A Facebook page is excellent for the people who already know you. The problem is the ones who do not, and who are typing your trade into Google right now and finding somebody else.

We have the same conversation two or three times a month. Somebody rings to ask about advertising, and when we ask for the website address there is a pause, then: "We don't have a site, we just have Facebook." Bakeries, salons, driving schools, veterinary practices. Facebook, sometimes Instagram, and that is the whole of it.

That is not laziness. Facebook is free, a post takes a minute, and people reply to you in the inbox straight away. All of that is true. But there is one thing a Facebook page does not do, and that one thing is the reason for writing this at all.

People do not look for you on Facebook, they look on Google

Picture a man with a flat tyre on a Saturday morning. He does not open Facebook to find a tyre place. He types his trade and his town into Google, looks at the first three results and the map, and rings the first one whose opening hours he can see. The woman looking for a hairdresser in a new neighbourhood does the same, and so does the business owner who needs an accountant.

A Facebook page usually does not appear in those results at all, or appears a long way down. Not because it is bad, but because Google indexes content it can reach freely, and social networks are walled gardens. Your posts, your prices and your service descriptions are visible there to people who are already on Facebook and already following you.

Put another way: a Facebook page serves the people who know you. A website serves the ones who do not. Those are two completely different groups, and the second one is where new customers come from.

What a business with no website actually loses

It is not only about search. Here is what we see with businesses running without a site.

You cannot show up properly on the map. Google Business Profile works far better when it has a site to point at. Without one the profile looks unfinished, and the map is exactly what brings local businesses the most calls.

You control nothing. Reach changes without notice, an account can be locked, and a page can be taken down over a report you never saw. We have seen businesses lose five years of posts overnight, with no other way left for a customer to find them.

You look smaller than you are. This is uncomfortable but true. When somebody is choosing a supplier for a bigger job, the absence of a website reads as a sign that the business is small or temporary. It is unfair, and it is how people think.

You cannot send a link. When somebody asks what you do and what it costs, you send them a Facebook page and they have to scroll through posts to find the answer. With a site you send one address where all of it is written down.

Check where you stand today

You can do this in five minutes, without anybody's help.

What you actually need to start with

You do not need a big site. For most businesses running on Facebook alone, five pages cover everything: a home page with one sentence on what you do, a services page with prices or at least ranges, a short page about you with a photograph of the people who do the work, a contact page with a map and a form, and a gallery of finished jobs if the work is the kind you can show.

Facebook stays. You are not closing it and not moving out, you are giving it an address to point to. The posts still go there, only now each one can lead to a page where a person finds the price and leaves an enquiry at two in the morning.

When you genuinely do not need a website

We will say this part too. If you work with a handful of regular clients and do not want new ones, you do not need a site. If nobody searches the internet for what you do, that is a legitimate reason to wait. If you sell one product in person at a market stall, the money has a better use.

But if even once in the past year somebody has asked "do you have a website" and you had to say no, that is your answer.

If you want us to check how you currently look on Google, send us the business name and the town. We will look and tell you honestly, including if the finding is that you do not need a site yet. A first website with us starts at 250 EUR and is finished in two weeks, and what goes into that figure is in the pricing guide.

A guest picks where to eat while standing on the street looking at a phone. If your menu does not open in a couple of seconds, or has no prices in it, they have already gone next door.

Run this test tonight. Take your phone, type your restaurant name into Google and try, the way a guest would, to find three things: what you serve, what it costs and whether you are open. Time yourself. With most restaurants it takes too long or ends with no answer, and that is what an online menu is for.

A guest standing on the street with friends, deciding where to eat, has no patience. If the menu does not open at once, they do not ring to ask. They open the next result.

A photo of the menu is not an online menu

The most common solution we see is a photograph of the printed menu, posted to Facebook a year and a half ago. On a phone it is unreadable, the guest has to zoom in and drag the image around, and the prices have moved on since. The same goes for a PDF that downloads instead of opening.

Google cannot read what is written inside a picture either. When somebody searches for a dish plus a place name, or for pizza delivery in a neighbourhood, your dishes sitting inside an image do not exist as far as search is concerned. A menu written as text can be found, and that is the difference between the guest who finds you and the guest who finds someone else.

Prices, and all of them

This is the part people argue about. The argument against is that prices change and the competition is watching. The competition is watching anyway, they only have to come in once for a coffee. A guest who cannot see a price assumes it is expensive, and that is the worst assumption you can invite.

A menu with prices does something else as well: it filters. A guest who arrives knowing what things cost is not unpleasantly surprised, does not argue over the bill, and comes back. If you are worried about frequent changes, the site is built so that you change the prices yourself, in two minutes, without ringing anybody.

What a guest looks for before walking in

The QR menu at the table and the online menu are the same thing

Plenty of restaurants already have a QR menu on the table, introduced when contactless menus became the norm. It can be the same menu that sits on your website: one place where you change a price, and it changes for the guest at the table and for the one still standing outside deciding. If you have two menus today, an out of date one on Facebook and one behind the QR code, joining them up is a day's work.

Your Google profile brings in more than the website does

For restaurants this is especially true. People type "restaurants near me" and choose from the map, not from the ordinary results. So your Google Business Profile needs accurate photographs, correct opening hours and a link to the menu. Reviews are half the job here. Ask for them from guests who left happy, and reply to the bad ones too, briefly and politely, because everybody else reads that.

What you do not need yet

You do not need an online ordering system on day one. If orders come in by phone and messaging apps and you keep up with them, that works. A system makes sense once the calls go past what you can take during the rush.

You do not need an app either. A guest will not install an app to see what is on for lunch, and keeping an app alive costs more than the whole website.

If you want us to look at how your restaurant appears to a guest on a phone, send us the name and the town. We will tell you exactly what is missing, with no obligation. How we work with hospitality is on the restaurants page.

Almost everything written about this online was written by the people selling the service. Here is how it looks from the side that builds the site, including when you do not need cards at all.

Almost every time somebody mentions an online shop, the question is how long it takes to set up card payments on the website. The technical part takes a day or two. Everything else takes weeks and does not depend on us. That is the sentence that surprises everybody.

Let us take it in order, because most of what is written about this comes from providers selling their own service.

Who is who in the chain

Three parties, and it is worth telling them apart, because they get mixed up.

The shop is your website, where the customer picks the product and clicks to pay. That part is us, or somebody like us.

The payment provider takes the card, checks it and answers your shop. Stripe, PayPal, Mollie and Adyen do this, and most countries have a well known local one. They charge a percentage of each transaction plus a small fixed amount.

The acquirer actually accepts your card business and puts the money in your account. With Stripe or PayPal that is bundled in and you never deal with a bank separately, which is why those two are the usual starting point. A merchant account through your own bank is a separate contract, and the slowest link in the chain.

When somebody says "I want cards on the site", they mean all three. We prepare the first, connect the second, and the third goes through you.

What they ask of you before you can accept cards

What surprises people most is that the site must be finished and published before you apply. The provider reviews a live page, not a description of what you plan to build, so the order is always shop, then application, then connection. If you sell into the EU or the UK the payment also has to pass strong customer authentication, the step where the buyer confirms in a banking app.

What card payments on a website cost

Two pricing models, and the difference matters more than the exact numbers. Stripe and PayPal charge no setup or monthly fee and simply take a percentage of each transaction plus a fixed amount, higher on cards issued outside your region. A merchant account through a bank or a local processor more often has a setup fee and a monthly fee that runs whether you sell anything or not, in exchange for a better rate at volume. That monthly fee is the one that hurts if sales are slower than you hoped.

Money also arrives on a payout schedule of a few days, longer for a new account. On our side, connecting a shop to a provider takes a day or two on a standard platform. Something entirely bespoke takes longer and costs more, which is one reason we recommend standard solutions.

When you do not need cards on the site at all

This is the part it is not in our interest to write, so we are writing it first.

If you sell to other businesses and invoice on terms, cards add nothing. If your buyers are local and used to paying on delivery or on collection, that habit costs you no monthly fee and they already trust it. Plenty of small shops run well on transfer and cash on delivery, and service businesses often take a deposit and the rest on completion.

Cards start to make sense when you sell across borders, when you sell something digital delivered immediately, when the amount is too large to carry in cash, or when undelivered parcels keep coming back. Until then it is a monthly cost for something you rarely use.

There is a middle road. Start with transfer and payment on delivery, watch it for three to six months, then add cards once you know the real turnover. The shop does not have to be rebuilt for that.

One thing to line up straight away

Before the shop is built, ask your accountant which software they invoice from and how they want order data. This sounds like a detail and it is not, because reworking a shop afterwards to fit the bookkeeping costs more than building it that way from the start. The same goes for e-invoicing obligations, whose deadlines are still ahead but will reach you.

If you are not sure whether you need a shop with card payments or a catalogue site with an order form, tell us what you sell and to whom and we will say honestly which is the right move. A quote comes back within twelve hours, and what we can build is on the software solutions page.

It does not go down in a day. First the contact form stops working and nobody notices, then the certificate expires, then one morning the site simply will not open. Always on a Saturday.

A client rang on a Monday morning with a sentence we have heard many times: "My site has been down since Saturday and I haven't touched anything." That was true. He had touched nothing, and nobody had done any website maintenance either. That was the problem.

A website is not a device that either switches on or does not. It fails gradually, and the worst part is that the first failures are invisible. The site looks the same, opens normally, and for months you think everything is fine.

First the contact form stops working

This is the most common silent failure and the most expensive one. The form carries on looking normal, a visitor fills it in, clicks send and gets a message saying the enquiry has gone through. The email never arrives anywhere.

The cause is usually a change at the hosting company or at the mail service, or an expired password on the account the form sends through. The owner does not notice, because nothing arrives, and an absence of enquiries is easy to put down to a slow month. We have seen a form that had been dead for seven months.

You can check this today. Fill in your own form from your phone and see whether the email turns up. Do it once a month, even if nobody is maintaining your site for you.

Then the SSL certificate expires

The SSL certificate is the reason an address starts with https. Most of them renew automatically, right up until one does not. Instead of your site, the visitor then gets a red warning that the connection is not secure and a question about whether they really want to continue.

Almost nobody continues. For a person looking you up for the first time that is not a technical message. It is a sign that something is wrong with you.

Then the host switches off the old version

Hosting companies periodically turn off old PHP versions, because security patches for them no longer exist. If the site was built on an old version and nobody prepared it, that is the day it stops working. Notice goes out by email a few weeks earlier, to an address somebody left with the host long ago and which possibly nobody reads now.

That is a failure that arrives exactly when you least expect it, because it has nothing to do with anything you did.

And eventually somebody gets in

A site on an outdated system is not a target because it is yours. It is a target because an automated scanner found it. Nobody is looking for your company, they are looking for a known hole. The usual result is injected content pushing people towards gambling and pharmacy pages, and you do not see it, because it is shown only to Google.

It gets noticed when visits fall, or when Google starts flagging the site as unsafe. Putting it right at that stage is many times more expensive than maintenance and takes days, because the content has to be cleaned out and then you wait for Google to lift the flag.

Six website maintenance checks you can run today

That last check is the quickest way to find out that somebody has injected content into your site. If you see titles in a language you do not use, you have a problem.

What website maintenance costs against what a repair costs

Maintenance with us is 50 EUR a month and covers hosting, the domain, SSL, backups, updates and hours for small changes. It is not a large line item, but the figure is not really the point.

The point is that cleaning up an infected site, restoring from a backup nobody was making, or rebuilding a site because the old one cannot be saved, always costs several times more than that. And the most expensive item of all is that seven month stretch in which enquiries were arriving nowhere.

If you are not sure what state your site is in, send us the address. We go through these six items and tell you what we found, with no obligation and no charge. Exactly what is included in monthly maintenance is on the maintenance and support page.

GDPR has applied since 2018, and most small company websites still have no privacy policy and no cookie notice that does anything. Here is what you can check yourself in ten minutes.

A few weeks ago the owner of a small accounting practice sent us a screenshot. A client had emailed him a supplier questionnaire, and question four asked for a link to his privacy policy. He opened his own site, scrolled to the footer and found nothing. No policy, no cookie notice, nothing about what happens to the details people type into his contact form.

He is not unusual. That is the state of most small business websites, and for years nobody treated it as urgent. What changed is not the law so much as who is asking: the question is standard in supplier questionnaires now, and the person asking is usually a customer you want to keep.

What the rules actually say

The General Data Protection Regulation, Regulation (EU) 2016/679, has applied since 25 May 2018. It is not new, which is why "we never got around to it" is a weaker answer today than it was five years ago.

Two things in it matter to an owner. Every use of personal data needs a lawful basis, and consent is only one of them. And Article 13 says that at the moment you collect someone's data you have to tell them who you are, why you want it, on what legal basis, who else sees it, how long you keep it and what rights they have. Not later, not on request. Article 3 extends all of this to companies outside the EU that offer goods or services to people in the Union.

Article 83 sets two tiers of fine: up to 10 million EUR or 2 percent of total worldwide annual turnover, whichever is higher, and up to 20 million EUR or 4 percent for more serious breaches. Nobody is handing a five person company 20 million. But those ceilings are why your larger clients have compliance teams that send you questionnaires. There is also no single European regulator: each EU and EEA country has its own supervisory authority, so the body that could ask you questions is the one where you or your customers are.

Why the website is the exposed part

Because it is the one place where your business collects data from people you have never met, automatically, around the clock, usually in three or four ways at once.

The contact form takes a name, an email address and a phone number. Analytics records behaviour. A Meta pixel sends data to Meta. A newsletter signup builds a list, and an embedded map, video player or externally loaded font leaves a trace too. Each of those is processing and each ought to be accounted for somewhere. An office where you hand somebody a form to sign is easy to supervise. The site runs on its own.

Check your own site

You can do this yourself in about ten minutes.

Say no to more than two of these and you are not in worse shape than most competitors. You are simply in a position that is cheap to fix and expensive to ignore.

Technical part, legal part

The technical part is what happens on the site: publishing the policy page, installing a consent tool that genuinely blocks scripts until somebody agrees, adding the line under the form, and checking whether anything is quietly shipping data to a service you forgot was embedded. On an average site, one to two days of our work.

The legal part is the wording of the policy and the call on whether you need a data protection officer. We are not lawyers and will not pretend to be. We can draft what covers the site; the final word belongs to somebody who does this for a living.

On that officer question, here is something not in our interest to say: most small businesses do not need one. Article 37 makes it mandatory only for public authorities, for large scale regular and systematic monitoring of people as a core activity, and for large scale processing of special category or criminal conviction data. A twelve person firm with a contact form is none of those. Have a lawyer confirm it, but do not buy a retainer on the assumption that everyone needs one.

One piece of good news

A privacy policy is not only an obligation, it is a signal, particularly if you sell to other businesses. More tenders and framework agreements now ask a supplier to show that data protection is handled. A site that explains clearly what it does with data reads like the site of a company with its other things in order too, the same effect that makes a neglected site lose enquiries, running the other way.

Send us the address if you want us to look and say what is missing. The review is free, and we will say how much work there really is before we start anything. More on how we build and maintain sites is on the website development page.

Commission is paid on every booking, every year, forever. A website is paid for once. Here is the arithmetic, and what the site has to have before a guest will even consider writing to you.

The same conversation happens almost every time we sit down with somebody who rents out rooms. We ask how many bookings come from the platforms. The answer is "nearly all of them". We ask how many come direct. The answer is "someone phones now and then, mostly people who have already stayed".

That is not the owner's fault. The platforms do their job well and bring you guests who would never have found you. The trouble starts when they are the only channel, because then you have nothing to push back with. They change the rules, change where you sit in the results, add a fee, and you find out afterwards.

A calculation worth doing once

I am not going to put a commission percentage in here, because it differs from property to property and programme to programme. You know yours. Take it and do this on paper.

Multiply your average nightly rate by the average number of nights per booking. That is what one booking is worth. Multiply by your commission rate and you have what one booking costs. Now multiply by the bookings in a season.

Compare that with the one off cost of a decent website and it usually turns out the site pays for itself if it brings in a handful of bookings. Not half your business. A handful. And every year after that works in your favour, because a website takes no percentage.

To be fair about it: this does not mean the platforms go away. It means a guest who already knows you, or who found you on Google, has no reason to take the long way round.

Why the guest books through the platform anyway

Because it is easier there. They see a price for their dates, what is included, other people's reviews, and they know a confirmation is coming. If your site does not offer roughly the same, the guest goes back to where things were clear, and that is not their fault.

The usual mistake with accommodation sites is that they are built as a brochure. Good photographs, a paragraph about hospitality, a phone number at the bottom. Somebody planning a holiday at eleven at night will not ring. They want to send a message and get an answer in the morning.

What the site has to have

That last item is the most important and the most often missing. If your rate matches the platform, the guest has no motive to risk a site they do not know. Give them something they cannot get there, even if it is only free parking.

How the guest finds you in the first place

Two routes, and both can be built. The first is Google. People type "apartments near the old town", "guest house with parking" plus a place name, "family rooms close to the beach", and those searches carry obvious intent. You do well on them if the site has a separate page for each unit and text that genuinely describes the place instead of general phrases about comfort and relaxation. Next to that sits your Google Business Profile, which works unusually well for accommodation because it appears with photographs and reviews above the ordinary results.

The second route is the guests you already have. When somebody checks out, hand them a card with the website address and a discount for booking direct next time. It is the cheapest marketing there is and the only kind where you already know the person thinks well of you.

What not to do yet

You do not need online payments on day one. Most small properties still confirm by email or WhatsApp and take payment on arrival or by transfer in advance. A payment system makes sense once enquiries outrun what you can answer, and by then it is a different investment.

A live availability calendar can wait too. One you do not keep updated is worse than none, because you will lose the guest who saw a free date that was not free.

Start with a site that shows clearly what you offer, at what price, and how to get in touch. That is ninety percent of the job.

We build sites for hotels, guest houses and apartments in two weeks, at a price agreed before we start. Send us your listing on the platform and we will say what your site specifically ought to have. Details are on the hotels and accommodation page, and price ranges are in the pricing guide.

Accounting work has come through referrals for years and it still does. But the company that registers this month is looking for an accountant on Google, and there you either exist or you do not.

Accounting practices are one of the few trades where word of mouth still brings in most of the work. A client asks a colleague, the colleague passes on a number, and the list fills up over the years. It works, and there is no reason to change it.

There is one hole in it though, and it gets bigger every year. The person who registered a company yesterday has no colleague to ask. They open Google and type "accountant for a small limited company" or "bookkeeping fees per month". If you are not there, you do not exist for that person, however good you are.

Who looks for an accountant online

Three groups, mostly, worth telling apart because they want different things.

The first is new companies and sole traders. They do not know what they need and want somebody who will explain it. The most valuable content for them answers the basics: what an accountant actually does, what paperwork to bring, what it costs per month for a small business.

The second is companies changing accountant. Something specific is bothering them: deadlines slipping, reports late, nobody picking up when they need an answer. You do not win these on price but by showing how you work.

The third is cross border clients: non resident founders, online sellers, people who need VAT handled in more than one country. It is the smallest group and by a distance the best paying, and it wants something almost nobody puts on a website: a plain statement of which countries and regimes you handle.

Why the websites in this field all look the same

Open five accounting firm websites and you find the same thing. A home page with a sentence about many years of experience and a professional approach, services in three columns, a contact page. Nothing wrong with any of it, and nothing that would make somebody choose you over the next one.

What is missing is what the client wants to know before getting in touch: what it costs, who specifically works on my file, and how fast I get an answer to an email.

What to put on the site

The price item is the one people argue about most. The argument against is that competitors will see it. They will see it anyway, one phone call is enough. The argument for is that a published range turns away the cheapest hunters and prepares everybody else, so conversations get shorter.

Local search decides this one

Almost nobody looks for an accountant in another town, so the whole game comes down to appearing when somebody nearby searches, and there Google Business Profile does more than anything else. A profile with the right address, opening hours, photographs of the office and a few reviews often sits above sites that have been online for years.

Reviews are delicate here, because clients do not like discussing their accounts in public. The fix is simple: ask the ones you have worked with longest, and ask in person rather than by mass email. Five honest reviews are enough to stand out, because most of your competition has none.

What not to do

You do not need a blog with twenty posts a month. You have no time for it and it will bring you nothing. Five or six well written pages about what you do and who for, plus a couple of pieces a year when the rules change, works better than a pile of empty content.

You do not need a social media campaign either. People do not choose an accountant while scrolling. They choose one when they need one, and then they go to Google.

If you want to know what the first move would be in your case, send the address of your site, or tell us you have none and we start from nothing. A quote with price and deadline goes out within twelve hours. More on working with accounting firms is on the for accountants page.

The ranges you will come across, what goes into the monthly price, when SEO makes no sense, and how to spot an offer that promises too much.

The question we hear on almost every first call goes like this: "how much is it per month?" The answer is always awkward, because SEO is not a product with a label on it. But dodging the number is unfair to somebody trying to put a budget together, so here it is, with the qualifications that belong with it.

The ranges you will find on the market

SEO is generally sold in three shapes.

A one off audit costs roughly 150 to 400 EUR. It is a snapshot: what is holding the site back technically, which search phrases are worth anything to your business, where you stand against competitors, and what order the moves come in. For a company with somebody in house who can carry out the recommendations, this is often enough. For everybody else it is an expensive to do list that ends up in a folder.

Monthly work at serious agencies runs from about 150 to 400 EUR a month, with the ceiling going well past that for a shop with thousands of products or a company targeting several cities and languages. Below 150 EUR a month it is hard for anybody to be doing real work. What you usually get is a report generated out of a tool and a few edits to page titles.

A fixed scope project, for example a technical cleanup plus ten optimised pages, is charged as a package and tends to land between 750 and 2,000 EUR depending on the size of the site.

We work in the range of 150 to 400 EUR a month and that honestly is the range. There is no hidden tier above it for the "real" clients.

What goes into the monthly price

This is where offers differ most, so ask for a breakdown. With us a month looks roughly like this.

The first part is technical. Load speed, heading structure, meta descriptions, internal links, the sitemap, indexing errors, the mobile version. Most of it is done at the start and then maintained, but when it is neglected everything else is built on the wrong foundation.

The second part is content. A new page or article aimed at a phrase people genuinely type. This is the slowest part to produce a result and the one that holds it longest. A page we wrote a year ago still brings in enquiries, while a campaign switched off last month brings in nothing from the moment it was switched off.

The third part is local SEO: Google Business Profile, consistent company details across directories, reviews. For a business working in one city this often produces results faster than anything else, because competition in the map results is weaker than in the ordinary ones.

The fourth part is the report. Not a thirty page PDF of charts nobody looks at, but one page: what was done, where the positions are, how many enquiries came in, what happens next month.

Why nobody serious guarantees first position

Because none of us controls Google. We can control whether the page is fast, whether it answers the question, whether it is better than the one currently sitting first. That we do. But an agency that guarantees you first place for a phrase like "web design" within a month either does not know how this works or is counting on you not knowing.

There is one honest kind of guarantee, and that is a guarantee of scope. This many hours, this many pages, this many reports. That an agency really does hold in its own hands.

How long you have to wait

The first movement usually shows between the third and the sixth month. A new site with no history waits longer. A site that has been around for years and simply been left alone can surprise you. Sometimes, after a technical cleanup and two or three good pages, things shift within a couple of weeks, because Google already had a reason to like it and something was getting in the way.

If you need enquiries this week, SEO is not the tool for it. Google Ads is, and the combination is perfectly legitimate: ads keep the phone ringing while SEO builds the thing you will not have to pay for by the click later on.

When SEO makes no sense

We will tell you this on the first call if it is your case. SEO makes no sense if nobody is searching for what you offer, and there are niches where monthly volume is such that even first place would bring two clicks. It makes no sense if the site is so poor that a visitor who does arrive leaves after ten seconds; then we go to the website first and promotion afterwards. And it makes no sense if you can fund only two months, because you will stop at exactly the point where it was about to start working.

How to compare two proposals

Ask about three things. First, what specifically happens in month one. If the answer is general, there usually is no plan. Second, who writes the text and who approves it. Third, whose logins and accounts these are. Google Analytics, Search Console and Business Profile have to be in your name, not the agency's. That last one is the most common unpleasantness when a working relationship ends, and the easiest to avoid at the start.

And one more: ask them to show you one page they optimised and for which phrase. Specifically, not in general terms. If the answer is slow and roundabout, you have your information.

If you want to know what the first move would be in your case, send us the address of your site. We will look and tell you honestly, including if the answer is "you do not need this yet". More on how we do SEO is on the SEO page, and ranges for building the site itself are in the pricing guide.

More and more people ask an AI assistant instead of typing into Google. The answer they get back is assembled out of somebody's pages. Here is what can be done so that it is yours.

Out of curiosity we asked ChatGPT to recommend an employment lawyer in the city where one of our clients has an office. We got three names, then asked for a dentist in a town half the size and got two. Neither time were those the firms with the biggest marketing budget. They were the firms whose information online was easiest to read.

That is the whole story in one sentence, but it is worth taking apart, because a fog has formed around this topic and services are being sold that nobody knows how to measure.

What is actually changing

People searching is not what is changing. The shape of the answer is. Instead of ten blue links, a person gets one assembled answer with two or three suggestions and a short reason for each. That happens in ChatGPT, in Gemini, and inside Google itself in the summaries that sit above the results.

For you that means one uncomfortable thing. You used to be able to sit fifth and still get a click. In an assembled answer there is no fifth place. Either you are mentioned or you are not.

The good news is that these systems do not invent names. They read pages, directories, reviews and articles and assemble the answer out of that. So there is material you can influence, mostly with the same moves that help in ordinary search.

Why a small firm in a small market does well here

Because competition in a narrow language and one specific town is thin. Ask for a digital agency in London and the model is choosing between thousands of well described firms. Ask for a vet in a small provincial town and there is barely any material. A firm with a tidy site that says plainly what it does and where becomes the obvious pick, because it is the only one that is easy to understand.

That opening will not stay open forever, but right now it is there.

What to actually do

You will notice that nine out of ten of these are ordinary healthy SEO. That is how it should be. There is no separate discipline called optimising for artificial intelligence, whatever anyone is selling. There is a clearly written site a machine can trust.

How to check where you stand

You can do this yourself, tonight, for nothing. Open ChatGPT and Gemini and ask the question the way your client would. Not what do you know about my company, but recommend an accountant in your town, or which restaurants nearby cook local food.

Look at who is mentioned and, more importantly, why. The reasoning usually gives away where the information came from. If it is somebody's site with clearly written services, you know what you are missing. If it is a local portal or a directory, you know where you need to be listed.

Repeat it in two weeks. The answers move around, and that is normal.

What to be careful with

Offers are already appearing that guarantee ChatGPT will mention you. Nobody can guarantee that, for the same reason nobody serious guarantees first position on Google. We do not control the system, we control the material the system reads.

In the same way, do not spend money on this if your site is missing the basics. With no clearly written services, no prices and no location, talk about artificial intelligence is a roof with no walls.

If you want us to look at where your firm stands in AI answers, get in touch. We check it for free and send what we found, including when the finding is that there is nothing to fix for now. How we work on optimisation is on the SEO page.

The EU has settled the direction and several countries have already switched over. The deadlines are further out than the talk suggests, but if you have a web shop or you are planning one, this is the moment to take it into account.

Ever since the EU adopted its VAT in the Digital Age package, we get the same question from people with a web shop, or planning one: do I have to change something on the site urgently. The short answer is no. The longer one is worth knowing before you put money into selling online.

One thing up front: we build websites, we do not do tax advice; for your own situation ask your accountant. What we can say for certain is how it lands on the technical side, that being our job.

What is changing

The core of it is the move from an invoice as a document a person reads to a structured record a machine reads and reports to the tax authority. A PDF emailed over is not an electronic invoice in that sense.

The package was adopted on 11 March 2025 and entered into force on 14 April 2025. Two things in it matter to a small seller. Member states no longer need permission from Brussels to make domestic e-invoicing compulsory, which is why national mandates keep arriving. And the buyer no longer has to consent to receiving an electronic invoice.

The deadlines, since that is what people argue about

They are national and they differ. Germany has required every business to be able to receive an e-invoice since 1 January 2025, with issuing compulsory from 1 January 2027 above 800,000 EUR of turnover and from 1 January 2028 for everyone else. Belgium went live in January 2026, Poland in two steps in February and April 2026. France requires every business to be able to receive from 1 September 2026, large and mid-sized companies to issue from the same date, small and micro companies from 1 September 2027.

Above that sits the EU layer: digital reporting for cross-border business transactions starts on 1 July 2030, and existing national systems must match the EU standard by 1 January 2035.

If your country is not listed, check rather than assume; these dates have moved before. Penalties are national and vary widely, so anyone quoting one figure for the whole EU is guessing. And note what this is about first of all: invoices between businesses, not sales to consumers, which are handled differently country by country.

So e-invoicing is not a reason to build a web shop differently today, only a reason to build it so it can later connect to whatever your accountant uses.

What it means for the site

Do you even need a web shop

We ask everybody who comes to us with an idea about selling online, because for a good share the answer is no, at least not yet.

A web shop makes sense if you have a product that can be shipped, enough items for a choice to mean anything, and somebody to pack and send every day. If you sell a service, or five products people order by message anyway, an ordinary page with a catalogue and an order form does the same job for far less. We have seen plenty of shops built because that is what everyone does, then sitting at zero orders a month.

If you are not sure, tell us what you sell and to whom and we will say honestly which of the two is right. The offer arrives within twelve hours. More is on the software solutions page, price ranges in the pricing guide.

What a click costs, the floor below which there is nothing to measure, and where the money most often goes.

Google Ads is the only channel where you can spend fifty euro today and know tomorrow whether it was worth it. That is why it attracts, and why money goes to waste there faster than anywhere else. The question is not what Google Ads costs, but how much you need before you have anything to measure.

What you are actually paying for

You pay for the click. Not the impression, not the position, but the moment somebody clicks your ad and lands on your page. That price is set at auction and moves from day to day.

In the markets where we run campaigns, a click in most trades costs between 0.10 and 0.75 EUR. The expensive trades are those where one client is worth a lot: legal work, dentistry, emergency call-outs, anything people search for in a panic. Broad phrases are cheap and bring weaker enquiries. Emergency plumber plus a town name costs more than plumber, and is worth more.

So 150 EUR a month buys somewhere between 200 and 1,500 clicks, depending on the trade. It sounds like a lot until you work out how many turn into an enquiry.

How many enquiries make the arithmetic work

Say two to five out of every hundred who arrive from an ad get in touch. That is a normal range for a decent page; a bad page sits under one percent, an excellent one over six. Take three percent as the middle.

With 150 EUR a month and a click at 0.30 EUR that is around 500 clicks, so roughly fifteen enquiries. How many become work? A dental practice, maybe five. Construction work, maybe one, but that one is worth a whole year of advertising.

So the real question is what a single client is worth to you. If it is 100 EUR, 150 EUR a month is a reasonable start. If it is 2,500 EUR, advertising with 150 EUR a month is a missed opportunity, not thrift.

The smallest budget that makes sense

Our lower limit is 150 EUR a month for the ad budget. Below that there is too little data to conclude anything: a campaign needs a few hundred clicks before you can see which phrases work, and at 50 EUR you will not gather that in two months. It is not that it does not work; you cannot tell whether it works.

On top of that comes the cost of running it. With us that starts at 75 EUR a month: setting the campaign up, writing the ads, negative keywords, monitoring and a report. The ad budget you pay Google directly, from your own card, on your own account, and that is how it should be, because it is your money.

Where the money most often goes for nothing

First, on phrases that are not yours. Advertise on furniture making, somebody searches for how to build furniture yourself, and you have paid for a click from a man building it himself. The negative keyword list is the dullest and most useful part of the job; the first month we look at it almost daily.

Second, on sending people to the home page. Somebody searches for an orthodontist, lands on a page saying welcome to our practice, and has to go looking. Most will not. The ad must lead to the page answering exactly that question.

Third, on campaigns with no conversion tracking. Often we find an account where nobody knows which ad brought the enquiry. Optimisation then is guesswork with a nice chart.

Fourth, on the Display network left switched on by default. Google will happily suggest showing your ads across websites and apps. The clicks are cheap, the enquiries close to nothing. For most small firms that is money thrown out sideways.

When you should not be advertising

If the site does not work on a phone, if there is no clear phone number or form in sight, or if it takes five seconds to load, do that first. Ads only bring people to the door; if the door does not open, you have paid for the arrival and the departure.

And if nobody in the firm has time to answer an enquiry the same day. People searching for a service on Google usually write to three addresses. Whoever answers first gets the job.

Where the cheap clicks still are

The narrower the language and the smaller the town, the thinner the auction. Outside the big English-speaking markets there are trades with barely enough advertisers to make an auction at all, and the click stays cheap. If you advertise in English in a large market the figures above are not yours: the same trade can cost several times more, and the floor rises with it.

If you want to see what that looks like for you, get in touch. We estimate the click price for your phrases before you spend anything. Details are on the Google Ads page.

A profile you fill in in an hour that keeps bringing calls for years. What to put in, what not to do, and how to ask for reviews without the awkwardness.

One move in local marketing costs nothing, takes an hour and almost always pays off: a properly filled in Google Business Profile. It is the panel on the right when you type a company name, and what shows in the map when somebody searches for a service near me.

It sounds too simple to be important. Then you see how many firms in your town have a profile with the wrong opening hours, one photograph from 2019 and not a single review.

Why it matters more than it looks

When somebody searches for a dentist in a named district, or a garage near me, Google shows a map with three firms first and the ordinary results only after. Those three places are worth more than fifth position below. For services people look for nearby, that block is usually the whole match.

The profile also works for firms with no website. It is not a replacement, but if you have no site today, it is the first thing to make, not the last.

What to fill in, in order

The business name the way it stands on the door. Not Central Car Repairs, best garage, tyres, air conditioning. Google reads that as an attempt and can penalise it, and to people it looks dubious.

The category is the most important field on the profile. The primary one decides which searches you turn up in at all. Pick the most accurate, not the broadest: orthodontist if you are an orthodontist, not dentist. Add secondary categories for what you genuinely do.

Address and service area. If clients come to you, the address has to be correct down to the street number. If you go out to them, hide the address and list the area you cover. Firms working from home often get this wrong.

Opening hours, public holidays included. The fastest way to lose a client is somebody turning up on Saturday because the profile says you are open, and the door is locked. Google even asks users to confirm hours it suspects are wrong.

Phone and website link. A number somebody actually answers. A link to the home page, or better to the service you most want to sell.

A description of a few sentences, written by a human. Not a list of keywords.

Photographs. This is where the most is gained and the least is done. The outside of the building so people recognise it, the inside, the team, the work. Real photographs, not stock; a phone is fine in daylight. Add a few every month, because profiles that keep moving do better than ones that stand still.

Reviews, and how to ask without the awkwardness

Reviews are the second most important factor, behind category and proximity. And almost nobody asks for them systematically.

What works is asking straight away, while the person is happy. Not a month later by email. The moment the job is finished and the client says thanks, that is great, it is natural to say: a review on Google means a lot to us, it takes a minute.

Make the short review link Google offers in the profile dashboard and send it in a message. Every extra click loses half the people.

Reply to every review. To the good ones briefly and specifically, without a copy-paste sentence. To the bad ones calmly, without excuses and without argument, because that argument gets read many times afterwards. One bad review with a composed reply reads better than forty five-star ratings with none.

And do not buy reviews. They get recognised, they get deleted, and the damage stays.

The mistakes we see most often

Duplicate profiles, usually because somebody made one years ago and lost access. Ask for a merge, do not make a third.

An unverified profile: the card exists because Google made it, but nobody claimed it. Until you confirm ownership you cannot change anything, and anyone can suggest edits.

Different details in different places. If the site says one number, Facebook another and the profile a third, Google loses confidence in all three. Make name, address and phone match everywhere you are listed.

And the most banal: a profile set up once and never opened again. Fifteen minutes a month keeps it alive: a new photograph, the hours checked, replies to reviews.

Honestly, most owners can do all this themselves in an afternoon and need not pay anybody for it. If you would rather we set it up and line it up with the site, that is part of SEO, including for firms whose site we did not build.

Eight things we keep finding on sites that look perfectly decent while the phone stays quiet.

Someone pays for a website, it looks tidy, six months pass and nothing happens. A few enquiries, mostly from people who already knew the company. We have that conversation often, and it almost always comes down to something below.

1. Nobody is arriving

First separate two different problems: are people not coming, or coming and leaving? If your analytics shows thirty visits a month, the site is not the culprit, there is nowhere to find it. That is a question of SEO, ads and your map listing, not design.

If three hundred people arrive every month and one writes, the problem is on the page. The rest of this list is about that.

2. Five seconds in, nobody can tell what you do

Open your home page and cover everything below the top third. Does it say, in ordinary words, what you do and who for? Or does it say "your partner in digital transformation" over a photo of a handshake?

People do not read websites, they scan them. The first heading should be a sentence you would say over coffee: "We build websites for small companies." Not poetic. It works.

3. It loads slowly

The most unfair item, because it is invisible. A site that needs five seconds on a mobile connection loses a good part of its visitors before showing anything. The usual culprit is photographs straight out of the camera, several megabytes each, uploaded without resizing.

Check it in PageSpeed Insights. If the mobile score is under fifty there is work to do, and it is usually the quickest fix on the whole list.

4. It is awkward on a phone

Most visits come from phones, and sites are still built and reviewed on big screens. Open yours on a phone and send yourself an enquiry. If you have to zoom, if the button is hard to hit with a thumb, if the menu opens full screen and will not close, you have found the problem.

5. The contact details are hidden

Phone number in the footer, grey, small. A form on a separate page you reach through the menu. More common than you would think.

The number belongs at the top of every page and has to be tappable on a phone. A contact button goes at the end of every larger section, not in one place only. People decide when they decide, so do not make them look for how.

6. The form asks for too much

First name, last name, company, registration number, address, city, phone, email, budget, how did you hear about us. Every extra field puts a few people off. For a first contact you need a name, a way to reply and a message. The rest you ask when you call.

And check that the form works. At least once a year we find a site where messages have gone nowhere for months, because the address in the settings belongs to someone who left, or everything lands in spam.

7. There is no reason to trust you

A site that only talks about itself is half the job. What convinces is evidence: real photographs of your work and premises, names and faces of the people in the company, reviews with a name attached, concrete examples of what you did and how.

A stock photo of a smiling team in a glass office does the opposite. People spot it instantly and start doubting the rest.

8. It says what you offer, not what the client gets

"We offer comprehensive solutions in the field of..." A sentence that means nothing. The same thing said differently: "You get a website in two weeks, with the text written and basic SEO done, and a phone number you can call when something comes up."

When you write, imagine someone across the table asking "and what do I get out of that?" after every sentence. Answer them.

What to check first

If you have an hour: open the site on a phone, time the load, send yourself an enquiry through the form, and read the first sentence out loud. Those four steps find most of the problems above.

The rest you do gradually, and more often than not it is a repair rather than a full redesign. A redesign is the answer when the site cannot go further technically, not when it only needs a clearer message.

If you want a second opinion, send us the address and we will send back a short list of what we would fix first, at no cost. How a new site gets built is on the website development page.

Projects run late because of material, not because of design. A list of what is worth having ready before the first meeting.

Ask anyone who builds websites why projects run late and nobody says "the design". They run late because of material: text waiting to be approved, photographs still to be taken, a logo that exists only as a picture saved off a social profile.

Here is what is worth having ready. Not all at once, but every item you settle in advance takes a couple of days off the project.

A clear goal, in one sentence

What should the site do? Bring in enquiries. Cut down phone calls because everything is written down. Look serious in front of a foreign partner. Sell online.

This sounds like a formality and it decides everything else. A site that brings in enquiries and a site that sells goods differ in structure and in price.

Who you are talking to

One or two sentences. "Owners of small companies with no IT person of their own." "Parents looking for a private dental practice." That sets the tone and decides what has to be explained at all.

A list of pages

Rough, not final: home, about, services (how many?), our work, blog?, contact. If each service deserves its own page, say so at the start, because it changes the scope of the work and the price.

Text, or at least the raw material for it

The item that holds things up most. Two options, both fine: you write it, or you leave it to us.

If you write it yourself, do not wait for perfect, send the rough version. Something to rework beats an empty field. For each service: what it is, who it is for, how the process goes, what the client gets.

If you leave it to us, we need half an hour per service and someone who knows the work from the inside. Writing the content is a job in itself and comes out best done together, not from a company description.

Photographs

Real photographs are the biggest difference between a site that looks like a site and one that looks like your company. You need the premises, the people, and the work or the products.

A phone is enough if you shoot in daylight, near a window, without flash. Take more than you think you need and send them full size, we do the resizing. If none exist and none can be taken, we use chosen stock, but that is always plan B.

A logo in the right format

Ideally a vector file: .ai, .eps or .svg. If all you have is a picture from a business card, say so straight away. A logo can be redrawn as a vector, but that is a few hours of work, better planned than discovered at the last minute.

If you have a note on the company colours and fonts, send that too.

Domain and hosting

If you already have a domain, we need access to where it is registered, not only the login for the site. It is the most common blocker before launch: everything is finished and nobody knows who the domain was bought from six years ago.

Check now, while there is time, and ask for the account in your name. With no domain, we register one for you and it stays yours.

Access to existing accounts

If a site already exists: access to the hosting and the admin. Also to Google Analytics, Search Console or a Business Profile, because the history does not transfer and it would be a shame to lose it.

Examples of sites you like

Three to five links, each with a sentence about what you like there. An example you dislike is welcome too, often more useful. Not necessarily from your industry.

One person who approves

The most underrated item. When five people review a design and each has an opinion, the project stops. Let one person collect the comments, decide what moves forward and have the last word.

A realistic deadline

If the site has to be ready for a trade fair or an opening, say the date at the first meeting. A simpler site takes us two weeks, a larger one three to five. Most of that goes on text and approvals rather than coding, which is why the list above shortens it directly.

Price ranges by type of site are in the pricing guide. If you want to go through the list together, half an hour is enough and costs nothing.

Someone looking for a lawyer usually has a problem and a deadline. The website either helps them decide, or sends them on to the next firm.

Someone typing "employment lawyer near me" into Google is rarely having a good day. They have a problem, usually a deadline, and will open three or four sites before calling. That changes how the site should be built.

Law firms are a particular case: trust is the product, discretion is the condition. Here are five things those sites most often miss.

1. Practice areas, separated and explained in plain language

The most common mistake is one page saying the firm works in "commercial, employment, family, criminal and administrative law". To a client that reads as nothing; to Google it is one page trying to rank for five things and managing none.

Every significant practice area deserves its own page: what cases belong there, how the process goes, how long it takes, what to bring to the first meeting. Not legal drafting, but the explanation you would give across a table.

It is also the best SEO move a firm can make. People do not search "law firm", they search "dividing property in a divorce" or "dismissed without notice, what are my rights".

2. Faces and biographies

People choose a lawyer, not a firm. A site with no photographs or names reads as though someone is hiding.

You need a real, presentable photograph, not necessarily a studio shot, the year of admission, practice areas, languages and education. A few sentences that make them sound like a person, not a row in a directory. Careful with titles: in many jurisdictions "specialist" is protected and may be used only with the formal certification, so describe what you focus on instead.

3. Contact that does not require courage

Someone looking for a lawyer often is not sure they need one. Calling to explain a private situation to a stranger is a threshold many never cross.

So next to the phone number put a form with a short message field and, if possible, the option to book a time. Write what happens after an enquiry: who replies, in what time, whether the first conversation is free and how long it lasts. Those three facts lift enquiries more than any design change.

Say explicitly that anything sent is treated in confidence, and what a message does not do: it creates no client relationship and it does not stop a deadline running. One line, and it saves misunderstandings.

4. Serious without being cold

There is a template for law firm sites: dark blue, scales, a gavel, stock leather bound books. Not bad, but invisible: every firm looks the same and none is remembered.

What works is order: white space, readable text, composed typography, photographs of the real office instead of stock. The client is not judging your design, they are judging whether these people look like they have a firm hold on things.

5. Local visibility, and reviews inside the rules

Most clients look for a lawyer in their own city, so a Google Business Profile is worth about half a website here: address, opening hours, photographs, reviews.

Reviews and case results are where you slow down. Advertising rules for lawyers are set by the bar or law society and differ by jurisdiction: some restrict client testimonials, some require a note that past results do not predict future ones, and confidentiality bars describing an identifiable matter without the client's written consent. Almost always fine: the type of case, without naming parties and without promising an outcome. Never fine: "we guarantee you will win." If a wording gives you doubt, check with your bar first. That call is not ours to make, and it is a five minute conversation that prevents an unpleasant one.

What you do not need

You do not need copied statute text, nobody reads it and Google treats it as duplicated content. No Latin maxim across the home page. No chat window popping up after three seconds asking how it can help.

What you need is clarity: what we do, how we work, how long it takes, how to reach us.

More on how we approach sites for the legal profession, including structure and text, is on the digital marketing for law firms page.

What people actually type when they look for a dentist, why the map is worth more than the website, and what a page that fills the calendar looks like.

Dentistry is one of the few fields where the road from search to appointment is short. A tooth starts hurting on a Sunday evening, the person picks up a phone, types "emergency dentist near me" and calls the first number they find. That patient often stays for years.

What people actually type

Rarely "dental practice". Far more often: "dentist near me", "wisdom tooth removal cost", "implant price", "emergency dentist", "braces for adults", "teeth whitening". Almost every one is a specific treatment or a price, so a page saying only "we offer all dental services" answers none of them.

The map first, everything else after

For "near me" searches Google shows three businesses on a map above the ordinary results. If you are in that block, the search is over. If not, your site helps far less than you think.

The ticket in is a well kept Google Business Profile: the right primary category, secondary ones for orthodontics, implantology and paediatric dentistry, accurate hours, real photographs of the practice and team, and reviews, which patients read before calling.

The best moment to ask is right after a successful appointment, while the person is relieved: a short link by message, before they leave the waiting room. Never offer anything in return, though: incentivised reviews break Google's policy and misleading ones are banned under EU consumer law.

A page per treatment, with a price or at least a range

The move most practices avoid, which is exactly why it works. Make a separate page for implants, orthodontics, prosthetics, whitening. On each: what the procedure is, how long it takes, what recovery is like, what is done about discomfort, and the cost, at least as a range.

We know the objection: it depends on the case. Of course it does. But "implants from 450 EUR, final price after an examination" keeps a person on the page; an empty field sends them to whoever wrote a number. Publish what you will actually charge, and what it includes.

Booking that takes a minute

Some will not call. Not from lack of interest, but because they are searching in a break at work or at eleven at night.

Three fields, a name, a phone number, and what is bothering you and when suits you, catch exactly those people, plus a line on what happens next: "we call back the same working day." An appointment system is better still, but a form and the discipline to answer fast are enough to start. Keep it short: what a patient writes about a symptom is health data under the GDPR.

Before and after photographs, with consent

No text sells cosmetic dentistry the way a good before and after photograph does. Shoot systematically, under the same light, and get written consent for publication first: a patient photograph is health data under the GDPR, so consent has to be explicit, kept on file and withdrawable.

Then one check we cannot do for you. Advertising rules for health services differ by country, and in some before and after imagery is restricted or must be demonstrably unedited. Ask your dental regulator before publishing.

The same goes for photographs of the practice: people want to see where they are going, especially with a child. A clean, bright photograph of the waiting room beats the words "relaxed atmosphere".

When ads make sense

SEO for a practice works, but not immediately. If you are opening, or adding a treatment, Google Ads puts you in front of people at once for exact phrases: implants, emergency dentist, orthodontist, each with your district.

A click in dentistry is among the more expensive, because a patient is worth a lot to whoever wins them. Still, the arithmetic works: if one implant is worth 500 EUR to you, 150 EUR a month is an easy decision. Keep the ad text plain, though: health advertising codes are strict, and "painless" or "guaranteed" are claims you must be able to prove.

The most obvious one: answer the phone

All of it collapses if nobody picks up. A patient calls down the list until someone answers, and the searching stops there.

If reception cannot keep up, have a number that diverts, or a message that reaches a phone and gets an answer within the hour. The cheapest marketing improvement a practice can make.

What this looks like in place, site, text, profile and campaigns, is on the digital marketing for dental practices page.