I started birds eye media because I love being behind the camera. Photography, video, drone work, VR. That’s where I want to spend my hours, not in a spreadsheet trying to figure out why my Google rankings haven’t moved in six months.
For the first few years, I did our SEO myself. Read the same articles everyone reads. Installed the standard WordPress plugins. Wrote a blog post when I remembered to. Posted to Instagram, hoped that did something. The results were what you’d expect: a slow trickle of website enquiries, mostly from word of mouth, and a Google ranking that bounced around the bottom of page two for any term a real client might actually search.
I’m not bad at the technical side. I can read an analytics dashboard. But running a creative studio means every hour spent on SEO is an hour not spent on a shoot, a client edit, or training the next operator on the drone. The maths stopped making sense.
So I called Oliver at The SEO Company.
We’ve known each other for years. We’ve collaborated on creative work, referred clients to each other, and had honest conversations about what’s broken in the industries we both work in. I knew the agency’s positioning: long-running, Perth-based, no lock-in contracts, no smoke and mirrors. I’d seen their work for other clients before they came near our site.
The first conversation was structurally different from any SEO pitch I’d had before. No promises of “page one in 30 days.” Instead, they asked about the kinds of jobs birds eye actually wants more of (commercial product shoots, drone work for property and infrastructure, VR for tourism and real estate) and how that maps to what people actually search for. It became a conversation about the business, not the rankings.
The work they did over the following months wasn’t glamorous. They cleaned up our technical SEO. Restructured the service pages around the actual booking categories. Wrote content from the angle of the client problem (what makes for a good product shoot, what does drone safety look like in WA) rather than from the angle of keyword stuffing. Built out the local SEO across Perth and regional WA where we do the bulk of our shoots.
The shift wasn’t a hockey stick. It was a steady upgrade in the quality of the leads coming through. Less “can you do a quick free job” and more “we have a serious production budget, can you scope a creative direction.” That’s the change that mattered for the business. The rankings followed because the content actually answered what real buyers were searching for.
What I learned working with their team: most SEO advice you’ll read online is generic, written by content marketers in Texas explaining best practices to an audience of “all small businesses everywhere.” That’s not how SEO works in 2026. Australian search results behave differently to US results. Visual content businesses have different conversion patterns to e-commerce or local service. The kind of agency you want is one that looks at your actual situation, your actual market, your actual customers, and builds from there.
I’ll keep doing what I’m best at: shooting, directing, flying drones, building immersive content for clients. I’ll let people who run the SEO work full-time, in this market, for businesses like ours, do that part. That’s the trade-off that worked.
If you’re a Perth-based business thinking about hiring an SEO agency, I’d suggest talking to Oliver and the team. Tell them Dean from birds eye sent you.