Don't you get put off when the garage refers to you as "the black BMW" (or whatever your car is)? Or the vet thinks of you only in terms of what animal you have? They focus on what they are working on and not the customer. Fixing an exhaust pipe rather than enabling you to go on your holiday, for example, shows where their focus is.

Well, we realised that we were in danger of doing the same sort of thing. Looking at a website as just another challenge to get high positions in the search engines for rather than helping a business owner earn a crust or be successful. We run a business ourselves and thought we don't like to be treated like that, so our customers must feel the same way! We know that we are fortunate enough to have very highly skilled people; people who could push the focus beyond simply getting high positions in search engines.

I referred to getting high positions as a 'challenge', but actually it's not that difficult. Well, not for us anyway. What was a challenge-and one that we have successfully overcome-was to test our skills to a level where we could have confidence beyond the high search engine positions to deliver return on investment and so put the focus beyond the search engine and on to client benefits.

Of course this is an individual thing; so each client is dealt with individually. We soak up what your company is about and steer its website not just to get high rankings-though that is part of it-but to deliver meaningful visitors that want to do business.

This only works if we work together: you as the expert on your business and we as the experts in online marketing.

To start with, we'll do some preliminary work to see the lie of the land: your company, your website, your market, your aspirations and so on. From that we'll get a good idea of what we can achieve for you and at that stage we'll present our proposition. If you accept it, that's great. If you want to tweak it, that's fine too.

Once we've got a deal agreed we start the fine tuning work. If our service just stopped at search engine positions, we would do some serious research to find out what keywords are in the right ball park to get you business and use those as a basis. It's theoretical (but scientific nonetheless) and works well. But we know it can be improved on. This means taking it out of the theoretical arena and into a live one to prove what actually works best for you. And that can only be achieved by market testing.

We've got this down to fine art and can get the data we need in a couple of months or so. We call it 'Metric Testing'; it measures and fine tunes key phrases to find what gets the best return for your investment. At the end of metric testing, you know exactly what's working for you, so going into the longer term campaign you have high degree of confidence and virtually no risk. Incidentally, when we research your site, if we discover we can't do anything for you or the investment isn't going to see a return, we'll tell you. We won't rip you off by flogging a dead horse!

Well, if that sounds like we're in control, yes we are. But we're not inflexible. If you want something different we're happy to listen to you. See Have it Your Way