We just did something that most agencies in our industry would call stupid.
This morning, Be Better Online published a press release announcing a policy we call Total Transparens. In practice, it means we have made public our complete methodology — every tool we use, every process we follow, every deliverable a client can expect, and the reasoning behind how we approach each engagement.
On our website, there is now a page that describes how we actually do SEO. Not the hand-wavy “we combine technical excellence with strategic insight” language that most agency websites use. We published the specifics. The tools. The sequence. The decision framework. The things a competitor could read and understand well enough to attempt replication.
That is exactly the point.
The opacity problem
Most SEO agencies treat their methodology like a trade secret. There is a business logic to this. If you sell a service that clients struggle to evaluate, opacity creates a protective moat. The client cannot compare what you actually do against what another agency does, because neither publishes their process. Switching gets harder. Evaluating results becomes guesswork.
The problem is that this same opacity enables terrible behavior. Agencies delivering questionable work hide behind vague reporting. Clients sign 12-month contracts for services they never fully understood. When results disappoint, the agency claims the strategy needs “more time to mature.” The client has no framework to challenge this, because they were never shown a framework in the first place.
I have seen this from both sides. Before starting BBO, I worked at one of Sweden’s larger SEO firms. I watched what happened when clients had no visibility into the work. Expectations were wrong. Results were misattributed. Contract renewals depended on relationships rather than performance. When I left to start BBO in 2009, I did it specifically because I believed consulting should work differently — the agency should sit on the client’s side of the table.
Total Transparens is the operational extension of that principle. You cannot claim to sit on the client’s side while keeping the playbook hidden.
The bet
If we are genuinely good at what we do, showing our work makes us more competitive, not less.
A competitor who reads our methodology page will learn our tools and processes. But knowing the process is not the same as executing it well. Our advantage was never in having secret tools — most SEO tools are commercially available to anyone with a credit card. The advantage is in how we apply them, how we diagnose problems specific to each client, how we prioritize when everything seems urgent, and how we adapt when Google changes the rules.
If a competitor reads our page and decides to adopt the same approach, that is good for the industry. If a potential client reads our page and decides they can handle SEO internally using our framework, that is fine — they were never going to be a good consulting client anyway.
What we gain is trust. When a potential client reads exactly how we work before contacting us, they walk into the first meeting with a different posture. They ask specific questions. They challenge our approach with actual knowledge. They compare us to alternatives using real information rather than sales-pitch impressions. This is the kind of client relationship worth having.
What we actually published
The page at bebetteronline.com/totaltransparens now covers:
- Our SEO analysis framework for new clients — the tools we run, the sequence of checks, what we look for first
- The technical audit process — what constitutes critical versus nice-to-have, how we prioritize findings for a client’s specific situation
- Our content strategy approach — how we identify topics, evaluate keyword potential, structure editorial recommendations
- Link strategy principles — what we consider legitimate, what we refuse to do, and why that line exists where it does
- Reporting structure — which metrics we track, how often, and what each one actually tells the client about progress
- The tool stack — which commercial platforms we build on, what we have built ourselves (very little — we believe in composing proven tools rather than reinventing them), and what each tool does in the workflow
This is not a teaser. It is the real thing. A technically competent person could read this page and understand our entire service delivery model.
What I actually believe
I believe that seriousness and long-term results can only function in combination with total openness about working methods. “Seriositet och långsiktiga resultat kan bara fungera i kombination med total öppenhet mot kunden om våra arbetsmetoder” — that is the line from the press release, and I mean every word of it.
The SEO industry has a credibility problem. Some of it is earned — there are operators doing genuinely bad work. But some of it is structural — the opacity makes it impossible for outsiders to distinguish the good from the bad. Total Transparens is our attempt to opt out of that structure entirely.
I do not know yet how the market will respond. My expectation is that most competitors will not follow, because their business models depend on the same opacity we are removing. Some potential clients will come to us specifically because of this. Others will use our published framework to evaluate their existing agency. Both outcomes serve our positioning.
The test will be straightforward: a year from now, did this decision make us stronger or weaker? I believe stronger. If I am wrong, I will write about that too.
If you work with a services provider who guards their methodology like classified information, ask them why. The answer will tell you more about the relationship than any case study they send you.