About · Boundaries
What we won't do.
Saying what we won't do is how we earn the right to be specific about what we will. These apply to every engagement, every client, every budget tier. No exceptions.
We won't do black-hat SEO.
Why: Link farms, PBNs, comment spam, content cloaking, fake reviews, doorway pages, prompt injection on AI engines. All of it. Short-term gains, long-term Google penalty or AI de-indexing. We've seen sites lose 80% of traffic overnight from links the previous agency bought.
What we do instead: Editorial backlinks earned through real content + outreach. Real reviews from real customers. Schema markup that signals what's actually true.
We won't generate AI-spam content.
Why: Pumping out 50 AI-written blog posts a week feels like productivity. It's actually entropy — Google + AI engines both detect mass-produced filler and penalise it. And even when they don't, your buyers do.
What we do instead: Every page on your site has a human writer or editor on our team. AI is a tool inside the workflow (research, drafting), not the workflow itself.
We won't send vanity-metric reports.
Why: Impressions, reach, engagement rate, follower count — these don't pay your bills. We've seen agencies hide poor performance behind dashboards bristling with green numbers that don't connect to revenue.
What we do instead: Reports show CAC, qualified pipeline, organic citations, win-rate, and the ratio of leads-to-customers. Plain-English. Short enough to read on your phone between meetings.
We won't take work outside our actual capacity.
Why: Most agencies say yes and figure out delivery later. That's how clients end up with a 25-year-old executive juggling 14 accounts and never getting your call.
What we do instead: If we're full this month, we tell you. We'll book a start date or refer you to a vetted alternative. We turn down ~30% of inbound work — that's the only way the rest works.
We won't guarantee #1 rankings.
Why: Google's algorithm has 200+ ranking signals out of any agency's control. Anyone guaranteeing a specific position is either lying or about to game search in a way that gets penalised.
What we do instead: We guarantee the work, the transparency, and a written audit you can keep. Specific metric promises (top-3 for 5 priority queries, 3+ AI citations) are in the engagement letter — measurable, not vague.
We won't build lock-in into the work.
Why: Some agencies build sites only they can maintain, use proprietary tracking only they can read, structure campaigns that fall apart if you leave. That's not service, it's hostage-taking.
What we do instead: Everything we ship is hand-off-able. Standard stacks. Documented. Your CRM, your hosting, your accounts. If you ever leave, you take it all cleanly.
We won't take cases where unit economics don't work.
Why: If your CAC has to drop 80% for the business to work, no amount of paid spend or SEO fixes that. We'd be charging you to deliver disappointment.
What we do instead: We tell you upfront. Sometimes that means a product or pricing conversation, sometimes a referral to a different kind of help (fractional CMO, advisor, product consultant).
We won't sign annual lock-in contracts.
Why: Annual contracts are a way to extract revenue from clients who'd otherwise cancel. We'd rather earn the renewal each month than trap you in one.
What we do instead: All packages are monthly. Sprints have a 14-day refund window. Be Led has a 3-month minimum, then month-to-month with 30 days' notice. No annual lock-in, ever.
Sound like the right kind of agency?
30-min discovery call. We listen first. If we're not the right fit we'll tell you that — and probably suggest someone who is.