest picture of what's actually working

Most SEO reporting stops at the numbers that are easiest to collect, such as how many people visited your site this month or where you rank for a handful of keywords. These are often called 'vanity metrics' because they look healthy on the surface, but they tell you very little about whether your website is actually bringing in work. Traffic can rise while enquiries stay flat, and a ranking can climb for a search term that none of your customers ever type.

It's much more useful to ask questions about what happens after someone arrives on your site and analyse that data: did they enquire, book, buy or call? If so, which page, search or campaign brought them there? Answering these questions relies on Google Analytics 4 (GA4) and Google Search Console being set up correctly from the start, with your enquiries and bookings tracked as conversions so that they are counted and not just assumed. We then bring those numbers together in a Looker Studio dashboard, so you can see what's working in one place without digging through a raw export or waiting for someone to put a report together for you. That is what we mean by building an honest picture, and it's usually the information that's missing when SEO has been 'done' but doesn't seem to be working.

We scope ongoing SEO and analytics around your site and what you want it to achieve, rather than working from a package. These are the factors that shape it most, and we'll talk you through which of them apply to you before anything is agreed:

A one-off audit tells you what was wrong with your site on the day it was run. While it can be useful as a quick insight, it doesn't reveal the full picture because SEO doesn't stay fixed once it has been corrected. Pages drop out of Google's index, a plugin update breaks something in the background, or a competitor publishes something better, and everything changes. Equally, Google changes how it ranks and displays results several times a year, including the AI-generated answers that now appear above the usual results for many searches, meaning your site can quickly fall out of view. None of these factors announces themselves; most only become visible once your traffic or enquiries have already dropped.

That's why we set SEO and analytics up as an ongoing service by default, with continued monitoring and optimisation so that problems are caught while they're small, and improvements keep building on each other. If a one-off audit is all you need for now, we're happy to do that too, and it's a good place to start if you'd like to see how we work before committing to anything longer term.

If you'd like to see where your site stands before speaking to us, our free website audit checks the technical and on-page basics, and our AI visibility check shows whether ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity and Google's AI Overviews can read and cite your pages. For a single-location business, we've written about why your local business might not be showing up on Google and how to set up your Google Business Profile so that it works for you, and our free SEO tips for small businesses cover the improvements you can make yourself. If AI search is on your mind, our guide on how to get cited in AI search covers what makes a site easier for those tools to read and reference. And if you run more than one location, what twelve locations taught us about multi-location SEO goes into the problems that only show up at scale. If you're planning a change of domain, the No Regrets migration chapter explains how a brand name and domain were changed at the same time, and why we'd avoid a domain move wherever possible.