Send a description of the problem and you get an assessment of whether search can solve it, before anything is agreed. This page says what the first step involves, what the diagnosis covers, and what arrives back.
How do you start?
You start by writing down the situation rather than a brief. Three things are enough for a first assessment: what your company sells, which markets it sells into, and how commercial enquiries reach you today. That description goes through the form on this page, and it is the whole of the first step.
What follows is a short conversation to establish whether the category is something buyers actually search for, and whether the numbers work in your favour. Both questions are answerable from the outside in a few days.
What does the free diagnosis cover?
The diagnosis covers three things, and each one produces a written answer.
Market and search potential
What your buyers actually type, in which markets, and in what volume — together with an assessment of how contested those queries are and which of them carry purchase intent rather than research interest.
An assessment against enquiries and return
What the present site and present campaigns produce, read in commercial enquiries with a denominator, with traffic kept as the explanation of them. This is where most of the surprises sit, because an advertising panel reports only what it can attribute: comparing enquiries tagged with a campaign parameter in a CRM against panel conversions gives a difference of 1.4–1.9×, always in the same direction — the panel sees fewer (denominator: campaign-parameter leads in the CRM ÷ panel conversions; a control from a third system agreed within 0.4 percentage points; drySEO lab data).
A plan for joining search to the rest of the marketing
How the organic and paid halves of search feed each other, and where they connect to the systems that already hold your customer data.
What do you receive?
You receive a written assessment covering those three points, with the reasoning visible: every figure in it carries its denominator, so each one can be checked against your own records. Where a question cannot be answered from outside your systems, the assessment says so and states what would answer it.
The assessment is yours whatever you decide afterwards. Companies use it as a brief for their own team as often as they use it as the start of an engagement, and both uses are fine.
What helps the diagnosis?
Four things make the assessment sharper, and all four are optional.
- Access to analytics and Search Console, in read-only form — this turns estimates into measurements.
- The value of a typical order and the share of enquiries that become orders. These two numbers decide what an enquiry is worth to your business, and therefore what it is worth spending to produce one.
- The markets that matter most, in priority order.
- Whatever is already running — campaigns, content, an earlier audit.
How is the work settled?
Per lead. The value of one commercial enquiry follows from the value of an order multiplied by the rate at which enquiries become orders, and the settlement sits underneath that figure — which makes the arrangement checkable by you, with your own two numbers, before it starts. The scope of work that produces those enquiries is set out in our SEO and SEM services.