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Ours starts at £9.99 for an automated Digital Health Check — no meeting, no call. Fixed-price jobs run £29.99 to £69.99. Full consultancy is priced to the work and the size of your business: a sole trader needs something very different to a firm with twelve staff. We tell you the number before you commit, not after.

There isn’t one. The Health Check is automated — software pulls your Google presence, your reviews and your keyword data, and it costs us pence to run. We charge £9.99 because we’d rather a thousand businesses see their own numbers than ten pay £500 for a report they don’t read. Some of them come back for the bigger work. Most don’t, and that’s fine.

Not on anything under £70 — those are one-off payments and that’s the end of it. The only recurring cost is a mailbox at £4.99 a month (or £49.90 a year), and you can stop it whenever you like. Ongoing consultancy is agreed in writing with an agreed end point.

No. And there’s no discovery call disguised as a sales pitch. If we can’t help you, we’ll say so and point you at whoever can.

Whatever we agree will happen, happens. We review it with you every three months against what was actually promised — not against a moving target. If we’ve missed, we fix it or we stop charging you for it.

On the automated products, if the report doesn’t run or the data comes back wrong, you get your money back — no argument. On consultancy, we’d rather sort the problem than hand the money back, but we’ve done both.

Depends what you’re fixing. Google Business Profile changes — opening hours, categories, service areas, photos — can shift your local ranking inside a fortnight. Website and content work is a three to six month job before you see real movement, longer in a crowded trade. Anyone promising page one in thirty days is selling you something.

For a local trade, a Google Business Profile does more heavy lifting than a website. It’s what puts you in the map pack when someone searches “window cleaner near me”. But the profile links somewhere, and if that somewhere is a Facebook page, you’ve handed your shop window to someone else’s algorithm. One decent page you own beats no page at all.

It’s the free listing that shows your business on Google Maps and in the local results — name, hours, photos, reviews, phone number. Yes, you need one. It’s the single highest-return thing most small businesses have never properly filled in. We’ll create, claim or optimise yours for £29.99.

Usually three things: they’re closer to the searcher, they have more and fresher reviews, or their profile is complete and yours isn’t. Distance you can’t change. The other two you can. That’s most of what the Visibility Checker is looking at.

For some trades, yes — they buy you visibility you couldn’t earn quickly on your own, and the leads are real. But you’re renting, not owning: stop paying and it all disappears. Our honest view is use one if the numbers stack up, but don’t let it replace the assets you own outright — your profile, your reviews, your site.

Ads buy you traffic today; SEO earns it for years. If you need the phone to ring next week, ads. If you’re building something that doesn’t collapse the moment you stop spending, do both — but fix the free stuff first. Sending paid clicks to a profile with no reviews and a broken booking form is setting money alight.

Keywords are just the words people actually type. The mistake is chasing the big obvious ones — “cleaner” is fought over by every firm in the country. The money is in the specific ones: “end of tenancy cleaning Leigh-on-Sea”. Fewer searches, far less competition, and the person searching is ready to book. Our Health Check gives you ten of them with real search volume and difficulty scores.

People are increasingly asking an AI assistant instead of typing into Google, and those assistants read the same public signals: your Google profile, your reviews, your website, whether your details match everywhere. There’s no separate trick for it. If you’re findable and consistent, you get quoted. If your address says one thing on Google and another on Facebook, you get skipped.

There’s no magic number — the target is to be at least level with the three competitors sitting above you in the map pack. Recency counts as much as volume: twenty reviews from this year beat sixty from 2019. A steady trickle looks real, which is exactly the point.

Reply to it, publicly, within a day or two, without arguing. Everyone reading it already knows businesses get the odd bad day — what they’re judging is how you handled it. A calm, specific reply that offers to sort it does more for you than the review costs you. Never ignore it, and never get into a row in public.

Ask once, at the moment they’re happiest — job finished, everything working, you’re packing up. Send a direct link so it’s two taps, not a hunt through Google. You can ask for a review; you cannot offer anything in return for a good one. That crosses the line into illegal territory.

You need something you own. Facebook can change its reach, restrict your page or lock you out tomorrow and you’ve no recourse. A single page with your services, your area, your number and your reviews is enough to start — it doesn’t need to be a ten-page brochure.

It costs you jobs, quietly. A quote from you@yourfirm.co.uk reads as a business; the same quote from a hotmail address reads as a bloke who might not be there next month. On bigger jobs and anything commercial, it’s the difference between being shortlisted and being ignored. We’ll sort a domain and working email for £39.99 plus £4.99 a month per mailbox.

If you trade in the UK, .co.uk. Nobody here is confused by it and it often ranks better locally. Buy the .com as well if it’s cheap and available, and point it at the same place — it stops someone else having it. Avoid hyphens and clever spellings; you’ll be reading it out over the phone for the next ten years.

A one-page site for a trade is a £70 to £500 job depending on how much is bespoke. A proper multi-page site with booking, content and ongoing work is low thousands. If someone quotes you £8,000 for a five-page site, ask exactly what the money buys — and get the answer in writing.

You do. The domain is registered in your name, the site files are yours, and if you leave we hand over the login details rather than holding them hostage. This is worth asking every supplier you deal with, because plenty won’t answer it straight.

Sarah Penn and Andy Thorne. There’s no account manager between you and the people doing the thinking. Sarah handles business strategy, tendering and growth; Andy handles the digital side — search, sites, systems and automation.

Yes. Outstanding Branding went into liquidation in October 2021, and we’ve never hidden it. We turned down an offer for the business because we were certain the best was still to come, and we were wrong. That’s the single most useful thing we bring to a client: we know precisely how a good business talks itself into a bad decision, because we did it ourselves.

No. The free Visibility Checker, the £9.99 Health Check, the £29.99 Google profile work, the £39.99 domain and email setup and the £69.99 done-for-you package are all self-serve. Card, done, no phone call. Only the full consultancy involves sitting down together, because that one genuinely needs a conversation.

Southend-on-Sea. Most of our work is across the SS postcodes and the wider Essex area, because local work benefits from someone who knows the patch. The automated products work anywhere in the UK, and we take remote clients further afield.

Most of our clients are trades and service businesses — cleaners, window cleaners, builders, one-van operations, small agencies. The principles hold across almost any local business selling to people nearby. If yours is genuinely a poor fit, we’ll tell you on the first call rather than take the money.

An agency sells you activity and bills you monthly for it. We start by asking whether the activity is the problem at all — quite often the website is fine and the pricing, the follow-up or the staffing is what’s broken. Sometimes the honest answer is that you don’t need us.

Yes. No card, no trial, no call. You type your business name, you get a score out of 100 in about thirty seconds, and you keep it whether you buy anything or not.

Live public data — principally your Google Business Profile and what Google already publishes about you: reviews, rating, opening hours, website, category, whether you can be booked. It reads the same signals a customer sees. It doesn’t see anything private, and it can’t see your accounts, your CRM or your bookings.

One hundred points, split three ways: can customers find you (40), can they trust you (35), can they buy from you (25). Each is built from things you can actually change — profile completeness, review volume and recency, whether there’s a working website and a way to book. No secret sauce, no black box.

We use it to send you the detailed fault list and, occasionally, something we think is useful. We don’t sell it, we don’t pass it to third parties, and one click unsubscribes you for good.

It’s accurate on what it can see, and honest about what it can’t. If your Google profile is a mess but your reputation locally is superb, the score will read low — and that gap is precisely the point: your customers’ word of mouth isn’t reaching the people searching for you online.