Frequently asked questions

Search Value was founded in April 2007 as a digital marketing agency and grew into a technical, analytical SEO and paid-media specialist for IT services and technology companies.

We started with a broad idea: a digital marketing agency for any business. Over the first few years we gravitated to the technical and analytical side of marketing, which means search engine optimisation, paid campaigns, tracking and measurement, rather than social media management or content production.

Since then we have been through the 2008 downturn, a period of rapid growth to nearly 100 people, a decade-long enterprise engagement, and the launch of our own mobile ad platform, OneAD. Today we focus on helping IT services and technology companies win business in global markets. The full timeline is on our About page.

Search Value is led by Sachin Bansal, founder and CEO, a marketer at heart and an entrepreneur by nature with more than 25 years of experience in technology, product and delivery.

Sachin trained as an engineer at IIT Roorkee and studied marketing and finance at the Indian School of Business. He has built several businesses, from startup scrappiness to enterprise execution, and Search Value is where it all began.

That mix of engineering discipline and marketing instinct shapes how the team works: we look for the opportunity first, then measure it properly so you can see what your marketing spend produces. You can read more on the About page.

Search Value ITES Pvt Ltd is registered in India, and our clients are mostly IT services and technology companies in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and India.

We work remotely with clients across time zones, which is how we have operated for most of our history. Our early work came from the UK, Australia and the US, and today the majority of our programmes support technology companies selling into North America, Europe and India.

If you sell into a market we have not named, tell us. SEO, paid media and nurture work in most markets, and language or regional search behaviour is something we plan for at the start. Our Korean-language search work and twenty-language-site programme show how we handle multilingual search.

IT services and technology companies, mostly in the US, UK, Europe and India. Clients over the years include Coforge, Birlasoft, Alibaba Cloud, Innodata, EXL Service, GS1 India and Incessant Technologies.

Our sweet spot is the IT services and technology company with a long, considered sales cycle and a sales team that needs better leads rather than more of them. That includes global system integrators, mid-sized services firms, SaaS and platform companies, and specialist consultancies.

Some of our longest relationships are covered by confidentiality agreements, so we cannot show every programme. The ones we can are on our case studies page, with the challenge, the work and the results for each.

We run SEO and GEO, LinkedIn and Google advertising, inbound lead nurturing and analytics, and we report on the number that matters to your sales team: the leads they accept.

Most B2B marketing is judged on traffic or form fills. We judge it on lead-to-SAL ratio, the share of marketing leads that sales accepts as worth following up. That one number connects search, paid media, nurture and reporting into a single funnel you can manage.

• SEO and GEO: technical, content and off-page work, plus optimisation for AI assistants
• LinkedIn and Google advertising: media plan, search, LinkedIn and retargeting
• Inbound and lead nurturing: personas, scoring and workflows
• Analytics and attribution: one report from first visit to sales-accepted lead

We are a specialist, not a generalist. We focus on the technical and analytical side of marketing for IT and technology companies, and we are not a social media, creative or content-production agency.

A generalist agency often sells a bundle: social posts, a blog, some ads, a monthly report of impressions. We narrow the scope deliberately to search, paid, nurture and measurement, because that is where we have nearly two decades of depth and where B2B technology buyers are actually found.

We also report differently. Instead of a deck of vanity metrics, you get a funnel view that ends with leads your sales team accepted, so marketing and sales argue about the same number.

We price as a monthly retainer, a project fee or an embedded pod, and we scope it after a pipeline review once we have seen your funnel. We do not publish a flat price because the right scope depends on your market and goals.

Three factors drive the cost: how competitive your target terms and audiences are, how much work the site needs before it can rank or convert, and how many channels you want us to run. A technical audit and migration plan is a project. Ongoing SEO, paid media and nurture is usually a retainer. If you want a named team that works as part of your marketing group, that is an embedded pod.

Beware of any agency that quotes a fixed price before it has looked at your site and funnel. A short pipeline review gives you a scoped proposal rather than a guess.

Paid campaigns produce leads first. SEO and nurture compound over months. In our top-5 IT company case, organic rankings moved within six months and the full effect showed at twelve.

As a rule of thumb for a B2B technology company: paid search and LinkedIn can generate leads within weeks once tracking is in place, nurture improves lead quality over one to three months as workflows and scoring settle, and SEO and GEO typically show meaningful movement from around month four to six, with the full effect building through the first year.

Timelines depend on your starting point, such as domain history, site health and competition. That is why we agree early indicators with you, like indexing, ranking movement and lead-to-SAL, rather than waiting a year to find out whether the programme works. See how a top-5 IT company went from 0.22% to 4.12% lead-to-SAL.

A pipeline review is a short conversation and a look at your funnel, from first visit to sales-accepted lead. We need access to your analytics, your CRM or marketing automation reporting and a few minutes with whoever owns sales follow-up.

We ask about your target accounts and markets, your current lead sources, how sales qualifies leads, and what has and has not worked. We then review your site, search visibility and tracking, and come back with what we would fix first and why.

You do not need a finished brief or a large budget to begin. The review ends with a clear view of the opportunity and, if it makes sense, a scoped proposal. You can book one here.

Yes to both. Many clients start with one layer, such as an SEO audit or a paid programme, and add others once results show. We also work alongside in-house marketers, sales operations and agencies.

The layers are designed to work together but not to be mandatory. If you have a strong content team, we can plan topics and brief subject experts while you write. If your marketing automation is already running, we can focus on search and reporting. If you already have an SEO partner, we can review their work.

What we ask is clear ownership: who approves changes, who owns the website and who follows up with leads. We write that into a short responsibilities split at the start so nothing falls between teams.

No. We plan topics and brief your subject experts, but we are not a content, creative or social media agency. We focus on search, paid, nurture and measurement.

B2B technology buyers trust content written by people who actually deliver the work. So we do the strategic part: keyword and question research, a topic plan tied to buyer stages, briefs with the points the piece must make, and editing for search structure. Your engineers, architects and consultants supply the substance.

If you need long-form writing or design, we can work with your chosen writers or studio. We will not bolt generic content onto your site to hit a word count, because it rarely ranks and does not persuade a serious buyer.

B2B SEO for IT services is search optimisation aimed at a small number of high-value buyers who research for weeks, so it targets specific problems, services and industries rather than high-volume consumer keywords.

Consumer SEO chases volume. B2B IT services SEO chases relevance and intent: a CTO searching for an SAP migration partner, a head of operations comparing integration approaches, or a procurement lead shortlisting vendors. The searches are few, the deals are large, and one good page can be worth more than a thousand generic visits.

That changes the work. We prioritise service and industry pages, comparison and problem-led content, proof such as case studies, and technical health. We measure success by qualified leads, not sessions. Our guide to SEO for IT services companies goes deeper.

Target buyer-intent keywords that combine a service, a problem or an industry, such as "SAP S/4HANA migration partner" or "ERP integration for manufacturers", rather than broad terms like "IT services".

We build a keyword map in three layers. First, commercial terms where buyers look for a provider: service plus location, industry or platform. Second, problem terms where they describe a pain before they know the solution. Third, comparison and evaluation terms such as alternatives, costs, timelines and risks.

Each keyword is assigned to one page, so pages do not compete with each other, and each page is built to answer the full question a buyer has. We also check what Google and AI assistants already show for these queries, so we can see what the page must do better. Read more in SEO for IT services companies.

Expect early signals such as indexing and ranking movement in two to four months, and meaningful lead growth from around six months, with the full effect over twelve. Competition and your starting site health change this.

SEO is cumulative. Month one is usually an audit and fixes: crawl and index problems, page speed, structure and tracking. Months two to four are content and page improvements and the first ranking movements for lower-competition terms. Months four to eight are where competitive terms start to move and organic leads become visible in your CRM.

A new domain or a site with a history of penalties takes longer. A site with good authority and weak structure can move faster. Anyone who promises page one in 30 days for a competitive B2B term is guessing or cutting corners.

Technical SEO is making sure search engines can crawl, understand and index your site efficiently: clean URLs, fast pages, correct canonicals, a sitemap, structured data and no broken links. Without it, good content struggles to rank.

For B2B sites the common technical problems are duplicate or near-duplicate service pages, slow pages from heavy scripts, orphan pages with no internal links, accidental noindex tags, broken redirects after a redesign, and missing structured data.

A technical audit checks crawlability, indexation, site architecture, Core Web Vitals, mobile usability, canonical tags, hreflang for multiple regions, XML sitemaps and robots rules. Fixing these is usually the fastest SEO win because it removes the ceiling on everything else. Our SEO and GEO service starts with this audit.

GEO is the practice of making your content clear, credible and easy to cite so AI assistants such as ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Perplexity describe your company accurately. It builds on SEO rather than replacing it.

Search engines rank pages. AI assistants synthesise answers and cite or paraphrase sources. To be included, your pages need a direct answer near the top, clear entity information (who you are, what you do, where, for whom), consistent facts across your site and the wider web, and structured data that machines can read.

We cannot guarantee a mention, because assistants choose their own sources. What we can do is make your pages the clearest answer available and measure how you are described each month. See our guide to GEO for technology companies.

No. AI assistants rely on the same public web content that SEO improves, so strong pages, clear structure and credible sources help you in both. But buyers increasingly ask assistants first, so visibility in AI answers is now worth measuring.

The practical approach is to treat SEO and GEO as one programme. Technical health, topical depth and authority still decide what search engines and assistants can find and trust. On top of that we add answer-first writing, clear definitions, FAQ content, structured data and consistent brand facts.

We also track how assistants answer your target questions every month, who they cite, and whether the description of your company is accurate. That tells you where to improve and gives you a baseline in a channel that is changing quickly.

llms.txt is a plain-text file at the root of a site that summarises what the site is and links to its most useful pages for language models. It is an emerging convention, not a ranking factor, but it costs little and can help.

The file is written in Markdown: a short description of the company and a list of key pages with one-line summaries. Not every AI system reads it, and no major search engine has said it affects rankings, so treat it as a low-cost clarity aid rather than a lever.

It works best alongside the basics: clear page titles, an accurate sitemap, structured data and well-written answer-first content. Our own llms.txt is public, so you can see what a clean one looks like.

Ask the assistants the questions your buyers ask, on a fixed set of prompts each month, and record whether you are mentioned, how you are described and which sources are cited.

A simple method: build a list of 20 to 40 buyer questions across your services, industries and comparison queries. Run them across ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews. Log mentions, position, accuracy of the description and the sources cited. Repeat monthly and compare.

Answers vary between runs, so look at trends rather than one result. Pair the log with referral traffic from AI assistants in your analytics, and with inbound leads that say they found you through an AI tool. Our GEO guide includes the approach we use.

Map every old URL to its best new equivalent with a permanent 301 redirect, keep what already ranks, test on a staging site, submit the new sitemap, and monitor Search Console for errors for several weeks.

The biggest migration risks are broken redirects, lost pages that earned links, changed titles and headings on pages that ranked, and blocked crawling left on from staging. Before launch we export every indexed URL, your top landing pages and backlinks, and agree a redirect map. After launch we check that redirects return a single 301 hop to the right page, the sitemap is clean, canonicals are correct and analytics still work.

We then watch crawl errors, coverage and rankings daily at first and weekly after. We used exactly this method when relaunching our own site; see the marketing plan guide for how it fits the wider programme.

Yes, if each post answers a real buyer question with expert depth. Publishing a few strong pieces a month beats daily thin posts, and updating your best pages usually pays back faster than writing new ones.

Good B2B content explains how to solve a problem, compares options honestly, shows a worked example or opens up the cost, risk and timeline of a decision. It is written or reviewed by someone who has done the work. Each piece should target one question, link to the relevant service page and end with a clear next step.

We recommend a topic plan tied to buyer stages, a realistic cadence your subject experts can sustain, and a quarterly refresh of the pages that already get impressions. Volume is not the goal; being the clearest answer is.

Yes, when it is aimed at a defined account list and offers something worth the click. LinkedIn is expensive per click, so it pays only if the audience is precise and the follow-up converts into sales-accepted leads.

LinkedIn lets you target by job title, seniority, company size, industry and named accounts, which suits long-cycle IT services sales. The cost per lead is higher than search, but the quality can be much better when the targeting is tight and the content offer matches the stage of the buyer, for example a benchmark report, a migration checklist or a technical guide.

We usually send LinkedIn traffic to useful resources first and retarget engaged visitors with a stronger call to action, rather than pushing a contact form straight away. See our LinkedIn and Google advertising approach.

Start with Google Ads search if buyers already search for what you sell, because it captures existing demand quickly. Add LinkedIn when you need to reach defined accounts that are not yet searching.

Search ads reach someone with a stated need, so they convert fastest and teach you which messages and terms work. LinkedIn creates demand among a chosen audience. In practice we build a media plan that splits budget by intent: search for high-intent terms, LinkedIn for target accounts, and retargeting to bring both back.

The mix changes with your market, average deal value and how well your tracking connects ad clicks to sales-accepted leads. We review it monthly and move budget to what the CRM data supports, not what the ad platform reports.

Usually because the campaign is optimised for form fills, not for qualified buyers: the targeting is too broad, the offer attracts students or job seekers, or the form does not ask enough to qualify the lead.

Fixing it means working backwards from the leads sales did accept. Look at their job titles, company sizes and the searches or audiences they came from, then tighten targeting, add negative keywords, change the offer, and add qualifying fields or scoring. Feed accepted-lead data back into the ad platforms so they optimise for it.

This is exactly what lead-to-SAL ratio measures. When we reported it for a top-5 IT company it rose from 0.22% to 4.12% in twelve months; read our guide to the ratio and the case study.

Spend enough to collect meaningful data for at least two to three months and judge by cost per sales-accepted lead, not cost per click. The right amount depends on your deal size and sales cycle.

A test that is too small never produces a signal; one that is too large wastes budget on untested messages. We usually start with a focused test across two or three audiences or keyword groups, then scale the winners. Early metrics are click-through rate and cost per lead. Later ones, once CRM data arrives, are lead-to-SAL and cost per accepted lead.

For long sales cycles also track assisted pipeline, because paid media often starts conversations that close months later. Our analytics and attribution work connects those dots.

Retargeting shows relevant ads to people who already visited your site or engaged with your content, keeping you visible while a buying committee researches over weeks or months.

For IT services, a good retargeting plan is segmented: visitors to service pages see a case study, readers of a guide see a related technical resource, and visitors to the contact page who did not submit see a reassurance message. Frequency caps avoid fatigue.

On LinkedIn you can also retarget video viewers and people who opened a lead form. We measure retargeting by assisted conversions and lead-to-SAL, not only by last-click, since its job is to support the conversation.

It is the share of marketing leads that sales accepts as worth following up: sales-accepted leads divided by marketing leads for the same period and source. It is the number we report.

A lead is a form fill or similar capture by marketing. A sales-accepted lead (SAL) is one that sales agrees is worth pursuing. The ratio shows quality, not volume: a small number of well-qualified leads can beat a large number of poor ones.

Tracking it by source, such as SEO, LinkedIn, Google Ads or events, tells you which channels deserve more budget. Our guide to the lead-to-SAL ratio explains how to calculate and improve it.

An MQL is a lead marketing scores as engaged, a SAL is one sales accepts for follow-up, and an SQL is one sales has qualified as a real opportunity. They are successive stages in the same funnel.

Definitions vary between companies, so write yours down and agree them with sales. A common version: MQL means the lead meets fit and engagement thresholds; SAL means a sales rep has reviewed and accepted it; SQL means after a conversation the rep confirms budget, need, authority and timing.

We focus on lead-to-SAL because it is the first point where sales confirms the marketing lead is worth their time, and it is an early, reliable signal that arrives long before revenue. More in our lead-to-SAL guide.

Lead nurturing is a sequence of relevant emails and content that moves a lead toward a sales conversation. For B2B IT services it often runs for several months, with different tracks for different interests and stages.

Most B2B leads are not ready to buy when they first fill a form. Nurture keeps you useful while they research: a guide on their topic, a case study from their industry, an invitation to a short review. Workflows branch on behaviour, so someone who visits pricing pages gets a different path from someone who read one article.

We design personas, scoring and workflows, then review performance monthly and prune what does not work. See inbound and lead nurturing.

The best platform is the one your team will use well and that connects cleanly to your CRM. We build in HubSpot, Pardot, Marketo, Eloqua and LeadSquared, and recommend based on your CRM, team size and sales process.

HubSpot suits teams that want an all-in-one system with quick setup. Pardot fits Salesforce-centred organisations. Marketo and Eloqua suit larger enterprises with complex scoring and multi-region programmes. LeadSquared is popular where sales and marketing run closely together, especially in India.

Switching platforms is expensive, so we prefer to make better use of what you have unless it is clearly limiting you. We can audit your setup and tell you honestly whether the issue is the tool or how it is configured.

Score on two things: fit (job title, company size, industry, region) and engagement (pages viewed, content downloaded, emails opened, repeat visits). Agree the threshold with sales and test it against accepted leads.

Fit scores stop you sending students and competitors to sales. Engagement scores show interest. Weight high-intent actions, such as visiting a service page twice or requesting a review, more than low-intent ones, such as opening an email.

Revisit scoring every quarter by comparing scores to the leads sales actually accepted and the deals that closed. If high scorers are being rejected, the model is wrong, not the sales team.

Track leading indicators that connect to revenue: qualified leads, lead-to-SAL, sales-accepted pipeline and cost per accepted lead by channel, then tie them to closed deals as they arrive.

Revenue in IT services can take six to eighteen months to appear, so waiting for it hides what works. Instead, connect your website analytics to your CRM so each lead carries its source, campaign and first touch. Report the funnel stage by stage and keep the history, so when a deal closes you can see which channels helped.

We build that single funnel report as part of our analytics and attribution work.

A useful report shows the funnel from visit to lead to sales-accepted lead by channel, the cost and trend of each stage, what changed and why, and what you will do next month.

We report on a fixed rhythm: one headline page with lead-to-SAL and sales-accepted leads by source; search visibility and AI assistant mentions; paid performance with cost per accepted lead; nurture engagement; and technical health. Each section ends with a decision, not just a chart.

Keep it short enough to read. If a metric never changes a decision, remove it.

They measure different things, from different moments, with different rules. GA4 counts sessions and events in a browser; the CRM counts people and records. Without shared identifiers, they will never match exactly.

Common causes: form submissions not passed to the CRM with source data, ad blockers and consent choices hiding visits, duplicate leads, different attribution windows and offline conversions never recorded. Fix it by capturing campaign parameters and the GA4 client ID in hidden form fields, passing them to the CRM and agreeing one source of truth for lead counts.

The aim is not perfect agreement but a consistent method everyone trusts. We set this up in our attribution work.

Most mid-sized B2B companies do well with a simple model: first touch for what starts conversations, last touch for what closes them, and the full path reviewed on key deals. Advanced models need clean data and volume.

Complex attribution tools give a false sense of precision when tracking is incomplete. Start by getting source data into the CRM for every lead. Then review the customer journeys of recent won deals to see which channels repeated.

Add a weighted model only when you have enough volume and trust in the data to act on it.

Give the site a named owner, keep a change log, review performance monthly, audit quarterly, refresh your best pages and keep tracking, security and backups in order.

A B2B website is a sales asset, not a brochure, and it needs an operating rhythm.

• Ownership: one person accountable for content, one for technology, one for approvals.
• Monthly: check leads by source, top pages, Search Console errors and site speed.
• Quarterly: audit titles, internal links, outdated pages, case studies and calls to action.
• Always: test forms, keep a change log, and record why changes were made so you can learn from them.

Treat each change as a hypothesis you can measure.

Review key service and case study pages every three to six months and update them whenever offers, proof or facts change. Add new content on a schedule you can sustain.

Stale pages hurt trust and rankings. Prioritise pages that already earn impressions or leads: update statistics, add recent examples, improve the opening answer, check internal links and refresh the date only when you made real changes.

Retire or merge thin pages that overlap. A smaller site of strong pages usually outperforms a large site of weak ones.

Yes, speed affects both user experience and search performance through Core Web Vitals. Keep images compressed, limit third-party scripts, use caching and a content delivery network, and test on mobile.

The three Core Web Vitals measure loading (Largest Contentful Paint), responsiveness (Interaction to Next Paint) and visual stability (Cumulative Layout Shift). Heavy chat widgets, tag managers and tracking scripts are the usual culprits on B2B sites.

A lightweight, statically served site like ours loads quickly and has a smaller attack surface. Whatever platform you use, test with PageSpeed Insights and review after every new script is added.

Use HTTPS everywhere, keep software and plugins updated, limit admin access, enable two-factor authentication, take regular tested backups and monitor for changes.

Most compromises come from outdated plugins, weak passwords and over-broad access. Remove what you do not use, give each person their own account with the minimum permissions, and keep backups off the same server. Test a restore at least once.

Security headers, DNS records for email authentication (SPF, DKIM, DMARC) and a clear process for who can change what are also part of keeping a company site trustworthy.

A clear statement of who you help and how, proof (clients, results), your main services, a visible call to action and fast navigation to key pages. A buyer should understand what you do in five seconds.

Lead with the outcome for the buyer, not your history. Put proof near the top: named clients where permitted, a headline result, or a short case study. Show your services in plain language, link to industry and case pages, and add an FAQ that answers early objections.

Keep the primary call to action consistent, such as a free review or a short call, and make the form short.

Give each service and industry its own page with a unique primary topic, link related pages together, use descriptive anchor text and keep important pages within two or three clicks of the homepage.

A clear architecture helps search engines and AI systems understand what you do. A common pattern: a services hub, one page per service, supporting guides that link up to the service page, and case studies that link to the services used.

Avoid several pages targeting the same keyword. Use breadcrumbs, a clean URL structure and an up-to-date sitemap.

Schema markup is code that labels the content of a page so machines understand it. B2B sites typically use Organization, WebSite, BreadcrumbList, Service, Article and FAQPage.

Structured data helps search engines show richer results and helps AI systems identify entities. Use JSON-LD, keep it accurate to what is visible on the page and validate it with Google's Rich Results Test and the Schema Markup Validator.

It is not a magic ranking lever. It clarifies meaning, which supports both SEO and GEO.

Redirect any old page that has traffic or links to its closest new equivalent with a 301, avoid redirect chains, return a proper 404 for pages that are gone and monitor Search Console.

Maintain a redirect map whenever you remove or rename a page. Do not send everything to the homepage unless nothing relevant exists. Check for chains where one redirect leads to another, and fix internal links to point straight to the final URL.

Review the crawl errors report in Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools monthly, especially for the first weeks after a redesign.

Ask only for what you need, such as name, work email and company, say when you will reply, test the form regularly and use a honeypot or similar spam protection instead of intrusive CAPTCHAs.

Every extra field lowers completion. Use a topic selector or short optional message to help route the lead. Confirm success on the page and by email, and make sure submissions reach a monitored inbox.

Pass source and campaign data with each submission so you can report lead-to-SAL by channel.

Accessible sites are easier for everyone to use and for search engines to read, and they reduce legal and reputational risk. Good headings, alt text, colour contrast and keyboard support are the foundations.

Use one H1 per page and a logical heading order, descriptive link text, labels on every form field, sufficient contrast and visible focus states. Check keyboard navigation and use semantic HTML.

These practices overlap heavily with technical SEO, so it is worth doing once and doing well.

Verify your domain, submit your sitemap, check indexing and crawl errors monthly, review queries and pages with impressions, and use the URL inspection tool after major changes.

Search Console shows which queries trigger your pages, which pages are indexed and which have problems. Bing Webmaster Tools gives similar data and feeds several other search products. Both are free.

Look for pages with many impressions but low clicks, because better titles and descriptions can lift them.