SEO and AI visibility for Agencies & service providers.

With agencies, your own marketing is always a project for later. Customer projects come first, your own website shows the status from three years ago, and the best cases are in the pitch deck instead of on the Internet. Meanwhile, the shortlist for the next call for proposals is created in an AI response in which you do not appear.

Whether performance, creation, development, recruiting or public relations: the first step is not a measure, but a decision - which projects you really want. We then build the positioning pages, the cases and the comparisons that support this decision.

Agencies have a self-marketing problem that their clients don't have: their own visibility is always the project that gets postponed. In our industry benchmark, the average for B2B service providers is 20 out of 100; and agencies we measured rarely score higher. The cobbler's children problem is not an anecdote in this industry, but rather measurable.

At the same time, agency search is one of the areas where AI is being used early. The shortlist is created before a call for proposals goes out: three to five names mentioned in response to a question like “which agency for Shopify migrations in the DACH region”. Anyone missing there won't be rejected - they'll never be checked, and in your own CRM it looks like a quiet month.

What is named follows known patterns. The Princeton study (KDD 2024) measures +115% citation probability for sources, +41% for expert quotes with attribution and +40% for concrete statistics; copy editing alone brings around +3%. For agencies this means: The case with numbers, time period and method beats the third round of text polish on the home page.

The sore point is the positioning. An agency that offers “Strategy, Design, Development and Performance” doesn’t fully answer a single question. Google AI Mode breaks down a query into eight to twelve sub-questions and only has around 12% overlap with the classic Google top 10 - anyone who only uses the main keyword is not represented in this ranking at all.

There is also a topic that agencies are reluctant to touch: comparisons with the competition. If you don't name your competitors on your own website, you're leaving this answer to third-party sources and listicles. A comparison page that honestly admits at least one point to the other side is weighted differently by buyers and systems than one that only claims its own superiority.

The material for this is usually already in the house. Completed projects with reliable figures, recurring objections from pitches, specialist knowledge from implementation: This is where the statements that are quoted come from. The effort lies less in writing than in getting this knowledge out of people's minds and out of old presentations - and getting customers' approval for it.