---
title: Ready Steady Cut case study
canonical: "https://firecask.com/case-studies/ready-steady-cut/"
author: FireCask
description: "How FireCask rebuilt Ready Steady Cut and ran its SEO for three years: organic traffic up 30 times, top-three keywords up from 1,044 to 13,200."
categories: [SEO, Content Marketing, Development, Design]
---

Ready Steady Cut is an independent entertainment site covering film, TV and streaming. We worked with the team for more than three years, from a redesign and a move to new hosting through to monthly SEO, as it grew from a hobby project into a business.

## The brief

Ready Steady Cut came to us through an introduction from Taboola, looking to upgrade its website. That became one design and development project: a custom reskin, a brand overhaul and a move to a dedicated server.

## What we did

- **Design and build:** We gave the site a new look and brand, built it on WordPress and moved it onto a dedicated server.
- **Monthly SEO:** We reported every month on organic traffic, site health and how the site held up through each Google algorithm update.
- **Technical support:** We handled hosting upgrades, reconfigured Jetpack when image hosting caused problems, and added third-party modules such as OpenWeb for comments and ad units.
- **Strategy:** We advised on SEO best practice and schema, and on recovery when Google's Helpful Content Update made rankings volatile.

## Results

Every figure below runs from the month the work began to the site's high point in year 3, before Ready Steady Cut moved on.

- Organic traffic rose to 30 times its month 1 level (Ahrefs estimate).
- Keywords ranking in the top three grew from 1,044 to 13,200.
- Referring domains grew from 569 to 2,678.
- Domain Rating rose from 40 to 52.