Live Case Study · Updated Monthly
Building Web Level Up: Our Live SEO Case Study
How we grow our own agency with fast pages, white-hat SEO and useful content — and zero spend on ads. Updated every month, in the open.
The best proof we can give you is our own business
Any agency can promise you rankings and leads. We decided to prove it — in the open — on our own website.
This is a live case study of how we grow Web Level Up itself: with fast, well-built pages, genuinely useful content and white-hat SEO, and zero spend on paid ads. We update it every month with the real numbers, good or bad. In fact, if you found this page through Google, you’re looking at the experiment working.
The rules we set ourselves
So this stays honest and repeatable for our clients, we play by strict rules:
- £0 on ads. Organic only — no Google Ads, no paid social, no boosting.
- White-hat only. No spammy link schemes, no mass auto-generated content. Durable beats fast.
- Sustainable cadence. Three quality, human-reviewed posts a week — not daily spam.
- Build in public. We update this page monthly so you can see exactly what we did.
- Measure honestly. Real Search Console and analytics numbers — we report the flat months too.
The numbers we’re tracking
Here’s our honest starting line. We refresh the “Latest” column every month so you can watch it move (or call us out if it doesn’t).
| Metric | Baseline (8 Jun) | Latest |
|---|---|---|
| Spend on paid ads | £0 | £0 |
| Google impressions (90 days) | 52,420 | 41,970 |
| Google clicks (90 days) | 32 | 33 |
| Search click-through rate | 0.06% | 0.08% |
| Average Google position | ~52 | ~60 |
| Organic search visits (GA4, weekly) | ~3 | ~4 |
| Visits from building in public — social (weekly) | 0 | ~4 |
| Homepage PageSpeed (mobile) | 98 / 100 | 98 / 100 |
| Largest Contentful Paint (homepage) | 2.0s | 2.0s |
| Google reviews | 2 | 2 |
| New blog posts (SEO cadence) | 0 | 10+ |
The story these numbers tell: over the last 90 days Google showed our pages 52,420 times for exactly the searches we want — “seo cheltenham”, “web design cheltenham” and dozens more — yet we earned just 32 clicks. The reason? We rank on page 5–7 (average position around 52). We’re visible, but buried. The whole job now is to climb those positions and turn impressions into clicks, and clicks into enquiries — with zero spend on ads.
Update — 25 July (ten weeks in): an honest month. Two things happened at once. The good: clicks and click-through rate actually ticked up (our homepage is winning more branded and broad searches), organic visits are up on our starting line, building in public on LinkedIn and Facebook is now an established stream of visitors, and our free WordPress plugin, DineKit, was hand-picked by WordPress.org as a Featured plugin — independent proof that the software we build is genuinely good. The honest bit: we spent these weeks heads-down building DineKit, and our SEO inputs — fresh content, reviews, links — paused. Search is “use it or lose it”, so our core Cheltenham rankings drifted down a few places as competitors who kept publishing edged past us. No spin: that’s a step backwards on the headline goal, and exactly the kind of month a real case study should show. The fix isn’t clever — it’s restarting the compounding work: a Google review drive, the three-posts-a-week cadence, turning the WordPress feature into genuine press and links, and refreshing the money pages. We’ll show you next month whether it worked.
Organic growth compounds over months — this is our honest starting line. We refresh these numbers monthly (organic data is slow, so a month shows a truer trend than a week), the flat months included.
The progress log
Exactly what we changed, month by month — newest first.
Weeks 7–10 — an honest dip, and a big win elsewhere
25 July 2026
- The honest headline: our local Cheltenham rankings drifted down a few places this window. We spent these weeks heads-down building our free WordPress plugin, DineKit, and our SEO inputs — fresh content, reviews, links — paused. Search rewards momentum; stop feeding it and rankings slip. We’d rather show you that honestly than hide it.
- The win those weeks bought: DineKit was hand-picked by WordPress.org as a Featured plugin — chosen by hand from the whole plugin directory and shown to millions of site owners. It’s independent proof that the software we build is genuinely good, and a real story we can now earn press and backlinks from.
- Traffic still grew: clicks and click-through rate actually ticked up (our homepage is winning more branded and broad searches), organic visits are up on our starting line, and building in public on LinkedIn and Facebook is now an established, measurable stream of visitors that didn’t exist at baseline.
- The lesson we’re taking — and sharing: SEO compounds, and compounding only works if you keep feeding it. A few quiet weeks on the inputs shows up in the rankings a month later. That’s the whole game.
- The plan from here: a Google review drive (our biggest quick win — we’re still on two), restarting three-posts-a-week, turning the WordPress feature into outreach and links, and refreshing the core Cheltenham pages. Back to the grind.
Weeks 3–6 — momentum & measuring honestly
26 June 2026
- Kept the three-posts-a-week promise: a run of practical guides — why a site isn’t showing on Google, what SEO really costs in the UK, how to choose a web design agency — plus our 20-site website speed study.
- Started building in public on LinkedIn, in the same plain-English tone as these guides. Social is now a real, measurable stream of visitors that simply didn’t exist at baseline.
- Added proper lead tracking so every genuine enquiry is tagged with the channel and page that earned it. We’d rather measure honestly than guess where results come from.
- The honest read on the numbers: rankings on the most competitive head terms haven’t moved yet — three to six months is the real timeline — but our daily impressions have started trending up since the build went live. That’s the first green shoot.
- A wry sign of progress: automated spam submissions are rising. Annoying, yes — but it means the bots can now find us, and our server-side filter keeps every one of them out of the inbox.
Weeks 1–2 — the build sprint
15 June 2026
- Shipped the full technical SEO pass: BreadcrumbList structured data site-wide, FAQ schema on the money pages, cleaned-up sitemaps and flushed a stale cache leak.
- Deepened the core commercial pages — hosting, web design, SEO and Bishop’s Cleeve — with genuinely localised, in-depth content.
- Built new pages targeting real Search Console demand: website maintenance, e-commerce and web development in Cheltenham.
- Launched a free Website Speed Checker tool (live PageSpeed data) — a genuinely useful, linkable asset rather than a thin page.
- Trashed 9 thin, dead-weight posts with proper 301 redirects, and refreshed older articles worth keeping.
- Kicked off the three-posts-a-week run — map-pack and AI-testing guides are live, with a 20-site speed study landing next.
- From here we report the numbers monthly — organic growth is slow, and a month is long enough to show a real, honest trend rather than chasing day-to-day noise.
Week 0 — foundations & baseline
8 June 2026
- Rebuilt the homepage around clear positioning and lead capture (free review + book-a-call modals).
- Rewrote 12+ service and location pages with benefit-led headings and proper meta descriptions.
- Fixed keyword cannibalisation — one distinct focus keyword per page.
- Added LocalBusiness, Service, FAQ and ItemList structured data so Google understands us.
- Built hub-and-spoke internal linking between services and locations.
- Restored performance: homepage Lighthouse 76→98, Largest Contentful Paint 4.8s→2.0s.
- Rewrote the Services hub so every service funnels to its page (and added our Custom Software story).
- Converted every image to WebP — around 6.7MB saved across the site.
- Started this live case study. From here, we publish 3 quality posts a week and report the numbers.
Why this matters for your business
If we can do this for ourselves with no ad budget, we can do it for you.
Most businesses are renting their traffic — the moment they stop paying for ads, the leads stop. Organic growth is an asset you own. It takes a few months to compound, but it keeps working long after the work is done. That’s the difference we’re proving here, in public, on our own site.
Want results like this for your business?
Get a free, no-obligation review of your website and we’ll show you exactly where your organic quick wins are — no ad spend, no jargon, no hard sell.
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