One market. One client. No divided loyalty.

SEO is not like most services. There is only one first position on Google. If we get one client to the top for a search term, a competing client cannot also be there. An agency working for both sides is being paid twice to compete against itself — and one of those clients is going to lose.

Most agencies don’t mention this. We’d rather put it in writing.

Our principle

When we accept an SEO client, we will not provide SEO services to a direct competitor targeting the same services, search terms and market. We work with one client per competing market, so our research, strategy and effort stay fully committed to them.

What counts as a direct competitor

We define it by keyword overlap, not just geography — because online services no longer stop at city limits. A business is a direct competitor if it targets the same services and the same search terms in the same market, whether that market is a town, a state, or nationwide online.

So we could work with:

A GP clinic in Ipoh and a dietitian practice in Kuala Lumpur — different services entirely.
A physiotherapy centre and a dental clinic in the same city — same industry, different searches, different patients.
Two retailers selling to genuinely separate markets with no shared target keywords.

We would not take on:

Two dietitian clinics both chasing “dietitian Kuala Lumpur”.
A Penang dietitian and a KL dietitian if both offer nationwide online consultations — different cities, but they compete for the same national searches. This is exactly the case where geography-only rules quietly fail, so we test the keywords instead.
Two contractors competing for the same service in the same state.

The scope, stated plainly

This applies to SEO only. Website design, e-commerce builds and care plans are not exclusive — building a website for another business in your industry does not affect your rankings, so it would be false to charge you for a restriction that protects nothing.
It lasts for your whole engagement, plus 3 months afterwards. If you leave, we won’t take your direct competitor for three months. Long enough to matter, short enough that we will genuinely honour it.
We keep a written market register — service, market and target keywords for every SEO client. When an enquiry comes in, we check it before quoting. If there’s a conflict, we tell the enquirer we’re unavailable, without naming who holds the slot.

What this costs us — and why we do it anyway

This rule turns away good business. Healthcare is our strongest area, so it’s precisely where we have to decline most often. We accept that, because the alternative is worse: quietly taking both sides, splitting our research between competitors, and letting a client believe they have our full attention when they don’t.

Doctors, lawyers and accountants decline work over conflicts of interest as a matter of course. SEO should be no different.

What it means for you

If your market is open, you can hold it. If it isn’t, we’ll say so straight away rather than take your money and quietly compete against ourselves — and we’ll point you to what we can still help with.

Message us on WhatsApp with your service and location and we’ll tell you honestly whether your market is available. See SEO pricing for what an engagement looks like.

Let's build a website that works as hard as you do.