Agency, freelancer or in-house: who should build your Astro site?
Agency, freelancer or in-house team: what each option costs and brings for an Astro site, the questions to ask before you sign, and when a freelancer is enough.
CEO, SM4B
SEO since 2003. Several hundred WordPress sites, now Astro. Starting with his own.
Pierre-Marie Coupry did his first SEO work in 2003, on a friend’s site. The friend was a chauffeur-guide in Paris. He was a journalist at the time, covering sustainability.
He moved to Marrakech. With a friend he built a city guide there that reached 30,000 to 40,000 visitors a month. It ran on an ageing CMS, so he migrated it to WordPress. No traffic lost.
The result showed on the local market. Client work followed, and he opened his first agency in Marrakech, mostly in tourism. Alongside it he published his own guides: Marrakech City Guide, Désert Maroc, other destinations. That is still what he writes about.
SM4B opened in 2012. Several hundred WordPress sites built or optimised since. The move to Astro came from the work: security, reliability, load times, deployment that stays simple.
Marrakech City Guide is the case he cites most, because it is his own. In February 2026 a Google update knocked it down: impressions fell from 920 a day to 300. By June it was down to 98 visits from Google for the month. The redesign and the Astro migration were done together, two jobs most people will tell you to keep apart.
The site went back online on 17 July 2026. Impressions started climbing two days later, with no transitional dip. Sixty days on it runs at 31 visits a day from Google against 3 in June, at an average position of 14 where it sat at 20 before the drop.
And the curve is still steepening: 8 visits a day in the first month, 25 in the second, 37 over the past week. The tourist season accounts for part of it. So do the pages published since the rebuild, each bringing in clicks of its own. The volumes are small, but the site is back above where it stood a year ago.
This blog is written with the help of an artificial intelligence, Claude, developed by Anthropic. Here is how, in practice.
Topics and angles are chosen by Pierre-Marie Coupry, from the questions our clients ask and the searches the site already appears for in Google Search Console.
Research and writing are done with Claude. Every figure is checked at its source, preferably a primary one: official documentation, published reports, vendors' pricing pages. When a source cannot be opened or verified, the figure is not published.
Measurements come from tools anyone can check: Google Search Console for the sites we run, PageSpeed Insights, and the HTTP Archive for market averages. The cases presented, such as Marrakech City Guide, are real sites you can check online.
Before publication, each article is checked against Google's guidance on helpful content, compared with the top search results on its topic, then reviewed and approved by Pierre-Marie Coupry.
Updates are dated when an article changes in substance. A minor correction does not change the date.
Spotted a mistake? Write to pm.coupry@sm4b.eu.
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