Our approach
Most SEO retainers fail for the same three reasons
Work starts before anyone knows what the constraint is. Findings arrive as documents nobody can implement. And reporting only ever contains good news. We built the engagement model around avoiding those three.
How we work
Diagnosis before prescription
Most SEO retainers start shipping deliverables in week one because deliverables are easy to invoice. We spend the first two weeks finding out which of the four pillars is actually costing you traffic — and sometimes the answer is that you do not need us for three of them.
01Diagnose
Crawl, log files, Search Console and analytics. Two weeks, fixed scope, and you own the findings whether or not we continue together.
02Prioritise
Every finding sized by effort and by the revenue it touches. The output is an ordered backlog your developers can pick up, not a 90-page PDF.
03Ship
We implement, or we write the ticket precisely enough that your team can. Technical fixes first, because content on a broken foundation does not compound.
04Report
Monthly: what moved, what did not, and what we changed our mind about. Rankings, traffic and conversions in one view, against the baseline.
How we operate
Diagnosis is a deliverable, not a sales call
The audit sprint is fixed-scope and fixed-price, and the findings are yours whether or not you continue with us. An agency that gives away the diagnosis to win the retainer has an incentive to make the diagnosis flattering.
We optimise for margin, not for the easiest keyword
Before the first crawl we ask which product lines actually carry margin. Ranking a low-value term is easy and shows well in a report; it is also how retainers quietly become theatre.
Tickets, not PDFs
Findings ship as issues your developers can pick up — the URL pattern, the current behaviour, the expected behaviour, and how to verify. A finding nobody can implement is not a finding.
We report what did not work
Every month includes at least one thing that did not move, and what we are doing about it. This is the part clients say they have not had from an agency before.
No guarantees on things we do not control
We do not promise a position, a traffic percentage or a timeline for an algorithm. We commit to the work, the measurement and the reasoning.
Your team keeps the knowledge
Documentation, dashboards and decisions live in your accounts, not ours. If the engagement ends, nothing you paid for leaves with us.
Who we work best with
Teams with a real product, a site big enough that technical decisions compound, and someone internal who can get a change deployed. Usually B2B SaaS, ecommerce with a deep catalogue, and marketplaces.
Who we are wrong for
Anyone who needs rankings guaranteed by a date, anyone who wants volume content with no editorial review, and anyone who cannot ship a code change within a quarter. In those cases we will say so on the first call rather than bill for six months of it.
Start with the audit sprint
Fixed scope, fixed price, and you keep the findings. Write to support@fissionx.ai or send the form and we will come back with what we would look at first.