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What depends on you and what depends on us
This page sets out who does what in an SEO project: you provide access to Search Console, business decisions and real information from your company, while we handle technical fixes, keyword research and reporting. An audit once found three service pages where a broken contact form lost visitors for months.
Optimizing a website is not a service you buy and leave to run on its own, the way you buy hosting. It is more like accounting: the result depends on the quality of the information we receive from you.
This chapter says clearly who does what, so that we don't discover together in month four that a piece was missing.
What only you know
There are things we cannot find out from any tool, however good. They are not in the data; they are in your head and in the heads of the people who answer the phone.
- What customers ask you before they buy. Not what you think interests them, but the questions you hear dozens of times. They are, word for word, what people search for on Google.
- What actually brings you money. A service can generate a lot of traffic and a small margin. Without knowing that, we optimize what is visible, not what is profitable.
- What you don't want to sell. The customers you turn away, the areas you don't deliver to, the jobs you no longer do.
- What has changed. A price, a service that was dropped, a new law in your field. We are the last to find out, usually when it has already been published wrong for a few months.
The case that sums up the whole chapter
During an audit of one of our own sites we found three pages presenting service packages. They were well made: clear text, correct structure, indexed, receiving visitors from search.
On each one, at the end, where the contact form should have been, there was a strange line of text between square brackets. A short code left orphaned after a theme change made long ago. The old theme turned it into a form. The new one didn't know what it was, so it displayed it as is.
The result: for months, every person who read the page to the end and wanted to write to us found a line of code there. Nobody complained. People don't complain, they leave.
All the work before that was impeccable and completely useless. Good rankings, good content, real visitors, and at the last step a dead end.
That is why we ask you to go through your own site from time to time, as a customer would, all the way to the end. We look at what can be measured. A broken form doesn't show up in any ranking report.
In the same audit we also found three services with published prices that had no page of their own. In other words, the offer existed, the price was set, but there was nothing to find in search. It is not a technical problem. It is a decision nobody had made.
What we ask of you, concretely
| What | Why |
|---|---|
| Access site administration, Search Console, analytics, domain | Without them we work from the outside and guess. The access remains yours and can be withdrawn at any time |
| Decisions which services matter, which prices get published, what is not to be touched | These are business choices, not technical ones. We make them in your place only if you explicitly ask us to |
| Raw material real questions, real cases, your own photos | The difference between a text that could have been written by anyone and one that visibly comes from a company that actually does this work |
| A reply within a few days to questions and to texts awaiting approval | A text that waits three weeks for approval is a month lost out of the few in which something gets built |
We are not asking you to write. We are asking you to tell us, even in a disorderly way, even in a two-minute voice message, what actually happens in the company. Writing is our job.
What we do
- We find and fix what prevents the site from being read correctly.
- We find out what people search for in your field and with what words.
- We write and structure the pages that answer those searches.
- We measure and report, including what didn't work.
- We tell you when a request makes no sense, even if it would be more convenient to carry it out.
The last point deserves emphasis. Sometimes we are asked for something that doesn't help, and occasionally for something that actually does harm: a star rating generated by the site itself, a text repeated mechanically, a page made for a search engine, not for a person. We will tell you, we will make our case, and if you stand your ground we will do it and note that it was your decision.
What happens when a piece is missing
Nothing dramatic stops. It just becomes slower and more expensive, in ways that are hard to notice.
- Without access to analytics: we report rankings, not customers. The figures look good and don't say whether anyone called.
- Without information from the company: we write correctly and generically. The texts won't be wrong, just interchangeable with those of any competitor.
- Without decisions: we optimize what is already on the site, meaning we inherit the priorities of someone who built the site a few years ago, with other goals.
- Without your own check: things like the form above stay broken for months, because they don't show up in any automated tool.
To do at the start of the collaboration
- Give access to the site administration, to Search Console and to analytics. If you don't know whether you have Search Console, ask; it is free and it is yours.
- Write down ten questions your customers ask most often. Ten lines, not a document.
- Tell us which three services bring you the most money, not the most visitors.
- Go through your own site on your phone, as a customer would, all the way to sending a message. Actually send it.
- Decide who in the company answers our questions and how quickly.