SEO Campaign, 6 Month Results

A UK-based digital advertising agency came to us with a well-designed site and almost no organic traffic. They had a reasonable domain authority from prior link building, but the technical foundation had significant issues and the content was too thin to rank for anything competitive.

Month 1 was the full technical audit. 22 issues identified and prioritised: crawl errors, slow server response, duplicate content across paginated URL sets, missing canonical tags, broken internal links, and an outdated sitemap with 404 URLs still listed. All resolved in month 1.

Keyword research covered 200 terms mapped across their service verticals: paid search, programmatic advertising, social media buying, and analytics consulting. Commercial intent terms were prioritised for existing service pages. Informational terms went into a content calendar for months 3 through 6.

Content briefs were written for the eight highest-priority pages. The agency's in-house team produced the content to the briefs. We handled on-page optimisation, internal linking, and schema markup.

Month 3: First rankings appear. 12 keywords in positions 11 to 50. The signal Google needed to see was the technical foundation plus new, properly optimised content.

Month 4: The inflection point. 47 keywords in the top 100. First page-one appearances for three target terms. Traffic starts moving.

Month 5: 68 keywords in the top 100. 14 in the top 10. Organic traffic up 180% from baseline.

Month 6: 91 keywords in the top 100. 21 in position 1. Traffic up 340% from baseline. The agency's business development team reported inbound enquiries from organic search for the first time in the company's history.

The pattern repeats across SEO engagements: months 1 and 2 are foundation work with modest movement. Months 3 and 4 are the inflection point. The businesses that quit at month 2, frustrated by modest early results, never see what they paid for.