Investigative reports from the field.

Every case study on this site follows the same skeleton: the client's situation before we arrived, the specific hypothesis behind our first ninety days of work, the sequence of changes we made, and an honest read of the results against that hypothesis. We write the baseline section first and lock it before any results are known, so the "before" picture isn't reverse-engineered to flatter the "after" one.

We source every figure the same way we do on portfolio entries — Search Console exports, Semrush snapshots, Google Business Profile insights, or client-provided revenue and lead data where the client has agreed to share it. Where a number can't be sourced, it doesn't appear, even if it would make the story read better.

A finished case study goes back to the client for a factual check before publication. This isn't about softening the language — it's about catching errors, confirming we haven't disclosed anything commercially sensitive, and making sure the timeline we describe matches what actually happened on their end, including any changes the client's own team made that we should credit rather than absorb into our own numbers.

A baseline is only useful if it's captured before intervention and dated precisely. We take our starting snapshot in the first week of an engagement — organic keyword count, Search Console impressions and clicks, indexation status in Google Search Console, and a technical audit of crawl errors, page speed, and schema coverage. This gets logged internally even for engagements that never become a public case study, because it protects both the client and us if questions come up later about what changed and when.

For clients who come to us mid-campaign — say, after a previous agency's work, or after they've already made changes themselves — we're explicit in the case study about which portion of the history is theirs and which is ours. Claiming credit for gains that predate our involvement is one of the more common ways agency case studies mislead, even unintentionally, and we build the baseline section specifically to avoid it.

SEO rarely happens in a vacuum. A client's paid search spend, seasonal demand, a competitor closing, or a core algorithm update can all move organic performance during the same window we're doing our own work. Where we're aware of a confounding factor, we name it in the case study rather than let a reader assume our tactics alone produced the entire swing. This is slower and less flattering to write than a clean before/after narrative, but it's the only version that holds up if a prospective client asks pointed follow-up questions.

When we can isolate a specific change — a technical fix that resolved an indexation problem, or a content cluster that captured new query volume — we say so plainly and point to the corresponding Search Console query data. When we can't isolate it, we describe the result as attributable to the combined programme, which is the accurate description even though it's a less punchy sentence.

Read for structure before you read for numbers. A trustworthy case study should let you answer: what was the site's condition before the engagement, what specifically changed, over what timeframe, and what happened afterwards that can plausibly be tied to those changes. If any of those four pieces is missing — especially the starting condition — treat the headline result with proportionate scepticism regardless of which agency published it.

Watch for language that implies certainty an outside observer can't verify, like precise attributed revenue figures with no methodology explained, or claims that a single blog post "generated" a specific dollar amount months later. And notice whether the write-up acknowledges anything that didn't go as planned; a case study with zero friction anywhere in the story is more likely edited for effect than a faithful account.