The Shapes and Pages SEO Methodology

When I founded Shapes and Pages in 2006, we weren’t an SEO agency.

Our mission was much simpler. We wanted to help businesses build a professional presence on the web and use technology to grow. Websites were changing rapidly, digital marketing was still in its early stages, and every business was trying to understand how the internet would influence the way people found information and made buying decisions.

Over the years, one thing became increasingly clear. A beautiful website wasn’t enough. Businesses needed to be found. They needed to answer their customers’ questions better than their competitors. They needed websites that could adapt as search engines, technology, and customer expectations continued to evolve.

That’s how our methodology was born.

It wasn’t created during a brainstorming session or by looking at what other agencies were doing. It developed over years of solving problems, measuring results, learning from successes and failures, and continually asking a simple question:

What should we do next?

Today, that question has become even more specific.

What can we do this month to make your website a better answer than it was last month?

That question guides every recommendation we make.

We Don’t Start with SEO. We Start with Your Business.

One of the biggest misconceptions about SEO is that it begins with keywords.

We don’t believe it does.

Successful SEO begins by understanding the business itself. Before we evaluate rankings or search volume, we want to understand which products and services create the greatest value for your company, where you see opportunities for growth, who your ideal customers are, and what questions they ask before making a purchasing decision. Those answers become the foundation for everything that follows.

The goal has never been to attract the most visitors. The goal is to attract the right visitors—people who are actively searching for the products and services your business is uniquely qualified to provide.

Every Website Begins in a Different Place

We offer predefined SEO packages sometimes clients come to us with one specific request or they've been burned by an SEO Agency that failed to deliver results.  In both cases, we have packages with fixed pricing to address their needs and that also gives us time to establish our credibility, which is important for any business.

For those that are just looking for growth, we perform our due diligence and propose a solution that fits with their specific budget.  Sometimes that means fast, and sometimes it's a slow steady effort over time.

Some websites have technical issues that prevent search engines from properly crawling, understanding, or indexing their content. Others have solid technical foundations but service pages that no longer answer the questions today’s customers are asking. Some businesses have simply outgrown the website they built years ago, while others need to establish expertise in an entirely new area.

Our responsibility is to identify the greatest obstacle preventing your website from becoming the best possible answer for your prospective customers. Sometimes that means spending the first month focused almost entirely on technical improvements. Other times it means optimizing your highest-value service pages before expanding your content. The work is determined by your website’s needs—not by a checklist.

Progress Creates Momentum

Many business owners assume improving their website means rewriting everything at once. In reality, that’s rarely the best investment.

Once the technical foundation is strong, we usually recommend identifying the four to six products or services that represent the greatest opportunity for growth. We begin improving those pages one or two at a time while continuing to strengthen the website around them with supporting content, improved internal linking, and ongoing technical refinements. This approach allows businesses to spread their investment over time while still creating meaningful progress.

Search engines also need time to discover, evaluate, and understand those improvements. As optimized pages begin earning greater visibility, each month’s work builds on the last. We often describe this as a snowball effect—not because growth happens overnight, but because consistent improvement creates momentum that becomes increasingly difficult for competitors to match.

We Invest Your Budget Where It Matters Most

Clients occasionally ask what they’ll receive each month for their investment.

The honest answer is that the work changes because your website changes.

At the end of every month, we evaluate your website’s current performance, identify new opportunities, and create a prioritized list of improvements. Some opportunities involve technical SEO. Others focus on optimizing a service page, publishing supporting content, strengthening internal links, improving conversion paths, or addressing changes in your market or competitive landscape.

We begin at the top of that list and work our way down until your monthly investment has been fully utilized. Then we stop.

The following month, we evaluate the website again. Some priorities remain. Others move up or down based on new information, changing business goals, or the results of the work we’ve already completed. This disciplined process ensures your investment is always directed toward the improvements most likely to create meaningful business impact.

We Believe Authority Is Earned

There are countless ways to chase rankings.

Some agencies focus on purchasing backlinks. Others concentrate on publishing large volumes of content or trying to exploit short-term changes in search algorithms. Those approaches may produce temporary gains in traffic, but they aren’t the foundation of our methodology.

We believe authority is earned by becoming genuinely useful.

That means creating service pages that answer real customer questions, publishing supporting articles that demonstrate expertise, improving the technical health of your website, and continuously refining the experience for both search engines and visitors. When a website consistently becomes a better resource, it becomes more worthy of recommendations, references, and links from others.

We believe that’s a strategy that will continue to create value regardless of how search engines evolve.

This Is Our DNA

Every organization develops a way of thinking that influences every decision it makes.

This is ours.

The Shapes and Pages SEO Methodology isn’t simply a process we follow. It’s the lens through which we evaluate every recommendation, every proposal, every monthly report, and every conversation we have with our clients. While the specific work changes from month to month, the philosophy behind it never does.

Our goal isn’t to complete a checklist or sell a package of predefined services. Our goal is to continually improve your website in the areas that will create the greatest long-term value for your business.

Everything we do begins with one simple question.

What can we do this month to make your website a better answer than it was last month?

After two decades of helping businesses grow online, we believe that’s still the right question to ask.

Questions?

Use the form below to request a website audit, or the chat to correspond via text, and I'll be glad to explain how this will benefit your website.

Kevin Clinton
President
Shapes and Pages