How we do SEO that pays for itself.
Most SEO agencies are paid to make numbers go up: traffic, keywords, domain authority. The numbers do go up, but the phone doesn’t always follow.
Arken is set up the other way round. We start with the calls, enquiries and jobs your business needs, then work backwards to the pages, rankings and links that put them there.
If a piece of work can’t be traced back to a customer, it doesn’t get done.
Money pages first. Everything else serves them.
Every site we work on has a small number of pages that make the business money. For a plumber, it’s the service-area pages the phone rings from. For an accountant, it’s the handful of pages a director lands on before booking a call.
These are the money pages, and our job is to rank those pages for the searches your customers actually type. Not the searches Ahrefs says are high-volume, or the searches that would be “interesting to write about”. We rank the ones that’ll end with someone getting in touch.
Everything else, the blog posts, guides, tool pages, and internal links, earns its place by pointing readers and Google back towards a money page. If a piece of supporting content can’t point somewhere that matters, it doesn’t ship.
A blog post that ranks beautifully for a term nobody would buy from is not a win. It's a distraction we got paid for.
Good content, pointed at the right things.
SEO gets a bad name because most of what agencies ship does not serve the reader, the search engine, or the sale. Thin blog posts, bloated guides, and links from sites nobody visits. The work is there to justify the retainer, not to move the business forward.
That’s why we hold every piece of work to three tests. If it fails any of them, we rework it, or we don’t ship it.
That includes blog posts. It includes the supporting content around your money pages. It includes the links we build. We’ve got no problem with any of these formats, but we’ve got a problem with doing them badly.
- Blog posts and guides that answer real questions your customers ask
- Supporting pages that internally link back to the pages that sell
- Pages structured for search engines and written for humans, not one or the other
- Links from sites a real reader might find useful
- Conversion work on the pages that are already ranking
- Blog posts chasing volume for keywords no customer would type
- Guides written for Google first, readers last
- Supporting content that links nowhere useful
- Guest posts on link farms nobody reads
- "Technical" audits full of issues Google does not care about
Reports lead with the calls. The rankings come second.
Every client gets a monthly report. It opens with the numbers that mattered to the business that month: leads, enquiries, booked jobs, revenue, and where the CRM connects. Rankings and traffic are in there, yes, but they sit behind the business numbers, never before.
We build the reports in our own platform. That keeps the format consistent without burning senior time assembling slide decks.
Experienced people, a rhythm you can plan around.
Most agencies solve the scale problem by hiring juniors and handing them a playbook. The client pays senior rates and talks to a junior. The agency makes a margin, the work comes from a template, and nobody asks why the rankings have not moved in six months.
Arken is built a different way. Every account has experienced people doing the thinking, setting the priorities, and pushing back on work that won't move the business forward. You speak to someone who can make a call without needing to run it up a chain.
Retainers are a pattern of moments more than a list of deliverables. These are the moments that matter.
Onboarding
A working session with your lead strategist. We map your money pages, the commercial terms we’ll target, and what does and doesn’t make the first-quarter plan.
Monthly rhythm
A call at the end of each month to review the report, see what moved, and agree on what needs to change next month. Between calls, you’ll hear from us by Slack or email when something needs your input. You won’t hear from us when it doesn’t.
Strategy review
Every three months, we step back. What moved, what didn’t, and what we’d cut from the retainer next quarter. This is also where we’ll tell you if the budget is better spent elsewhere.
No surprises
You never hear "we forgot to mention" on a quarterly call. If something needs flagging, it gets flagged when we see it, not three months later.
Pricing is public: every service page lists what its retainer costs.See Local SEO pricing →
See this methodology applied to your site.
Send us your URL. Richard records a 15-minute video walkthrough with the money pages we'd prioritise, the work we'd refuse, and the rankings we'd chase. No sales pitch at the end.