Sweden’s Best SEO – The Goal

When I started Brath, there were several paths to take, and I had to make choices that I believe many companies face before opening their doors. For me, the decision was to provide the highest-quality search engine optimization available in Sweden. Let me explain why I chose that goal.

Swedish SEO has long suffered from low prices and squeezed budgets. The average Swedish SEO buyer compares prices, and everything began with extremely cheap services in the mid-2000s. Of course, lower prices and competition are generally good and healthy for any industry. But with SEO, there’s a slight problem: as price goes down, either risk goes up—or results disappear.

Cost, risk, and results form a triangle you constantly have to balance. Everyone tries to find their own sweet spot, but these three factors are present in every SEO project. In my experience, there were basically two types of companies in Sweden (internationally, it looked very different). Either they leaned toward low cost and good results, but with very high risk. Or they went for low cost and low risk—at the expense of actual results. In my view, no one had truly chosen the corner with low risk and strong results.

They positioned themselves in the bottom-left or bottom-right corners of that triangle. Of course, it’s a sliding scale, but in my opinion, no one had placed themselves in the top corner—where solid results meet low risk. Most tried to fix the third variable too (as did we), but it was easy to map out our competitors on such a graph.

My goal became clear: strong, sustainable results with low risk. Long-term SEO that delivers a steady stream of customers for our clients—and I felt we were alone in that pursuit. That we also invested heavily early on to bring down our costs and make this model viable is another story (we lost money on quite a few clients).

This became my definition of the best SEO. Others might define it differently—maybe cheapest is best in their eyes—but this was the path I chose. And that goal is what shaped the SEO model we use today—a model that comes with serious obligations.

An SEO Model That Demands Accountability

Because our goal at Brath is what it is, it places certain demands on us—demands that others in the industry may not feel as strongly. One of the most important of those demands is continuous development. Google evolves, our clients’ markets evolve, and our competitors evolve. If we want to remain comfortably in our chosen corner, convinced we deliver truly excellent SEO (as defined above), we need to constantly improve.

That means we invest heavily in refining our model. Over the past few years, we’ve spent 15–20% of our revenue on product development—depending on how you calculate. Among other things, we’ve had two full-time people over the past year (with a few minor side tasks) dedicated solely to improving our SEO model.

For the company, that obviously costs a lot of money, and sometimes we do feel the pinch. But I, and we, are 100% convinced it’s worth it—for us and for our clients. If you share our definition of what “the best” means, I’m confident you’d do the same if it were your company.

The Future of the SEO Industry

In the long term, I genuinely hope more of our competitors do the same analysis we’ve done. We sometimes jokingly say you can recognize the other two corners of the triangle by either the number of PowerPoint slides in the “low price, low risk” corner—or the number of link directories in the “low price, strong results” corner.

Personally, I believe it’s bad for Swedish SEO buyers to be pushed into either of those two corners. And in the long run, it’s bad for the entire SEO industry. If more of our competitors chose to compete in our corner, not only would it push us to become even better—it could actually help evolve the whole field.

So, dear competitors: come join us in this corner. Or better yet, let’s see the triangle as a pyramid—and meet at the top, where we can drive the industry forward together.