How we measure, and what we found
Before you read anything an SEO agency says about results, including us, ask one question: where did the number come from?
This page explains where ours come from, what we have honestly found across our own client work, and what we do when a number goes the wrong way. No agency likes talking about that last one. That is exactly why we do.
Where our numbers come from
Every traffic figure we report comes from one of two places: Google Analytics sessions or Search Console clicks. Both measure real people actually arriving at your website, from your own data.
What we never use is modelled traffic estimates, the numbers that SEO platforms generate about any website by extrapolating from rankings. Those estimates power most of the industry’s case studies, and they can be spectacularly wrong. We have watched one overstate a client’s month by roughly two and a half times, and invert the seasonality entirely: it called a quiet month the busy one. Any conclusion built on that number would have been confidently backwards.
Rankings themselves are different. A ranking position is observed, not modelled, so we do use those. But traffic claims come from your analytics or they do not get made.
A result, with the mechanism showing
A regional business networking service we work with has grown organic sessions 23% year on year, and nearly tripled them over two years. Source: Google Analytics sessions, compared like for like across the same months each year.
The number is nice. The mechanism matters more. Each new location page we built, city by city, earned its own cluster of top-ten rankings, and that compounding is what drives the traffic line up. The most recent city page was still climbing positions as we measured. This is what a working strategy looks like in the data: a steady curve, month building on month, not a spike with a mystery behind it.
We anonymise measured results like this one as a rule. Named clients say what they like about us in their own words, and you will find them doing so across the site. Their traffic data is theirs.
What we found when we measured everything
In 2026 we measured our whole client book, not just the flattering parts. Here is the honest picture.
Some clients are growing. Some are flat. And across parts of the book, organic clicks are down while rankings hold steady, which is worth dwelling on, because if you run a business you may have felt it without knowing why.
When rankings hold and clicks fall, the likely explanation is not that anyone did something wrong. It is that Google now answers many questions directly on the results page, with AI-generated summaries, so fewer searches become clicks for anyone. If your own traffic has drifted down while your agency insists your rankings are great, both things can be true. You deserve someone who says that plainly rather than burying it under a graph of impressions.
Independently verified case studies
Three of our engagements have been reviewed and verified by Clutch, the B2B ratings platform. We did not write these; Clutch interviewed the clients and published the findings. That is exactly the kind of number-checking we would tell you to do to any agency, including us.
- Digital Marketing Services for Custom Badges Merchandiser
- SEO for Advertising Agency
- SEO and PPC for Shipping Container Sales and Rental Company
What we do when a number goes the wrong way
We tell you. In plain English, in the regular rhythm of the work, not smuggled into slide forty of a quarterly deck.
Then we diagnose before we prescribe. A falling number has a cause: a market shift, a technical problem, a tracking breakage, a change on the site. Each has a different fix, and jumping to tactics before finding the cause is how budgets get burned. Sometimes the diagnosis is uncomfortable. We deliver it anyway, because you cannot steer a business on numbers that are only allowed to go up.
That is the deal. We would rather lose a pitch for being honest about this than win one by promising a line that only points upwards. Nobody controls Google, and anyone who guarantees you growth is telling you something about themselves.
Want your numbers read honestly?
The audit starts with exactly this: your real data, read properly, explained in plain English.
