How We Work
The Evidence Standard
Every marketing agency has opinions. We decided that wasn't enough. So we went and read the patents.
Not blog posts about patents. The actual granted claims, the court transcripts from the Google antitrust trial, the peer-reviewed research. Three hundred and twelve patent records. Around a hundred and forty papers and primary documents. Every number checked against the source before we wrote it down.
What we found changed how we work. It also explains why we say no to things other agencies happily sell.
Three labels, and one rule
Before anything becomes a line on your invoice, it gets a label.
It appears in a granted patent claim, in the court record, or in Google's own published guidance. We can show you the sentence. This is what we build strategy on.
A reasonable reading of a documented mechanism, but not proven. We still do it. We just tell you which kind of thing it is.
The industry repeats it constantly. Nobody can point to a source. We don't charge for it, and if it's harmless we'll do it free.
And the rule that catches most of the industry out:
If it's in the patent's claims, we say "the patent claims." If it's only in the description, we say "the patent describes."
A patent's description can say anything. Only the claims are the invention. Blur those two and you're selling fiction with a citation attached.
Most of the patents your agency quotes aren't Google's
Here's something we found that we didn't expect.
The patents the SEO industry cites most often for "semantic content" advice mostly don't belong to Google. One of the most-quoted belongs to a British telemedicine company and is about extracting medical facts. Another belongs to Microsoft. Another to a company called Finch Computing.
The reason is almost funny. They're all hosted on patents.google.com, which is Google's patent search engine. It indexes every patent office on earth. Being on a Google URL says nothing about who owns the patent.
People cite "a Google patent" because they found it on a Google website.
We checked ownership on every single one. Eleven that get attributed to Google belong to someone else: HP, Microsoft, Yahoo, IBM, Amazon, British Telecom, Citibank.
If your agency has ever quoted a patent number at you, ask them who owns it.
We ran the gate on ourselves, and failed it
We sell clients a five-criterion eligibility gate: a page only gets built if it can clear all five. It's easy to sell a standard. It only means something once it costs you something.
So we ran it on the location pages we were planning to build for ourselves. Here is a page we will now never publish, scored honestly: "Marketing Agency in Tampa," with no Tampa office.
Real presence. No address, no staff based there. This is the criterion we tell clients is close to fatal on its own, and under the two-regime rule a business outside the resolved area is scored on distance, not prominence. You cannot win the Tampa map pack from West Palm Beach.
Unique local proof. Only if we had a named Tampa client we were allowed to name. With one client per market that's a real constraint, and naming them would tell their competitors the slot is gone.
Locality-specific facts. There genuinely aren't many for a marketing agency. Tampa's search market isn't meaningfully different from Orlando's in any way we could write honestly.
Distinct offer. The service is identical in every city. That's the nature of the business.
Demonstrated demand. "Marketing agency [city]" has real search volume. This is the only one that clearly passes.
One out of five. Under our own rules, that's a reject.
We ran our own page-eligibility gate on the location pages we were going to build. They scored one out of five. So we didn't build them.
It costs us some long-tail traffic. We'd rather lose that than run a standard we don't apply to ourselves.
If you've been sold a set of city pages by an agency with no presence in those cities, this is the arithmetic they didn't show you. Ask them to score one.
What this actually changes for you
You get told when we're guessing. Marketing involves judgment. We just label it, so you know which parts of the plan are load-bearing and which are our best read.
You stop paying for things that don't work. There's a written list. It's on the site.
Your numbers survive scrutiny. When your board, your franchisor, or your next agency asks where a figure came from, there's an answer. We don't produce numbers we can't source.
You can check us. That's the point. Ask for the claim.
Want to see it applied to your market?
We'll score your business against the five factors Google's own patent claims for local ranking, and show you the claim language while we do it.
Check Your Market
See if your market is still open.
We take one business per industry, per market. Tell us your industry and city and we'll confirm availability, no pressure, no pitch.
Check your market
Tell us where you operate. We'll respond within one business day.
Got it. Scout's on your market.
We'll review availability and get back to you within one business day.