Read this bit first, because it changes how you should read everything else in this category. SerpInsight is a new business. We have not been running campaigns for years, and we're not going to dress up hypotheticals as client results to look like we have. Nothing in this category is a client case study, and none of the numbers in these posts are measured outcomes from work we've delivered.
What these are instead: worked reasoning. Each post takes a realistic situation, states the assumptions openly, and walks through how we'd actually think about it — what we'd look at first, what we'd rule out, what the decision points are, and where the reasoning could be wrong. The numbers in them are illustrative and labelled as such. The method behind them is real, and it's the same method we apply to paid work.
That's a deliberate trade. A fabricated case study with a tidy graph would convert better than an honest walkthrough. It would also be worthless to you, because you'd have no way to check any of it, and you'd learn nothing you could apply to your own site. Reasoning you can follow and disagree with is more useful than a result you can only take on faith.
Start with the link insertion walkthrough, which follows a hypothetical placement from prospecting through vetting to anchor selection and shows the reasoning at each stage. Diagnosing a page that lost rankings is the most practically useful of the three, because it's a diagnostic order of operations you can run on a real URL today. Building a local link plan is a planning exercise for a service business in a single city.
When we have client results we're permitted to publish — with the client's agreement, real data, and the caveats attached — they'll be published here, clearly marked as measured results and separated from the reasoning walkthroughs. Until then, this category is what it says it is.