SEO proposals have become strangely predictable.
Four blog posts.
Twenty backlinks.
One technical audit.
Monthly reporting.
A certain number of hours.
Perhaps some digital PR.
Everything neatly packaged into a list of things that will happen every month.
It looks reassuring.
Everyone knows what they're buying.
There is just one problem.
None of those things necessarily tell you whether the strategy is any good.
At MISE Media, we would rather begin somewhere else.
With the problem.
Activity Is Easy To Sell
Deliverables make agency relationships simple.
The agency promises to produce things.
The client receives those things.
At the end of the month, everybody can point towards activity.
Four articles were published.
Links were built.
Pages were optimised.
Reports were sent.
The contract has technically been fulfilled.
But something important can disappear within that process:
Why are we doing any of it?
An article isn't valuable because it exists.
A backlink isn't valuable because somebody acquired it.
A technical change isn't valuable because it appeared in an audit.
Each only matters if it contributes towards a larger objective.
We Prefer Questions Before Answers
When we begin working with a business, we're considerably more interested in questions such as:
- Where does revenue actually come from?
- Which customers matter most?
- What does the sales process look like?
- Where is the business genuinely competitive?
- Which markets offer the greatest opportunity?
- What has been tried before?
- Why didn't it work?
- What does success actually mean?
These aren't SEO questions.
That's precisely why they're useful.
SEO does not exist separately from the business it serves.
The strategy should follow the commercial objective, not the other way around.
Sometimes The Answer Is Less SEO
This is where fixed deliverables become problematic.
Imagine an agency contract includes eight new articles every month.
Three months into the campaign, analysis shows the business already has more than enough informational content.
Its real problem is that its highest-value commercial pages are poorly structured and barely convert.
What should happen?
The sensible answer is obvious.
Stop writing articles.
Fix the commercial pages.
But when an agency has sold eight articles every month, stopping them becomes surprisingly difficult.
The deliverable begins driving the strategy.
It should always be the other way around.
Strategy Should Be Allowed To Change
Markets change.
Competitors change.
Search results change.
Google changes.
AI search is changing how people discover information.
Customer behaviour changes.
A strategy created in January should not be protected from reality simply because it appeared in a twelve-month proposal.
Good consultancy requires the freedom to change direction when the evidence changes.
That doesn't mean constantly chasing trends.
It means being willing to reconsider assumptions.
Sometimes the smartest thing we can do is stop doing something that looked sensible six months ago.
This Is Why We Like Boring Spreadsheets
We've written before about our affection for a particularly boring spreadsheet.
There is a reason it matters.
It forces us to look at what is actually happening.
Not what was promised.
Not what looks impressive in a presentation.
What is working?
What isn't?
Where is visibility increasing?
Where is commercial performance improving?
Where are competitors gaining ground?
Where has our original hypothesis been proved wrong?
Good strategy is iterative.
It learns.
Deliverables Can Hide Poor Thinking
One of the uncomfortable truths about agency work is that enormous amounts of activity can disguise a lack of progress.
A 70-page report feels substantial.
Twenty new pieces of content feel productive.
Hundreds of tracked keywords create impressive graphs.
But volume can make it harder to identify what actually matters.
We prefer fewer, clearer measures.
Are we becoming more visible where it matters?
Are we attracting the right audience?
Are we strengthening authority?
Are enquiries improving?
Is organic search contributing more commercially?
Those questions are harder to hide behind.
That's why we like them.
Clients Should Understand What They're Paying For
Rejecting rigid deliverables does not mean rejecting accountability.
Quite the opposite.
Transparency matters more when strategy is flexible.
Clients should understand:
- what we're doing
- why we're doing it
- what we expect to happen
- what actually happened
- and what we're changing as a result.
There should never be a mysterious black box labelled SEO.
If something matters, we should be able to explain it clearly.
If we can't explain why we're doing something, we probably shouldn't be doing it.
Consultancy Is Different From Production
This is ultimately the distinction we're interested in.
Production asks:
What needs to be delivered this month?
Consultancy asks:
What does the business need most right now?
Sometimes that will mean technical SEO.
Sometimes content.
Sometimes digital PR.
Sometimes PPC.
Sometimes CRO.
Sometimes the right recommendation is to do absolutely nothing in one area and move resources somewhere more valuable.
That flexibility is difficult to package.
But it creates better decisions.
There Is Still A Place For Deliverables
Of course there is.
Businesses need:
- timelines
- responsibilities
- budgets
- expectations
- and accountability.
We aren't advocating chaos.
We're arguing that deliverables should be the consequence of strategy rather than the starting point.
Once the problem is understood, the work becomes much clearer.
If technical infrastructure is restricting growth, fix it.
If the business lacks authority, build it.
If content doesn't match search behaviour, change it.
If rankings are strong but conversions are weak, investigate the experience.
The work should follow the evidence.
The Best Strategies Don't Fit Neatly Into Packages
Every business arrives with a different combination of:
- strengths
- weaknesses
- history
- competition
- resources
- and ambition.
Pretending those businesses all require the same monthly output is convenient.
It just isn't particularly strategic.
We would rather understand the problem properly and build the work around it.
That means our recommendations occasionally change.
It means we sometimes challenge the original brief.
It means we might recommend less activity rather than more.
And it means clients always know why something is being done.
Because ultimately, nobody hires a consultancy because they desperately want four articles and twenty backlinks every month.
They hire one because they want something to change.
The deliverables are simply the work required to make that happen.
If you'd like to discuss how we work, we'd love to hear from you.
Get In Touch