The Bearing Method.
A bearing is a measured direction taken from a fixed reference point — you cannot correct a course you haven't first measured honestly. That's the discipline behind every engagement here.
Five phases, run on every engagement.
- 01
Datum
The fixed reference point. A full baseline reading before anything is touched — technical, content, local, and AI-visibility state as it actually stands, not as assumed.
Produces: The audit artefact: crawl data, indexation state, current entity/AI-visibility snapshot.
- 02
Bearing
The reading taken from the datum. Where the gap is, ranked by evidence and effort, not by what's easiest to sell.
Produces: A prioritised, evidenced finding list — the actual "what's wrong and why" document.
- 03
Calibration
The correction. Technical fixes, on-page and structured-data corrections, information architecture repaired against the datum.
Produces: Implemented or specified fixes, verified against the original reading.
- 04
Course
The held route. Content, internal linking, entity and authority building, plotted and sequenced — not a content calendar of disconnected posts.
Produces: A sequenced roadmap and backlog, executed on the agreed cadence.
- 05
Sight
Taking a new reading. Recurring reporting and recalibration — checking the course is still true and correcting drift.
Produces: Monthly reporting, re-bearing where the landscape has moved.
03 — Calibration
What calibration actually involves.
Calibration is where findings become work: redirect chains resolved, canonical tags corrected, structured data validated against schema.org, duplicate content merged or redirected, internal linking rebuilt against the site's real information architecture. Every fix is checked against the original datum reading — not marked done until it's verified, not assumed fixed because it was attempted.
What the findings actually look like.
A redacted, synthetic sample of the format — no client data, no real site. This is the shape of the document, not a specific engagement.
Tools & data
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Google Analytics 4
traffic and engagement context, used to prioritise findings against what actually earns visits.
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Google Search Console
real indexation state, real query data, real crawl errors; the primary evidence source for Datum and Bearing.
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Screaming Frog
full-site crawl: redirect chains, duplicate content, broken links, structured-data presence.
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Ahrefs/Semrush-class tooling
topical and competitor coverage analysis for content and entity work.
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Looker Studio
the monthly Sight reporting view, built from live data, not a static PDF.
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PageSpeed Insights & CrUX
real-user Core Web Vitals, not lab estimates alone.
Monthly
Reporting cadence.
5 days
Retainer onboarding turnaround.
Re-bearing is triggered by an algorithm shift, an AI-answer-engine change, or a competitor move — whichever comes first.
What we guarantee — and what we don't
- 01
Fixed scope. What's included is fixed at purchase — no scope creep, no surprise invoices.
- 02
Change orders, in writing. Anything beyond the agreed scope is written up and agreed before it's billed.
- 03
Redo-or-refund. If a listed deliverable isn't delivered, we complete it or refund that part. We don't guarantee rankings — no one can honestly do that.
- 04
Direct access, not a queue. We're a young practice. That means a senior practitioner on your account from kickoff to report, not a junior hand-off.
See it applied to your site.