One2 Agency: 3 Long-Term SEO Retainers Signed

The Client

One2 Agency runs out of Kyiv, a small SCRUM-run team that treats SEO the way a dev shop treats a product roadmap — two-week sprints, a backlog, a retro at the end of each cycle. Four years in the market, more than a hundred sites optimized, a 98% success rate they'll quote you without checking notes. Their own site lists case after case — Am.ua, steamid.pro, ilounge.ua, a Georgian e-commerce site called Zoommer.ge whose organic traffic they grew eightfold after a Google update wiped it out. All of that, and new client acquisition still ran on the oldest channel there is: somebody who liked the work telling somebody else.

The Challenge

Referrals move at the speed of other people's conversations, not at the speed a growing agency needs. One2 wanted a way to reach founders and marketing leads who already had a stalled or underperforming site — the kind of prospect their own audit process is built to diagnose in the first meeting — without spending its own budget on the paid ads it spends every day helping other companies avoid relying on.

Our Approach

The ICP came together fast, because One2 already knew its best clients cold: mid-size e-commerce and B2B sites with real traffic history that had flattened or dropped, usually after a Google core update, usually run by a founder or marketing director who'd tried an in-house fix and watched it not work. A prospect database was built around exactly that signal — sites with visible ranking drops, agencies and stores active enough to have a blog nobody had touched in a year. Sending domains went up separate from one2.agency, warmed the standard way, nothing rushed. The sequence opened with a specific, verifiable observation about the prospect's own traffic — not a generic pitch — because for an SEO agency, showing you've actually looked at the data is the whole opening argument.

Replies started coming in through week three, and a few of them, from what got forwarded around, opened with some version of "how did you know that."

Results

26,860 emails went out to 19,023 contacted leads, holding a 1.1% reply rate — two hundred and sixteen replies — with 40.2% of those, eighty-seven conversations, turning positive. Bounce rate held at 0.8% for the run.

Three clients signed with One2 Agency out of that pipeline, and in SEO, a signed client rarely means a single invoice — it means a retainer, the kind of engagement that runs six months, a year, sometimes longer, because ranking work doesn't show its full return in a single sprint. For an agency built around exactly that model, three long-term retainers from one campaign is the number that actually matters, more than any single month's invoice ever could. The next sprint planning had a new line item in it: onboarding.