The starting point
The business goal, website situation, market and baseline before the engagement.
BLOG MATRIX / CASE STUDIES
SEO case studies.
How to judge the evidence.
We have none published yet, and say so below rather than dressing something up. What this page does instead is set out how to read anybody’s case studies, including ours when they exist.
PUBLIC CASE STUDY LIBRARY
No client stories
are published yet.
Client-approved stories will appear here with the project scope, timeframe and verified outcomes. In the meantime, explore how we approach measurement.
Discuss how we would measure your projectEvery case study you read was chosen by the person showing it to you
The engagements that stalled, the ones where the client never implemented the recommendations, and the ones that simply did not work are not written up. That is not dishonesty. It is what a portfolio is. But it does mean a page of successes tells you the ceiling of somebody’s work and never the average.
So the useful question is not whether a provider has a good example, because almost everyone does. It is what share of their engagements resemble it, and what happened in the ones that did not. Somebody who can describe a project that went badly and what they took from it is giving you more information than somebody with nine polished stories.
An anonymous case study is not evidence
A leading D2C brand in the home category cannot be checked. Neither can a dashboard screenshot with the property name cropped out, or a chart whose axis begins at a number nobody will state. If the client is not named and reachable, you are being asked to take the figures on trust, which is the one thing evidence is supposed to remove.
There are legitimate reasons for anonymity. Confidentiality agreements are real and some clients simply decline. But the honest response to that constraint is to say so and offer a reference call, not to publish an unverifiable story and present it as proof. When you meet an anonymous case study, read it as a description of method rather than a demonstration of result, and judge the method.
The traffic graph is usually the wrong exhibit
A rising line is the most common image in SEO marketing and among the least informative. Sessions can rise because a site started ranking for things nobody buys, because one article caught a news cycle, or because the comparison year was unusually poor. None of that reaches the bank.
What is worth looking for is whether the exhibit connects to money, or to something that leads to money: enquiries, qualified enquiries, bookings, orders. And whether absolute numbers appear at all. A four hundred per cent increase is a very different claim if the starting point was nine visits a month rather than nine thousand. Where a case study shows percentages and withholds the base, that choice was made deliberately. Which measures are the right ones depends on the business, and the table further down sets out how that differs.
Something else was always happening at the same time
Attribution is the hardest part of an honest case study, because SEO never runs in isolation. Across the same twelve months a business might have raised funding, hired a salesperson, run paid campaigns, been written about, launched a product, or simply watched a competitor go quiet. Search itself changed several times.
None of that makes the work worthless. It makes single-cause claims unreliable. A case study worth reading names what else was in play and says which part of the movement it can reasonably claim. One that draws a clean line from we did SEO to revenue doubled is telling you about the confidence of its author rather than about the business.
What to ask for when nobody can show you verifiable work
Ourselves included. BLOG MATRIX has no published client stories, and inventing some would fail the first test on this page. What we would suggest instead is the thing that actually predicts whether an engagement goes well: ask any provider to look at your site and tell you what they think is wrong with it, and why, before you sign anything.
A specific diagnosis of your website is harder to fake than a case study and considerably more relevant, because it is about you. This page competes with that one. This section generates URLs nobody should see. This service has demand you are not addressing. It also shows you how somebody thinks, which is the thing you are buying. If you want to see how we approach it, the technical, content and consulting pages set out the method in more detail than a success story would.
WHAT A CASE STUDY SHOULD TELL YOU
The work.
The evidence. The context.
Measured against everything above, this is what we would have to put in our own. When there is something to publish here, it will carry these three things or it will not be worth reading.
The work completed
The priorities, actions and implementation responsibilities, with a clear timeframe.
The measured outcome
Relevant changes, the source of the data and the limitations behind any result.
MEASUREMENT THAT FITS THE BUSINESS
Choose meaningful signals.
The right measures depend on how your business serves customers and records enquiries or sales.
| Business context | Measures to consider | Context to keep |
|---|---|---|
| Local service business | Relevant local visibility and qualified enquiries | Service areas, seasonality and lead quality |
| Online store | Organic product/category visits and attributed sales | Stock, promotions and attribution limits |
| B2B or professional services | Relevant demand and qualified business enquiries | Longer buying cycles and sales follow-up |
QUESTIONS, ANSWERED
A few practical details.
Will you ever publish case studies?
When we have client work we are permitted to publish and can describe without dressing it up. Until then this page says what it says. A page of anonymous, unverifiable results would not tell you anything useful anyway.
What should we ask for instead?
Something checkable. A named client you can contact, read-only access to a live report, or a small piece of paid work with a defined output. All three tell you more than a portfolio you cannot verify.
Is a traffic graph good evidence?
Rarely on its own. It is the easiest exhibit to select favourably, and something else was usually happening at the same time — a season, a campaign, a site change. Ask what else changed in that window.
A USEFUL NEXT STEP
Start with a goal you can measure.
We can discuss the outcomes that would matter to your business and how to track them.