SEO research
Most SEO work hands you a 400-row keyword spreadsheet and walks away. Ours hands you three things: a content map ranked by opportunity, a graded audit of every page on your site, and a per-page action — update, expand, cut, or leave. So when we’re done, you know exactly what to do next.
The process
Each step ships a deliverable. Not a phase, not a discovery, not a workstream — a thing you can open and read and assign work from.
STEP 01
What should be on your site, ranked by opportunity. Search terms grouped into topic clusters, traffic estimates from real volume data, and an ROI estimate for each cluster. Not every keyword — the ones that actually move the business.
Artifact: annotated topic-cluster map. Pillar pages, supporting articles, and the search terms each one owns.
STEP 02
Every page you have, read and graded. We open every URL the sitemap admits, check on-page execution against the cluster it’s meant to serve, and grade A through F with the reasoning shown.
Artifact: graded page-by-page audit. Grade, reasoning, projected lift, the move.
STEP 03
Map plus audit, reconciled into one list. Every page gets a verdict: update in place, expand into a series, cut and redirect, or leave alone. No more “we’ll figure it out later.”
Artifact: the action list. Prioritized, with the writing brief for each ‘update’ or ‘expand’ line.
Sample report excerpt
To make “what depth looks like” concrete: the top-line findings from a recent SEO research engagement on a mid-stage B2B SaaS site. Same shape, every engagement.
SEO research findings
Five hundred and six blog posts. Thirty-one guides. Zero comparison pages targeting the category-defining “X vs Y” query — a query their largest competitor was already ranking on without trying. The blog was working hard; the surface was incomplete.
Reconciliation: 4 pages to expand into series (the “what is X” pillar posts had been sitting on the same 1,500 words for three years), 1 dead changelog cluster of 38 posts to cut and redirect (low search demand, no inbound links), 17 pages graded C+ with concrete lift moves (most needed a richer FAQ section and a working comparison table), and 2 new pillar pages to commission for the X-vs-Y cluster that didn’t exist.
22 pages graded A or B, leave alone. 17 to update. 4 to expand. 38 to cut. 2 to commission. Total budget: one writer’s quarter, not a year of new-post production.
What lands in your inbox
The deliverables are concrete and shippable. The meeting is where we walk you through them so you can hand the action list to your writers or to us.
DOCUMENT
Topic-cluster diagram, pillar + supporting structure, search terms per cluster with volume and difficulty, ROI ranking. Annotated.
DOCUMENT
Every URL, grade, reasoning, projected lift, the recommended move. Sortable. Filterable. Hand it to a writer and they can start tomorrow.
DOCUMENT
Update / expand / cut / leave, per page, prioritized. Writing briefs for everything in ‘update’ or ‘expand.’ Redirect map for ‘cut.’
Pricing
We don’t list fixed prices because the right number depends on the size of the surface (a 30-page site is not a 500-page site). We’ll quote on the call, after a quick look at your site.
Standalone
Map, audit, reconciliation. Yours to act on with your own team or any writing partner.
Bundled
Buy the research, then have us execute the writing on the same shared map. Bundle discount applied to both line items.
Honest answers
No. SEO research is a standalone deliverable. The reconciliation list comes with writing briefs that any competent writer (yours, ours, a freelancer) can execute against. The bundle discount exists if you want us to write — not as a lock-in.
Two to four weeks, depending on site size and category complexity. We’ll commit to a specific date on the call.
Real volume sources (we cross-reference multiple providers because no single one is reliable) plus signals from your own GSC if you give us access. We’ll show the math on the call — nothing is “trust me, it’s high volume.”
Yes. Smaller sites are often where this work has the highest leverage, because the gap between “what should be there” and “what is” is usually bigger. The price scales down with the surface.
Yes — on the walkthrough call. Most clients prefer their audits stay private, so we share live, not via downloadable links.
We’ll spend ten minutes on it before the call, and walk you through what we’d audit and why. Twenty minutes, live, no slides.
Book the walkthrough