Proposal · In response to the K3 Statement of Work

SEO and AI search visibility for KBS Corporate and Knightsbridge

Prepared forK3 Advisory Group · Growth Operations
Prepared byCarl Hendy · AUDITS.COM
Date17 August 2026
KBS Corporate Knightsbridge

Your brief asks for a partner who can quickly build an understanding of your sector, competitive landscape and current positioning. We analysed both websites before writing this proposal. Section 01 sets out what we found.

Who we are

AUDITS.COM

A search and growth partner for brands, investors and in-house teams, focused on long-term, scalable organic growth where generic SEO falls short and commercial context matters most.

Track record

  • 20+ years in SEO and ecommerce. Founded and exited a B Corp, award-winning agency, and built and sold multiple online brands
  • Advises boards, venture capital and private equity on organic strategy, due diligence and the commercial value of search
  • Professional and financial services, multi-brand groups and lead-generation businesses at scale
  • Senior-led delivery. The work is carried out by the named consultants
Our own platforms
Salience

AI search visibility measurement

We built and run Salience, which tracks how brands appear across AI answer engines: visibility, share of voice, sentiment, which prompts a brand wins and loses, and which sources the models cite when they answer.

Relevance here: Objectives 1 and 2 of your SOW require an AI citation baseline and ongoing share-of-voice measurement. That is what this platform does, and it is included rather than bought in.

LogLens

Log file and crawler analysis

We built and run LogLens, which analyses server logs to show how search engine and AI crawlers actually behave on a site: what gets crawled, how often, what is ignored, and where crawl budget is wasted.

Relevance here: Section 3.1 of your SOW asks for log-file analysis and crawl budget review, including AI crawler accessibility. This is the tooling that produces it.

Your consultants

Selected clients

Eventbrite Groupon BlackRock Virgin Aviva IG British Airways John Lewis Citation

Includes lead generation programmes for Citation and Eventbrite, both of which depend on organic search for qualified enquiry volume.

01 · What we found

Seven findings from your existing data

All figures are from Google Search Console for the 12 months to 15 August 2026, accessed through our existing SEO Gets licence, together with live AI search and authority data. No client input was required to produce them.

Finding 01 · The topline

KBS Corporate carries three times the organic traffic of Knightsbridge

12 months to 15 Aug 2026KBS CorporateKnightsbridge
Organic clicks68,00822,840
Impressions2,698,423578,109
Click-through rate2.52%3.95%
Average position14.8918.58
Domain Rating (Ahrefs)2812
Live referring domains783571

Both sites have an average position between 14 and 19, which places them on the second page of Google. There is substantial impression volume across both sites, and little of it sits in a position that earns a click.

Finding 02 · Brand dependency

93% of Knightsbridge's identified search traffic is its own brand name

Of the queries Search Console identifies, 93.3% of Knightsbridge clicks come from searches for the Knightsbridge name. The equivalent figure for KBS Corporate is 55.6%.

Brand and non-brand share of clicks
Share of clicks from queries Search Console identifies · 12 months to 15 Aug 2026
Brand Non-brand
Knightsbridge12,512 identified clicks
93.3% brand
KBS Corporate22,809 identified clicks
55.6% brand
44.4% non-brand

Knightsbridge recorded 844 non-brand clicks in the 12 months, from 243,933 impressions. That is a click-through rate of 0.35% at an average position of 27. In the last three months, 4,794 of its 4,924 non-brand queries produced no clicks.

Both sites already receive 3.3 million impressions between them, at positions that generate few clicks. Improving the position of existing impressions is a shorter route to lead volume than generating additional demand.
Finding 03 · Traffic concentration

Over half of Knightsbridge clicks land on a single page

The Knightsbridge homepage accounts for 55.5% of page-attributed clicks, rising to 61.2% when a duplicate tracking-parameter version of the same page is included. The top five pages account for 73.6%. On KBS Corporate the homepage accounts for 21.1% and the top five for 34.2%.

Share of clicks held by the top pages
Cumulative share of page-attributed clicks · 12 months to 15 Aug 2026
Knightsbridge KBS Corporate

This distribution indicates that the commercial service pages below the homepage are not ranking independently. Those pages are where buying intent sits.

Finding 04 · AI search

Neither brand is recommended when a buyer asks AI who to appoint

We put the core buying question to ChatGPT with web search enabled, and retrieved Google's AI Overview for the main commercial term. Both results are reproduced below.

OpenAI ChatGPT · web search enabled · United Kingdom

"Who are the best business brokers or M&A advisors in the UK to sell my business with profits around £500k?"

The six firms it recommended:

dns Corporate AdvisoryChurchfield Business BrokersHornblower Business BrokersEntrepreneurs HubDexterity PartnersArcher Fleming
Neither KBS Corporate nor Knightsbridge was named. £500k of profit falls within KBS Corporate's stated £300k to £2m range.
Google Google AI Overview · "sell my business uk" · United Kingdom

An AI Overview occupies the first result slot, placing the first organic listing at position two. The sources cited were:

RedditFederation of Small BusinessesXeroGOV.UKNorth Norfolk District CouncilBusinessesForSale.comSelling My Business
Neither KBS Corporate nor Knightsbridge was cited. The cited sources include a district council and a Reddit thread.

We repeated the exercise across six buying questions covering both brands' segments. The results are consistent.

Question askedWho the model namedK3 brand cited
Best UK brokers to sell a business, ~£500k profit (KBS segment)dns Corporate Advisory, Churchfield, Hornblower, Entrepreneurs Hub, Dexterity Partners, Archer FlemingNo
Sell a small business, turnover under £1m, ~£150k profit (Knightsbridge segment)County Business Sales, Abercorn, Transworld, Hornblower, Ernest WilsonNo
Selling to an Employee Ownership Trust, and who advisesScottish Enterprise, Thorntons, Armstrong Watson, Azets, Grant ThorntonNo
How to value a UK business before selling, and who should do itEvelyn Partners, Evolve Corporate Finance, Cattaneo, Hyde HouseNo
Google AI Overview: "sell my business uk"Reddit, FSB, Xero, GOV.UK, North Norfolk District Council, BusinessesForSale.comNo
Buying an established UK business, best brokers and listingsBusinessesForSale.com, Daltons, Rightbiz, Knightsbridge (ranked 4th), Christie & Co, Hilton SmytheYes
The split is consistent. Knightsbridge is cited on the buy-side, where ChatGPT recommended it fourth and quoted its 1,642 listings and 73,000 registered buyers directly from the site. Across all five sell-side questions, neither brand appeared. Sell-side mandates are the revenue-generating side of the business.

The buy-side citation is instructive. That page states its numbers in plain, extractable text, so the model was able to read them, quote them and rank the brand on them. The sell-side pages do not provide equivalent material.

Note: ChatGPT localises these answers, and in testing it returned adviser shortlists for South Wales, Glasgow and Birmingham. Neither brand appeared in any of those regional answer sets.

An important distinction. This finding is about adviser recommendations, where a model is asked who to appoint. It is not true that KBS Corporate is absent from AI results generally. Ahrefs shows it cited in 16 Google AI Overviews, several of them sell-side. Finding 05 covers what that is currently worth.
Finding 05 · What already works

KBS Corporate has real non-brand rankings, and they are not being replicated

One KBS Corporate page, /business-brokers/, ranks in the top ten for nine competitive commercial terms, several of them in the top three, against keyword difficulty scores of 24 to 51. This is the strongest asset either site has.

KeywordPositionVolumeDifficultyEst. traffic
business broker150044264
business sale broker22004232
broker business for sale21502425
business brokerage31503415
business brokers uk42005145
business sales broker41504219
best business brokers uk6150278
business brokers74005120

Ahrefs, United Kingdom, August 2026. A second page, /guide-to-selling-a-limited-company/, holds a further seven top-ten non-brand positions.

This matters more than any single ranking. It shows the domain can compete for commercial sell-side terms at this authority level. The problem is that the pattern stops there. Knightsbridge, by contrast, has only two genuine non-brand top-ten rankings across the whole site, "accounting firms for sale" and "commercial cleaning business for sale", and both are buy-side.

The counter-example

KBS Corporate is cited at position one in the Google AI Overview for eot disadvantages and employee ownership trust pros and cons, each around 200 searches a month. Both return an estimated zero traffic. Search Console shows the same page sitting at organic positions 19 to 42 for the wider EOT question set.

Query (KBS Corporate, last 3 months)ImpressionsClicksOrganic position
employee ownership trust explained1,101019.1
what is an employee ownership trust985041.9
employee ownership trust pros and cons947019.7
what is an eot920051.3
employee ownership trust911033.5
employee ownership trust disadvantages816018.1
eot explained592014.8

The page is good enough for Google to quote in an AI Overview, and not visible enough in the organic results beneath it to earn a click. Seven queries, 6,272 impressions and no clicks over three months, on a topic Google itself names as one of three main exit routes for a UK business owner. Across the site, 72 non-brand queries sit in positions 5 to 20 with over 300 impressions each, producing 42,214 impressions and 182 clicks in total.

This is the pattern the programme is designed to address: existing assets that are close to working, on decision-stage queries, held back by authority and on-page structure rather than by a lack of content.

Finding 06 · Technical

The same content is indexed on multiple URLs

Search Console data alone shows the same content live on more than one URL on both sites, which splits authority between the versions:

Duplicate pairClicksAvg. position
knightsbridgeplc.com/meet-the-team8248.9
knightsbridgeplc.com/about/meet-the-team/6617.8
knightsbridgeplc.com/selling-a-business828.2
knightsbridgeplc.com/selling-a-business/ (trailing slash)8319.9
kbscorporate.com/completed-deals/…grahams-machinery…1748.1
kbscorporate.com/resources/completed-deals/…grahams-machinery…1674.9

A page indexed twice splits its authority and leaves Google to select which version to rank.

The /selling-a-business pair shows the effect: two versions of one commercial page, one at position 8.2 and one at 19.9. The pattern is systematic rather than isolated. A CMS migration will either resolve it or carry it forward.

Finding 07 · Group overlap

Both brands target the same head terms, and neither ranks for them

KBS Corporate and Knightsbridge are separated commercially by deal size, but they compete for an overlapping category vocabulary in search. Neither currently ranks well for it.

QueryKBS CorporateKnightsbridge
business brokers uk14.841.4
selling a business40.956.6
how to sell a business35.261.5
business broker9.237.5

Average position, last three months. Lower is better.

Your Statement of Work raises the same question in relation to the K3 Deal Advisory website. We would want to answer it in Discovery, before either site invests in the same content clusters: which brand targets which intent, split by deal size.

Note on method. Search Console anonymises a proportion of queries, so brand and non-brand shares are calculated across identified queries only, being 33.5% of KBS Corporate clicks and 54.8% of Knightsbridge clicks. Historical data in this Search Console view begins 2 April 2025, so no like-for-like year-on-year comparison is available. Establishing a clean baseline is the first Discovery deliverable.

02 · Scope

Delivered against your three workstreams

The structure below maps to Sections 3.1, 3.2, 3.3 and 4 of your Statement of Work, applied across both KBS Corporate and Knightsbridge.

Workstream 1 · SOW 3.1

Technical SEO audit and roadmap

Full technical audit of both sites, producing one prioritised, RAG-rated roadmap with owners, dependencies and target dates.

    Workstream 2 · SOW 3.2

    Information architecture and content clusters

    IA redesign and pillar-and-cluster build around commercial intent, structured for both classical ranking and generative synthesis.

      Cross-cutting · SOW 3.3

      Digital PR: we recommend this sits outside the search brief

      We can deliver everything else in your Statement of Work. Digital PR is the exception, and we would rather flag that at this stage than claim it.

        Advisory · SOW 4

        AI-CMS and Contentful migration

        Not a core deliverable. Recommendations will be written to remain valid after a move to headless, and to resolve the URL duplication in Finding 06 rather than carry it forward.

          Also covered
          On links. Authority is the main constraint on both sites, so links still matter. We acquire them directly through paid placement on top-tier publications, at each publication's own rate, quoted separately from the fees below. This is a link acquisition service for SEO and AI visibility purposes, which is a narrower activity than a PR programme.
          Out of scope, as per your SOW. Full site rebuild, CMS migration execution and core re-platforming remain with your development team. We provide specification, QA and SEO governance of that work, including migration risk review, rather than delivering the build.
          03 · Platform direction

          On the move from WordPress to Contentful

          You have identified a possible move to headless Contentful as a future direction rather than a deliverable of this engagement. This is an area we specialise in. We handle enterprise migrations and re-platforming, and we are also brought in to diagnose and fix migrations that have gone wrong. Carl has spoken and written on the subject at length over a number of years.

          Background listening: Carl on enterprise re-platforming and SEO, Inside Commerce podcast.
          insidecommerce.fm/enterprise-replatforming-seo-with-carl-hendy

          A large number of organisations are currently moving WordPress installations to headless solutions. It can be done well, but it needs to be done with care, and every migration carries trade-offs that should be understood before the decision is taken rather than after. Re-platforming projects commonly lose organic revenue when the design is migrated and the search equity is not.

          There are three consequences during this engagement. The IA will be expressed as a content model, covering entry types, fields and relationships, so it can be implemented in Contentful directly rather than retrofitted. Each technical recommendation will be marked as either a fix for the current WordPress site or a specification for the new platform. The URL duplication in Finding 06 will be resolved within the migration mapping.

          If the Contentful decision is confirmed during the engagement, we would recommend adding a migration risk and QA workstream, covering pre-migration crawl baseline, redirect mapping, staging validation and post-launch monitoring. We would scope this separately once the timeline is set.
          04 · Investment

          Two ways to run the programme

          Your covering note refers to this as a two-month project. Having looked at the data, we do not think the commercial objective, which is lead volume from organic search, is achievable in two months across two websites. The findings in Section 01 are the reason: average positions of 15 to 19, and Domain Ratings of 28 and 12, are not two-month problems. Both options below are longer than that, and we would rather set it out now than agree to a timescale we do not believe in.

          Option 1 delivers the programme. Option 2 delivers the same programme and then runs it for a further nine months. Option 1 costs less in total because a three-month engagement carries far less programme management, reporting and ongoing support than a twelve-month one, and because it is committed in a single block. Option 2 costs more because you have us engaged across the year rather than handing over at month three, which is the right choice if what you want is a long-term partner on the account.

          You have said you want to move quickly, and a Contentful decision is in prospect, so our recommendation is Option 1.

          Recommended Option 1 · Front-loaded

          Three-month intensive

          Both websites, full programme delivered and handed over
          £60,000 / month
          £180,000 over three months
          • Audit, roadmap, IA, cluster plan and priority content, all delivered
          • Significantly more resource running concurrently
          • Specification complete and handed over before a Contentful build starts
          • Roadmap in your developers' hands inside the first quarter
          • No twelve-month commitment. Continue on a retainer only if you want to
          • Invoiced monthly in advance, three payments in total
          Requires concentrated client time within the quarter, covering stakeholder access, developer capacity and content sign-off. Ends at month three with a handover, rather than an ongoing commitment.
          Option 2 · Progressive

          Twelve-month programme

          Option 1, plus nine further months of execution
          £18,000 / month
          £216,000 over twelve months
          • Everything in Option 1, delivered over a longer period
          • Link acquisition planned and managed across the full period
          • Content clusters built, published and revised against performance
          • Monthly reporting against the lead taxonomy, quarterly steering
          • Lower monthly cost, at £36,000 more in total for the extra nine months
          • Break clause at month six on 30 days' notice
          Spreads the investment and the client-side workload, and gives you a partner on the account for the full year rather than a handover at month three. The roadmap, IA and content clusters arrive later than in Option 1.
          Commercial terms
          Invoicing

          Monthly, in advance

          Fees are invoiced up front at the start of each month, on 30-day terms. Work begins once the first invoice is settled and access has been granted. Link acquisition is invoiced separately as placements are confirmed.

          Commitment

          Six-month break clause on Option 2

          The twelve-month programme carries a break clause at month six, exercisable on 30 days' written notice. If the break is not exercised, the agreement continues for the full twelve months. Option 1 is a fixed three-month engagement with no ongoing commitment.

          If these numbers are not in your range, say so. They are indicative and deliberately sent early, so that neither side spends time on a scope that was never going to be funded. Three ways the figure moves, if it needs to:
          One website instead of two. Roughly 60% of the quoted fee, not 50%, as the group-level and shared technical work does not halve. KBS Corporate carries three times the traffic, so it is the one to start with.
          Audit and roadmap only. Workstream 1 plus the IA blueprint, without the content build. A defined piece of work at a materially lower cost, which leaves your team to implement.
          Tell us the budget. If you have a figure in mind, we will tell you honestly what it does and does not buy, and whether we think it is worth doing at that level.

          Both options are quoted for the two websites named in the Statement of Work. Extension to further K3 trading subsidiaries can be priced on the same per-site basis, preserving the group-wide standards for tracking, tagging and reporting taxonomy set out in Section 1. Link acquisition is quoted separately and priced per publication, typically in the hundreds to low thousands per placement depending on the title. All fees exclude VAT and third-party tooling.

          05 · Deliverables

          How the work arrives

          Every recommendation is delivered in the same five-part structure, formatted for both the working team and steering committee reporting. Provided as a secure HTML report or Google Docs, whichever your teams prefer.

          01

          What the issue or opportunity is

          02

          Why it matters commercially

          03

          The supporting data and evidence

          04

          How we recommend resolving it

          05

          Priority, effort and expected impact

          Standing deliverables across the programme are the prioritised technical roadmap, the IA blueprint and cluster plan with page-level briefs, the on-page optimisation checklist, the editorial governance model including the approval workflow for AI-assisted content required by Section 9.3, and the KPI tracker covering rankings, AI citation share, referring domain quality and organic-attributed leads. Where implementation sits with your developers, we provide the specification and QA the result.

          Happy to talk this through

          The costs above are indicative and sent early on purpose, to establish whether we are broadly aligned before either side puts more time in. If they are roughly right, we would suggest a call with the wider team to work through the findings and agree priorities. If they are not, tell us the number you had in mind and we will be straight with you about what it buys.

          Reply to Carl