Norfolk Boards: the SEO stopped in December and kept growing all year

The situation

Norfolk Boards sells American garden games into the UK. They came to us in December 2024 on a recommendation from a previous agency, wanting their websites brought up to date. The sites were dated, and the business had built genuine search authority on its core product term over several years, enough to sustain a summer sales cycle, but very little beyond it. No social presence, no email activity, and a couple of years of slowing sales.

The strategy workshop, and what it found

In October 2025 we ran Think First with them, one of the first businesses to go through it. The constraint it surfaced was not the website and it was not the marketing. It was the calendar. A company selling outdoor games in Britain has a few good months and then a long wait, and no amount of marketing spend fixes a product range that only makes sense in July.

Think First always ends in five recommendations. Photography was a significant one here. The biggest was to extend the range into games that sell when it rains. They have since started producing indoor and board games. In June 2026 we rebranded Norfolk Boards and rebuilt the site around the wider range, new colours and a modernised look aimed properly at the people they want to reach. It is early and they are beginning to see traction. That is a change to what the business sells, arrived at through a marketing consultation, and it is the piece of this we are proudest of.

What we did

We built three new websites, Norfolk Boards, Cornhole and Shuffleboard, replacing an ageing design and tightening the buying journey throughout. Norfolk Boards was rebuilt again in June 2026, this time with a full rebrand, turning what had been a holding page for the group into a site with a job of its own. The SEO followed, running to December 2025, deliberately through the off season and aimed at the following year: solidifying the foundations, then covering the questions buyers ask before they spend, from what the game is and how it is played through to which boards and bags to choose.

From December 2025 the focus moved to social. We created their accounts and built the presence from nothing, and it reached the point where brands were approaching them about partnerships at around a hundred followers. We manage those conversations and the user-generated content that comes with them. Alongside all of it: market research, rebuilt product photography at minimal cost, content shoots, and a dormant email list brought back. We have represented them at in-person events. We meet them in Norfolk and they come up to Glasgow.

The outcome in search

Across the two sites we can measure, the group earned 9,804 organic clicks from 768,096 impressions over twelve months. Cornhole’s average position improved from 10.6 to 6.9 with impressions up 76% season on season, and its strongest month delivered 1,156 clicks. Shuffleboard moved from an average position of 31.6 to 12.2, monthly clicks rose from 109 to 265, and click-through rate nearly doubled from 0.72% to 1.32%.

The timing matters, and so does why it stopped. In December 2025 we sat down with them and agreed the search foundation was in good shape and projected to grow through the following year on its own. So we recommended moving the budget off SEO and into social, which is what we did. Almost all of the movement above happened after that point.

Cornhole is seasonal, so a summer peak on its own could be argued away. Shuffleboard climbed steadily every month from December through to July, which seasonality does not explain. Two sites, one programme, both still improving long after we stopped billing for search, and growing roughly as we said they would.