Every engagement follows the same four stages: agree a starting point, clear the blockages, rebuild the pages that earn, then build authority and answers. This page walks through each one with dates attached.
The most common complaint we hear about previous agencies is not that the work failed. It is that nobody could say what the work was. Reports arrived, invoices arrived, and the store owner never knew what had changed on their own site.
So we publish the process. You can read it before you sign anything, hold us to it while we work, and check it against what actually happened.
What Do We Do in the First Two Weeks?
We record where you stand today and we agree it in writing. This is the single most important step, because without it nobody can honestly say six months later whether the work paid off.
You sign off on this document before any work starts. It becomes the reference point for every report afterwards, and it stops the argument that quietly kills most agency relationships, which is a disagreement about what before looked like.
- Organic revenue by month for the last twelve months, and the same figure split by product group.
- Rankings for the terms that already send you money, not a vanity list of terms you would like to rank for.
- How often your brand and products are named in AI answers across a fixed set of buying questions we agree with you.
- How much of your catalogue is actually indexed, compared with how many products you have live.
- Page speed on your top collection and product pages, measured on a phone rather than a desktop.
What Gets Fixed in Month One and Month Two?
We clear the things stopping your store from being read. This is unglamorous work and it usually produces the first visible gain, because you are recovering pages that already existed.
Each fix is logged with a date and a page list. You can see the change, check it yourself, and hand the log to a developer if you ever change agency.
- Crawl waste. Filter and sort links that create thousands of near identical pages and burn the budget search engines give your site.
- Duplicate products. The same item appearing under several web addresses, splitting its own strength.
- Missing product data. Titles, descriptions, prices, availability and reviews that are not marked up in a way machines can read.
- Blocked AI crawlers. Many stores unknowingly block the crawlers used by ChatGPT, Perplexity and other tools, which makes being named in an answer impossible.
- Slow pages. Especially on phones, and especially on collection pages loaded with filters and apps.
- Broken and orphaned pages. Products with no link pointing at them, which search engines struggle to find at all.
What Gets Rebuilt in Month Three and Month Four?
We rewrite the pages that carry your revenue. Collection pages first, then your best selling product pages, then the buying guides that feed both.
A collection page on most stores is a headline, a filter bar and a grid of products. There is nothing on it for a search engine to understand and nothing for a buyer who is still deciding. It cannot rank for the term it is named after, because a dozen competitors have written a real page for the same term.
We rebuild those pages so they answer the question the buyer is actually asking. What is the difference between these options. Which one suits my situation. What should I check before buying. That copy sits above or below the product grid, depending on how the page is used.
Product pages get the same treatment at a smaller scale. Unique descriptions instead of manufacturer copy, the specific questions buyers ask in reviews and support tickets answered on the page, and the product data marked up so it can enter shopping feeds and AI results.
We work in priority order, highest revenue first, so the earliest work has the best chance of paying for the engagement.
What Builds From Month Five Onward?
Once the pages are worth pointing at, we start pointing at them. This is where digital PR, answer engine work and catalogue wide scaling begin.
This is the stage where the work compounds, and it is why we ask for at least six months. Stopping at month four means paying for the foundation and leaving before the building goes up.
- Answer formatting. Restructuring your best pages so a machine can lift a clean answer out of them without guessing.
- Digital PR. Earning mentions in the publications, roundups and comparison sites that AI tools draw on when they describe your product category.
- Brand description control. Making sure the way your brand is described is consistent everywhere it appears, so AI tools describe you correctly rather than inventing a description.
- Catalogue wide rollout. Applying the collection page template to the next fifty pages, then the next two hundred, by rule rather than by hand.
- New question coverage. Building pages for the buying questions we found in research but have not yet answered anywhere on your site.
How Often Will You Hear From Us?
A short written update every two weeks, a full report every month, and a strategy review every quarter. Plus a shared work log you can open at any time.
We do not send automated tool exports with our logo on the cover. Every report has a person’s written summary at the top explaining what the numbers mean and what we are doing about them.
| When | What you get | How long it takes you |
|---|---|---|
| Any day | A live work log showing every change, the page it touched and the date. | As long as you want. |
| Every two weeks | A short written note. What we did, what we found, what is next, what we need from you. | Two minutes to read. |
| Every month | A full report against the agreed baseline, including organic revenue, rankings and AI mentions. | Fifteen minutes, or a thirty minute call if you prefer. |
| Every quarter | A strategy review. What worked, what did not, and what changes for the next three months. | One hour. |
What Do We Need From Your Team?
Less than you think, but not nothing. Search work stalls when nobody on the client side can approve a change or ship code.
If you cannot give us a route to change the site, we can still do the research, the strategy and the writing, but the fixes will sit in a document instead of on your store. We will say so plainly at the start rather than discovering it in month three.
- One decision maker who can approve copy without a committee.
- Access to your store admin, your analytics and your search console.
- A route to whoever can change your theme or template files, whether that is your developer, your platform partner or us.
- Roughly two hours a month of your time for the report and the questions that come out of it.
- Honesty about what you have tried before, including the things that went badly.
How Do We Decide What to Work on First?
We rank every possible task by what it is likely to earn against how hard it is to do, then we start at the top. The list is visible to you and you can argue with it.
Every audit produces more findings than any store can act on at once. The value of an agency is not the list. It is the order.
So each finding gets two scores. The first estimates the revenue at stake, based on the traffic and conversion rate of the pages involved. The second estimates the effort, including whether it needs a developer, a writer or just a settings change.
High value and low effort goes first. High value and high effort goes into the roadmap with a date. Low value goes to the bottom and often never gets done, which is the correct outcome.
You see both scores. If you disagree, because you know something about your business that a scoring model does not, we change the order. It is your store.
What Should Six Months Look Like?
At six months you should have a store that machines can read fully, revenue pages rebuilt around real buying questions, first mentions appearing in AI answers, and a report that ties all of it to money.
We will not tell you what percentage your traffic will rise, because we do not know and neither does anyone who tells you they do. What we will commit to is the scope of work, the schedule, and the reporting.
What we can say from experience across the industry is the shape of the curve. Technical recovery shows up fastest, often within six to eight weeks. Rebuilt collection pages usually take three to four months to settle. Authority work and AI mentions take longest and keep growing after the other two have levelled off.
If by month six the numbers are flat against the baseline and we cannot explain why, that is a conversation about ending the engagement, and we will start it ourselves.