Case study Direct client

Bespoke Marketing Solutions

A marketing agency that hired me to do their own SEO

Visit bespokemarketingsolutions.co.uk (opens in a new tab)

+76%

Organic clicks

353 to 620 over six months

93

Enquiries sitting unseen in the database

Nobody had gone looking

19 in 20

Were cold outreach, not real leads

The bot check had keys but no field on the form

Client
Bespoke Marketing Solutions
Sector
Digital marketing agency
Services
Technical and local SEO
Engagement
Monthly retainer, ongoing

The client

Bespoke Marketing Solutions are a digital marketing agency in Bournemouth. They sell SEO. They hired me to do theirs.

That is the whole case study really, and it is the one I would want a prospective client to read. An agency who does this for a living, who can judge the work properly, and who could have done it in house, chose to bring someone in. They have been on a monthly retainer since 2025.

The problem was a familiar one for an agency. They owned Poole and Dorset comfortably, sitting first for seo agency poole and second for seo dorset, but they were stuck on page two across Bournemouth, which is the bigger city and the money term.

The rankings

Bournemouth was the target, after work on internal linking, a cannibalisation fix between their generic service pages and their Bournemouth pages, and a page title collision that was quietly making two pages compete for the same term.

Metric Before After
seo bournemouth 37.2 18.8
local seo bournemouth 33.0 13.9
seo dorset 31.9 7.4
seo agency poole 10.4 6.3

Across the whole site over the same period, average position improved from 30.4 to 21.1 and organic clicks grew 76 per cent. The Dorset and Bournemouth terms came off page three and four onto page one and two, which is where clicks actually start.

Average positions from Google Search Console, the six months to 15 August 2026 against the six months before.

The enquiries nobody could see

Rankings were only half of it. They had told me the site did not generate leads, so I went through the form submissions rather than taking it at face value.

There were ninety three of them sitting in the database, and around nineteen in twenty were SEO and web design cold outreach. The genuine local enquiries were in there, just buried under other people’s spam.

The cause was small and specific. The bot protection had its keys configured but the field had never been added to the form, so nothing was actually being checked. Adding it stopped the automated traffic, and a keyword filter on top of that catches the human outreach that passes a bot check. Real enquiries now arrive where somebody will see them.

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