Marketing & Growth
Digital Marketing Services
Search, content, paid media and conversion work run by engineers, on products we can also change when the marketing keeps hitting the same wall.
What engineer-led marketing actually means
Who it’s for: Companies whose growth is limited by how their product or site is built rather than by how it is promoted, and who would rather one senior team diagnosed and fixed that than two suppliers pointing at each other.
Most digital marketing fails for reasons that are not marketing problems. The campaign is fine, the keyword research is fine, and the site takes six seconds to render on a mid-range phone, or the crawler sees an empty shell, or the checkout drops a third of the people who reach it. A marketing agency finds those things, writes them up, and sends the report to a development team who put it behind their existing roadmap. Six months later the recommendations are still open and everyone has quietly agreed to stop mentioning them.
We are on the other side of that handoff. Yarqat is an engineering consultancy first, and this cluster exists because we kept finding the same pattern in web development work: the growth ceiling was in the build, not in the marketing. When the fix is a rendering change, a schema change, a caching strategy or a redesigned form, we do not raise a ticket. We change it.
That shapes what we take on and what we decline. We are the right people for search visibility on a site with real technical complexity, for the measurement layer underneath your reporting, and for conversion work that touches the product itself. We are the wrong people for brand campaigns, influencer programmes, PR, video production and social content calendars, and we will say so in the first conversation rather than take the retainer and subcontract it.
What you get
- A diagnosis that starts with measurement you can trust, because acting on numbers nobody has validated is the most expensive thing in this discipline
- Search engine optimisation covering the strategy, the queries worth winning and the content that answers them
- The crawl, render and Core Web Vitals layer that decides whether any of that reaches an index at all
- Content marketing written for buyers who can tell when a page was generated rather than written
- Paid search and advertising where the economics genuinely work, and a straight answer where they do not
- Conversion rate optimisation on the pages and flows that already have traffic
- The analytics and attribution plumbing behind all of it, built as data work rather than assembled from tag-manager snippets nobody owns
- Engineering capacity to implement every recommendation, which is the part that usually goes missing
What Digital Marketing does for you
One team owns the diagnosis and the fix
The most common failure in this field is a correct recommendation that nobody implements. Removing the handoff removes that failure. It also removes the argument that follows it, where the agency says the developers never shipped it and the developers say the request was unclear.
Technical depth where the hard problems actually are
Rendering strategy, crawl budget, structured data, migrations that preserve rankings, and the performance work behind Core Web Vitals are engineering problems that happen to affect search. They are the ones marketing suppliers escalate and rarely resolve, and they are the ones we are strongest on.
Honest scope, stated early
We name what we do not do at the start rather than discovering it halfway through a retainer. If a large part of your requirement is brand, PR or social content, you need a marketing agency for that part, and you should hear it from us before you sign rather than after.
Why teams choose us for Digital Marketing
- The people who diagnose the problem can also change the code that caused it, so a finding and a fix are the same engagement rather than two suppliers and a delay.
- We are explicit about the boundary of this service. Brand strategy, PR, influencer work, video and social content calendars are not things we do, and we will point you elsewhere for them rather than resell someone.
- Measurement comes first and is treated as engineering. Analytics built on unvalidated events produces confident decisions in the wrong direction, which is worse than no data.
- We will tell you when a channel does not work at your economics. A recommendation to spend less is one you will very rarely get from a supplier paid a percentage of the spend.
What Digital Marketing includes
The concrete pieces of work this covers, scoped to what your problem actually needs.
Diagnosis and measurement foundations
Auditing what is currently tracked, correcting what is wrong, and building an analytics and attribution layer that survives someone asking a hard question about it. This is where most engagements start and where the largest early gains usually are.
Organic search, strategy through implementation
Query research, the architecture of what should exist and what should not, the content itself, and the technical work underneath. Handled as one thread rather than split between a strategist who cannot ship and a developer who was not in the room.
Paid acquisition where the maths works
Search and shopping campaigns, landing pages built for the ad rather than repurposed from the site, and a genuine read on whether the channel can repay its cost given your margin and sales cycle.
Conversion and product-side growth
The work that happens after the visitor arrives: forms, flows, pricing pages, checkouts and onboarding. Frequently the cheapest available growth, because the traffic is already paid for and the fix is in code we can change.
Migrations that do not lose you rankings
Replatforming, redesigns and domain moves are the single most common way a business destroys its own search visibility overnight. Redirect mapping, parity checks and staged rollout are treated as part of the engineering plan rather than as a checklist someone remembers late.
Where it fits
The audit that has been open for a year
You have a technical SEO report from a previous supplier, most of it is probably right, and almost none of it has been implemented because it needs developer time nobody has allocated. We take the report, verify what is still true, and ship the changes.
Traffic that arrives and does not convert
Acquisition is working and the business is not growing in proportion. This is a conversion and measurement problem, and it is usually cheaper to solve than buying more visitors, because the visitors are already there.
A rebuild that needs to not lose what you have
You are replatforming or redesigning and you cannot afford the ranking collapse that often follows. The marketing considerations belong in the architecture from the first week, not in a pre-launch checklist.
A product where the buyer is technical
Selling to engineers, CTOs and technical evaluators is a different job from selling to a consumer. The content has to survive being read by someone who knows the subject, which is a constraint most content operations are not set up for.
How we approach Digital Marketing
We start by working out whether you have a marketing problem at all. That sounds like a way of talking ourselves out of work, and sometimes it is: a business with a product nobody wants, or a sales process that loses qualified enquiries, will not be rescued by better rankings, and taking money to prove that slowly is not something we are willing to do. More often the answer is that some of the spend is working and the measurement is too poor to show which part.
So the first phase is almost always instrumentation and diagnosis. What is actually being measured, is it measuring what people think, where do visitors arrive, what do they do, and where do they leave. Only then does it make sense to argue about tactics. Everything after that is prioritised by what is both broken and fixable, in that order, and reported against numbers that existed before we started rather than ones that appeared conveniently afterwards.
How an engagement runs
The first few weeks are diagnosis and instrumentation. We establish what is being measured and whether it is trustworthy, crawl and render the site the way a search engine does, look at what is actually ranking and converting, and separate the problems that are worth money from the ones that merely look untidy. You get a prioritised picture with the reasoning shown, including the items we think are not worth doing and why.
Then we implement, in short cycles, starting with whatever is both highest-value and lowest-risk. Because the implementation is ours, the loop between finding something and fixing it is days rather than quarters. Each change is shipped against a baseline captured beforehand, so the effect is attributable rather than asserted.
Reporting is deliberately plain. What we changed, what moved, what did not, and what we now think was wrong. Search work has long feedback cycles and a great deal of noise, and any supplier presenting a clean upward line every single month is selecting the metric to fit the story. We would rather show you a flat quarter honestly than train you to distrust the reporting later.
Signs it’s time
- You have a technical SEO audit that nobody has implemented, and the developer time keeps getting reallocated
- Your analytics and your invoices tell different stories and no one can reconcile them
- Traffic is flat or falling since a redesign, replatform or domain change
- Paid acquisition is spending, and you cannot say with confidence whether it is profitable
- You rank for terms nobody buys on, and not for the ones your sales team hears every week
- Your marketing supplier keeps raising things that turn out to need engineering, and the two never quite meet
What we will not claim
Nobody controls search rankings, and any guarantee of a position is either ignorance or a lie. What can be committed to is the work: the technical corrections, the content, the measurement and the pace. We will give you an honest read on whether a query is winnable given who currently ranks for it and what they have behind them, and that read will sometimes be no.
Timelines in organic search are long. Meaningful movement usually takes months, and the early period often looks like nothing is happening while indexing catches up with the changes. Paid channels report faster but tell you less about durability. We would rather set that expectation at the start than manage a disappointment at month three.
We also do not do the parts of digital marketing that require a different discipline. Brand strategy, public relations, influencer programmes, video production and daily social content are real skills, and pretending an engineering firm has them because they sit under the same heading would be exactly the overreach this cluster is meant to avoid.
Technologies we build it with
Chosen per problem, not per fashion. This is the stack we most often reach for on this work.
How we deliver
- 01
Discover
We map the system, the constraints and the business it serves, including the parts nobody documented.
Architecture brief
- 02
Architect
Decisions get made, written down and defended before a line of production code exists.
Decision records
- 03
Build
Short cycles against working software. You see progress in the product, not in a status deck.
Shipping increments
- 04
Operate
Monitoring, incident response and iteration. The system is alive, so the engagement is too.
Runbooks & SLOs
Want a straight answer on Digital Marketing?
A short call with a senior engineer, before you write a brief. If Digital Marketing is the wrong answer for your situation, we will say so and tell you what we think is right.
What changes
Recommendations that get implemented
The distinctive claim here is unglamorous: the findings turn into changes. Most audit documents die in the gap between the agency that wrote them and the team that would have to act. When the same people do both, that gap does not exist, and the work is judged on whether the numbers moved rather than on whether the document was thorough.
Measurement you can make decisions on
Marketing reporting is frequently built on events that fire twice, goals that were configured once and never checked, and attribution nobody can explain. We rebuild that layer first, so the arguments afterwards are about strategy rather than about whether the dashboard is lying.
A clear read on what is not worth doing
A useful part of this work is deciding what to stop. Channels that will not repay their cost at your margins, keywords you cannot credibly win, and pages built for a search volume that turned out to be irrelevant to your buyer. Cutting those is usually faster than adding anything.
Industries we serve
Domain knowledge changes what gets built. A few of the sectors we know before the first meeting.
How pricing works
- Most engagements start with a fixed-price diagnosis, because scoping the ongoing work honestly requires knowing what is actually wrong first. That phase produces a prioritised plan and a recommendation, including the recommendation to stop if the finding is that your constraint is not marketing.
- After that the usual shape is a monthly capacity arrangement covering both the marketing work and the engineering to implement it, sized to the amount of change you can absorb rather than to a fixed list of deliverables. Paid media budgets are paid directly by you to the platform, never through us, because a supplier whose fee scales with your ad spend has an interest in that spend going up.
- The main cost drivers are the size and technical state of the site, whether the measurement layer has to be rebuilt before anything can be judged, how competitive the queries are, and how much engineering the fixes require. A small site with clean instrumentation is a very different proposition from a large one with three content systems and no reliable analytics.
How to engage us
Three ways to work with us on this, chosen to fit the problem, not our margin.
- Dedicated team A standing team that works only on your product, in your rituals and your tooling. Best when the roadmap outlives the project. Ongoing product development
- Staff augmentation Named senior engineers embedded into your existing team, reporting into your leads. Best when you know what to build and need capacity. Filling a capability gap
- Software outsourcing A defined outcome delivered end-to-end by an accountable team. Best when you want the result owned, not just the hours filled. Outcome-owned delivery
Services in this practice
The specific services that make up this practice.
Common questions
Are you a marketing agency or a software company?
A software engineering company that does the parts of digital marketing which are really engineering problems: search visibility, site performance, measurement and conversion. We do not do brand strategy, PR, influencer marketing, video or social content, and if those are a large part of what you need you should hire a marketing agency for that work. Saying this plainly costs us some enquiries and saves both of us a bad engagement.
Can you guarantee first-page rankings?
No, and neither can anyone else. Search engines do not sell placement in organic results and do not disclose their ranking systems, so a guaranteed position is either a misunderstanding or a deliberate misrepresentation. What we can commit to is the work itself, an honest assessment of whether a given query is realistically winnable for you, and reporting that shows what moved and what did not.
How long before we see results?
For technical fixes that were actively suppressing pages, sometimes weeks, because you are removing an obstacle rather than building an asset. For content and authority, several months is normal and the first stretch often looks like nothing is happening. Paid channels give you a read within days, but on a narrower question. Any supplier promising fast organic results is describing a timeline that the indexing process itself does not support.
Do you take a percentage of our advertising spend?
No. Paid media budgets are paid by you directly to the advertising platform, and our fee is for the work rather than a share of the spend. A percentage model quietly aligns the supplier with spending more of your money, which is precisely the wrong incentive when a legitimate finding might be that the channel is not profitable for you.
We already have a marketing agency. Does this conflict?
Usually not, and the split is often a good one. A common arrangement is that your existing agency keeps brand, campaigns and channels they are strong on, and we take the technical and product-side work they have been escalating without resolution. What matters is that the boundary is explicit and that one party is clearly accountable for the site itself.
What if the honest answer is that marketing is not our problem?
Then we will say so, and say it early. If enquiries are arriving and being lost in the sales process, or the product does not retain the users it gets, more traffic makes the leak bigger rather than the business better. We would rather lose the retainer at the diagnosis stage than spend a year proving it slowly at your expense.
Thinking about Digital Marketing?
Tell us the problem in your own words, not in requirements. A senior engineer reads it and comes back with a straight view on whether Digital Marketing is the right answer here, or what would be.
- 01A senior engineer reads it. Not a form queue, and not an account manager.
- 02We reply either with questions or with a straight answer that we are not the right fit.
- 03If it looks like a fit, a technical call with the person who would actually run the delivery.
- 04Then scope, effort and risk in writing, before anyone signs anything.