Search-Led Lead Generation for Safety Management (SML)

Client: Safety Management (SML)

Regions: United Kingdom

Services: Paid Search, Paid Social, Creative Production, Email and Content

Key Achievements:

Paid search conversion rate up 139% (December 2025 to July 2026)
94% of paid search leads from business email addresses in August 2026
Target of 30 good leads a month passed by February 2026

Introduction

Safety Management (SML) is a UK health and safety consultancy based in Daventry, Northamptonshire. It supports businesses from multi-site retailers to manufacturers with audits, risk assessments, specialist services such as DSEAR and PUWER assessments, training and ongoing retained support.

What sets SML apart is the pairing of experienced consultants with SML Connect, its own compliance platform, which gives clients one place to manage risk assessments, audits, checklists and incidents across every site.

Challenges

Most of SML’s new business had come through word of mouth and through clients’ facilities and operations managers moving to new companies. SML asked us to build a consistent flow of enquiries from the right organisations, with the emphasis on quality: enquiries from businesses that could become retained clients, rather than a higher volume of contacts that would never convert.

Strategic Approach

To address this, we focused on:

Search rebuilt around intent:
We moved spend from Performance Max into dedicated Search campaigns, gave DSEAR its own campaign, added exact-match ad groups for retained consultancy terms and used negative keywords to filter out personal and low-intent searches.
Microsoft Ads alongside Google:
We ran the same service themes on Microsoft Ads as well as Google, then moved budget between the two engines according to the cost and quality of the enquiries each one delivered.
Service landing pages:
We built dedicated landing pages for DSEAR and PUWER, written for buyers without health and safety expertise, and turned the DSEAR page into the pattern for testing each further service: landing page, organic content, then a small paid test.
Creative and content:
We produced UGC, motion and static ads and a client testimonial for Meta, and kept a steady programme of blogs, emails and LinkedIn posts. When Meta’s lead quality did not hold, we moved its budget into search.

Performance Highlights

Uplift in Paid Search Conversion Rate

0 %

Search Leads From Business Emails

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Blogs and Emails Written

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We judged the account on the quality of enquiries as well as their number. Conversion rates and lead quality below come from SML’s own CRM records of website enquiries.

Paid search converting more visitors: The paid search conversion rate averaged 3.1% a month from December 2025 to July 2026, compared with 1.3% across October and November 2025, our first two full months. Every month in that period outperformed both baseline months, including the quieter summer, with a peak of 4.75% in April 2026.
Better quality search enquiries: In January 2026, around 35% of paid search enquiries came from business email addresses. By August 2026, 94% did.
Ahead of target: SML set a target of 30 good leads a month for the start of 2026. In the 30 days to 11 February, enquiries from business email addresses across all channels reached 40.
DSEAR as the engine: DSEAR assessments became the strongest search theme on both platforms in 2026, and Microsoft Ads delivered DSEAR enquiries at around a third of Google’s cost per conversion, which shaped how we split the search budget.

Conclusion

Safety Management now has a search programme built around the services it most wants to sell, with landing pages and tracking that trace each enquiry back to the campaign behind it. With SML’s new website now live, we are applying the DSEAR model to further services, one test at a time.

This project drew on our search marketing, paid social, video and motion design, email marketing and organic social services. See more of our work.

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