Services / SEO
Getting found, with a monthly note you can actually read
Search work has a bad name for good reasons: long contracts, no communication, and reports full of charts that answer nothing. The work itself isn't mysterious. Here's exactly what I do and what you'll see.
from £750 a month
No long tie-in. Leave whenever you like.
First, an awkward question
Have you got the capacity to handle more work?
I ask this before anything else, and almost nobody selling search will. If you're already turning jobs away or running six weeks behind, more enquiries won't make you money — they'll make you busier and slightly worse at your job.
The second question is which work you actually want more of. Most businesses have jobs they're happy to get and jobs they take because the phone rang. There's no point being found for the second kind.
If the honest answer is "we're flat out", I'll tell you to keep your money and come back when that changes. It costs me a client and saves you a year of retainers.
Doing the sums out loud
Before you spend anything on being found, work this out — and if whoever you're talking to won't do it with you, that's your answer.
- What's an average job worth to you, after costs?
- How many of those a month does the spend need to produce to break even?
- Is that number realistic for your town and your trade?
- Could you actually deliver that much extra work?
If the break-even is one extra job a quarter, that's a straightforward decision. If it's four a month, that's a much harder one — and you should know which before you start, not after.
The work
There's no magic in it. There's just doing it.
Search comes down to three unglamorous things, and anyone telling you otherwise is protecting their margin.
Making the site easy to read
Fast loading, sensible structure, working properly on a phone, images that aren't ten times bigger than they need to be, and the behind-the-scenes markup that tells Google what your pages are about.
Saying what you actually do, where
If your site never mentions the towns you cover or the specific jobs you take, you won't appear when someone searches for them. This is the single most common gap and often the biggest win.
Getting other sites to mention you
Trade bodies, suppliers, local directories, accreditation schemes, the local press. Slow, manual, and it works. No bought links — they're a risk to you, not to me.
And for most local businesses, the free thing first
Your Google Business Profile costs nothing and for a local trade it often moves more than the website does. If yours is half-filled-in, that's where I'll start — and I'll show you how to keep it topped up yourself rather than billing you monthly for it.
Timescales
Six to twelve months, and I won't pretend otherwise
Anyone promising page one in six weeks is either lying or about to do something that gets you penalised. Search is slow. That's genuinely the honest position and it's why I ask for three months before it goes month-to-month.
Three months isn't enough to judge results — it's enough for you to judge me. Whether I turn up, whether the monthly note tells you anything, whether I explain things in words you use. If any of that disappoints you, leave at three months having lost far less than a twelve-month contract.
Some things do move quickly. A broken contact form, a Google Business Profile nobody's filled in, pages that never mention your town — those can change things within weeks. I do the fast, cheap wins first.
What you get each month
- A written note: what I did, what changed, what's next
- Enquiries and calls, not just "impressions"
- Where you rank for the terms that actually matter
- An honest note when a month was quiet
- A call whenever you want one
When not to hire me for this
- You're at capacity. Covered above. Fix that first.
- You need work this month. Search won't do that. Paid ads might — that's a different page, and honestly it's often the better first move.
- Your website doesn't convert. Sending more people to a page that doesn't work is paying to fail at scale. Fix the site first.
- You want to buy links or spin out AI articles. Not something I'll do. It works until it doesn't, and it's your domain that carries the risk.
Find out if it's worth it for you
On a free call we'll do the break-even sum together and I'll tell you honestly whether search is the right spend right now. Half an hour, no fee, nothing to sign.
