We have already made the expensive mistakes.

We read all of it, not the total

Counting Horsley’s year meant reading all 176 quote requests rather than summing them. One pickup postcode appeared fourteen times. It turned out to be a fencing company in Canvey Island quietly sending over every job that fell outside its own delivery area. Nobody briefed that. It is now one of their better channels, and it exists because somebody got curious about a repeated postcode.

The same read turned up a grandfather clock, 2.1 tonnes of fencing, a pottery kiln three separate times for the same customer, an antique painting valued at £30,000, and a set of keys collected in Mayfair at six in the morning for somebody about to miss a flight. None of that is a metric. All of it is why we knew what the pages had to say.

On AstroTalent the same instinct rebuilt the product. Reading a company’s job board live tells you what is open today and nothing at all about what has been open for four hundred days, so we stopped reading and started keeping a copy every morning. That one decision is where the 73.5 day median time a role stays open comes from, and the long tail past a thousand days, which quietly identifies the seats a company has given up filling through its own board. Those are the ones worth a phone call.

The unglamorous half

Synel’s old site carried ten years of addresses that still ranked. Moving it meant re-engineering 270 pages one at a time: 102 blog posts, 27 hardware pages, the old shop and checkout, and 36 slugs the build had renamed after the audit was written.

The part worth being pleased about is the list at the end of that report, the one recording what did not map cleanly. Seven pages with no equivalent in the new build. Four case studies not yet rebuilt. Publishing the misses is what makes the rest of it worth believing, and almost nobody does it because nobody makes you.

Outmanoeuvring is the enjoyable part

Most of our clients are the smaller firm in the fight. Six people against houses twenty times the size. A fifteen-year-old IT company with no website at all, in a category where every competitor promises the same four things on the same dark blue page. That is only a disadvantage if you are unwilling to do something the big one will not bother with.

So a recruitment firm’s roles carry the structured data that puts them into Google Jobs, instead of sitting on a careers page nobody visits. An IT company puts a live security panel on its home page rather than another claim about monitoring. A community of two hundred recruiters gets a card studio so all of them can post the same event on the same day without a designer in the loop, and the studio tells them plainly that LinkedIn will not auto-fill a post, so they paste it themselves rather than pressing a button and wondering why nothing happened.

And a national courier answers a Birmingham enquiry on an 0121 number, because the region owns that number and every page beneath it inherits it.

And occasionally we take it too far

Nine thousand programmatic pages on the Horsley’s build. Google read it as spam, because it was, and we spent a month taking it apart. We would rather find that line than spend a career never going near it. It is on their case study, and it is the most useful thing on it.