Industries
Who I build for, and what tends to be wrong.
Eight sectors. Each page says what usually goes wrong in that trade, what I would fix first, and what it costs — and where there is a client behind it, it names them and links to the live site.
Three of these have a client behind them. Those pages name them and link to the live sites. The other five say plainly on the page that there is no client in that sector yet — experience is either evidenced or it is not, and you should not have to work out which.
Evidenced
Sectors with a client behind them.
Named, with measured figures and a live site you can open.
Two of the five case studies on this site are shops — one carrying a thousand lines sold by the gram, one carrying seventeen thousand products. This is what actually decides whether a catalogue sells.
The sector where the website matters least and the phone matters most — and where almost every firm is renting leads from a portal instead of owning anything.
A price-comparison market where every competitor shows the same vehicles at the same prices, and nothing on any of the sites tells you why to pick one supplier.
The only sector here where the wrong sentence on a page is a regulatory problem before it is a marketing one.
Market data and method
Sectors with no client behind them yet.
The work is the same and the page says so rather than implying otherwise. What transfers between sectors is method; what does not is claimed experience.
Every client on this site is a small business, so this page is less about a sector than about a size — and about the things that get sold to businesses this size that they do not need.
Consultants, architects and brokers compete on trust and buy their enquiries expensively — while the questions their clients actually search before choosing go unanswered.
Technical catalogues, long sales cycles, and buyers who research thoroughly before they ever make contact — on sites built as brochures for people who already decided.
A sector where the website competes with an aggregator that takes a cut, and where the Google Business Profile matters more than either.
A sector where the portals own the property searches, so the website has one job: win the valuation, not the viewing.
The search data here splits in a way worth knowing about: the design terms are among the most contested on this site, and the SEO terms are not contested at all.
Schools and training providers
A school website has a published list of things it must contain, and an accessibility standard it must meet. Most meet neither, and nobody notices until an inspection.
A gym, a studio and a personal trainer sell three different things, and most fitness websites are built as though they were the same business. That is unusual, and it changes what is worth doing first.
Financial advisers and brokers
A regulated firm cannot say what an unregulated one can, and most adviser websites are written as though it can.
The closest thing on this site to a salon is a nurse-led aesthetics clinic — which is also where the sector is heading, and why the advertising rules now matter here.
The smallest market on this page by some way, and the one where competing on the obvious terms is most clearly a mistake.
Of everything we have measured, this sector has the widest gap between what a client is worth and how hard the search is to win.
Accountancy clients arrive already comparing three firms on fees, and most practice websites answer everything except that. This page is about what to publish instead.
The dearest click we have measured anywhere — £60.50 — sits on a term most agencies are not even trying to rank for.
The menu is the most-read page on the site and it is usually a PDF — invisible to Google, unreadable on the phone every one of your customers is holding.
A different business from sales, with a different customer — and the only sector on this site where our own data says the obvious search terms are not the way in.
Why these are not the same page eight times
Written from the work, not from a template.
Sector pages usually swap the noun and keep the paragraphs. These say something different in each because the problems genuinely are different — a catalogue fails on product data and feeds, a trade fails on the phone and the Google Business Profile, and a law firm fails on neither.
Not on this list? Ask anyway.
The disciplines are the same in every sector — structure, speed, local search, tracking. Tell me what you sell and what the current site is not doing, and I will tell you honestly whether not being on this list matters.