A number without a baseline is decoration
“+340% organic traffic” tells you nothing on its own. Three hundred and forty percent of what, over how long, on what budget, and what else was happening — a rebrand, a funding round, a competitor going under, a seasonal peak? Agencies publish the number and omit every variable that would let you judge it, because the omission is the point.
No baseline stated
A site starting from almost nothing can post enormous percentage gains from trivial absolute movement. Without the starting number the percentage is unfalsifiable.
The winner is selected after the fact
Publish the three best outcomes from forty engagements and the average reader assumes those are typical. Nobody publishes the ones that went nowhere.
Attribution taken on faith
Organic traffic rose during a period that also included a paid campaign, a PR push and a site redesign. Assigning all of it to SEO is a choice, not a measurement.
Traffic reported, revenue omitted
The metric shown is almost always the flattering one. If a case study reports sessions rather than enquiries or revenue, assume the commercial number was less impressive.
What we will and will not publish.
Most of our work sits under confidentiality — clients competing in their own markets do not want their SEO strategy documented publicly, and we would be a poor partner if we published it anyway.
So rather than inventing named clients or stripping real ones to unrecognisable initials and calling it evidence, we publish composites: patterns we encounter repeatedly, with the method shown in full and the disclosure made obvious. Where we can share real references, we do it privately, in a call, with the client’s permission.
- Composites are labelled as composites — every scenario on this site carries the disclosure in the section itself, not in small print at the bottom of the page.
- Targets are labelled as targets — figures described as planning targets are exactly that — what we plan against, agreed from your baseline, not a record of past averages.
- References are given privately — if you want to speak to a current client in a comparable situation, ask on the call. We will arrange it where the client agrees.
- Your own baseline is measured first — the only numbers that will ever matter to you are yours. We establish them during the free audit before any work begins.
- Reporting reconciles to your systems — we report against your analytics and your CRM, not against a dashboard only we can see.
The four questions to ask about any case study: what was the starting number, over what period, what was the budget, and what else changed in the same window? An agency that cannot answer all four is showing you decoration.
The measurement framework behind every engagement
This is the part that makes a result defensible. It is set up before any work starts, because a baseline captured afterwards is not a baseline.
Baseline capture
Traffic, rankings, conversion rate and revenue recorded before anything changes, with the date stamped. Everything later is measured against this.
Define a result
What a customer is worth, what an acceptable acquisition cost looks like, and what number would make the engagement worth continuing. Agreed in writing.
Clean tracking
Conversion tracking verified end to end before launch. A surprising share of engagements begin with tracking that has silently been wrong for months.
Isolate what we can
Where other channels are running we say so and separate what can be separated, rather than claiming the total movement as ours.
Report against the baseline
Monthly, in your own systems, in plain language, including the months where the number went the wrong way.
Review honestly
Quarterly, against the definition of a result agreed at the start. If it is not working we say so rather than reframing the metric.
Judge us on the things you can actually check
Published numbers are the weakest form of evidence available to you. These are stronger.
The free audit itself
It is a work sample. Whether the findings are sharp, correctly prioritised and actually actionable tells you more about competence than any published percentage.
A reference call
Ask to speak to a current client in a comparable situation. We arrange it where the client agrees, and an agency that cannot arrange any is telling you something.
The written scope
Specific monthly deliverables you can verify happened. Vague scope is the single reliable predictor of a disappointing engagement.
Our own visibility
This site ranks for what it targets across the markets it serves. It is the one piece of our work you can inspect without asking anyone’s permission.
What we decline
Ask what work we have turned down and why. An agency that has never declined a budget is optimising for its own revenue rather than yours.
How we answer hard questions
Ask what would make you fire us, or what typically goes wrong. The quality of the answer is more diagnostic than any case study.
Why Businesses Choose SDM for SEO
Same budget, very different outcomes. Point by point, here’s how a specialist partner compares to a typical agency or going it alone.
| What actually matters | With SDM | Typical Agency | In-House / DIY |
|---|---|---|---|
| Senior specialist on your account | Always | Often a junior | Stretched thin |
| Custom strategy built for your goals | Tailored | Templated | Guesswork |
| Deep audit before any work begins | ✓ | Surface-level | Skipped |
| White-hat, penalty-safe methods | Guaranteed | Varies | High risk |
| Plain-English reporting tied to revenue | Monthly | Jargon PDFs | None |
| Direct access to your specialist | ✓ | Account-manager relay | N/A |
| Baseline captured before work starts | ✓ | Sometimes | Rarely |
| Composite scenarios labelled as such | ✓ | Buried disclaimer | n/a |
| Reference calls arranged on request | ✓ | Logos only | n/a |
| Bad months reported, not hidden | ✓ | Reframed | n/a |
| Reporting reconciles to your CRM | ✓ | Dashboard only | None |
| Ongoing competitor gap analysis | ✓ | One-off | Manual |
| Conversion-focused, not just traffic | ✓ | Traffic-first | Unclear |
| Premium tools included (Ahrefs, SEMrush) | ✓ | Sometimes | Costly extra |
| No long lock-in contracts | Flexible | 6–12 mo lock-in | N/A |
| Established agency, operating since 2017 | ✓ | Varies | Learning curve |
| Fast onboarding & early quick wins | ~2 weeks | Slow | Trial & error |
| Human, SEO-led content (no AI spam) | ✓ | Outsourced / AI spam | Time-heavy |
| Focus on compounding, long-term ROI | Core promise | Short-term wins | Slow & ad-hoc |
| Recovery from Google penalties | ✓ | Sometimes | Very hard |
20 reasons growing brands make the switch. See the difference for yourself →
What we report, and why those
Each of these is checkable in your own systems without taking our word for it.
Qualified enquiries
Enquiries your sales team would accept, not raw form fills. The distinction usually changes the picture considerably.
Organic revenue vs baseline
Attributed in your systems and compared against the figure recorded before we started.
Commercial query coverage
Share of the terms that produce buyers, rather than total keyword count.
Cost per acquisition
Blended across channels, so SEO can be judged against the paid alternative rather than in isolation.
Time to first movement
How long before the baseline moved at all — useful for calibrating what the rest of the year should look like.
Four stages from baseline to result
The sequence that makes a number defensible twelve months later.
Baseline
Traffic, rankings, conversion and revenue recorded and date-stamped before any change is made.
Definition of a result
What outcome would justify the spend, agreed in writing so it cannot be redefined later to suit the report.
Monthly reporting
Progress against baseline in your own systems, in plain language, including the months that went backwards.
Honest review
Quarterly, against the original definition. If it is not working we say so and recommend a change, including stopping.
Three patterns we see repeatedly
These are composites — constructed from situations that recur across engagements to show method and reasoning. They are not the account of any single named client, and the figures are illustrative rather than audited results. Ask for a reference call if you want to speak to a real one. The scenarios below are composites drawn from situations we encounter repeatedly — they illustrate method, not the account of any single named client.
Questions about our results
What we can evidence, what we cannot, and why we say so.
Further reading
Go deeper on this
The thinking behind the work. These guides go deeper on the methods this page describes — written by the team that runs them.
Case Study: 0 to .2M in 8 Months (D2C Fashion)
A composite fashion ecommerce scenario showing baseline, timeframe, budget and method — the variables most case studies leave out.
Read the guide →Performance MarketingThe Omnichannel ROI Framework: Stop Burning Ad Spend
The server-side tracking and attribution framework we use to scale ad budgets with precision across Google, Meta and beyond in 2026.
Read the guide →