SEO and search visibility

Producing content on a broken foundation is the most common way to spend six months without moving anything.

1. Week 1–2

   Technical audit

   What Google can crawl, what's outside the index, which pages load poorly and where content is duplicated. With priorities, not an inventory of everything.

2. Week 2–3

   Intent architecture

   Research into your market's real searches, grouped by what the person typing them wants and assigned to a specific page on your site.

3. Week 3–4

   Fixing the critical issues

   Whatever prevents you from competing gets resolved before a single piece is produced. It's the rule of the process and the one that generates the most impatience at the start.

4. Month 1

   Editorial plan

   Three months of content mapped to intent and stage, with pieces ordered by what can pay off soonest. You review it and approve it.

5. Month 2 onward

   Production & optimization

   We publish, measure what enters the index and at what position, and adjust what already exists. Re-optimizing a page that ranks usually pays off more than writing a new one.

6. Every month

   Report & decision

   Which searches gained position, how much traffic they brought and how many leads came from there. Compared against your starting point.

• How long until I see results?

  Longer than you'd like and less than you fear, but the useful answer isn't a number: it's understanding that in this channel the work compounds. What gets done in month one is still paying off in month twelve, which is why the first months feel slow and the following ones feel fast.

  How the curve behaves

  • First few weeks. No traffic movement worth celebrating. What's being fixed is what prevented you from competing: pages outside the index, slow loads, duplicates, structure. On badly neglected sites this alone unlocks rankings that had been stuck for a while, but don't count on it.
  • Months 2 and 3. Specific searches start coming in, the three- or four-word ones. They have the lowest volume and the highest intent, so traffic grows a little and leads grow more. It's the first reliable signal that the work is headed the right way.
  • Months 4 to 6. Pages build history and rankings stop bouncing. This is where the channel starts showing up in the business and where it makes sense to evaluate whether to continue.
  • After month 6. Each new piece starts from higher up because the domain now carries weight. This is the point where the cost of acquiring a customer through this channel starts dropping steadily.

  What speeds things up and what slows them down

  The factor that weighs most is the competition in your sector. Fighting for a term in insurance, real estate or legal is a different project from doing it in a niche with few players, and it's worth knowing which one you're in before signing, not in month four.

  The second is the technical state of your site. If there are important pages Google isn't indexing, the first win comes fast and without writing anything. If the site is already healthy, progress depends entirely on content and authority, which are slower.

  The third, and the most underestimated, is your ability to approve. An editorial plan that gets stuck in review for two weeks every month turns a six-month project into a nine-month one.

  What to expect from the first report

  Month one's will be boring on purpose: it documents the starting point and what was fixed. If someone shows you upward charts in the first month, either the site was badly broken and something obvious got fixed, or things that don't matter are being measured.

• What's this about showing up in ChatGPT, and why is it included?

  More and more queries don't end in a list of ten links. They end in a paragraph that compares options and cites two or three brands. It might be the generated answer Google places above the results, or a conversation in ChatGPT, Perplexity or Gemini where someone asks which provider is right for them.

  The fundamental change for your business is this: in that answer there's no tenth place. Either you're cited or you don't appear, and the person asking rarely runs a second query to double-check.

  What actually gets done

  A good part overlaps with SEO as it's always been — a crawlable site with clear content and real authority is a site the models can trust. But there's specific work:

  • Answering questions directly. Models extract better from content that answers first and elaborates later, not from content that gives three paragraphs of context before getting to the point.
  • Structured data. Marking up what you are, what you sell and where you operate so it doesn't have to be inferred from body text.
  • Consistent information. Making sure your name, category and location say the same thing on your site, on your Google profile and in the directories where you appear. Inconsistency makes a model unwilling to risk citing you.
  • Mentions on sources that exist. Being talked about on real sites carries more weight here than in traditional search.

  Why we don't charge extra for it

  Because it's the same discipline, not a new product. Splitting it into a premium tier would be charging you twice for the same work with a trendy label on top. It's in every plan, including the entry one.

  How it's measured

  Honestly: this part is measured less precisely than classic SEO, because the platforms don't publish citation data the way Google publishes rankings. What can be done is systematically querying the questions where your category gets decided, recording who shows up cited and tracking how it evolves. It's manual tracking and that's how we'll present it to you, not dressed up as an exact metric.

• Can you guarantee rankings or traffic growth?

  No, neither one. And this is the question where it's worth comparing carefully, because there are agencies that answer yes — some publish on their sites that they guarantee significant organic traffic growth.

  It sounds reasonable and it isn't. Organic traffic depends on the algorithm, on what your competitors do, on how many searches end in a generated answer with no click, and on product changes Google announces with weeks of notice. Committing to a percentage on top of that is committing to something nobody controls.

  How an impossible guarantee gets fulfilled

  There are two ways and neither helps you. The first is ranking terms nobody searches for: pick a phrase with ten queries a month and reaching first place is trivial and changes nothing in your business. The second is technical shortcuts that produce a quick jump and leave your domain exposed to a penalty that later takes years to undo.

  When someone guarantees a result in a system they don't control, they'll either deliver it one of those two ways, or they won't deliver it.

  What we do commit to

  • Documenting your starting point before touching anything: what's indexed, what rankings you have and what traffic they bring.
  • Publishing the control KPIs we work against, which are on this very page, and reporting on them every month against that starting point.
  • Showing you which searches you won and which leads they generated, not a count of improved keywords.
  • Telling you if the project isn't going well, even if that means recommending you stop.

  How to evaluate us without relying on our report

  Search Console is yours and so is the access. You can log in any day and see the same searches, the same rankings and the same clicks we see. If an SEO provider doesn't give you that visibility, either they don't have it or they'd rather you didn't.

• How do I know whether the SEO I'm paying for is working?

  You can check it yourself, without technical knowledge and without depending on whoever delivers it. It's four checks on free tools you should already have access to. If you don't, that's the first answer.

  The four checks

  • Open Search Console and sort by clicks, not impressions. Impressions go up on their own when Google tests your site on new searches. Clicks are people who decided to come in. If impressions grow and clicks don't, you're gaining visibility on searches that aren't yours.
  • Look at the actual queries bringing those clicks. Do they look like what your customer would type when they're about to buy, or are they informational queries that were never going to request a quote? This is the check that changes the conversation the most.
  • Review Coverage or Indexing. Count how many pages are indexed and compare it with how many you think you have. If important pages are missing, no amount of new content makes up for it.
  • Search for your brand and your three main services in ChatGPT or Perplexity. Ask the way a customer would. Note who shows up cited. If it's never you and always the same competitors, there's a front nobody is working on.

  What the results mean

  If clicks grow on purchase-intent queries, your SEO is working even if rankings move around. If impressions grow but clicks don't, volume is being optimized instead of business. If key pages are outside the index, the problem is technical and no content plan will solve it.

  The question worth asking your current provider

  “Which searches did we win this month and how many leads came from them?” If the answer comes with a number and a list, you're in good hands. If it comes as an impressions chart or a keyword count, it's not necessarily bad faith — but it isn't telling you whether your money is paying off.

• Is SEO or paid advertising better for me?

  They solve different things and the question is usually framed wrong. Advertising buys attention today and stops bringing it the day you switch it off. SEO takes months to get going and keeps working afterward. They don't compete: they arrive at different moments.

  What each one solves

  • Advertising solves right now. It shows up on day one, lets you test messages in weeks and switches off whenever you want. Its limit is that the flow ends the day you stop paying.
  • SEO solves tomorrow's cost. It takes months to get going and then keeps working without you paying per visit. Its limit is that it won't cover a weak quarter.

  What changes depending on where you start

  If you already have ads running, you have something very valuable for SEO: you know which searches actually convert and what a customer costs you. With that data the editorial plan targets the right terms from month one instead of guessing them.

  If you start with SEO without that history, search research does the work of estimating it. It works well and it's the usual path; you'll simply validate hypotheses more slowly than if you had campaign data on the table.

  And if your situation is that ads are already getting expensive, neither entry point is theoretical: building rankings is how a growing share of your demand stops being rented every month.

  How they feed each other

  The terms that convert in paid ads are the best priority list for the editorial plan. And the other way around: an organic page that works usually improves the quality of the landing page you send your ads to. Working them with the same measurement and the same person watching both numbers pays off more than treating them as two separate projects.

  On the thirty-minute call we review where you are and tell you which of the two makes more sense right now. If the answer is that hiring SEO isn't right for you today, that's going to be the answer.