TL;DR

Services that under our ‘foundations’ umbrella are those which aim to help establish the fundamentals for your site – assessing your site, organising workflows, creating strategies and more – the tactics and techniques that help your site get indexed, assess issues, identify opportunities and prepare you to take your next steps. 

Whether you’ve been working on your SEO for years, or are just starting out, our foundational services make sure you’re findable, indexable and ready for success in search. The results you can achieve vary, obviously, by how much work needs to be done – but it has been proven to us and by us, over and over, that strong foundations have strong, measurable and long term impact on revenue and profitability.

What we mean by ‘foundations’

Obviously, we don’t think you need the term itself explaining – but what we’re talking about when we say ‘foundations’ are the things that you need to get right first. As SEO has developed over the years, there have been a huge number of spin-offs, and adjacent services and strategies that have gone on to become separate specialisms. 

While it might not be the most exciting set of activities, the general cleaning up of previous activity, the refinement or creation of strategy, the assessment of keyword targets and research, are foundational undertakings that all need to be solid in order for next steps to have the best chances of success.

MMC Digital’s ‘foundations’ services

We split our core SEO service offering into ‘foundations’, ‘growth’ and ‘trust’ not to be different (okay, not just to be different), but because we believe certain fundamentals need to be in place before a brand can really begin to grow their search traffic to its full potential.

Our services come from time served. We’ve worked with, created and executed SEO strategies for some of the UK’s top agencies, with some of Europe’s most well known brands. We know what works and what doesn’t. Our SEO ‘foundations’ services include:

Organic Search (SEO)

Search has changed considerably since we started out in the world of digital marketing. Google introduced huge improvements to their algorithms aimed at combatting various manipulative techniques for improving rankings, they introduced machine learning into both their language parsing and ranking algorithms, they severely damaged their reputation by rushing out generative search into their results pages, and much more besides. 

However, just as the aims of SEO have remained the same, there have been a number of best practice techniques that have been the best way for brands to rank for a decade. Our foundational organic search (SEO) services include:

• SEO strategy – if you lack senior experience directing inhouse talent for the best results, we offer our expertise to create an SEO strategy that makes use of your resources to achieve more. Whether you want to include us for execution is entirely up to you.
• Technical audits – sometimes you need a sense check – whether you’ve been working to master SEO, or need to find out how big the task at hand really is. We tend to start with this as part of initial discovery – but we can end here too, if that’s all you need.
• Digital marketing audits – this is effectively an audit of your owned, earned and paid presence, how it’s impacting performance and what it says about your brand.  
• Penalty & algorithm recovery strategy – whether you’ve had a manual action penalty, something algorithmic, or just seem to be losing ground every update, we will set out a strategy to get you back to where you need to be.
• Keyword research – this should be about meeting your customers where they are, and not about volume. Good keyword research can reduce reliance on paid budgets, increase organic revenue – but also improve brand recall and discoverability.
• Longtail strategy – especially important in modern SEO, and with AI’s prevalence, longtail targeting makes sure you have the information people need and that it can be matched to queries. This is about making sure you’re there from the awareness and discovery stage of the buyer’s journey, ready to build trust and earn conversions.
• Competitor analysis – you can learn a lot about what you need to do and what you need to avoid by choosing the right competitors and analysing how they’re tackling the problems you’re experiencing.
• Content strategy – content’s importance can’t be overstated. Especially as LLMs eat the internet for breakfast. You do, however, need to be producing the right content.
• Site structure and architecture – it’s incredible how often site structure and internal linking is overlooked when working on SEO, it’s a huge part of how search engines and other bots understand your site and your brand.
• International SEO strategy – if your national SEO is in place and working well, and you’re ready to enter a new territory, we can help you hit the ground running.
• Local SEO – if you have physical locations, or operate on a local level, you need a local SEO strategy (going global starts local) to make sure searchers in those areas know what you do and that you’re there when they need you.

Technical SEO

This is the fundamentals, and we get into exactly what that means on the service page itself but, in short, it’s getting your page titles and meta descriptions right, it’s making sure your site’s crawlable, your content is discoverable and you’re ready and able to be indexed.

• Crawling and indexing – generally only a major concern for large ecommerce brands, but examining how your site is crawled and what is (and is not) being indexed can help to understand and add context to your overall performance.
• Log file analysis – it might seem a little old-school, but as various platforms give you less information, the more useful log file analysis can be (not to Screaming Frog’s log file analyser is a wonderful aspect of a highly recommended tool).
• Core Web Vitals and performance – it’s part of the core ranking signals used to determine your visibility, but it’s also vital to how customers perceive your brand and how or whether they convert.
• Technical fixes – we audit and then tackle a list of SEO fixes your site needs to perform optimally in search and boost organic revenue.
• Migration SEO – don’t leave your legacy SEO work behind when you move, and don’t carry over mistakes to a new platform. Involve SEO from the scoping stage for the best migration.
• Schema and structured data – things looking slightly better for structured data these days. Most sites have the basics, but unless your schema connects to the web, your site is the jigsaw puzzle piece lost under the couch, forever unconnected to those lovely corner pieces.
• International SEO implementation – whether using your roadmap or our own, we’ll make sure that your international SEO is implemented properly for the best chances of success.
• Ecommerce SEO infrastructure analysis and strategy – ecommerce SEO keeps your products ranking for commercial terms, categories for informational and much more. There are a lot of overlooked aspects of ecommerce SEO in all sectors and across platforms – we make sure you’re not making the same mistakes as your competitors.

What can SEO foundations do for your business?

Success in the SERPs is obviously at the core of most SEO, but the benefits of strong SEO foundations go beyond improving your rankings (especially with what is being referred to as agentic AI or AI search), and can help:

• Improve customer interactions and perceptions at key moments
• Build authority within your industry vertical (especially important in YMYL verticals)
• Making the most of your site’s traffic (good SEO improves conversion)
• Improve discoverability, profitability, and revenue
• Expand to new areas and countries – and with new offerings