Guides
The answers, with the prices left in.
These are written to answer the question, not to get you onto a call. Every figure names the tool it came from and the date it was read, and where something cannot be measured, the guide says so.
Written by Simon, who does the work. 93 guides.
93 guides
Start here
If you only read six.
The questions most businesses arrive with, in roughly the order they arrive.
- Why your site is not on GoogleMy site is not on Google, or not where it should be.
- How to get found onlineI need more people to find the business.
- What a website costsWhat should a website actually cost?
- Is an SEO agency worth it?Is paying someone for SEO worth it?
- Choosing a web design agencyHow do I choose who to trust with the build?
- How long SEO takesHow long before any of this shows up?
Getting found online
18The questions a business asks before it knows the words. Where people look, how to be there, how long it takes, and what you can do yourself — written from the sites we run.
- How to Get Your Business Found Online: The Order That WorksMost businesses try to get found in the wrong order: a website first, adverts second, and the free listing that actually decides local searches last, if at all.
- Why Your Website Is Not Showing Up on Google, and How to Check in Ten MinutesThere are two different problems hiding behind “my website is not on Google”: Google has not got the pages, or Google has the pages and does not rank them. Ten minutes in Search Console tells you which.
- How to Get Google Reviews: Asking, Linking, Replying and RemovingReviews decide the local pack, the local pack sits above the websites, and most businesses ask for reviews badly or not at all. The fix is a link, a habit and a reply.
- How to Do SEO Yourself: What Actually Moves a Small Business SiteYou can do most of the SEO a small business needs yourself. The catch is not difficulty; it is that the parts that work are unglamorous and the parts that feel productive mostly are not.
- How Long Does SEO Take? A Month-by-Month Answer From a Real SiteSEO takes three to six months to show in clicks, but it shows in Search Console much earlier than that if you know which numbers to read. Here is what each month should look like.
- How to Check Your Website Traffic, and What Actually Increases ItMost owners check traffic in the wrong tool, celebrate the wrong number, and then try to increase it with the one method that stops working when the money does.
- How to Do Keyword Research for a Small Business, With Free ToolsKeyword research is finding out what your customers type, in their words, and how many of them do it. The tools make it look complicated. The method is an afternoon.
- How to Get More Customers Online Without Buying Adverts FirstType “how to get more customers” into Google and the results are adverts for people who sell adverts. The answer that works for most small businesses is cheaper, slower and compounding.
- How to Read Google Analytics 4 as a Business Owner: Five Reports, One CaveatGoogle Analytics 4 has hundreds of reports and most owners open it, feel lost and close it. Five reports answer the questions a business actually has, and one caveat applies to all of them.
- How to Tell If Your SEO Is Working: Six Numbers, Read in the Right OrderIf you are paying for SEO and cannot tell whether it is working, that is the first finding. Here is what you should be able to see, when, and where — and what a report shows you when there is nothing to show.
- How to Write Page Titles and Meta Descriptions That Earn the ClickThe title is the blue link. The description is the two lines under it. Together they are the whole of your advert on a results page, and most small business sites leave them to the software.
- On-Page, Off-Page and Technical SEO: What Each One Is and Which You NeedEvery SEO proposal splits the work into on-page, off-page and technical, then charges for all three. Most small sites need one of them badly and the other two lightly. Here is how to tell which.
- What Are Backlinks, Why They Matter, and How a Small Business Gets Them HonestlyA backlink is another website pointing at yours. Google treats it as a vote. The industry built on selling votes is why the word has a bad name, and why the honest version is so unglamorous.
- What Is a Sitemap, Does Your Site Have One, and How to Submit ItA sitemap is a list of your pages for search engines. It helps Google find pages it would otherwise reach late or never, and it is the first thing to check when a site is not being indexed.
- What Is Google Search Console, and How to Read It in Ten Minutes a MonthSearch Console is Google telling you, for free, what it thinks of your website: which pages it has, which searches it shows them for, and what is broken. Most businesses never open it.
- What Is Local SEO? How the Map Pack Decides Who Gets the CallLocal SEO is the part of search that happens before anyone reaches a website. For a business that serves an area, it is most of the game, and it is largely free.
- What Is Schema Markup? The Five Types a Small Business Should HaveSchema markup is a way of telling search engines exactly what a page is about, in a format they read without guessing. Five types cover almost every small business, and one popular type is a liability.
- What Is SEO? Explained With a 17,000-Product Store Instead of a DiagramSEO is the work of being the page Google chooses when someone types what you sell. Most explanations are diagrams. This one is a bed shop.
What things cost
11Published prices, the market around them, and what the money actually buys. Very few studios publish any of this, which is exactly why it is here.
- How Much Does a Website Cost in the UK?Almost nobody in this industry publishes a price, which is why you are reading a guide instead of a price list. This is what I charge, what the parts actually cost, what changes the number, and what to ask anyone who quotes you.
- Website Maintenance Costs in the UKMaintenance is the cost people forget at quote stage and resent paying until the week they need it. Here is what it costs, what should be in it, and the specific ways an unmaintained site fails.
- What Does It Cost to Host a Website in the UK?Hosting is the most over-shopped and under-understood line on a website budget. The gap between a bad host and a good one is about £40 a month and roughly a second of load time — and only one of those is visible on the invoice.
- How Much Does SEO Cost in the UK?SEO is sold by the month with no agreed definition of what a month contains, which is why quotes for the same work vary by a factor of twenty. Here is what the levels actually mean, and what mine costs.
- Wix, Squarespace, WordPress or Bespoke: What to PickA web designer telling you not to use a website builder has an obvious interest. So this one starts with the cases where the builder wins, and only then explains what changes.
- Google Ads Management Fees: What You Should Actually PayThe percentage-of-spend model is a convention, not a cost. Understanding what each fee structure rewards tells you more about the agency you are hiring than their case studies will.
- What a Logo and Brand Identity Cost in the UKYou can pay £5 for a logo or £50,000, and both transactions happen every day. This explains what separates them and where a normal business should actually sit.
- What Does PPC Management Cost in the UK?There are only three fee models, and the difference between them matters most to the advertisers with least to spend — which is the opposite of how it is usually explained.
- How Much Does It Cost to Redesign a Website?A redesign quote is really two quotes stapled together: what it costs to make the site look different, and what it costs to keep the customers it already has. The second one is usually missing.
- How Much Does an SEO Audit Cost?The uncomfortable fact about audits is that most of them are never implemented, which makes the cheap one the expensive one. What you are really buying is a decision about what to do first.
- How Much Does Custom Software Cost in the UK?Almost every published figure for this is useless, because "custom software" describes who wrote it rather than what it does. Here is what actually moves the number.
Search, local and AI
9How search, the map pack and AI answers actually work, written from client sites rather than from other people's blog posts.
- Google Business Profile: The Free Thing That Beats Your WebsiteIt is free, it takes an afternoon, and for most local businesses it will out-earn the first several months of anything an agency can sell you. That includes me, which is why this guide exists.
- Getting 94.5% of a 17,233-Item Feed Approved in Merchant CentreShopping feeds fail quietly. Items disappear one at a time, the account still says "active", and nobody finds out until someone asks why a whole category has stopped selling. This is how one large feed was fixed and kept fixed.
- Websites and SEO for Trades: What Actually Brings the CallTrade websites fail in the same four ways every time, and none of them is the design. This is what a paving company in Greater Manchester actually needed, and what the numbers say about it.
- Generative Engine Optimisation: What Actually ChangesMost of GEO is SEO with the emphasis moved. A meaningful minority of it is genuinely different, and that minority is worth understanding — as is the large amount of it that currently cannot be measured by anybody.
- Using AI for SEO: What Works and What Gets You PenalisedI use these tools every day and they have made parts of this work several times faster. They have also produced the worst web pages I have ever seen. The difference is entirely in which jobs you give them.
- What Is llms.txt, and Does It Actually Do Anything?A file at the root of your site that tells AI systems what you publish and where. It costs an hour to write. Whether it does anything is a genuinely open question, and this page will not pretend otherwise.
- Is SEO Dead Now That AI Answers Everything?Something real did change, and most of the writing about it is either denial from people who sell SEO or panic from people who do not. The useful answer is narrower than either: one kind of traffic is disappearing, and it was never the kind that made anybody money.
- What Does an SEO Agency Actually Do All Month?The reason this question keeps being asked is that the answer is usually a report full of charts that never quite says what anybody did. Here is the actual list.
- Can You Write Your Website Copy With AI?Yes, for the first draft, and it will be competent and slightly weightless. The problem is not that a machine wrote it — it is that a machine has never spoken to your customers.
AI, honestly
9What AI actually does for a small business, what it costs, and where the simpler thing wins. Prices come from vendors’ own published pages and official statistics — never from another agency.
- How Much Does an AI Receptionist Cost?The published prices for this are unusually far apart — tens of pounds a month at one end and $30,000 a year at the other, with almost nothing in between. That gap is the whole story, and nobody selling either end will explain it to you.
- Can AI Replace a Receptionist?Mostly it replaces the answering, not the receptionist. That distinction sounds like a dodge until you list what the person at the desk actually does all day, at which point it becomes the entire answer.
- How Much Does It Cost to Add an AI Chatbot to a Website?The price depends almost entirely on which of three quite different things you are asking for, and most quotes do not say which one they are for.
- How Much Does AI Integration Cost?Two quotes for the same brief can differ by a factor of ten, and it is almost never because one of them is dishonest. It is because “AI integration” describes the model, not the job — and the job is nearly all integration.
- What Is an AI Agent? A Business Owner’s AnswerThe word is doing an enormous amount of work in the market right now, and a good deal of what is sold as an agent is a workflow with a model in the middle. That is not a criticism — the workflow is often the right answer — but you should know which one you are buying.
- Does Google Penalise AI Content? What the Policy Says and What Actually Gets DemotedGoogle does not penalise content for being written with AI. It penalises content produced at scale with nothing in it for the reader, and AI has made that very easy to produce. The distinction decides whether your pages rank.
- How to Get Your Business Recommended by ChatGPT, AI Overviews and AI SearchAI assistants do not have opinions about plumbers. They summarise what the web says and cite the pages that said it clearly. Being recommended is being the clear, consistent, verifiable source, and it overlaps almost entirely with good search practice.
- What Is AI Search, and What Does It Change for a Local Business?AI search is a search engine that writes the answer instead of listing links. It still has to get the answer from somewhere, and where it gets it from is what a local business can influence.
- Will AI Replace Web Designers? An Answer From One Who Uses It Every DayAI has already replaced part of web design: the part that was making plausible-looking pages. What it has not replaced is knowing what the page should say to your customers, and that was always the job.
Is it worth it?
15The decisions people actually agonise over before they spend anything — with the case against included, because a guide that only argues one way is an advertisement.
- Is an SEO Agency Worth It? When to Hire, When Not To, and What to RefuseAn SEO agency is worth it when there is something structural to fix or a market worth winning, and not worth it when the honest answer is “publish your prices and get ten Google reviews”. Here is how to tell which you are.
- How to Choose a Web Design Agency: Twelve Checks Before You Pay a DepositEvery web design proposal looks similar. The differences that matter are in what happens after launch, who owns what, and whether anyone can show you a number that went up.
- Is Email Marketing Still Worth It?Yes, and for an unfashionable reason: it is the only audience nobody can take away from you. Everything else you have built an audience on is rented from a company that can change the rules on a Tuesday.
- Does My Business Need a Website in 2026? An Honest Answer From Someone Who Sells ThemSome businesses do not need a website yet, and a web studio that says otherwise to all of them is not worth hiring. Here is how to tell whether you are one of them.
- Facebook and Instagram Ads for a Small Business: What They Cost, When They Work, How to StartGoogle Ads reaches people who are looking. Facebook and Instagram ads reach people who are not, which is a different job with a different price. Here is when the second job is worth paying for.
- Google Ads vs Facebook Ads for a Local Business: Where the First Pound GoesOne reaches people who are looking; the other reaches people who are not. Which is right depends on whether your customers know they need you before they see you.
- How to Set Up Google Ads Yourself, What It Costs, and the Five Settings That Waste MoneyGoogle Ads is an auction for the right to appear when someone types a phrase. Setting it up takes an hour. Setting it up so the defaults do not spend your budget on the wrong people takes knowing five things.
- Is a Digital Marketing Agency Worth It? What One Actually Does, and the AlternativeA digital marketing agency is a group of specialists you rent by the month. For a company with a marketing department to manage them, that works. For a small business, the management layer is often the thing you are paying for and the thing you did not need.
- SEO or PPC: Which Should a Small Business Do First?It is not SEO versus PPC. They do different jobs at different speeds and the question is which to start with. For most small businesses the answer is neither: fix the site first, then PPC for the searches you must win now, and SEO for the ones you want to own.
- How Much Should a Small Business Spend on Marketing? Work It Out From One NumberEvery article says “spend 5 to 10% of revenue on marketing”. That number was invented for companies with marketing departments. A small business should start from what one more customer is worth and work backwards.
- What Is Content Marketing, and the Version That Works for a Local BusinessContent marketing is publishing things people want to read so that they find you and trust you before they buy. Most small business versions of it are a blog nobody reads. The version that works is smaller and more useful.
- What Is Digital Marketing? The Version for Someone Who Owns a Small BusinessDigital marketing is every way a business gets found, chosen and remembered online. Most definitions list the channels. This one ranks them by what they do for a business with one owner and no marketing department.
- What Lead Generation Actually Means for a Small Business (and What Is Being Sold as It)Lead generation is a grand name for getting enquiries. The industry around it sells two different things under one word, and only one of them is yours to keep.
- What Is PPC? Pay-Per-Click Explained With Real UK Click PricesPPC is renting the top of the search results by the click. The price is set by an auction you cannot see, and it is public if you know where to look.
- Who Owns Your Website? Domain, Hosting, Code, Content and Accounts, One by OneBusinesses pay for a website and assume they own it. Often they own the invoice. Here is who owns each part by default, what to check, and what our contract says.
Building, choosing and measuring
31The technical half: which platform, how long it takes, performance, migrations, and knowing whether any of it worked.
- What Makes a Good Website? Nine Things You Can Measure, Not Nine OpinionsAsk ten designers what makes a good website and you get ten aesthetics. Ask what makes a website good for a business and you get nine things you can measure, and most sites fail three of them.
- Shopify vs WooCommerce vs Custom: Which to Build OnAlmost every comparison of these platforms is written by somebody with an affiliate link. This one is written by somebody who has to maintain the result for years afterwards, which produces different advice.
- Is Magento Still Worth It, or Should You Move?Most people asking this are not really asking about a platform. They are asking whether they are stuck with an expensive store nobody wants to touch, and whether leaving would cost more than staying.
- Is Headless Commerce Worth It?For a small number of businesses it is genuinely transformative. For most it is an expensive way to buy a slightly faster website and a permanent dependency on whoever built it.
- How Long a Website Takes, and What to Ask Before You Commission OneAlmost every website project that runs late runs late for the same reason, and it is not the build. Knowing that in advance is worth more than any other preparation you can do.
- Core Web Vitals: Real Numbers From Five Live SitesMost guides on this subject explain the thresholds and show you a stock photograph of a stopwatch. This one shows five live client sites, the numbers they actually produce, and the two measurements we do not have.
- What Is Conversion Rate Optimisation?The cheapest growth available to most businesses, and the one most likely to be measured wrongly. Half of this guide is about getting the number right, because a conversion rate you cannot trust is worse than not having one.
- How to Move a Website Without Losing Your RankingsThe classic disaster is a beautiful new site that immediately loses half its search traffic. It is entirely avoidable, it is nearly always the URLs, and it is the one piece of technical work where being invisible is the whole point.
- Setting Up GA4 and Conversion Tracking ProperlyAlmost every business I start with is making decisions on numbers that are wrong. Not slightly wrong — wrong in a direction and by an amount nobody has quantified. Here is where it goes wrong and how it is fixed.
- Signs Your Website Needs a Redesign — and When It Doesn'tHalf the businesses that ask me for a redesign need one. The other half need three days of work on the site they already have, and I would rather say so than take the larger invoice.
- How to Add Products to Shopify Properly: The Fields That Decide Whether They SellAdding a product to Shopify takes two minutes. Adding it so that Google finds it, Shopping accepts it and a customer buys it takes the same two minutes done in the right fields.
- How to Build a Website for Your Business: The Nine Steps, and When to Stop Doing It YourselfAnyone can make a website in an afternoon. Making one that a stranger finds, trusts and enquires through is nine decisions, and most of them are not about the software.
- How to Keep a Small Business Website Secure: Six Things, None of Them ExpensiveSmall business websites are not hacked by someone targeting them. They are hacked by automated scans that find an unpatched plugin or a weak password. Six habits close almost every door.
- How to Renew a Domain, and What Actually Happens If You Miss ItDomains expire on a date, not when you notice. The site, the email and years of search history go with it. Renewal is ten pounds and a calendar entry, and the two ways it fails are both avoidable.
- How to Speed Up Your Website: The Six Fixes That Do Most of ItMost slow small business websites are slow for the same six reasons, and four of them can be fixed without a developer. The fifth is the plugin pile. The sixth is the theme.
- How to Start an E-commerce Business in the UK: What the Two Shops We Run Taught UsOpening an online shop takes a weekend. Getting anyone to buy from it takes the parts of the job the platform adverts leave out: product data, findability and trust.
- How to Update and Back Up a WordPress Website Without Breaking ItWordPress updates arrive weekly and every one is a small risk. The routine that makes them safe takes fifteen minutes and starts with a backup you have actually tested.
- How to Write a Web Design Brief in One Page (and Get Quotes You Can Compare)A brief is not a specification. It is one page that tells a designer what the business does, what the site must achieve, and what you can spend, so that every quote you receive is for the same thing.
- How to Write Your Own Website Content: Homepage, Services, About and ContactMost small business websites are written by the owner, and most read as if the owner was talking to themselves. The fix is not better prose. It is answering the visitor’s questions in the order they ask them.
- Is Shopify Worth It? How It Works, What It Costs, and Who Should Use Something ElseShopify is the easiest way to run an online shop and the most expensive way to own one. Whether that trade is worth it depends on your team, your margins and how unusual your products are.
- Is WordPress Free? What a Business Website Really Costs on ItYes, WordPress is free. No, a WordPress website is not. The gap between those two sentences is where most of the confusion, and most of the cost, lives.
- Why Your Website Gets Visitors but No Enquiries: The Eight Usual CausesA site with visitors and no enquiries is not a traffic problem, and buying more traffic will not fix it. It is one of eight things, and most of them are visible on your phone in five minutes.
- What Does a Web Designer Actually Do? A Week, Described by OneTwo hundred and ten people a month ask what a web designer does, and the People Also Ask box under Manchester’s web design results asks whether the job is still in demand. Here is the week, from inside it.
- What Is a CMS? And Which One Should a Small Business Actually UseA CMS is the thing that lets you change your own website without asking a developer. Which one you get decides what the site costs to run, how fast it is, and whether you can ever leave.
- What a Domain Name Is, How to Buy One, and Why You Must Own YoursThe domain is the one part of a website a business can lose permanently. It costs about ten pounds a year and it must be in your name.
- What Is a Good Bounce Rate, and a Good Conversion Rate? Read the Right NumberBounce rate is the most quoted and least useful number in analytics, and its definition changed in 2023. Conversion rate is the number that matters, and almost nobody measures it per page.
- What Is a Landing Page, and What Makes One Convert?A landing page is where a visitor arrives. In marketing it has come to mean a page built for one visitor, one offer and one action. Most businesses need fewer of them than they are sold, and better ones.
- What Is SSL, and Does Your Website Need It? (Yes, and It Should Be Free)SSL is the padlock. Without it, browsers label your site “Not secure” next to your business name, Google ranks it lower, and forms send customers’ details in plain text. It has been free for years, so anyone charging for it is charging for nothing.
- What Is Website Hosting? Explained for the Person Paying for ItHosting is where your website lives. The cheapest plan and a good one differ by a few pounds a month and by how long every visitor waits. Here is what the fee should buy.
- What Is Website Maintenance, What Does It Involve, and How Often Should a Site Be Updated?A website is not finished at launch. It runs on software that changes weekly, on a web that changes monthly, for customers whose phones change yearly. Maintenance is the work of keeping up, and most sites get none.
- Wix vs WordPress (and Squarespace) for a UK Business: The Honest ComparisonWix and Squarespace are the right answer for more businesses than a web studio likes to admit. WordPress is the right answer when the site is a business asset rather than a business card. The difference is ownership, and it shows up in year three.
Why these are different
Written from client sites, not from other blog posts.
Every guide here names the site the evidence came from — Beds.ie's Search Console, a Merchant Centre sync log, browser timings from five live homepages — and carries the date it was read. Where a number is the client's rather than ours, it says so in the sentence.
Got a question these do not answer?
Ask it. If the answer is useful to more than one person it usually becomes the next guide, and you get the answer either way.