TU Became Its Own Client: The Baseline
Most agencies have a blind spot. Ours is our own marketing.
TU Marketing has been trading since 2007. Every day, we tell clients that consistency is what makes SEO work. But for years, we left our own SEO slightly unmanaged while we focused on client work. If a prospect had ever asked to see our rankings, we would have quietly changed the subject.
This year, that stopped. We turned TU Marketing into our own client. This post is the first in a monthly series showing what that looks like in practice, starting with the honest bit: where we actually stand today.
If you run a small business and have ever wondered how long does SEO take to work, this series will show you in real numbers, not theory.
The one rule we now follow
TU is now treated as an account, not just a company.
That means:
- It has an owner, the same way every client account has an owner.
- It gets a monthly report, the same way every client gets one.
- It answers to a number, the same way every client campaign does.
One rule sits above all of this: if we would not accept it from a supplier working for us, we do not accept it from ourselves. No owner, no report, no target. Simple rules are hard to talk your way out of, which is exactly why this one works.
Why agencies neglect their own marketing
The easy explanation is hypocrisy. The real explanation is simpler than that, and far more common.
Client work pays this month. Your own marketing pays later. When a client deadline and your own blog post are competing for the same afternoon, the client wins every time. The client is an invoice. The blog post is a bet on the future.
There is also no one checking. A client notices instantly if their report does not arrive. Nobody notices if you skip your own. So the work quietly slides, without anyone ever deciding to let it slide.
This is the same pattern behind a lot of small business websites that have not been touched in years. The work that builds next year’s enquiries always loses to the work that pays this month’s invoices. Agencies are not special here. We just have less excuse.
Neglect is rarely a decision. It is usually just the absence of a system that forces the work to happen. That is the actual fix: an owner, a report, a number, the same setup we would build for any paying client.
Our baseline, measured in July 2026
Before fixing anything, you write down exactly where you stand, without rounding the numbers in your own favour. Here is ours.
- Around 110 organic visits a month. For an SEO agency, this is not a good look, and we are not going to dress it up.
- Ranking for over 1,200 keywords. Sounds strong until you look closer.
- More keywords lost than gained in one recent month. More on why that matters below.
- Page one, but not top three, for the commercial search terms that matter most. We sit around position 4 for some of our most important terms, and page two for the bigger ones.
- A pile of blog posts holding position one for informational questions that bring almost no commercial traffic. We rank brilliantly for questions asked by people who were never going to hire us.
The foundations are decent, to be fair. The site has been earning links since 2007, and we rebuilt it in June 2026 with proper case studies in place. This is not a broken site needing rescue. It is a good site that nobody has been managing, which is a much more common problem than people think.
What the keyword churn tells us
Losing more keywords than you gain sounds dramatic. It usually is not. Most of what churns is long-tail: phrases you rank for at position 40 one month and not at all the next, worth only a handful of searches either way.
What matters is the direction. A managed site churns too, but gains more than it loses, because someone keeps feeding it: new pages, fresh content, internal links pointing where they should. An unmanaged site just slowly erodes. Rankings are not a wall you build once. They are more like a garden, and Google notices when nobody has tended it in a while.
What page one, but not top three, actually costs
Position 4 feels fine. It is page one, after all. You can show it to people.
Here is the catch. The top three organic results take the vast majority of clicks on a commercial search. By position 4, you are already down into single figures for click-through rate, and it keeps falling from there. Page two, for most buyers, might as well not exist.
So the gap between position 4 and position 3 is not one place. It is most of the traffic. If you are checking your own rankings report, remember that “we’re on page one” is often the most comforting and least useful sentence in SEO. Page one is the qualifying round. Top three is the actual match.
For us, the real reading of the baseline is this: we do not have a visibility problem, we have a positioning problem. Google already thinks we are relevant. It just thinks three other agencies are slightly more relevant. Closing that gap is a cheaper, faster job than starting from nothing, and it is what month one was built around.
The four fixes we started with
Fix one: put proof on the page that sells
The first thing we did was look at our main SEO services page and ask a simple question: does this give a sceptical buyer any reason to believe us?
It did not. It described services, the way every agency page describes services. What buyers, and increasingly Google, actually want is evidence: real results, with real numbers, attached to real client work.
So the page now carries genuine client proof, with numbers linked back to public case studies where clients have agreed to be named. (Note for the team: our packaging supplier stat needs a live case study to point to before this goes out. Check with Claire or Danny.)
If you want to try this on your own site, the method is short:
- Find your most commercially important page.
- Add three real outcomes with real numbers.
- Link each one to the fullest public version of that story.
- Cut an equal amount of adjectives to make room.
Fix two: use internal linking, the free lever
Those blog posts sitting at position one for informational questions earn us almost nothing on their own. Together, they are assets, because a page ranking at position one carries authority, and authority can be passed along through internal linking SEO.
So the second piece of work was internal linking: those strong posts now link through to the services page that needs to rank, using natural, varied anchor text rather than the same phrase copied and pasted everywhere.
This is the most underrated lever in SEO, and it costs nothing. No tools, no budget, no developer needed. Just someone opening your best-ranking pages and asking where that authority should be pointing next. Most sites, including ours until this month, never ask.
Fix three: tidy up the basics an audit would flag
The third piece of work was the unglamorous list. Every audit we run for a client produces one of these, and running the same audit on ourselves turned up a similar list.
- FAQ schema added to pages where we answer real questions, so search engines can read them as structured data.
- Service-area copy that names the actual Hertfordshire towns we serve, because Google cannot guess a service area you have never written down.
- Honest FAQs on the services page, including a straight answer to the cost question. Buyers search for cost. Pages that dodge it rank for nothing and convince nobody.
None of this is clever. That is rather the point. The basics are called the basics because everyone already knows them, and they get skipped because nobody is accountable for doing them.
Fix four: build proper location pages
The fourth piece of work has the strongest evidence behind it: town-specific location pages, a core part of local SEO location pages strategy.
Businesses search locally. A managing director in Stevenage searches for help in Stevenage, or Hertfordshire at a push, and a generic county page rarely beats a page built specifically for that town. We know this works because we watched it happen for a manufacturing client this year. We built a local page programme covering around 30 towns, and organic traffic rose 16% in the first month.
So we are now building our own, town by town. Each page has to say something true and specific about serving that place, because a page that is one template with the town name swapped out is exactly the thin content Google has spent recent updates learning to ignore.
Why paid search and SEO run on different clocks
Anyone weighing up paid search against SEO for small business UK should understand the two clocks.
Paid search runs on a fast clock. Set it up properly and it can bring in enquiries within weeks. Organic search runs on a slow clock. It builds quietly over months, then becomes obvious. Neither clock is wrong. They measure different things, and most businesses benefit from running both.
The trouble starts when you check the slow clock at fast-clock speed. Digging up your SEO strategy every fortnight to see if it is “working” is one of the worst habits in marketing. Two weeks of ranking data is mostly noise, and reacting to noise means abandoning a strategy before it has had time to work. We have watched businesses give up on sound strategies in month three, switch agencies, start again from zero, and repeat the cycle for years.
Marketing rarely fails because it does not work. It fails because people stop before it gets the chance to.
That is exactly why this series reports monthly, on purpose, rather than daily. It is also why the early updates will look unglamorous. That is not an apology. It is the point.
What we expect to happen, and when
Since we would set expectations for any client, here is what we expect for ourselves.
In the first couple of months, expect movement in the leading indicators rather than the headline number: impressions rising on our money terms, keyword churn turning from net loss to net gain, and our first location pages getting indexed and picking up early local impressions. Organic visits may barely move, since 110 a month is a small enough base that any single month will bounce around regardless.
The positions we actually care about, top three on commercial terms, are a months-not-weeks job. The site already has the authority to get there. What it has lacked is consistent, unglamorous input, and that is now on a schedule with someone’s name against it.
We are also tracking one number most SEO reports skip entirely: enquiries from organic search. Traffic shows the machine is running. Enquiries are the reason anyone builds it.
The real reason we are doing this in public
Partly, it is discipline. A public series is very hard to quietly abandon.
Mostly, it is this: you should not take marketing advice from people who will not follow it themselves. Every agency says SEO compounds and consistency wins. Very few show you their own account while it happens. We think that is backwards.
If this approach works, you will see it work in real numbers on our own site, checkable by anyone with a search bar. If something does not work, we will say so plainly and explain what we changed.
FAQ
How long does SEO take to work for a small business?
Leading indicators like impressions and keyword growth usually move within two to three months of consistent work. Meaningful positions on commercial terms, and the enquiries that follow, are typically a six-to-twelve-month build, depending on competition and the state of the site.
Why is my website on page one of Google but getting no leads?
Usually one of two reasons. Either you rank for informational terms buyers do not search, or you rank below the top three for terms they do, where clicks drop off fast. Check which terms actually send you traffic before celebrating a rankings report.
Do location pages really work for SEO?
Yes, when each page says something specific and true about that place. No, when it is one template with the town name swapped in. We ran a programme of around 30 town pages for a manufacturing client, and organic traffic rose 16% in the first month.
What should a monthly SEO report include?
The number the work answers to, movement on the terms that earn money, what was done this month, and what happens next. If a report cannot be read in five minutes, or never mentions anything that went wrong, it is decoration.
What happens after this baseline?
Month two is already under way: more location pages, more internal linking as new content goes live, and the first read on whether the money-page changes are moving impressions. The next update lands in early September.
The baseline is written down, now the work starts
This baseline is unflattering, and that is exactly why it is useful. You cannot fix what you have not measured honestly.
If you run a business and have never checked your own SEO baseline the way you would check a supplier’s report, that is the first step worth taking, whether you do it yourself or get a free SEO audit to see where you actually stand.
The plumber has finally looked under his own sink. Updates monthly.
