No mystique, no black box. This page sets out how engagements actually run — the framework every client goes through, the systems it runs on, and the standard we hold our own site to. If the way we work doesn't make sense to you after reading it, don't hire us.
Every engagement starts the same way, because starting anywhere else is guessing with your money. Before any ongoing work, we establish what's actually true about your local search position: where you rank across your real trading area, what your Google Business Profile is exposing you to, how your reviews and consistency compare to the businesses above you, and — the part most agencies skip — whether Google is structurally capable of delivering for a business like yours at all.
That diagnosis is the Audit: fixed scope, fixed price, a written report you keep either way. It exists as a product in its own right precisely so the recommendation at the end of it doesn't have to earn anyone a retainer. Sometimes the honest recommendation is "do these three things yourself and don't hire us." We've given that recommendation. It's the cheapest credibility we own.
The framework is written down — not as a marketing artefact, but as the operating documents the work actually runs on. Every engagement moves through the same cycle:
Two things fall out of running this way. The work doesn't drift — month fourteen runs on the same documented process as month one, so there's no slow slide into invoice-padding. And the reporting can afford to be honest, because when a change doesn't move anything, the framework's answer is to say so and reprioritise — not to bury it under a traffic graph.
We'd rather lose a client to an honest report than keep one on a dishonest one. Rolling 28-day terms make that more than a slogan: the work re-earns its place every four weeks or the client leaves, and that's the correct pressure for it to be under.
The evidence for the operation isn't a client-logo wall. It's infrastructure — live, in production, doing real work today.
We built a review-capture product and run it in production for a multi-location business — handling real review requests across multiple locations, every week. Not a demo, not a deck: a shipped product with a client depending on it. When we talk about reviews as a ranking signal, it's from operating the machinery, not reading about it.
Client reporting runs on automated data pipelines we built and maintain — the same infrastructure, whether the client is large or small. Numbers arrive from the source systems, not from a junior copying cells on a Friday. It's why our reporting is monthly, plain-language, and doesn't slip.
The audit framework we sell has been applied to this website. Clean indexation, accurate titles and descriptions, one honest H1 per page, substantive content, consistent name-address-phone everywhere it appears. If we don't pass our own test, we don't ship — and you're welcome to check.
We don't publish named case studies until a client has agreed to it, and we don't invent outcomes. But how we work shows up best in specifics — so here are three real moments from real engagements, anonymised.
We corrected our own diagnosis mid-job. Working on a multi-location service business, our initial analysis — built from search console data — pointed to one fix. Live search-results checking contradicted it, so we threw our own first answer away and shipped the fix the evidence actually supported, instead of the one already written up. The data you act on has to beat the data that's convenient.
We told a client to stop before we'd sell them more. A business came to us spending on ads to compensate for weak organic visibility. The diagnosis was blunt: the spend was renting attention the fix would have earned, and until the structural problem was addressed, more budget was more waste. That conversation shrinks an invoice. It's also the only version of it we're willing to have.
We rebuilt the boring things first. On a long-running engagement, the visible work — design, content — waited while we fixed indexation, misrouted internal links, and page-level accuracy across dozens of pages. Nobody screenshots that work for a portfolio. It's also where the rankings actually live, and it shipped first because the framework prioritises what moves visibility, not what demos well.
Everything on this page begins the same way for every client: a fixed-scope Audit of your local search position. A written report, a straight recommendation, 45 minutes to talk it through — and a method you'll have already read before you spend anything on it.