SEO questions, answered honestly.

Typically £400–£1,500/month with an independent consultant, £1,500–£5,000+/month with an agency, or £50–£120/hour for ad-hoc help. One-off audits usually run £250–£1,000. The honest answer is that cost scales with how competitive your market is — ranking a plumber in Bridgend costs less than ranking a solicitor in central Cardiff.

No. Rankings built on solid technical foundations, useful content and genuine links persist with light maintenance. Many businesses invest properly for 6–12 months, then drop to a smaller maintenance retainer — or take it in-house. If a provider's rankings collapse the moment you stop paying, that tells you how they were built.

No — and nobody honest can. Google's organic results can't be bought or guaranteed by anyone outside Google. Anyone guaranteeing #1 is either targeting keywords nobody searches or using tactics that risk penalties. What I do guarantee: transparent work, honest reporting, and accountability to targets we agree together.

Local searches typically move within 8–12 weeks. Competitive city-wide or national terms take 4–6 months or longer. SEO compounds — month 12 delivers far more than month 3 for the same monthly effort, which is exactly why it beats renting visibility through ads over the long run.

Usually, yes — if your customers search for what you sell. Unlike ads, rankings keep working after the work is paid for. Where it's not worth it: markets with no search demand, or when you need leads this week. Ads are faster for urgent pipeline; SEO is how you stop needing them.

Ads buy immediate visibility that stops the moment you stop paying. SEO earns visibility that persists and compounds, but takes months to build. Most local businesses do best with SEO as the foundation and ads filling short-term gaps.

Optimising to appear when nearby customers search — the Google map pack, local organic results and "near me" queries. It centres on your Google Business Profile, consistent name/address/phone citations across the web, reviews, and location-specific pages like our Cardiff, Newport and Swansea pages.

Making your business visible in AI-generated answers — ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity and Google's AI Overviews. In practice: structured data (schema markup), clear factual content that answers questions directly, consistent business information across the web, and machine-readable files like llms.txt. It's the fastest-growing part of search and most local competitors haven't started.

AI is changing where answers appear, not whether you need to be findable. AI assistants still draw on crawled, structured, trustworthy websites — the same fundamentals good SEO builds. The businesses losing out are the ones invisible to both traditional and AI search.

South Wales is home turf — Cardiff, Newport, Swansea, Bridgend and the Valleys — but I also work with remote clients across the UK. Local knowledge transfers; the process is identical.