Three structural choices that put us in a different category than agencies running the same five SEO playbooks they ran in 2019. We work in one vertical, we get paid on one metric, and we ship work that compounds for months.
Every customer is an accredited higher education institution. Every domain config, every audience archetype, every compliance rule, every peer cluster — built from one vertical's depth.
Generalist agencies optimize across hospitals, law firms, SMB, and HE in the same week. They miss the things that matter here: Title IV claim rules, FERPA-adjacent language, accreditor scrutiny patterns, transfer-credit signals, audience archetype distinctions between adult-completion and traditional first-year. Our compliance validator catches them before content ships. Theirs doesn't exist.
9 audience archetypes from returner through grad-program prospect, each with intent libraries, schema priorities, and behavioral notes.
Title IV, FERPA, accreditor language. Every output runs through the validator. Generalists ship copy that gets your institution sanctioned.
10 cluster archetypes — community-college, regional-private, flagship-public, online-adult, and others. Benchmarks by cluster, not by industry.
Floor + Outcome Escalator pricing. You pay the floor; if we move your Citation Rate Lift, the escalator captures upside. Cap = floor + 50%. 30-day satisfaction guarantee. No setup fees.
Most agencies bill on activity — pieces shipped, hours logged, calls held. We bill on the only metric that matters: are AI engines citing your school more often than they did before we started? Quarterly Business Reviews refactor the contract based on the answer. The lock path freezes your current rate when you've earned the win; the floor protects you when we haven't.
$499 / $1,499 / $3,499 by tier. The minimum we get paid, full stop. If CRL doesn't move, the escalator stays at floor.
Three rungs based on CRL movement. Moves up at QBRs only — never silently. You see it coming a quarter ahead.
Floor + 50%. The most you'll pay regardless of how high CRL goes. You capture the rest of the upside on your enrollment side.
Single-shot audits are commodity. Single-month engagements don't move CRL. Higher ed authority is built ladder-by-ladder over six months, twelve months, three years — and we tag every piece to the queries it targets so attribution is unambiguous.
Your 75-query set is locked at signup. Every piece of content, every schema artifact, every recommendation maps back to specific queries in that set. Monthly re-scans attribute the lift. Per-piece learnings flow into per-domain learnings flow into the platform's meta layer. The engagement compounds because the work compounds.
50% your picks, 50% Phil-approved. Locked at signup. Baseline scored against this exact set.
Every content piece tagged with its target queries. Monthly re-scans show which pieces moved which queries.
Wins promote into the Positioning Archetypes Library. Year 2, we know how AI engines categorize HE better than anyone in the market.