Performance marketing agency — basic SEO structure for the agency's own site

An agency specializing in ads and performance marketing. Client campaigns were running well, but they'd put off SEO on their own homepage.

Performance marketing and SEO sit inside the same broad marketing category, but the texture of the work is completely different. Performance marketing is about running ad campaigns to generate immediate traffic; SEO is about cleaning up the structure of the site itself so that organic traffic compounds over time. So even an agency strong at performance marketing tends to have its own site's SEO pushed to the back of the queue.

This agency was in that exact situation. Ad campaigns were running actively, but the agency had missed the window to do an SEO pass on its own site. The first question when we got the inquiry was "we don't know where to start with SEO". So we structured the engagement around starting from diagnosis, explaining the rationale for each piece of work, and tidying things up step by step.

The diagnostic findings were a familiar pattern, but the volume was significant. Metadata was inconsistent page to page; some pages had empty meta descriptions, so search engines were pulling arbitrary fragments from the body to display. Even the agency's own brand searches weren't reliably surfacing the homepage.

There was no per-service-area keyword strategy. Similar marketing terms repeated across pages, so from a search engine's perspective the signal of "what area is this company actually strong in" was weak. Structured data wasn't applied. OG metadata was missing on some pages. The sitemap was still on a much older structure. Search Console wasn't registered either, so there wasn't even a way to directly check the indexing status.

Before any of the work, the part where we spent the most time with the client was explaining "why". Why metadata matters, how JSON-LD works for search engines, why a dynamic sitemap is safer — we walked through each at a level a non-specialist could follow, and reached agreement on work priorities. The explanations took more time than the actual implementation, but skipping that step leaves the client with no basis to evaluate the result once the work is done.

The work was split into four areas.

First, page metadata. We unified titles and meta descriptions across the homepage, about, services (3–4 of them), portfolio, blog, and contact pages with a single template. Service pages were mapped so each owned a different core keyword — ad operations, performance marketing, growth hacking, data analytics — so each page covers a distinct search intent.

Second, structured data. Organization JSON-LD included business info, contact details, and social sameAs. Each service page got Service JSON-LD specifying what service is offered and where. BreadcrumbList was applied across all pages.

Third, sitemap, robots, and indexing policy. We swapped the static sitemap.xml for a dynamic handler so new content is included automatically, and added private-area blocks and the sitemap line to robots.txt.

Fourth, Search Console registration, verification, and indexing requests. After completing domain verification and submitting the sitemap, we filed indexing requests on key pages.

Two extra deliverables went out alongside the work. One was an "operations guide for keeping SEO automatic when publishing new content" — a document, written from a non-specialist's perspective, covering which fields to fill in to get what applied, and how to submit indexing requests in Search Console. The other was a "future-checks checklist" — a simple quarterly checklist for verifying metadata, schema, sitemap, and Search Console indexing status.

The directly measurable changes after the work were clear. Metadata consistency across eight core pages, three categories of JSON-LD passing validation, dynamic sitemap in place, Search Console registration complete. The agency's own SEO fundamentals were cleaned up in one pass, and the guide for the client to run it themselves afterwards was handed over. The line in the review — "it wasn't an area I was familiar with, but you explained it kindly" — was actually the heart of the engagement: not just a setup job, but building a foundation where the client understands SEO and can manage it directly.