What’s your priority focus for 2025 in relation to your department?
Rebecca (COO): “My team’s core priorities are around our product and on deepening our value-led relationships with our clients.”
“We ended 2024 with some brilliant collaborative conversations about the future with our clients, focused on the value we can deliver together above all else. These conversations serve as the perfect springboard to work in tandem particularly with our most invested clients to ensure we’re delivering tangible results. Which in today’s search landscape means innovative tactics and aggressive implementation.”
Olivia (Head of Content & Promotion): “With advances in AI tech showing little signs of letting up, misinformation gaining pace and growing search engines & platforms, the Content & Promotion department has set three principles for the year ahead: working smarter, moving with agility and harnessing performance-first mindsets. Practically, this can be distilled as:
- Continuing to create quality content designed for (the benefit of) people and handled in an agile, scalable and resilient manner. This leans into working smarter, not harder with the Content Strategists in our team coming up with some incredible advancements in how we strategise and produce credible content at pace.
- Building brand and organic equity through quality and agile link building and Digital PR. This means securing coverage and links from outlets that truly mean something to our partners’ audiences, but also not defaulting to an outreach-only approach – there are so many routes to promoting our brands, outreach is really only the tip of the iceberg and investing in a diverse promotion strategy is key.
- Continuing to push a performance first-focus with our workflows and deliverables. If you don’t know the impact of that work and what it’s doing to the numbers that truly matter, then frankly, what’s the point? Our team are lasering in on this more than ever this year.”
What learnings have you taken from 2024?
Harry (Head of Technical SEO): “Google is continuing to be proactive in the defence of their monopoly of search – seeing through innovations like AIO whilst pushing lots of core updates around search quality. We expect more of this in 2025 – and more personalisation of search. This has undoubtedly brought challenges for our clients, where regular updates introduce uncertainty.”
“To offset this, my team will be working hard to ensure that SEO is both understood and high up on the agenda within revenue-focused organisations. Constant testing to better demonstrate the impact of our work will also be a big flavour this year.”
Rebecca: “We just don’t shout about ourselves enough. It’s such a privilege to be under the hood of this agency; to see the unparalleled processes, consultative thinking and creativity that lives here. It’s really infectious to be around. I want that to be way more externally visible, but we can be guilty of channelling all of our energy into our products and our work here. Whilst I don’t want that to change, I do want to address the balance a little.
What changes do you want to implement now versus throughout the year?
Gary (Head of Data): “We’ll be immediately changing our processes on things like reporting and dashboarding, to improve time-to-insight. Building on Harry’s point above, when we’re faced with multiple changes on external platforms, it’s critical that we’re able to test and demonstrate impact in short time frames, not just over the longer term.”
Harry: “Right away we’re implementing our Named Project Workflows (NPWs) approach to strategy. This means objective-led strategic headlines which each encapsulate impactful, cross-channel tactics. The language used is to clarify the SEO levers available, engaging higher-ups to get SEO into the broader marketing agenda through better understanding and alignment on business objectives.”
How do you plan to make the Builtvisible offer more competitive?
Gary: “I want to improve the accessibility of insights across the business so that these can be reused in different contexts. We started this in 2024, by embedding op sizing data into our new forecasting process which gave us additional insights to the tune of ‘What does our plan aim to deliver over and above the existing forecasted performance?’. In 2025, I want to do this on more data sets and at scale. Being able to specifically quantify the impact of organic workstreams is an area that will set us apart from other providers.”
Emily (Head of People & Culture): “This year, I intend to take our already brilliant career development programme ‘Career Architect’ to the next level by fully integrating it with our Career Coaching benefit and the well-being support which we provide through clinical psychologists The Core Collective.”
Olivia: “It might sound cheesy, bit within Content & Promotion especially, one of our biggest assets is our people. They’re all committed to offering the smartest insight and opinion out there in the industry. We’ll continue to use their wealth of knowledge and experience to be active consultants for our lovely clients. And what I mean by that is not being ‘yes people’, but rather looking at and insightfully sharing what is truly best for delivering maximum impact in organic.”
Harry: “It’s important for us as an independent organic agency to make it clear the level of expertise and value onboarding us adds to external teams. The majority of the SEO team are Senior Consultants, with 5+ years of experience delivering impactful SEO at the top top level. This year, we’re looking to do a better job of spotlighting this through better promotion of both our work and client outcomes. When buying several product lines – such as tech, content and digital PR – these have to be bigger than the sum of their parts. Through NPWs, we’re going to be making the combined impact of multiple channels much clearer.”
And last but not least, what was your highlight of 2024?
Emily: “My highlight of 2024 was seeing so many people progress with their career and personal development goals with the support and encouragement of their team and the wider agency. I also loved reading all the nominations for our annual awards including our Rising Star of 2024 Miranda!”
Harry: “Seeing Ash speak at BrightonSEO and James provide e-commerce training at the conference was a highlight. Both represented themselves and our agency brilliantly.”
Olivia: “Towards the end of Q3, my team and I took some time away from the office and had a brilliant team workshop which was centred on building trust, solidifying team relationships and learning more from one another. I’m keen to make sure these become a regular feature for us. From a client perspective, we’ve also established some new and incredibly exciting partnerships with fantastic brands, from Opodo to Aviva and Currencies Direct, there’s lots to get stuck into!”
Like what you’ve heard? Get in touch with our team today to work with us in 2025.