01
Exchange-focused
↓
We trade the monthly PDF for a private live dashboard — direct Search Console data 24/7, the same view we use to make decisions. You see what we see, the moment we see it.
§ About · No. 002 We started SEO216
We started SEO216
because the gap kept widening.
Two things changed at once. The search environment moved decisively toward speed, structured data, and content depth. Generative AI made content production economically different. Most agencies adjusted neither. We were built to adjust both.
★ Est. 2026 · Senior team, intentionally small · Darmstadt · DACH
§ Principles
Five beliefs, one stance.
I.
The technical foundation determines what's possible. A site on the wrong stack will never rank as well as a comparable site on the right one, no matter how good the SEO work on top is.
II.
AI does not replace editorial judgment. AI is the volume mechanism. A senior editor is the rank mechanism. Both are required.
III.
The number of cities a business serves should determine the number of location pages it has. Most agencies cap location pages at what a human writer can maintain. We removed that cap.
IV.
Long contracts are a sign that the work doesn't produce results fast enough to justify staying. Our retainers run month-to-month after the first 90 days.
V.
Strategy calls should produce a written scope, not a sales pitch. If a 30-minute call doesn't yield a document you can act on, the call was wasted.
§ Essay
Why this agency, why now.
Two structural shifts arrived in the search environment within the same eighteen months. First, the Core Web Vitals weighting in Google's ranking model crossed the threshold where it stopped being a tiebreaker and started being a primary signal for mobile queries. Second, the rise of AI-generated overviews in search results put a premium on content that is structured cleanly enough for an LLM to summarise.
Most agencies were built to optimise a CMS they did not write, with content workflows that scale linearly with headcount. Neither of those assumptions survives either shift. The CMS bottleneck caps Core Web Vitals; the headcount bottleneck caps content volume. Trying to compete in 2026 with the agency model of 2018 means falling behind on both axes simultaneously.
We started SEO216 because the alternative is straightforward: pick a modern stack that solves the technical ceiling, build an internal content engine that solves the volume ceiling, and staff with senior people who can make editorial judgment calls. None of that is novel. It just requires starting from scratch with no legacy commitments — which is what we did.
BY THE NUMBERS /// EST. 2026
What we are, in numbers.
2026
Year founded
100%
Senior team, intentionally small
1
Stack generation, zero legacy
0
Lock-in after 90 days
¹ A young agency, honest about what it is: a small senior team on a modern stack, with no contractual lock-in.
The stack
What we build on, every day.
- Framework
- Astro
- Hosting
- Vercel (Edge functions, global CDN)
- Type system
- TypeScript end-to-end
- Styling
- Tailwind CSS
- Content
- Astro Content Collections + Markdown / MDX
- Forms / data capture
- Vercel server actions, edge-routed
- Analytics
- Plausible (client) + Vercel Analytics (server)
- Schema / SEO
- JSON-LD via component layer, Schema.org types validated at build
- Content engine
- Spindle (proprietary, in early access)
§ The agency
We are:
02
From Germany, operating worldwide
↓
Headquartered in the Rhine-Main region — Germany's economic core — with the cultural fluency and DSGVO reflexes the Mittelstand expects, plus the cross-border experience to build organic visibility well past DACH for clients with international ambitions.
03
Objective-driven
↓
Every retainer starts with a written goal — a specific number, a specific city, a specific deadline. Every monthly review measures against it. No vanity metrics, no aspirational adjectives.
The team.
SEO216 is currently a small senior team — intentionally small. We do not plan to scale headcount the way traditional agencies do; that's the assumption Spindle is designed to break. Founder bios and team page coming as the team formalises. In the meantime: the person who scopes your retainer is the person who runs it.
Book a 15-min call → § In plain terms
„A young agency, honest about what it is: a small senior team on a modern stack, with no contractual lock-in."
The person who scopes your retainer is the person who runs it. No handoff to a junior team, no lock-in, no vanity metrics — just the view we use ourselves.
§ First cohort open
Ready for the first cohort?
Both are free. Neither commits you to anything.