Case studies

Not the number. The story behind it.

Anyone can publish a figure. What does not get published is what was happening before it, how it was diagnosed, and what we refused to do. Every case here carries the original board before and after, and checks you can run on your own work today.

Search engine optimisation·Property
He was paying every month to damage his own site, and nobody told him.
The site had 841,000 backlinks. A number anyone would call excellent. But when we looked at where they came from, all of them traced back to just 36 domains. This is the story of the moment we found that, and why it was the thing keeping the site invisible.
The signal
841,000 links ÷ 36 domains
That means each referring domain was handing the site about 23,000 links on average. There is no natural way that shape occurs.
Read the story
200K
organic visits a month
up from 39
The figures
Monthly organic visits
39200,000
Ranking keywords
68169,700
Referring domains
361,230
Domain Rating
3466
Search engine optimisation·Ecommerce
The links went up every month, and the traffic went down.
This site was losing 21,000 keywords and 67,000 visits every 30 days. In those same thirty days the backlink count rose by 5,900 and referring domains by 376. Somebody was working and reporting numbers that went up, while the site fell underneath them.
The two trends
Links rising · rankings falling
When both happen in the same month, the problem is not the number of links, and more of them will not fix it.
Read the story
4,300
keywords in the top three
was 777
The figures
Keywords ranking
54,900102,000
Keywords in the top three
7774,300
Domain Rating
3640
Referring domains
2,5002,000
Social media·Ecommerce
Thirty thousand followers, and 51 clicks in four months.
This page was not empty. It had 30,900 followers. Across four full months it reached 8,294 people, down 99.1% on the period before. The followers were there. The platform was not delivering anything to them.
The ratio
2,161 organic reach against 30,900 followers
Across four months. Nine in ten followers saw nothing the page published.
Read the story
7,000
link clicks
was 51
The figures
Link clicks
517,000
Organic reach
2,16118,371
Content interactions
705,700
Total reach
8,294709,739

The shape

What is inside every case

All four are on every page, in the same order. The first three prove the work. The fourth gives you something to act on even if you never work with us.

The original board, before and after

A screenshot from Ahrefs, Meta, or Search Console exactly as it was, not redrawn and not retyped into a table of ours. Only the client name is withheld. Figures and dates stay where they are.

The diagnosis, not the result

The result is stated once at the top and then left alone. The rest of the page is about what was happening before it, and why, because that is the part that matters if your situation looks like it.

What we refused to do

In every case there were things that would have made the numbers look better sooner, and we did not do them. They are named, so you know what we say no to before you work with us.

Checks you can run yourself

Each case closes with three checks you can run in five minutes, with no tools and no account. If they come back healthy, your problem is not there, and we will tell you so.

Which one is yours?

You do not need to read all three. Find the column describing something close to your situation, and start there.

Case: the link profile

Your site has had SEO work for a while and the result is not showing
Your monthly reports show numbers rising while visits stay flat
Somebody has ever sold you a backlink package
Your site is established and running but nobody finds it

Case: the site that was falling

SEO work is running on your site and traffic is falling rather than rising
Your monthly reports carry numbers that rise while sales stay flat
Your site is large and many pages are losing their positions
Somebody is building links for you and you cannot tell whether it helps

Case: the page that had collapsed

You have followers and reach has almost stopped
You are spending on ads and cannot see the result
Engagement on your posts is close to zero
The page went quiet for a while and needs to work again

Why only three cases

A case study needs a before board and an after board we are allowed to publish, and a client who agrees. The rest of the work sits on the portfolio page with its figures and domains, and the sites are yours to open.

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