Worked example, professional services
An accountancy practice's first ninety days with an SEO company, week by week
A three-partner accountancy practice in a market town signs up for the monthly tier. The partners want to know what happens, in what order, and when they will see anything. This is the first quarter laid out week by week: what we do, what is measured, what the partners see, and the sentence we say at day ninety if nothing moved.
Written by Daniel Stoychev. The practice is a composite; the maturity rules are the ones we apply to every account; the one search volume quoted is a Google Keyword Planner figure from our own export. Nothing on this page is a client result.
Worked example. The practice and the partners are invented to show the first quarter in order. The rules about when a number may be judged are real and are the ones we use.
The timeline
Thirteen weeks, one row each
| Week | What we do | What is measured | What the partners see |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Search Console and Analytics access, the technical pass, the demand read | Indexed pages, faults, the queries the site already shows for | The audit, with the faults ranked |
| 2 | The faults fixed and verified live; the Business Profile checked line by line | Each fix re-tested on the live site | A list of what changed, with a before and after for each |
| 3 | The page plan: one page per service the practice sells, in the practice's words | Planner volumes per service, marked where unmeasured | The plan, for a yes or a no on each page |
| 4 to 6 | The first three service pages written with the partner who does the work, and published | Impressions per new page once indexed | Drafts to correct, then the live pages |
| 7 | The review request process set up, with the confidentiality rules written down | Review count and date of the last review | A one-page script for the front desk |
| 8 to 10 | The next three service pages and the first guide, on a question clients ask every January | Impressions per page; the queries each shows for | Drafts, then live pages |
| 11 | Internal links set, every service page reachable in two clicks | Crawl depth per page | Nothing visible; the report explains it |
| 12 | The reading: every page's impressions and queries, no clicks judged | Day-84 impressions per page | The quarter's report, two pages |
| 13 | The second quarter's plan, decided from the reading | A list of what continues and what stops |
What the readings can show, and when
The rules we apply before anyone judges a number
- Nothing is judged before day 28 from the day a page was indexed, because Google has not settled where to show it.
- Impressions are read from day 28; clicks are judged from day 90 and only on a page with at least a hundred impressions, because below that a click is a coincidence.
- A page with clicks or a top-ten position is not touched, however much we would like to improve it. The raised bar for changing a page that earns is evidence, not best practice.
- A guide is judged on impressions and on whether an assistant quotes it, not on clicks, because answers are read in place more often than they are clicked.
The one Planner figure the plan rests on: seo for professional services is searched about 140 times a month in the UK, which is a buyer's search rather than a client's, and it frames how we sell, not what the practice's pages are written for. The practice's own searches, its services and its town, are mostly unmeasured in the Planner and are read from Search Console instead.
What the partners do
The four things only the practice can do
- Ask for reviews, with the script, from the clients who say thank you. The confidentiality rules mean no reply ever confirms someone is a client.
- Send photographs of the office, the team and the street, because a stock image of a calculator is the picture every practice uses.
- Read the two-page report each month and ask about the numbers that look odd. We explain them rather than hide them.
- Tell us about the January rush and the year-end, because the guide calendar follows the practice's calendar, not ours.
Day ninety, if nothing moved
The sentence we say, and what follows it
If at day ninety no new page has a hundred impressions and the service searches show nothing, we say: the pages are not the problem, the demand is, and the next quarter should not be more pages. Then we propose the two things the reading supports, which are usually the Business Profile and the reviews for the town searches, and a smaller plan. A quarter that ends with that sentence and a smaller plan is a quarter that saved the practice money, and we would rather send it than invent a reason to continue.
Where this leads
The pages that do this work
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