Two different problems. Most SEO only solves the first one.
Being in Google's index is not the same as being the answer when somebody asks a question. More and more they are asking ChatGPT, Gemini or Google's own AI, and those name two or three businesses rather than listing ten. Getting into that shortlist takes different work from ranking.
Worth knowing which of the three is actually your problem before anybody spends money.
Is the site actually in Google's index, or just sitting on the internet? A great many small business sites have a handful of pages indexed and the rest invisible, and no amount of keyword work fixes that. It is checkable in an afternoon.
Different system entirely. Being listed is about the index. Being named as the good one, the reliable one or the best value is about evidence: reviews, consistent listings, and being mentioned somewhere other than your own website.
Traffic that does not ring you is a vanity number. A visible phone number, correct opening hours, a form that works on a phone and a price people can see beat another thousand visitors who bounce.
No secret formula. It is a list of unglamorous things, done properly and in order.
When somebody asks an assistant for a plumber, an accountant or a computer repair shop in their town, it does not hand back ten blue links. It names two or three. That shortlist is built from evidence it can verify: your reviews, your listings agreeing with each other, structured data it can actually read, and mentions of you somewhere other than your own site.
Which means a business can be perfectly findable and still never be recommended. It is a genuinely different failure, and keyword work does not touch it.
This is measurable. You can check which assistants know your business exists, whether they describe it correctly, and how often they put you forward against your competitors. That is where the free check starts, because it usually explains more than a ranking report does.
Being straight about it: this is new, it moves, and nobody can promise you a place in an AI answer. What can be done is to make sure the evidence those systems look for actually exists and points at you.
Not a hypothetical. These are real numbers from a real check on a small Luton business site — the sort of thing that comes back, and the reason the first one is free.
Good copy, sensible structure, clean code, a perfectly respectable score from an automated audit tool. And nineteen of its twenty-one pages had never made it into Google's index at all. No amount of writing better content fixes that, because nothing was being read in the first place.
Five of the seven assistants tested knew the business existed and described it accurately. Not one put it forward when asked who was reliable, fastest or best value locally. Being known and being recommended turned out to be two entirely separate problems, and only the second one was actually broken.
Different closing times on three different directories. A phone number malformed on one of them. No listing at all on the index that two of the AI assistants rely on. Individually trivial, collectively the reason nothing could confidently identify the business as one entity.
In the whole measured period, search had sent the site three clicks, and the single query on record was for a completely different kind of business. That one line says more than a ranking report does: the search engines had no working idea what this company did.
No prices a machine could read, no opening hours in a form anything could parse, and no connection between the website and the profiles that carried its reviews. Asked to name a good local firm, an assistant had nothing to work from and named seventy-six other people instead.
One scored the site four out of five for search visibility. Another marked its reviews as missing when it had five-star ones. Both were reading the page and calling it visibility. Neither could see the index, which is where the actual problem was.
The indexing problem first, because everything else is wasted until pages can actually be read. Then the machine-readable layer: prices, hours, services and identity in a form search engines and assistants can parse without guessing. Then the listings, so every profile agrees on who the business is, where it is and when it opens. Then the evidence that answers the questions people actually ask — reliable, fast, good value — because those are reputation questions and no amount of technical work answers them.
Roughly a day of work for the foundations. The reputation half is measured in months, because it depends on other people, and anybody telling you otherwise is selling something.
Deliberately no method detail here. If you want to know whether your own site has the same problem, the check is free and you get the findings whether or not you do anything about them.
What is indexed, what is not, what the profile looks like, which assistants know you exist and who they recommend instead. You get one page back. If the answer is that you do not need me, it will say so.
Indexing, profile, structured data and listings. Mostly a fixed amount of work with a clear end, and the part that produces the quickest change.
Reviews, pages worth ranking, and consistency maintained rather than set once. This is the slow half, and it is the half that decides whether you get recommended.
Same as everything else here: quoted before it starts, and no contract. Full list on the prices page.
Indexing, profile, listings and AI visibility, with what is actually wrong and what it would take to fix. No obligation and no follow-up sales call.
Set up or cleaned up properly: categories, hours, services, photos and posts. Often worth more than the website to a business that relies on local trade.
Billed for what it takes, or fixed-price where the job has a clear edge. A monthly arrangement is quoted per site once we both know what it needs.
It will not put you first for a term the national chains are spending thousands a month on. For a one-van business the money is far better spent owning your own town and the three around it, where you can genuinely win.
It will not fix a business problem. If the phone rings and nobody answers it, or the quote takes a week, more visitors just means more people finding that out.
It is not instant. Indexing can move in days. Reputation takes months, because it is built from other people's evidence and you cannot rush that honestly.
And it is not a subscription you cannot leave. If a month goes by where there is nothing worth doing, you will be told that rather than invoiced for a report.
Technical fixes such as getting pages indexed can show within days. Ranking and reputation take months, because they depend on evidence accumulating rather than on a setting being changed. Anyone promising page one in thirty days is either lucky or lying, and you should ask which.
No. Work is quoted job by job at £45 an hour, or as a fixed price where the job has a clear edge to it. A monthly arrangement is available if you would rather have steady work and reporting, but it is not a condition of getting help and there is no minimum term.
It is whether ChatGPT, Gemini, Copilot, Perplexity and Google's own AI answers can find your business and whether they recommend it. It matters because a growing share of people ask a question rather than search a keyword, and those systems name two or three businesses instead of listing ten. Being absent from that shortlist is different from ranking badly, and it is fixed differently.
No, and nobody can. Google does not sell positions and does not publish the algorithm. What can be promised is that the technical faults get fixed, the profile gets built properly, and you are told honestly what is and is not moving.
No. Most of this work is done on sites somebody else built, and that is fine. If the site itself is the thing holding you back you will be told, but the default assumption is that we work with what you have.
A plain-English summary of what was done, what changed and what it means. No forty-page automated PDF full of charts nobody reads. If a number went the wrong way it will be in there too.
Tell me what is playing up, or send me your web address. You get back one page: what is slow, what is insecure, and what Google cannot see. If the answer is that you do not need me, I will say so.