Evidence, then argument,
then work.
We are not a fast agency. Every engagement opens with a proper read of your data before anyone is allowed to have an opinion about it. That is the whole method, and most of the value.
Diagnose
A week or two in the data, the codebase and the search results. We establish what is true before anyone proposes a fix.
Model
Opportunity is sized and sequenced. You see the forecast, the assumptions behind it and what happens if we are wrong.
Ship
We work inside your sprints: tickets, code review, QA. Where you have no engineering capacity, ours implements directly.
Compound
Monthly review against the model, quarterly re-forecast. The programme narrows toward what is measurably working.
Principles
Four things we hold to.
These are the ones that occasionally cost us work. We publish them so the mismatch surfaces before a contract rather than after.
Evidence first
We start in the logs
Every engagement opens with your own data: server logs, Search Console, the codebase. Opinions come later, and only when the evidence runs out.
Legible work
No black boxes
You get the reasoning, the query, the spreadsheet and the ticket. If we cannot explain a recommendation to your engineering lead, it is not ready.
Narrow focus
Organic search only
No paid media, no social retainers, no brand workshops. One channel, understood properly, is worth more than five understood partially.
Long horizons
Built to compound
We optimise for where you will be in three years. That occasionally means recommending you do less this quarter than you had budgeted for.
Inside a diagnostic
Four steps, in order.
Nothing here is proprietary. We describe it in full because the sequence matters more than any individual technique, and because you should be able to tell whether we skipped a step.
We take Search Console access, analytics access, server logs where they exist and a look at how the site is actually built. Before analysis begins we verify that the data itself is trustworthy: bot traffic, sampling, duplicate tags and consent gaps all distort what follows.
How the site is crawled, what is actually indexed, what a search engine sees once the page has rendered, and how internal links move authority around. This is where most of the recoverable performance usually sits.
What your market actually searches for, mapped against what you can credibly claim, and a gap analysis limited to the competitors genuinely ranking rather than the ones named in your brief. Existing pages are assessed for refresh potential before anything new is proposed.
Opportunity sized and sequenced by what it would return against what it would cost to do. You receive findings written as work, with the reasoning attached and the downside case stated rather than buried.
Questions
The rest of the answers.
Technical fixes can move within four to eight weeks, indexation and Core Web Vitals respond quickly. Content and authority compound over six to eighteen months. We forecast both separately at the start so nobody is surprised in month three, and we tell you which category any given recommendation falls into.
Whichever suits you. Most engagements run through your existing sprint process: we write tickets, review pull requests and QA the deploy. Where clients have no in-house capacity, our engineers implement directly against a staging environment. We do not require a platform change to work with you.
An SEO audit starts at R4,500 and takes one to two weeks. Ongoing work typically sits between R4,500 and R15,000 a month depending on the size of the site, how competitive the market is and how much of the implementation we carry rather than hand over. Once-off projects (a migration, a rebuild, a schema implementation) are quoted individually. We publish the range because filtering early is better for both of us.
No. We are based in Durban and that is where our local search work is focused, but we are an online agency and the work itself is not tied to a place. We can work with businesses throughout South Africa and internationally. We have hands-on experience working on SEO for deck-building companies in the United States.
No. SEO Studio is an online agency based in Durban, KwaZulu-Natal. We do not keep premises here or anywhere else, and we do not claim branches in the surrounding areas we serve. Calls, screen shares and email cover everything an office would.
No, and any agency that does is either misunderstanding the system or misrepresenting it. We forecast ranges with stated confidence intervals and the assumptions behind them. If a forecast turns out wrong, we say so at the next review and explain what we got wrong.
You keep everything: dashboards, documentation, the regression suite, the editorial system and the reasoning behind every decision. Our handover assumes we will not be there to answer questions. Several former clients now run their programmes in-house, which we consider a good outcome.
Next step
Start with the evidence.
An audit tells you what is actually limiting organic performance, before anyone commits to a monthly retainer.