Marketing & Growth
SEO Services for Complex Sites
Search strategy, site architecture and content for products where the ceiling is technical, run by the team that can also change the code.
Search visibility as an engineering problem
Who it’s for: Businesses with a real site and a real product whose organic performance is capped by how that site is built or structured, rather than by how much content has been published.
Search engine optimisation covers three quite different jobs that get sold as one. There is deciding which queries are worth pursuing and what should exist to answer them. There is writing the thing that answers them. And there is making sure a crawler can reach it, render it, understand it and choose it over the alternatives. Most suppliers are genuinely good at one of those and treat the other two as someone else’s department.
This page is about the first and the third, with the second handled as content marketing. The reason we split it that way is that the third job is where the money usually is on the sites we work with, and it is the one that most often stalls. A recommendation to change how pages are rendered, restructure a URL hierarchy or fix what a JavaScript framework serves to a crawler is not a marketing task. It is a change to the application, and it sits in a development queue until someone with authority moves it.
If your constraint is specifically crawling, rendering, indexing or Core Web Vitals, technical SEO is the narrower page and probably the one you want. This one is the wider engagement: what to target, how the site should be shaped to target it, and the ongoing work of getting there.
What you get
- Query and intent research grounded in what your buyers actually search and what your sales team actually hears, not a spreadsheet of volume with no purchase intent behind it
- A competitive read on which queries are genuinely winnable for you, including the ones that are not and why chasing them would waste a year
- Information architecture: what pages should exist, what should be merged, and what should be removed or de-indexed because it competes with something better
- Internal linking designed as a structure rather than accumulated by accident, so authority reaches the pages that earn money
- Metadata, headings and structured data across the templates that generate them, fixed at the template rather than page by page
- Coordination with the crawling, rendering and indexation work underneath, since a perfect strategy on an unindexable site returns nothing
- Migration planning whenever the site is being rebuilt, replatformed or moved, because that is when rankings are most often lost
- Reporting against a baseline captured before we started, showing what moved, what did not, and what we got wrong
What SEO does for you
Strategy from people who have to implement it
A recommendation written by someone who will personally have to build it comes out different. It is more specific, more honest about cost, and far less likely to contain the phrase “work with your development team to”. That sentence is where most SEO audits quietly end.
Cannibalisation found and fixed
Sites that publish steadily end up competing with themselves, with several pages half-ranking for one query instead of one page ranking properly. It is one of the most common causes of a plateau and one of the least often diagnosed, because it looks like healthy activity from the inside.
Rankings that survive your next rebuild
Replatforming and redesigns destroy more organic visibility than any algorithm update. Having the people who understand your search position also involved in the web build means redirect mapping, URL parity and template metadata are architectural decisions rather than a pre-launch scramble.
Why teams choose us for SEO
- We implement what we recommend. The gap between an audit and a change is where most SEO value is lost, and closing it is the main thing we offer that a marketing agency structurally cannot.
- We will tell you when a query is not winnable. That judgement, made early and with the reasoning shown, is worth more than a year of effort aimed at a term you were never going to take.
- Strategy is grounded in your own conversion data rather than in search volume alone. A term with a tenth of the traffic and the right intent is usually the better target, and the tools cannot tell you that.
- We do not buy links, run private blog networks or use any tactic that depends on a search engine not noticing. Those carry a real risk of a manual penalty, and the risk lands on you, not on the supplier who recommended it.
What SEO includes
The concrete pieces of work this covers, scoped to what your problem actually needs.
Query research with commercial intent attached
Understanding not just what is searched but who is searching and how close they are to buying. Volume without intent produces traffic that never converts and a report that looks better than the business does.
Site and URL architecture
How pages are grouped, how deep they sit, what the URL says, and how a reader and a crawler move between them. Architecture is the decision that constrains everything afterwards, and it is much cheaper to get right than to change later.
Consolidation and pruning
Identifying pages that compete with each other or add nothing, then merging, redirecting or de-indexing them. Removing weak pages is often the single highest-return action available and is almost never proposed by a supplier paid to produce content.
Internal link structure
Designing the in-body linking that carries authority to commercial pages, with anchor text that states what the destination is about. Entirely within your control, unlike anything involving other people’s websites.
Structured data and rich results
Schema implemented at the template level and validated, so it describes what the page genuinely contains. Marking up things that are not on the page is a manual action waiting to happen, and we will not do it.
Ecommerce and catalogue search
Faceted navigation, pagination, variant handling and out-of-stock behaviour on online stores, where an ordinary catalogue can generate hundreds of thousands of crawlable near-duplicate URLs without anyone intending it.
Where it fits
A plateau after years of steady publishing
Output has not dropped but results have flattened. The usual causes are self-competition between pages, an architecture that buries new content, or a topic area that was saturated some time ago. More publishing is rarely the answer and is usually what has been tried.
A catalogue generating URLs nobody intended
Filters and sort parameters multiplying into an enormous set of near-identical pages, spending crawl budget on combinations no human wants. A structural fix, and one that needs someone who can change how the application builds URLs.
Programmatic pages that stopped performing
A large generated set of location or category pages that ranked initially and then faded. The question is which of them have a genuine reason to exist, and the honest answer usually means removing a good number of them.
A rebuild about to put your visibility at risk
A redesign or replatform is scheduled and nobody has yet mapped what happens to the URLs that currently earn your traffic. This is the moment to involve search, not the week after launch when the traffic has halved.
How we approach SEO
We begin with what already works, which is the part most audits skip in their hurry to list problems. Which pages bring in visitors who become enquiries, what queries do they arrive on, and what do those pages have in common. That tells you far more about what to build next than a keyword tool does, because it is evidence from your own market rather than an estimate of a market in general.
Then we look for the ceiling. Sometimes it is content that does not exist. Frequently it is that a template generates the same heading on two hundred pages, or that pagination hides half the catalogue from crawlers, or that the site’s own pages are competing with each other for one query and splitting the signal. These are structural problems, they are invisible in a keyword report, and they are the ones an engineering team is best placed to see and to fix.
How the work runs
We start with a baseline, because without one the entire engagement becomes unfalsifiable. What ranks today, what brings enquiries, what the site currently contains, and how it is being crawled. That baseline is captured before we change anything and is what every later claim is measured against.
Analysis then covers three layers together: the commercial question of what is worth targeting, the structural question of how the site is organised, and the technical question of what a crawler can actually reach and render. Looking at them separately is how sites end up with an excellent content strategy on an architecture that cannot support it.
Implementation is ours, prioritised by value against effort, and shipped continuously rather than delivered as a document. Template-level fixes come first because they affect hundreds of pages at once. Reporting shows movement against the baseline with the noise acknowledged: search data is seasonal and volatile, and a supplier presenting an unbroken upward line every month is choosing the metric to fit the narrative.
Signs it’s time
- Organic traffic has flattened or fallen despite consistent publishing
- Several of your own pages half-rank for the same query instead of one ranking properly
- A previous SEO audit is sitting unimplemented because the fixes need developer time
- You are about to rebuild, replatform or change domain and want to keep the visibility you have
- Your catalogue or filters are generating far more URLs than you have products
- You rank for terms that bring visitors who never enquire, and not for the terms your buyers use
Link building, and why we do not sell it
Links from other sites remain a significant ranking factor, so it is worth being direct about what we will and will not do. We do not buy links, place paid guest posts, or use private blog networks. Those tactics work until they are detected, and when they are, the penalty applies to your domain and not to the supplier who sold them.
What we do instead is unglamorous and slower. We make sure the pages worth linking to exist and are good enough that a link is defensible, fix the internal linking you already control, recover mentions of your business that were never linked, and reclaim links pointing at pages that have moved or broken. Digital PR and outreach at scale is a genuine discipline, and it is one we would point you to a specialist for.
If a supplier has offered you a fixed number of links per month at a fixed price, be aware that you are buying placements someone is selling, which means they are selling them to others too, and that the risk of that transaction sits entirely on your side.
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 SEO?
A short call with a senior engineer, before you write a brief. If SEO is the wrong answer for your situation, we will say so and tell you what we think is right.
What changes
Fewer pages, ranking better
A common outcome of this work is that the site gets smaller. Pages that duplicate each other, target queries nobody buys on, or exist because a template generated them are consolidated or removed. Consolidating three weak pages into one strong one is one of the more reliable moves in the discipline and it never appears on a content calendar.
The right pages get the internal authority
Most sites accumulate their internal linking rather than designing it, and the result is that navigation chrome dominates while the commercial pages are reached only from a sitemap. Restructuring that is cheap, entirely within your control, and frequently moves rankings without a single new page being written.
A defensible answer on what to ignore
Knowing which head terms you cannot realistically win against the incumbents, and being able to show the working, saves more budget than most positive recommendations. It also stops the recurring argument about why you are not first for a term owned by a company fifty times your size.
Industries we serve
Domain knowledge changes what gets built. A few of the sectors we know before the first meeting.
How pricing works
- Engagements normally open with a fixed-price audit and strategy phase, which produces a prioritised plan, a baseline and an honest view of the ceiling. That phase stands on its own: you can take the plan elsewhere, and occasionally the right recommendation is that you do not need ongoing help at all.
- Continuing work is a monthly arrangement covering strategy, implementation and the engineering time to ship it. It is sized by how much change the site can absorb rather than by a fixed quota of pages or reports, because a quota rewards volume rather than judgement.
- Cost is driven mainly by the size and technical condition of the site, how competitive your queries are, whether the measurement layer can be trusted, and how much of the work is engineering rather than editorial. A ten-page site with clean analytics and a hundred-thousand-URL catalogue with three content systems are not the same job in any respect.
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
Related services
Part of Digital Marketing. Other work we do alongside this.
Common questions
What is the difference between this and your technical SEO service?
This page is the broader engagement: which queries to target, how the site should be structured, what should be built or removed, and the ongoing work of getting there. Technical SEO is the narrower specialism underneath it, concerned with whether a crawler can reach, render and index your pages at all, and with Core Web Vitals. If you already know your problem is crawling, rendering or performance, go straight to that page. If you are not sure what your problem is, start here.
Do you guarantee rankings?
No. Search engines do not sell positions in organic results and do not publish their ranking systems, so nobody can guarantee one honestly. We commit to the work, to a clear assessment of which queries are realistically winnable for you, and to reporting measured against a baseline recorded before we started. A guarantee offered by anyone else is a reason to ask what happens when it is not met.
Do you build links?
Not by buying them. We will fix your internal linking, recover unlinked mentions of your business, reclaim links pointing at broken or moved pages, and make sure the pages worth citing exist and deserve it. We do not buy links, sell guest posts or use private blog networks, because those work until they are detected and the penalty then lands on your domain rather than on us.
How long does SEO take to work?
Removing a technical obstacle that was suppressing pages can show up within weeks, because you are unblocking something rather than building it. Earning a position for a competitive query usually takes several months and often longer, with an early period where indexing is catching up and the reporting looks flat. Anyone quoting a fast timeline for competitive organic terms is describing something the indexing process does not do.
Will you tell us to delete pages?
Frequently, yes. Pages that compete with each other, target queries with no commercial intent, or exist only because a template produced them are a drag on the whole site. Consolidating or removing them is one of the more dependable improvements available, and it is rarely suggested by suppliers whose fee is tied to producing more content.
Can you work alongside our existing marketing agency?
Yes, and it is a common split. They keep brand, campaigns and the channels they are strong on; we take the structural and technical work that has been escalated without being resolved. The arrangement works as long as the boundary is written down and one party is clearly accountable for changes to the site itself.
Thinking about SEO?
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 SEO 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.