Why We Started SEO Organic

We didn't set out to create an SEO business. We were just looking for someone decent to help with our own.

At the time, we were running a few businesses. An online store and a commercial shopfitting

business in a specific niche. We weren't joiners or shopfitters as such and our business spanned a few disciplines within the commercial interiors space. Both businesses relied heavily on organic search. No ads. No paid traffic. Just content, consistent updates, and time spent making sure our websites worked for the people landing on them.

We were getting real enquiries, including from global brands and many large well known companies, but we believed we could be doing even better, especially on the commercial side, and we thought that maybe a professional SEO agency could take things up a step.

So I Started Looking For An SEO Agency

I met with ten different agencies, some over Zoom, some in person. A mix of home based

consultants and agencies with smart offices in Manchester. They all had one thing in common. They all wanted big monthly retainers, straight away. It was a fairly uniform amount over all the agencies we met with. around the £4k per month mark. We thought that if we, as self taught business owners could gain the enquiries we had that agencies with professionals working in SEO day in day out would be able to really push things forward. It was a big investment for us but we believed it was what we needed.

I found most of the agencies and individuals I met with to be very formulaic and too corporate for the services and identity we had with our clients. The theme we heard time and time again from our clients was that they chose us and continued to do so based on personal service and relationships and quality of the work we delivered. We didn't want to suddenly become a corporate faceless business, we wanted to expand on what we'd already built. After many conversations we went with an agency who we thought understood what we wanted to achieve.

They were a large outfit in Manchester with over 50 staff. Very polished. Very confident. We signed up. I think we thought that the trustpilot reviews and the way the company presented themselves meant we had made the right choice.

At first, the numbers looked good. Traffic went up. We had more time to focus on the rest of the

business. SEO is time consuming, especially if theres a learning curve. I could spend more time on production schedules and installation schedules, logistics, finding new products and new suppliers or even just developing our relationships with current suppliers, which led to better terms and prices. We were able to focus on making our business more efficient in many ways. If you've ever run a small to medium sized business you'll understand that you tend to wear many hats and time is valuable. We were moving forward and for a month or two we were happy with the numbers we were seeing. Month three was a different story though...the enquiries started to drop. Not just in volume, but in quality too.

Instead of building on our niche, and our focus of being a business that offered a highly personal service and rather than trying to increase traffic on the terms and keywords we knew worked or had strong intent, they went after broad commercial construction terms. We had increased traffic to the site, but it wasn't targeted at all. We we're getting enquiries for services we didn't offer and the enquiries seemed to be increasingly price sensitive. We had intentionally positioned ourselves in the mid to higher end of the industry, our clients historically seemed to want quality first but many of the new enquiries we were receiving were focussed on cheap and quick and we were neither of those things.

The content they added was weak, outdated, and completely missed the point of

what our customers were actually looking for. It all felt a bit copy and paste. Despite all the reports and meetings, we were attracting fewer serious leads than before.

After four months, and what felt like endless Zoom calls trying to steer them back in the right

direction, we pulled the plug. We hadn't just wasted time and money. We'd lost ground. Our online presence had taken a hit, and now we had to fix the damage as well as move forward.

I'll be the first to admit out of frustration I blamed myself for choosing the wrong agency. I shouldered the blame and I wanted to fix the problem quickly. I went back to the list of professionals that I'd met with and contacted the agency that I had liked but dismissed because it wasn't a large company.

This one was different in style. An independent consultant based near London. He promised a personal approach. Keyword research that aligned with our goal and focus, he provided a reference and I checked them out, all seemed well. He specialised in B2B and outlined an approach that seemed to fit what we wanted. It sounded ideal.

Fast forward and taking into account we were now trying to also make up for the last 4 months of poor SEO, Month one and two seemed to be ok, but after another three or four months, the same pattern emerged. Website traffic ticked upwards, but real enquiries didn't. In fact, it felt like he was outsourcing the work to someone else. The content didn't sound like it had come from anyone who understood our industry and in some cases even our language. We were also now seeing big, short spikes in traffic, certain hours of the day we'd get 100+ visitors and then they'd vanish with no contact form submissions or emails. I didn't understand the technical details at the time, but i could see the pattern in the visits. It was an attemopt to inflate the traffic and make the numbers green, however, the enquiries told us everything we needed to know. Again, we were left with reports that looked positive, but nothing to show for it. The leads we'd once relied on had all but disappeared. Two completely different agency setups. Exactly the same result.

Vanity Metrics

We came to call it what it was. Vanity metrics. Graphs that looked good on screen but didn't mean anything in practice. We would be shown graphs and screenshots all assembled into PDF documents that showed green numbers and upticks in graphs, but we knew that this was either, at worst manipulated or, at best targetted incorreclty. It didnt matter too much, both the results were the same. Thousands spent and fewer enquires to show for it. We needed to do something that had an impact. If we hadn't, the business wouldn't survive.

Regrouping and Rebuilding

We stepped back, looked at the work they'd done, and decided we needed to take control back. So we stripped it all away. Rewrote the blogs. Removed the generic content. Refocused the site. We did it all ourselves. We went back to what had worked before. It was arduous, and time consuming and soul destroying at times. Just when you thought you'd found all the issues, more would become apparant. My Partner, and Wife, had the foresight to have taken screenshots of the site and the blog pages prior to appointing an SEO provider. This saved us. We reverted to the original content and improved it as we saw fit, we focussed on our core keywords and used appropriate longtail keywords, we did our own competitor research, and reverrted to honest, useful content written for our actual customers. No games. No gimmicks. Just good, consistent SEO. Within two months we were back where we'd been. After six months, we were getting five strong enquiries a day from serious clients who understood what we offered and wanted to work with us. It took time. It needed structure. But it was worth it. We were no longer handing over thousands of pounds a month for someone else to do what we were already doing better ourselves.

Why SEO Organic Exists Today

That experience is what led us to start SEO Organic. We had sold the commercial side to our business and we were now focussed solely on our ecommerce websites. We were getting bombarded with emails promising phenomenal SEO results and the feeling of being mis-sold we had just kept nagging away. Other businesses were experiencing what we'd experienced, they must be based on the volume of spammy SEO emails we received. I'd spent alot of time learning what worked and what didn't and I'd gone past the boredom threshold with SEO. It seems boring and laborious but I'd actually come to enjoy it. I liked the research element, looking at the businesses that were getting it right and then strategising how to implement that for our own business.

People we knew through the business started to ask us for advice on how to improve their own SEO and visibility, i would look and come up with some basic fixes and talk them through it. I loved this. I loved making a difference and we came to realise that we weren't the only ones learning the hard way. Many businesses outsource their SEO and see results but many don't see the results, they see the traffic and the green numbers and think everything is ok, They think it's normal to see results in 12 months or to just tick along. Most businesses don't fail at SEO because they don't care. They fail or get stuck in a monthly loop because even once they understand it, they simply don't have the time to do it properly.

That's why we created something better. A clear strategy built around your business, not someone else's template. We talk first, understand your goals and work backwards from there. Our perspective is unique, we understand that enquiries and sales are more important than green numbers at a monthly review. We have been in your shoes.

You have choices with what we offer. We provide the insight and you deliver based on that and if the market changes, we can reassess and react accordingly.

You can implement it in house, hand it to a writer, or come back to us for help if it's working and you want more. No jargon. No handcuffs. No magic tricks. Just honest SEO for people who want real results.

If you'd like to find out more about what we do, or you'd like us to have a look at your website free of charge, get in touch and we'll see what we can do.