Less Traffic, More Revenue: Why Our ‘Bad’ SEO Result Earned a UK Agency Awards Shortlist

Traffic went down. Revenue went up.

Webhive Digital have been shortlisted for Best SEO Campaign (Small) at the UK Agency Awards for challenging one of the oldest assumptions in SEO: more traffic must mean better performance.

Click2Pharmacy’s exact revenue figures will stay between us, them and the judges, but what we can say is that the increase wasn’t insignificant.

In 2025, when organic sessions started falling, Click2Pharmacy trusted us to make the right call. Rather than fighting to win back every informational click being lost to AI Overviews and zero-click search, we changed what we were aiming for. We focused on attracting people with stronger intent, improving the experience for those who did click through, and making every organic visit work harder.

The result was the campaign we entered as ‘Less Traffic, More Revenue: SEO in an AI-First World?’

For us, that is what makes this shortlist so meaningful. It recognises a campaign that didn’t chase traffic for the sake of a good-looking graph. We accepted that search behaviour was changing and adapted the strategy to focus on the metrics that actually mattered.

Who We Are

Webhive Digital is a UK-based digital marketing agency specialising in SEO, website design and AI implementation. We work with businesses that want straight answers, practical strategies and measurable improvements to their online visibility.

We are a small team, so strategy never sits several layers away from implementation. The same people looking at the data are close to the content, technical work and user journey. That makes it easier for us to spot when an old SEO rule is no longer serving the client and change course quickly.

What Being Shortlisted Means to Us

The UK Agency Awards shortlist matters because this was not a campaign built around an easy growth graph. Search behaviour was changing while we were working, AI visibility had no fixed rulebook, and healthcare added another layer of care around content, product data and messaging.

We had to be comfortable with a metric moving in the ‘wrong’ direction while the measures that mattered more moved in the right one.

“Clients don’t hire us because they want a nicer-looking SEO report. Ultimately, they want their business to make more money. They trust us to understand the technical side, cut through the jargon and make the right call when the data does not look the way people expect it to. This campaign is a great example of that. Traffic went down, but we knew that didn’t automatically mean performance was getting worse. Being shortlisted recognises the judgement behind that decision, not just the numbers at the end of it.”

— Kate Smoothy, Founder, Webhive Digital

For a small agency, recognition at the UK Agency Awards is a big moment for the whole team. It reflects the technical work, content, testing, user experience thinking and close client collaboration behind the campaign.

More than anything, it gives us confidence to keep challenging the definition of effective SEO. If traffic falls but the right people are finding you, engaging more and driving stronger commercial outcomes, that is not failed SEO. It is about getting the best outcomes for the client.

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