Growth Forensics:
we diagnose, build, fix, and lead organic growth for B2B SaaS companies
In The New Era of Search
For Startups ranging from Seed through Series E.
What is Growth Forensics?
We are an organic growth practice for B2B SaaS companies where pipeline and revenue are primary goals. We diagnose, build, fix, and lead organic growth engines built for the way search works today: conversational, AI-mediated, and intent-driven.
Every engagement starts with a structural diagnosis. No build, fix, or leadership engagement produces the right results without first understanding what the engine actually requires. The diagnosis is the foundation.
– For companies building the organic growth engine for the first time, we build the infrastructure from the correct structural foundations before significant budget is committed.
– At startups where the engine exists but is underperforming, we identify the specific binding constraint and lead the fix.
– For companies that need ongoing strategic leadership, we act as fractional organic growth leads until the team can own the function independently.
The diagnostic methodology we implement is all our engagements is Organic Growth Diagnostics. It is a discipline we built from scratch. It is not a new way to do SEO or a more comprehensive audit. It is a different type of work entirely: a structured investigation of the organic growth engine designed to find the specific constraint that is preventing the whole engine from working.
What we do and what we don't
Working with Growth Forensics
Every engagement starts with a diagnostic. The diagnostic is complete and standalone; what comes after it depends on what the engine requires and the role you want Growth Forensics to play in what follows.
Pricing is set in USD and defined per engagement. There are no predefined packages because the scope is determined by what the diagnostic finds. Costs are discussed during the scoping call, once the current state of the engine is understood.
We work with Venture Capital firms and investors
For investors and VC firms with portfolio companies for which organic growth is a strong driver of pipeline and revenue.
We provide a specialist resource that operates differently from the agencies and consultants your portfolio companies already have access to.
Our main job is to diagnose what is structurally preventing portfolio companies from producing commercial outcomes from organic growth.
We build organic growth engines for companies about to make a significant organic investment for the first time.
In addition, we fix structural constraints that agencies have been unable to identify, and lead the organic growth function as a fractional practice where the internal team does not yet have the senior depth to run it correctly.
Every engagement is accountable to one metric: whether organic growth is producing pipeline and revenue for the portfolio company.
Our proprietary diagnostic framework
What makes Growth Forensics unique is its proprietary diagnostic framework
The diagnostic methodology is built on a ten-component framework we developed to model how organic growth systems work and fail. We call it the Organic Growth Engine.
Each component represents a distinct capability that a company needs to grow organically at scale. The components are interdependent: each one depends on the ones before it. When any component is failing, it limits the performance of every component that follows. The failing component is the constraint.
Finding it is the diagnosis.
We produce a digital dossier, not a recommendation list
The output of a Growth Forensics engagement is a digital dossier.
Not a report. Not a slide deck. Not a list of 200 technical issues ranked by some formula. A dossier is a private, persistent digital workspace that contains the full structural diagnosis of your organic growth engine: which components are functioning, which are fragile, which are actively blocking growth, and in what exact sequence the constraints must be addressed.
It is built from your own data. Google Search Console, Google Analytics, your content estate, your technical infrastructure, your brand presence. The findings are grounded in evidence from your systems, not in our opinion about industry best practice.
A founder who has worked with agencies and consultants and still cannot explain why organic is underdelivering has never received a structural diagnosis. That is what the dossier contains.
We highly recommend you take a look at the full framework breakdown and how it could diagnose your company’s organic growth engine health.
Six common organic growth engine failure patterns
Organic growth engines do not fail randomly. They fail in recognisable patterns: combinations of component failures that produce a specific commercial symptom. Most companies experiencing chronic organic underperformance will recognise themselves in at least one of these.
Why this is structurally different from what you have may already tried
Agencies and consultants are not the problem. The type of work they are designed to do is the problem.
Every approach to organic growth that exists today starts with a component: fix the technical issues, produce the content, build the links, improve the rankings. These are legitimate activities. But they are all answers to a question that has not been asked yet: which component is actually the constraint?
When you fix the wrong component first, the results are marginal at best and invisible at worst. When you fix the right component, in the right sequence, the results compound. The difference between those two outcomes is not effort or quality of execution. It is whether a structural diagnosis preceded the intervention.
Growth Forensics starts with the diagnosis. Then it builds, fixes, or leads, depending on what the engine requires. That sequence is what makes the work structurally different from every other approach to organic growth.
Reviews From Founders and Growth Leads
Strategic, hands-on, and deeply thoughtful about what drives sustainable growth, he’s helped shape our SEO efforts and impact across key markets like Colombia, Mexico, Argentina, and Brazil. He’s great at driving projects forward with country teams and consistently shows up with clarity, focus, and follow-through.
Beyond his day-to-day, Angel regularly takes initiative to lead broader strategic work — and never shies away from a challenge. It’s been an absolute pleasure working with him.
All these reviews are verifiable on LinkedIn.
Questions & answers
Section 1: Growth Forensics and how it works
1. What does Growth Forensics actually do?
Growth Forensics is an organic growth practice for B2B SaaS companies where organic is a primary acquisition channel. The practice does four things: it diagnoses the structural constraints preventing the engine from producing commercial outcomes, builds organic growth engines from the correct structural foundations for companies investing in organic for the first time, fixes the specific constraints identified in a diagnosis, and leads the organic growth function as a fractional practice where internal capacity does not yet exist.
Every engagement starts with a structural diagnosis. Not because the diagnostic is the only thing Growth Forensics does, but because no build, fix, or leadership engagement produces the right results without first understanding what the engine requires. The diagnosis is the foundation. What follows depends on what it finds.
The diagnostic methodology is Organic Growth Diagnostics, a discipline Growth Forensics invented. It assesses the organic growth engine as a complete system of ten interdependent components, identifies the specific binding constraint, and produces the correct intervention sequence. It did not exist before Growth Forensics named it.
2. How is this different from an SEO agency?
The difference is structural, not stylistic.
An SEO agency is designed to execute components of an organic programme: producing content, building links, fixing technical issues, improving rankings. These are legitimate activities. But they are all answers to a question that has not yet been asked: which component is actually the binding constraint? An agency optimises components. Growth Forensics diagnoses the system.
The practical consequence: when the wrong component is optimised first, the results are marginal regardless of execution quality. Traffic can grow while pipeline stays flat. Rankings can improve while revenue stays flat. That gap almost always means the wrong constraint is being addressed. The diagnostic identifies the right one.
Growth Forensics also does execute after the diagnosis. Within the Engine Build and Fractional Lead engagements, the practice leads content and SEO programme execution, builds infrastructure, and directs internal and external teams. The difference from an agency is that all execution follows a structural diagnosis. Nothing is executed without first understanding what the engine requires.
3. How is this different from an SEO audit?
An SEO audit is typically a technical review: crawl errors, meta data, site speed, indexation. It answers the question: are there technical problems preventing the site from ranking? That is a useful question, but it is not the question most companies with an underperforming organic channel need answered.
The Organic Growth Diagnostic starts from a different question: which structural component of the organic growth engine is the binding constraint on commercial performance, and what is the correct sequence for addressing it? Technical accessibility is one of ten components assessed, and in most cases it is not the constraint. The constraint is almost never a robots.txt issue.
The practical difference: an SEO audit produces a list of things that could be improved. The diagnostic produces a ranked intervention sequence, the specific order in which to address structural gaps so that each fix compounds the one before it. The most common finding in a diagnostic is that Category Presence, whether the company exists in the search results buyers use before they know which vendors to evaluate, is the binding constraint. This is rarely identified in a technical audit because it is not a technical problem. It is an architectural one.
4. Is this just strategy consulting repackaged as organic growth?
It shares one characteristic with strategy consulting: it produces a diagnosis before recommending action. It is structurally different in every other way.
Strategy consulting typically applies established frameworks to a company’s situation and produces recommendations that reflect those frameworks. Growth Forensics runs a defined signal-level assessment of the organic growth engine and produces findings specific to what is actually happening in that engine. Every finding is traceable to a signal. Every recommendation is connected to a measured gap. There is no framework applied from outside, only what the data shows.
The other meaningful difference: Growth Forensics also executes. The diagnostic produces a dossier the team can act on independently. But where the team needs the infrastructure built, the specific constraints fixed, or ongoing senior leadership of the function, Growth Forensics leads that work. The practice is designed to end with a company that does not need it, not to perpetuate the relationship.
5. We already ran an audit with our agency. Why would we need this?
If the prior audit identified the binding constraint in the organic growth engine, produced an intervention sequence, and organic pipeline has materially improved as a result, a diagnostic is not needed right now.
If the audit produced a list of improvements, some of which have been implemented, and organic pipeline has not materially improved despite traffic growing, the audit did not identify the binding constraint. Implementing fixes to non-binding constraints produces marginal results regardless of execution quality. The traffic moving in the right direction while the pipeline does not is one of the clearest signals that the diagnosis was incomplete.
The question to ask about any prior audit is: did it identify which component of the organic growth engine was the binding constraint, and did it explain why fixing that constraint first would unlock the components downstream of it? If not, it was a useful technical review, not a structural diagnosis.
Section 2: Types of engagements and how they work
6. What does the diagnostic produce?
The diagnostic produces the Growth Forensics Dossier: a private, persistent digital workspace containing the full structural diagnosis of the organic growth engine. Not a report, not a slide deck, not a list of 200 technical issues ranked by some formula.
The dossier has four sections. The Engine Health Summary shows all ten components in one view with their states and the one-line finding for each. The Diagnostic Layer contains the full evidence-based findings for each component, written in executive language without SEO jargon. The Intervention Sequence is the prioritised action plan: what to fix, in what order, why fixing it before the next item produces compounding results rather than parallel activity. The Pathway Section describes the options for continuing the work after the diagnostic.
The dossier is built from the company’s own data: Google Search Console, Google Analytics, the content estate, the technical infrastructure, the backlink profile, the brand presence, and AI platform test results. Every finding is grounded in evidence, not in general observations about best practice. A demo dossier for a fictional company is available to evaluate whether the specificity of the output is useful for a specific situation.
7. Can we implement the intervention sequence without hiring Growth Forensics to execute it?
Yes. That is the point of the dossier.
The dossier is written to be used by a competent internal team or a well-briefed agency without further involvement from Growth Forensics. The recommendations are specific enough to brief a specialist, the evidence is documented enough to validate the findings independently, and the intervention sequence is clear enough to use as a project brief.
If the diagnostic finds that the existing agency’s approach is not addressing the binding constraint, the dossier provides the evidence to have that conversation and redirect the work. Engine Build, Organic Growth Fix, and Fractional Lead engagements are available for companies that want Growth Forensics involved in what comes after the diagnostic. They are offered because they produce faster and more predictable results for interventions that are architecturally complex, not because the dossier is incomplete without them.
8. What does the Engine Build engagement produce?
The Engine Build engagement constructs the organic growth infrastructure identified as missing or incorrectly architected in the diagnostic. This typically covers the components in the first two to three steps of the intervention sequence: category landing page architecture, content structure mapped to buying intent, AI visibility programme, positioning documentation, measurement framework.
The scope is defined by the diagnostic findings, not by a predefined package. The engagement ends with fixed deliverables, a formal handover session, and a documented process for the internal team to own ongoing operation. The team leaves the engagement able to run the function independently.
The Engine Build is also available as the entry engagement for companies that have not yet invested seriously in organic but where organic is a primary planned channel. In this case, Growth Forensics runs a pre-build assessment to establish the correct structural foundations before construction begins. Building an organic growth engine without structural clarity first is one of the most common sources of eighteen months of misdirected organic investment in B2B SaaS companies.
9. When is the Organic Growth Fix the right engagement?
The Fix engagement is for companies where the organic infrastructure exists but specific structural constraints are preventing it from performing. The diagnostic identifies those constraints precisely. The Fix resolves them.
The difference from the Engine Build: the Build is for companies where the infrastructure needs to be constructed. The Fix is for companies where the infrastructure exists but is broken or incorrectly configured at a structural level. The distinction is determined by the diagnostic findings, not by the company’s own perception of its situation.
In practice: if the diagnostic finds that category landing page architecture is missing entirely, that is a build. If it finds that authority is not flowing correctly to existing commercial pages because of structural linking issues, that is a fix. Both require the diagnostic first.
10. What does the Fractional Lead engagement involve?
Growth Forensics acts as the company’s head of organic growth on a retained basis. This includes setting strategic direction for the organic programme, prioritising work across the intervention sequence, directing internal team and agency execution, leading content and SEO programme work, running ongoing diagnostic monitoring to catch new constraints before they compound, and tracking commercial outcomes.
The engagement is not a content retainer. The work changes based on what the engine needs each month, not based on a fixed activity plan. All reporting and accountability is oriented toward pipeline and revenue, not traffic or ranking metrics.
The minimum commitment is three months. The engagement is structured to build internal capability over time so the function transfers fully to the team. A Fractional Lead engagement that is still running at 24 months without a clear capability-building plan in place has not succeeded, even if the client is satisfied.
Section 3: Before you commit
11. How much does the diagnostic cost?
The diagnostic is scoped per engagement. There is no fixed price because there is no fixed engine. The scope depends on the size of the content estate, the complexity of the technical infrastructure, whether multiple markets or audience segments are in scope, and the current state of the measurement and data infrastructure.
The scoping call is the only way to give an accurate number. That is not a commercial tactic, it is structurally true. A diagnostic of a 50-page site with a simple content programme is a different engagement from a diagnostic of a 1,000-page site with international presence and a complex agency relationship.
What can be said before the scoping call: the diagnostic investment is typically in the range where it makes commercial sense for companies spending three thousand dollars or more per month on organic growth activities, whether that is content production, an agency, or internal resource. If the organic spend is below that, the diagnostic cost will not be proportionate to the potential improvement. If it is above that, the diagnostic is typically one of the highest-leverage investments available, because it tells you whether the spend is addressing the right constraint.
Engine Build, Fix, and Fractional Lead engagements are scoped separately after the diagnostic findings are clear. Pricing for those engagements is determined by the specific scope of work the diagnostic identifies.
12. How long does the diagnostic take?
Four to six weeks from the point data access is provided. The first phase is data collection and signal assessment, approximately three weeks. This covers the signal-level work across all ten components: the crawl data, the GSC analysis, the keyword research, the AI platform testing, the backlink profile assessment, the conversion data review, and the qualitative assessments of positioning, operating system, and expansion readiness.
The second phase is dossier production and delivery, approximately one to two weeks. The dossier is written, reviewed internally, and delivered in a session where the findings and intervention sequence are walked through in full.
The diagnostic does not slow the current organic programme. It runs in parallel with whatever the team and agency are already doing. The only demand on the company’s time is the data access at the start and the delivery session at the end.
13. What do you need from us to run the diagnostic?
Four things, all of which can typically be provided in under an hour.
Read access to Google Search Console. This is the primary data source for organic performance at the query and page level. Read access to website analytics, Google Analytics 4 or equivalent, with conversion events configured. This is needed for the commercial performance data: session-to-lead rates, pipeline by landing page, engagement by traffic segment.
Access to the Ahrefs or Semrush project if one exists, or confirmation that Growth Forensics can run its own keyword and backlink analysis. And a 30-minute briefing call at the start of the engagement with the person who owns the organic programme. This call covers the presenting problem, the current agency and team structure, and any context not visible in the data.
No access to the CMS, the website backend, or any confidential commercial data is required. The diagnostic is conducted entirely from organic performance data and publicly accessible signals.
14. Can you guarantee that implementing the recommendations will improve pipeline?
No. Any practice that offers this guarantee is making a commitment it cannot keep.
What can be said with confidence: the intervention sequence produced by the diagnostic is the correct order of operations for the specific engine assessed, based on the structural relationship between components. Addressing a Blocking component before addressing Fragile components downstream of it will produce better results than addressing them in the wrong order. This is a structural claim, not a performance guarantee.
What cannot be guaranteed: the speed and magnitude of improvement, which depend on the competitive landscape in the specific category, the quality of execution, the timeline of the interventions, and factors external to the organic engine, including market conditions, product changes, and competitive moves.
Section 4: Fit, stage, team, and timing
15. Our organic programme is relatively early stage. Is it too soon to work with Growth Forensics?
It depends on what early stage means in practice.
If the company has been live for less than six months and has fewer than twenty published pages with no meaningful GSC data yet, the diagnostic will not produce useful findings. There is not enough engine to assess. But this is the right moment for the Engine Build engagement. Growth Forensics can establish the correct structural foundations before any organic investment is made, ensuring the architecture is correct before content is produced and budget is committed. Building without structural clarity first is one of the most consistent sources of eighteen months of misdirected organic investment.
If the programme has been running for six to twelve months, has twenty or more pages, and has GSC data showing at least some organic impressions and clicks, the diagnostic can identify the structural gaps before they compound. This is often the most valuable moment for a diagnostic: the constraints are visible but have not yet been reinforced by months of investment in the wrong direction.
The question to ask is not whether the programme is big enough, but whether the company has been investing in organic long enough that a structural misalignment would have produced a measurable gap between what was expected and what is being seen. If yes, the diagnostic is useful now.
16. What funding stage is Growth Forensics designed for?
Growth Forensics works with B2B SaaS companies from Seed through Series E where organic is a primary acquisition channel. Stage is not the primary qualifier. Situation is.
For Seed and early Series A companies that have identified organic as a primary planned channel: the Engine Build is typically the most relevant engagement. It establishes the correct foundations before significant budget is committed. A company at this stage that has not yet built organic infrastructure is not yet a diagnostic client. It is a Build client.
For Series A and B companies that have been investing in organic for twelve months or more and are not seeing commercial outcomes match the investment: the diagnostic is the right starting point. The diagnostic identifies the binding constraint before more resource is committed in the wrong direction.
For Series C through E companies with established organic programmes that are producing traffic but not pipeline at the expected rate: the diagnostic identifies which component of an engine that looks like it is working is actually limiting commercial performance. These companies have often been through multiple agency relationships and content programme iterations without identifying the structural cause.
Where Growth Forensics does not produce value: pre-product-market fit companies, companies where organic is not a planned primary channel, and companies whose immediate need is content production without any interest in the structural foundations.
17. We already have an agency running our organic programme. Do we still need this?
Having an agency does not make the diagnostic redundant. In most cases it makes it more useful, because the diagnostic gives a way to evaluate the agency’s work against the structural needs of the engine rather than against activity metrics.
The most common pattern: a company has been on an agency retainer for twelve to twenty-four months, content is being produced, some rankings exist, organic traffic is growing. But organic pipeline is not growing in proportion. The agency’s reporting shows everything moving in the right direction at the activity level. The diagnostic typically reveals that the agency has been addressing the wrong constraint, often because it was not briefed to identify the constraint in the first place.
After the diagnostic there are four possible outcomes for the agency relationship. The agency is well-positioned to execute the intervention sequence with a revised brief, and the relationship continues with better direction. The agency does not have the capability to address the specific constraints identified, and the company makes an informed decision about how to supplement or replace it. The agency was doing the right things but in the wrong order, and the intervention sequence reorients the work. The structural gaps require Growth Forensics to lead the build or fix directly, and an Engine Build or Organic Growth Fix engagement follows.
All four outcomes are more useful than continuing without knowing which one applies.
18. We have just hired a new Head of Marketing. Should we wait before doing a diagnostic?
The opposite is usually true.
A new Head of Marketing arriving without a structural diagnosis of the organic engine will spend their first sixty to ninety days forming their own view from the inside. That view will be shaped by the metrics the current dashboard tracks, the narrative the agency provides, and the institutional assumptions already baked into the team. By month three they will have a hypothesis about what needs to change, but it will be formed without the signal-level data that the diagnostic produces.
Running the diagnostic in the first four weeks of a new Head of Marketing’s tenure gives them the structural picture before the institutional narrative hardens. They arrive at month three having already diagnosed the engine, with a clear intervention sequence and a shared language for discussing the engine’s health with the leadership team. That is a materially different starting position.
The only exception: if the new Head of Marketing has a strong prior point of view about how the organic engine should run and is not open to findings that contradict it, the diagnostic will produce friction rather than alignment. But that is a question about the hire, not about the timing of the diagnostic.