SEO Questions Answered

SEO costs vary depending on the scope of work, the competitiveness of your market, and whether you need ongoing support or a one-off audit. We offer a free 15-minute consultation to help scope what makes sense for your business before discussing investment.

A five-page local services site does not need the same engagement as a 200-page e-commerce store. Tiered packages tend to bill for hours nobody uses or to under-deliver against the actual scope. Pricing the work to what the site actually needs is more honest and usually better value for the client.

For genuinely small sites with a simple proposition and a willing-to-learn owner, doing the basics yourself is realistic. Tools like Google Search Console are free, and the fundamentals are well documented. The point at which a consultant adds disproportionate value is when the technical or strategic work needs experience that takes years to build, or when the time you would spend learning is worth more spent on your actual business.

In most cases yes, as a marketing expense, but treatment depends on your specific circumstances and whether the work is considered capital or revenue in nature. Speak to your accountant for confirmation. We can provide invoices structured for whichever treatment makes sense.

An SEO consultant typically works independently, meaning you deal directly with the person doing the work. Agencies involve larger teams, more layers of communication, and higher costs. For many small to medium-sized businesses, a consultant offers a more focused and cost-effective approach. Find out more about working with an SEO consultant in Surrey.

Five stages: Audit, Crawl, Explore, Create, Optimise. Each produces a tangible output (a document, a brief, a specification). The full process is documented on the methodology page so you can see how we work before you ever speak to us.

Both, depending on what you need. Some clients want only the audit and prefer to implement with their own team. Others want ongoing support as the work goes through development, including reviews of deployed changes. Both arrangements work and we structure pricing to match.

Yes. With an independent consultant the person you speak to is the person doing the work. There are no account managers translating between you and a team you never meet.

Usually monthly for an ongoing engagement, though that can be adjusted. Outside scheduled meetings we are reachable by email and respond on the same or next working day. We try not to schedule meetings that could have been an email.

Most businesses start seeing meaningful movement within 3 to 6 months, though this depends on how competitive your market is, the current state of your website, and how quickly changes are implemented. Technical fixes can produce quicker wins; building authority for competitive keywords takes longer.

Organic impressions and clicks (from Search Console), position changes for the queries that matter to your business, indexed page count, conversions from organic traffic, and AI search visibility for relevant queries. We do not chase vanity metrics like keyword count or domain authority score in isolation.

No. Anyone who does is either misleading you or about to do something that risks harming your site. Search engines control rankings, not consultants. What we guarantee is that the work we do follows current best practice, that we will be transparent about progress, and that we will tell you honestly if our recommendations are not producing results.

Monthly performance reviews with the metrics that actually matter to your business. We do not produce 40-page reports of vanity metrics; we report on what changed, what is working, what is not, and what we are doing about it.

Some businesses are not well-suited to SEO as a primary marketing channel: hyper-niche markets with very low search demand, businesses where buyer behaviour does not include online research, or markets dominated by entrenched players. We will tell you that during the initial consultation rather than taking on work that will not deliver. If we are already engaged and the trajectory is wrong, we will say so and adjust the strategy or step away.

Yes. Paid search and organic SEO serve different purposes. Google Ads stops generating traffic the moment you stop paying. SEO builds long-term visibility that continues to deliver results over time. Most businesses benefit from running both, though SEO typically delivers a stronger return over the long term.

Local SEO focuses on improving your visibility in searches where location matters - for example, "SEO consultant in Surrey" or "plumber near me". This involves optimising your Google Business Profile, building location-relevant content, and ensuring your business appears in local map results. See our local SEO service or read our guide to local SEO for Surrey businesses.

Yes, in most cases. GBP supports service-area businesses (no physical address shown to customers) as well as locations. If you serve customers in a defined geography, a properly set up GBP is one of the strongest local SEO levers available.

Not if you would prefer not to. GBP lets you set up as a service-area business, where you list the towns or postcodes you cover but do not display a physical address. Common for home-based businesses, mobile services, and trades.

Very. Volume, recency, and your response rate are all visible signals for local pack rankings. We will not write fake reviews or anything that risks the listing, but the review request flow can usually be made significantly more effective without much extra work.

Yes. While we are based in Surrey, we work with businesses across the UK. Many of our engagements are fully remote. Get in touch to discuss your requirements.

Technical SEO covers everything that affects how search engines crawl, interpret, and index your website. This includes site speed, mobile usability, internal linking, site architecture, structured data, and ensuring pages can actually be found and understood by Google. Learn more about our technical SEO service.

Our SEO audits cover technical health, indexation, site architecture, keyword research, content performance, competitor analysis, and AI search opportunities. You receive a clear, prioritised action plan rather than a generic report.

Common signs include low or declining organic traffic, pages that don't appear in Google search results, slow load times, or a high bounce rate. A technical SEO audit is the most reliable way to identify specific issues. We offer a free initial consultation to help you understand where your website stands.

Structured data (also called schema markup) is code that explicitly tells search engines what your content is about and how different pieces relate to each other. It does not directly move rankings dramatically, but it makes pages eligible for rich results in search (FAQ accordions, star ratings, knowledge panels), helps AI assistants understand and cite your content, and sends clearer signals about your business identity.

Three measurable signals Google uses to assess page experience: Largest Contentful Paint (how long the main content takes to appear), Interaction to Next Paint (how responsive the page feels), and Cumulative Layout Shift (how much things jump around as the page loads). Failing any of them is a ranking factor on mobile especially. Most sites can pass with focused work over a few weeks.

Indexing is whether your page is in Google's database at all. Ranking is where it appears for any given search. A page that is not indexed cannot rank for anything; a page that is indexed may still not rank well if other pages are stronger. Many ranking problems turn out to be indexing problems on closer inspection.

Generative Engine Optimisation (GEO) and Answer Engine Optimisation (AEO) are strategies to get your content cited by AI-powered search tools like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews. These platforms are changing how users find information, and businesses that optimise for them now will have a significant advantage. Read our full guide to AI search optimisation or explore our AI search service.

Not entirely, and probably not soon. What is happening is that share of search behaviour is gradually moving from traditional ranked results into AI summaries and answer engines. Both will coexist for the foreseeable future. Treating either as the only thing that matters is the same mistake businesses made during the desktop-to-mobile shift.

Partly. Good content, clear structure, and strong technical foundations all help with both. But AI search has its own optimisation surface: schema, source clarity, content structured to summarise well rather than bury the answer, and topical authority signals AI assistants weigh differently from traditional ranking. Some pages that rank well organically are completely absent from AI summaries, and vice versa.

The most reliable method right now is direct testing: ask the AI assistants the queries that matter to your business and see which sources get cited. Tooling that reports on this is improving but still patchy. We test against ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews directly during the audit and ongoing engagement.