SEO Services
Search still sends more qualified traffic than any other channel. It also hands out fewer clicks than it used to. This page sets out what SEO actually involves now, which disciplines still earn their own line item, what we do, and what we refuse to promise.
Three situations, three different jobs
Most enquiries fall into one of these. Find yours before reading anything else on this page.
A site that has never ranked usually has a diagnosable reason: crawl waste, thin or duplicated pages, an architecture search engines cannot read. The audit finds which one, and it is the only sensible first purchase.
Impressions without clicks is now the most common shape of failure, and it is rarely a ranking problem. It is titles, intent mismatch, or an AI Overview absorbing the answer above you. Three different fixes.
Compounding work needs a standing pipeline, not a project. Publishing, earning citations, watching for the ranking losses nobody notices until a quarter has gone. Pairs with content marketing.
Four things that actually changed
Every figure below is dated and sourced. Search advice ages badly, and most of what circulates about AI search is guesswork with a percentage attached.
Google still owns search. It just gives away far fewer clicks.
The market share argument is settled and has been for years: Google held 91.1% of worldwide search across all devices in August 2026. What changed is what a search is worth. SparkToro's analysis of Similarweb clickstream data found that 68.01% of US Google searches in January to April 2026 ended without a single click anywhere, up from 60.45% in 2024. Searches producing at least one click fell 9.51 percentage points over that period, a 22.9% relative decline.
The practical consequence is that impression growth and click growth have decoupled. A campaign can be working, with more queries served and better positions, while clicks stay flat. A report that shows only one of those numbers is telling you half the story. This is why our reporting always shows impressions, clicks, average position and click-through rate together, per query.
The trap: treating a click decline as a ranking failure. Check whether the query now returns an AI Overview before you change anything. If it does, the click loss happened above you and no amount of on-page work will win it back.
An AI Overview does not remove you from search. It changes what winning looks like.
AI Overviews appeared on more than 20% of Google searches in the same study period, and where one appears, click-through rates fall by close to 60%. That is a real and material loss on informational queries. It is also narrower than the panic suggests: Google's separate AI Mode accounted for just 0.34% of searches over those four months, despite Google reporting it had passed a billion monthly users.
What follows is a change in target, not an abandonment of SEO. Informational queries that an AI Overview can answer completely are no longer reliable traffic. Queries an overview cannot resolve still send clicks: a comparison requiring judgement, a calculator, a decision with local or commercial context, anything needing data only you hold. Being the cited source inside an overview also sends qualified traffic. That work has its own page here: generative engine optimisation and answer engine optimisation.
The trap: the widely-circulated claim that AI Overviews appear on roughly half of all searches. That figure comes from tool vendors sampling their own keyword sets, which skew informational. The clickstream figure, which records what real people actually saw, is 20%. We cite the lower, better-sourced number and note the disagreement rather than picking the more alarming one.
Bing is not the untapped second chance the internet keeps promising.
Bing held 4.5% of worldwide search in August 2026, with Yahoo at 1.23%, Yandex at 0.99% and DuckDuckGo at 0.7%. Bing matters in specific places: enterprise desktop fleets where it is the locked default, some US B2B segments, and as the index behind several assistants. Bing Webmaster Tools is worth verifying, because it is free and takes ten minutes.
What it does not justify is a separate service line, a separate budget or a separate content strategy. The technical work that makes a site legible to Bing is the same work that makes it legible to Google, and pitching “Bing SEO” as its own product is a way of selling the same audit twice.
Performance is graded, and the metric changed underneath everyone.
Core Web Vitals are three measurements with published thresholds, assessed at the 75th percentile of real visits across mobile and desktop: Largest Contentful Paint under 2.5 seconds, Interaction to Next Paint under 200 milliseconds, and Cumulative Layout Shift under 0.1.
INP became a stable Core Web Vital in 2024, replacing First Input Delay. Plenty of sites are still being reported against FID by dashboards and agency templates that were never updated, which means their performance section is measuring something Google retired. It is the single most common stale item we find in an inherited audit.
The trap: optimising for lab scores. A perfect Lighthouse run on a developer's laptop proves very little; Core Web Vitals are assessed on field data from real visitors on real connections. Check the Core Web Vitals report in Search Console, not a synthetic score.
The disciplines that make up SEO, and three that no longer stand alone
SEO is routinely sold as a menu of ten or more separate services. Seven of the eleven below are real specialisms with genuinely different methods. One is worth buying only in specific circumstances. Three are the same work wearing a different label, and we would rather say so than bill for them.
| Discipline | What it actually involves | Who it is for | Separate line item? |
|---|---|---|---|
| Technical SEO | Crawlability, indexation, site architecture, canonicalisation, structured data, Core Web Vitals, log analysis. | Every site. Nothing else works until this does. | Yes · foundational |
| On-page & content | Intent mapping, page-level targeting, internal link architecture, cannibalisation cleanup, refreshing decayed pages. | Any site with more than about twenty pages. | Yes · continuous |
| Local SEO | Business Profile optimisation, citation consistency, review velocity, location pages, local-pack tracking. | Anyone with a physical location or a service area. | Yes · distinct method |
| International SEO | hreflang, geo-targeting, ccTLD or subfolder architecture, keyword transcreation per locale. | Multi-market sites. Genuinely hard to retrofit. | Yes · architectural |
| Link earning | Digital PR, original data, resource assets, reclamation of unlinked mentions, toxic-profile review. | Competitive markets where authority is the constraint. | Yes · see caveats |
| E-commerce SEO | Faceted navigation control, category and product templating at scale, variant handling, out-of-stock policy, product feeds. | Catalogue sites, where the scale problems are unique. | Yes · scale-specific |
| AI & answer-engine visibility | Earning citation inside AI Overviews and assistants, entity clarity, extractable answer formatting, tracking share of citation. | Anyone losing informational clicks to AI summaries. | Yes · new discipline |
| Video & YouTube SEO | Titles, chapters, transcripts, thumbnails, video schema on the host page. | Only teams already producing video regularly. | Conditional |
| Mobile SEO | Responsive behaviour, mobile performance, tap targets, parity of content between viewports. | Everyone, which is the point. | No · this is just SEO |
| Voice SEO | Conversational phrasing, concise extractable answers, structured data. | Overlaps almost entirely with answer-engine work. | No · merged upward |
| “Google SEO” / “Bing SEO” | Nothing distinct. The same technical and content work, described twice. | Nobody. Verify Bing Webmaster Tools and move on. | No · not a service |
Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools are both free and both should be verified on day one regardless of engagement. Assessment current 7 September 2026.
Where each of these lives on this site
Several disciplines above are deep enough to warrant their own page. Technical and on-page work sits inside every engagement described below; the rest are separate services you can read about directly: AI SEO, generative engine optimisation, answer engine optimisation, programmatic SEO for template-driven pages at scale, voice search engagement, link building and guest posting. Content production runs through content marketing, blogging and copywriting. If your catalogue is the problem rather than your content, start with e-commerce UX optimisation.
Technical & Content Audit
Find out what is actually wrong before anyone sells you a fix.
A full crawl of your site alongside your own Search Console and analytics data, producing a written report of every issue found, each scored on expected impact against implementation effort. We look at indexation and crawl waste, site architecture and internal linking, duplication and keyword cannibalisation, structured data, Core Web Vitals on field data, content quality and decay, backlink profile, and query-level performance including which of your queries now return an AI Overview.
What you get
A prioritised written report you own outright, a technical fix list your developer can work from without us, a query-level opportunity analysis, and a walkthrough call. If you take the report elsewhere or implement it yourself, that is a perfectly legitimate outcome and we will say so on the call.
What it is not
Not a tool export with a logo on it. Not implementation. The audit diagnoses, it does not fix. And not a guarantee that the findings are dramatic: some sites are technically sound and simply have an authority problem, which is a slower and more expensive answer that we will give you anyway.
Best for: sites that have never ranked, sites that lost visibility without an obvious cause, and anyone about to commission a rebuild who wants to avoid carrying existing faults into it.
Visibility Sprint
A fixed block of implementation aimed at the specific gap the audit found.
Scoped directly from audit findings, so it targets your actual constraint rather than a template. Typical sprints cover consolidating cannibalising pages into one page that ranks, rewriting titles and descriptions against real query data, restructuring internal links so authority reaches the pages that need it, fixing indexation and performance faults, adding structured data, and reformatting pages so they can be cited by answer engines rather than summarised past.
What you get
Changes shipped on your site, each one recorded with a date so we can attribute movement later. A before-and-after against the baseline agreed at the start. Where consolidation is involved, redirects are mapped and verified live before anything is removed. That sequence is not negotiable.
What it is not
Not a content mill. A sprint that publishes forty thin pages is the scaled content abuse Google's spam policies name explicitly, and we will not do it. Not a fix for an authority gap either. If you are outranked by sites with genuine editorial links, a sprint sharpens what you have but will not close that distance.
Best for: sites with impressions but weak click-through, estates carrying years of overlapping pages, and teams with a developer who can ship the technical items.
Managed SEO Retainer
A standing programme: publish, earn, monitor, correct, repeat.
An audit finds the obvious problems once. A retainer catches the ones that appear afterwards: the page that quietly decays, the competitor that starts outranking you, the migration that breaks two hundred URLs, the query that turns informational and stops sending clicks. Each month covers a planned publishing schedule, technical monitoring, link earning where authority is the constraint, and a report written in plain language against the baseline.
What you get
Monthly reporting that shows impressions, clicks, position and CTR side by side, plus which queries gained or lost an AI Overview. Full access to every tool and property we set up. They are registered to you, not to us, so leaving costs you nothing but notice. Pairs naturally with marketing automation and conversion rate optimisation, because traffic you cannot convert is an expensive hobby.
What it is not
Not worth starting if you need revenue this quarter. Google's own documentation says changes may take “several months” to be reflected. If your runway is shorter than that, paid search is the honest recommendation and we will make it, often alongside SEO rather than instead of it.
Best for: businesses where search is already a meaningful share of pipeline, competitive markets that need continuous authority building, and teams who want a search partner rather than a supplier.
How an engagement runs
The same order every time, because diagnosing before prescribing is the whole discipline.
- Scoping call, free. We look at your site, your Search Console access and your commercial goals, then tell you which engagement fits, or that SEO is not your bottleneck. Sometimes the answer is that your traffic is fine and your landing pages are losing it.
- Baseline. We record where you stand today on the metrics that will define success: impressions, clicks, average position, CTR, indexed pages and conversions. Without a baseline there is no honest “after”, and any agency that skips this step has made its reporting unfalsifiable.
- Audit. The full technical and content diagnosis described above, ending in a written prioritised report.
- Sequence the work. Technical faults first, because content published onto a broken foundation is wasted. Then consolidation, then new publishing, then authority. Doing these in the wrong order is the most common way an SEO budget disappears without a result.
- Implement and record. Every change dated and logged. When several things ship in one week and rankings move, an undated change log makes attribution impossible.
- Report against the baseline. Monthly, in plain language, including the things that did not work. We separate what we changed from what the market changed. An algorithm update or a seasonal cycle is not a win, and we will not present it as one.
What we will not claim
SEO attracts more inflated promises than any other marketing discipline. Here is our position, stated plainly enough to hold us to.
- We do not guarantee rankings, and nobody honest does. Google's own documentation is unambiguous: “No one can guarantee a #1 ranking on Google.” The same page tells you to be wary of anyone claiming a special relationship with Google or a priority submission. If a proposal you are holding contains a ranking guarantee, that single line tells you what you need to know about the rest of it.
- We do not promise a timeline we cannot control. Google states that some changes take effect within hours and others “could take several months”. Our working expectation for a competitive term is six to twelve months to a defensible position, and we would rather lose the engagement than agree to a number designed to close it.
- Every statistic on this page is sourced and dated. The market share, zero-click and AI Overview figures come from StatCounter and SparkToro's Similarweb clickstream analysis, both linked below and both verified on 7 September 2026. Where two credible sources disagree, as they do on AI Overview prevalence, we cite the better-sourced number and say the disagreement exists.
- We publish no client results on this page. Not because there are none, but because a percentage without the account behind it is unverifiable by you, and we are not going to ask you to take our word for a number we could have invented. Results are discussed with named references on a call, under whatever confidentiality the client requires.
- Your accounts stay yours. Search Console, Analytics, Business Profile, Tag Manager: all registered to your email, with us added as a user. An agency that owns your properties has taken a hostage, not a client.
- We will tell you when SEO is the wrong spend. A brand-new domain in a saturated market, a business needing revenue within the quarter, or a product with no search demand at all. In each case we will say so and point you at paid search, paid social or email instead.
Tactics we decline, and why
Google's spam policies define link spam as creating links “primarily for the purpose of manipulating search rankings”, and name buying or selling links, advertorials carrying ranking credit, and low-value content produced to manipulate linking signals. Scaled content abuse, which Google defines as generating many pages primarily to manipulate rankings rather than help users, is named separately and applies squarely to bulk AI publishing. We do not sell paid link placements, private blog network links, bulk directory submissions, or automated content at volume. This is not a moral posture so much as a practical one: these tactics have a history of working until they abruptly do not, and the recovery is always more expensive than the shortcut saved. Where links genuinely are your constraint, the work is earned link building and digital PR, which is slower and costs more, and we will say that at the scoping call rather than after the invoice.
Frequently asked questions
What do SEO services actually include?
At minimum: a technical foundation that lets search engines crawl, render and index your pages; content mapped to what people actually search rather than what you would like them to search; an internal link structure that concentrates authority on the pages that matter commercially; and measurement that separates what you changed from what the market changed. Beyond that, scope depends on your situation. A multi-location business needs local work, a catalogue site needs faceted-navigation control, a publisher losing clicks to AI summaries needs answer-engine work. Any agency quoting an identical package to all three is selling a template, not a service.
How long does SEO take to show results?
Google's own guidance is that some changes take effect within hours while others may take several months, and that you should generally wait a few weeks before assessing whether work had an effect. In practice, technical fixes on an established site can move impressions within two to four weeks; new content on a domain with existing authority typically takes two to four months to settle; and a competitive commercial term on a young domain is a six to twelve month project at best. Anyone who quotes you a shorter timeline before looking at your domain age, backlink profile and competition is guessing.
Is SEO still worth it now that AI answers so many queries?
Yes, but the target has moved. Purely informational queries that an AI Overview can fully answer are no longer dependable traffic, because where an overview appears click-through drops by close to 60%. What still earns clicks are queries an overview cannot resolve: comparisons requiring judgement, transactional and commercial intent, tools and calculators, and anything needing context an assistant does not hold. Being cited inside an overview also sends qualified traffic and requires its own work. The honest summary is that SEO's informational tier has shrunk and its commercial tier has not, so the mix of work changes rather than the case for doing it.
Can you guarantee first-page rankings?
No, and you should treat any agency that does as disqualified. Google's documentation states plainly that no one can guarantee a #1 ranking and specifically warns against firms that claim otherwise or allege a special relationship with Google. What we commit to instead is a written diagnosis you own, work sequenced so the foundation comes before the content, changes logged with dates so movement can be attributed honestly, and reporting against a baseline agreed before we start, including the months where the number goes the wrong way.
How much do SEO services cost?
We quote a fixed price after a free scoping call, because the variables are too large to price blind: a five-page brochure site and a fifty-thousand-URL catalogue are different jobs with different risks. The audit is the smallest fixed-scope engagement and the usual entry point; a sprint is priced from what the audit finds; the retainer is a monthly fee with a three-month minimum. What we will not do is publish a package price that we would have to renegotiate the moment we saw your site, and we would be cautious of anyone who does.
Do I need local SEO, international SEO, or both?
Local if you serve customers from a physical location or a defined service area. The work there is Business Profile optimisation, citation consistency, review velocity and location-specific pages, and it is measured in local-pack visibility rather than classic rankings. International if you sell into multiple countries or languages, where the work is hreflang, geo-targeting and per-locale keyword transcreation, and where architecture decisions are expensive to reverse later. A single-country online business needs neither as a separate workstream. The scoping call settles this in about ten minutes.
What is the difference between SEO and AI SEO or GEO?
Classic SEO optimises for a ranked list of links. Generative and answer-engine optimisation aim at being the source an AI system cites when it composes an answer, which rewards different things: unambiguous entity information, claims that can be extracted cleanly, corroboration across independent sources, and structured data that removes ambiguity. They share a foundation: a page an AI system cannot crawl or parse cannot be cited either. We treat them as one programme with two targets, and cover the specialist work on our AI SEO and generative engine optimisation pages.
Do you buy links or write content with AI?
We do not buy links. Google's spam policies name buying or selling links for ranking purposes and advertorials carrying ranking credit as link spam, and the history of paid-link tactics is that they work until a policy update makes them a liability. On AI: we use it as a research and drafting aid the way any modern team does, but every page is edited, fact-checked and dated by a person, and we do not publish generated pages at volume. That is the scaled content abuse Google's policies name explicitly. If a page on your site cannot survive being read closely by someone in your industry, it should not be published.
We have an in-house marketer. Can you work alongside them?
Often the best arrangement. A common shape is that we run the audit and set the technical direction while your team owns publishing, with a monthly review to keep priorities straight and catch regressions. Another is that we handle the technical and structural work your team lacks time for while they keep the voice and the subject expertise, which they will always hold more of than we do. We are happy to be the research layer rather than the whole department.
What happens to my rankings if we stop working together?
Technical fixes and published content stay put and keep working. SEO is not a subscription that switches off. What stops is the maintenance: decaying pages do not get refreshed, new competitors go unanswered, and a site migration or algorithm update lands with nobody watching. Sites typically hold position for months and then drift. Because every property is registered to you and every report is yours to keep, ending an engagement is a notice period, not an extraction. We would rather you leave cleanly than stay locked in.
Find out whether SEO is actually your bottleneck
Book a free scoping call. We will look at your site and your Search Console data and tell you honestly what is holding you back, even when the answer is that it is not search.
Book a free consultationSources
- Search Engine Market Share Worldwide, August 2026 — StatCounter Global Stats
- Google zero-click searches reach 68% in early 2026 — Search Engine Land, reporting SparkToro's analysis of Similarweb clickstream data
- Do you need an SEO? — Google Search Central documentation
- SEO Starter Guide — Google Search Central documentation
- Spam policies for Google web search — Google Search Central documentation
- Web Vitals — web.dev (Google)