Written for the person about to spend the money. Market rates rather than our rates, the questions worth asking a supplier, and the cases where the honest answer is that you should buy something off the shelf instead.
If an SEO agency has let you down before, the cure is checking, not trusting harder. The evidence to ask for, the questions that expose a weak pitch, and the signs to walk away from.
Agencies sell the same labels and very different things. How to test what a digital marketing agency will measure, who does the work, what you will own and what it refuses to do.
Plenty of businesses pay for SEO they did not need, and plenty ignore it when they should not. A test you can run yourself, and what to do when the honest answer is not yet.
The labels are loose, but the jobs are not: building what you own online is different work from deciding who to reach and what to say. How to match your problem to a supplier, and how to test an agency that claims both.
Shop SEO is rules applied to thousands of generated pages, so the agency you pick should answer specific questions about filters, stock and templates. A buyer's guide with questions you can put to any supplier, ours included.
B2B search is smaller, slower and more specific than consumer search, so a pitch built on traffic and rankings misses the point. A buyer's guide to the questions, proposals and warning signs, usable on any supplier.
Most PPC agency decisions are made on a pitch deck and a results slide. This guide covers what you can actually verify: account ownership, access, how spend and fees are shown, and the questions that work on any supplier.
A web development company is easy to judge badly, from a portfolio and a quote. This guide sets out what website development services include, what you can check yourself, and the questions that work on any supplier.
Software is the purchase where a bad supplier costs the most and shows it last. This guide sets out the evidence you can ask for, the terms that move risk, and the questions to put to any bespoke software developer.
A portfolio shows what a company has built, not who will own it or what it costs to keep running. The questions, the store-account and source-code checks, and the warning signs, in the order we would use them as a buyer.
An SEO audit should examine nine things and rank what it finds. Here is each check, what a real report looks like next to a tool printout, and when an audit is the wrong first step.
A site move loses rankings for ordinary, avoidable reasons. This is the checklist in working order, why each step exists, what usually goes wrong, and when the best plan is not to migrate.
Three measures of how a page feels to a real visitor, with published thresholds and a real but modest link to ranking. What each one measures, how to read the report and what actually fixes a failing page.
GEO and AEO are the new names for making your business easy for AI assistants to find, read and cite. Here is what the terms mean, what is known and unknown, and how to judge an agency selling it.
A practical, ordered checklist for auditing an online shop, with an honest view of which items decide results, which are noise, and when an audit is premature.
A PPC agency does five jobs in a set order: tracking, structure, research and build, optimisation and reporting. Here is each stage as a list of tasks, who should own the ad account, and what the fee does and does not buy.
Sourced 2026 market ranges for Google Ads and PPC management fees in the UK, why quotes differ so much, and what to ask before you sign.
Google Ads catches people who are already looking; paid social reaches people who are not. This guide sets out how intent, tracking and results differ, which suits B2B or B2C, and when neither is worth the money.
Named, dated 2026 ranges for UK digital marketing agency retainers and projects, why quotes differ, and what the cost of hiring an agency includes.
Sourced 2026 market ranges for a one-off SEO audit, what pushes the price up or down, the red flags in cheap and expensive quotes, and the situations where an audit is the wrong purchase.
Sourced 2026 market ranges for building an online shop, the ecommerce-specific drivers behind them, what a shop costs to run, and when a new build is the wrong spend.
Outsource software development when you need a finished system and have no engineering team to build it. This guide covers the choice against in-house, acceptance criteria, ownership of code and accounts, security, time zones and governance.
Four cost bands, six things that genuinely move the figure, and an honest account of when off-the-shelf software is the better answer. With UK day rates and the running costs that follow launch.
Five-year figures land closer together than anyone expects, which is why the spreadsheet is the wrong place to make this decision. The arithmetic, the signals that point each way, and the middle path most people miss.
Four build bands, the maintenance bill that decides whether an app is affordable at all, and an honest look at when a web app or a progressive web app is the better product.
Two bands, three line items that surprise every founder, and a clear account of what belongs in a first release. A properly scoped MVP will feel too small — that feeling is the point.
Template sites, freelancers, agencies and full custom builds sit at very different points on the same scale. Here is the band for each, the seven factors that move the figure, and the running costs most quotes leave out.
Published local price bands for brochure sites, business websites and e-commerce, why the West Midlands sits below London, and the two questions worth asking a local agency that you would not ask a national one.
Four monthly tiers from basic updates to business-critical support, the five things any honest plan includes, and the four signs a care plan is mostly hosting with a monitoring script attached.
Five monthly budget bands, what each one can genuinely cover, why £150 a month cannot work arithmetically, and how long a retainer takes to pay for itself.
Eight out of ten business websites are better served by a properly built WordPress theme than by a framework rebuild. The comparison table, the two criticisms that are really criticisms of bad builds, and the cases where custom genuinely wins.
One codebase or two is the whole question, and for most business apps the answer is one. The comparison, the cases where native genuinely earns its second invoice, and the third option that gets recommended far less often than it deserves.
The platform decision is more about your team than your technology. Where the fees stop being trivial, why custom commerce is rarely the right answer, and what to ask before you commit.
We are an agency, and we still recommend a freelancer in several situations. UK market day rates for all three routes, the hidden costs of hiring, and the six questions worth asking whichever you choose.
The channel you start with depends on three things nobody writes down: your timeline, your margins, and whether your customers search at all. Plus the mistake that wastes more budget than choosing wrongly ever does.
Tell us what you're building, improving or transforming. We'll propose a plan, timeline and a realistic cost estimate.
