One business per industry, per market. No exceptions.

Most agencies will happily work with two competitors in the same market, sometimes without either one knowing about the other. It's not usually malicious — it's just a natural result of needing enough clients to run the business, and treating each account as a separate transaction rather than asking whether taking it creates a conflict with someone they already serve. We decided early on not to run the business that way, and the policy has held for 13 years without an exception.

The conflict this actually solves

Search-based marketing has a structural problem that a lot of client work quietly ignores: for most of what we do, there are a limited number of good outcomes to go around. There are three spots in the map pack. There's one first organic position for a given search term in a given city. There's a finite amount of budget efficiency in a paid search auction before cost-per-click starts climbing because two advertisers are bidding against each other for the same clicks. If we're doing SEO for two plumbers in the same city, one of them structurally has to lose ground for the other to gain it — we'd be competing against our own work, and one client's success would come directly out of the other's campaign.

That's a different problem from most professional services. An accountant can serve two competing businesses without either one's books affecting the other's. A marketing agency doing local search or paid media for direct competitors can't make the same claim, because the channels themselves are zero-sum in the specific ways that matter. Once we recognized that, taking on both sides wasn't a service we could offer honestly — it was a compromise we'd be quietly wallpapering over.

How we define "industry"

We group industries the way we already organize this site — into the sections you'll see in the Industries menu, from exteriors and structural trades through healthcare, professional services and specialist categories like franchise systems. Two businesses count as the same industry if they're genuinely competing for the same customer intent, not just adjacent categories that happen to share a word. A roofer and a siding contractor might both show up in a "home exteriors" search, but they're usually not fighting for the identical customer at the identical moment, so we treat them as separate industries rather than lumping every exterior trade into one exclusivity zone. Where a genuine judgment call exists, we tell you our reasoning up front rather than deciding quietly and letting you find out later.

How we define "market"

This is the piece that actually varies the most, because "market" means something different depending on how the underlying business competes for customers.

For a business that depends on local or service-area search — most trades, most healthcare practices, most local professional services — the market is roughly the area the business actually serves: a metro area, a county, or a defined service radius. A plumber in Austin and a plumber in Denver aren't competing for the same call, so both can be clients without any conflict. A franchise system or a multi-location brand gets scoped to wherever its locations actually are, which sometimes means the exclusivity zone is a specific set of cities rather than a single metro.

For a business whose reach is inherently national — ecommerce brands, some professional services, and channels like GEO and AEO that are fundamentally about being the name an AI assistant cites regardless of the searcher's location — the market is effectively the whole country. In those categories we only take one client, full stop, because there's no smaller geographic boundary that actually reflects how the competition works.

We'd rather over-explain this on a call than leave it as a vague promise. If there's a genuine edge case — a regional brand expanding into a new state, for instance — we work out the boundary with you directly rather than applying a rule that doesn't fit the actual business.

What this costs us, and why we hold it anyway

This policy has turned away real revenue. There have been markets where a second, larger business in the same industry called after we'd already taken on a smaller one, and we said no to the bigger account on principle. That's an easy trade to describe and a genuinely hard one to make in the moment, and we've made it consistently because the alternative — quietly taking both and hoping neither noticed, or noticed and didn't mind — isn't a business we wanted to run.

It also means we can't scale the way an agency without this constraint can. Every market we enter closes that industry to every other business in it, which caps how many clients we can ever take on in total. We've made peace with that ceiling. It's the direct cost of the promise, not an accident of being small — we'd hold this policy even if we had the staff to serve twenty competitors in a city at once, because the conflict doesn't disappear with headcount.

This isn't how most of the industry works

Non-compete and exclusivity clauses are common in fields like advertising and management consulting, where a firm working both sides of a rivalry has always been recognized as a conflict worth avoiding in writing. Digital marketing largely skipped that norm, partly because the industry grew fast enough that treating every client as a one-off transaction was simpler than tracking who competes with whom, and partly because most agencies genuinely need the volume. We think the norm was right in the fields that kept it, and we don't think search marketing is different enough to justify dropping it.

That's also why we don't advertise this as a premium feature or price it as an add-on. It's a precondition for doing the work honestly, not a perk we sell separately, and treating it as a line item would suggest it's negotiable. It isn't.

What happens when you call

If your industry and market are open, we run the normal assessment and nothing about the process changes. If they're taken, we tell you immediately — before an assessment, before any paperwork — because there's no honest reason to let you spend a week waiting on a plan we already know we can't deliver. We'll also tell you plainly if a market opens up later, if you'd like us to keep your details on file, though we won't chase you down to sell it; that call is yours to make.