Google, all of it
Somebody two streets away is typing what you sell into a phone right now. What decides whether they ring you is a Business Profile that most owners have never logged into, then the ads above it, then the results almost nobody scrolls to any more. Three winnable things, three completely different jobs, and one supplier who will tell you which of them your money should go near first.
Your products are sold through a feed you have probably never read, bought through a campaign type that will not tell you what it did, and compared on price before anyone reaches your site. Google is still the cheapest place in the world to sell things. It has just stopped being somewhere you can run on instinct.
The search is four words long, the intent behind it is enormous, and the click costs more than it did last year. What decides whether it pays is not the bid. It is whether the ad matches what they typed, whether the page finishes the sentence, and whether anybody ever tells Google which of those enquiries turned into money.
Twelve questions, about three minutes, and no email address needed to see your score.
One search, four places to be, four different jobs. Only one of them can be bought this afternoon.
What we run across Google
One supplier for the whole of Google, so nobody gets to blame the other half.
Where we come in
They arrive in different words and underneath they are usually the same problem.
They arrive in different words and underneath they are usually the same problem.
They arrive in different words and underneath they are usually the same problem.
Wrong opening hours over Christmas, a category chosen in a hurry when it was set up, photographs from a van you no longer own, and four reviews nobody replied to. That listing is doing more selling than the website is, and it takes an afternoon to fix.
A radius set once and never revisited, broad match quietly widening it, and a location setting that includes people merely showing an interest in the area rather than standing in it. Nobody notices, because the report says clicks and the clicks are all there.
Eleven of them, all genuine, most from three years ago, against a competitor with hundreds because they ask every single customer and you have never got round to it. Reviews are the one ranking factor you can influence in an afternoon and the one everybody leaves to chance.
Product titles exported straight out of the platform, the ones your warehouse uses rather than the ones people search for. Missing brands, missing sizes, missing GTINs, a third of the catalogue disapproved. Every hour spent on bidding is worth less than an hour spent on the titles.
One number covering search, shopping, display, YouTube, Gmail and Discover, with no breakdown you can act on unless somebody goes and builds one. It works, often very well. It also quietly takes credit for people who typed your brand name and were coming anyway.
Brand searches convert beautifully, cost almost nothing and would largely have happened without you. Until they are separated out, every report flatters the account and nobody can answer the only question that matters, which is what the new customers actually cost.
The search terms report reads like a different business. People after a job, people after a free version, people after a competitor, students writing an essay. Every one of those clicks was paid for at your price, and the account will happily keep buying them for as long as the budget lasts.
Google optimises towards whatever you tell it is valuable, and almost every account tells it that a form fill is the goal. So it goes and finds more form fills, including the ones your sales team dread. Send the closed deals back and it starts hunting for people who look like buyers instead.
The advert promised something specific and the page it leads to is about everything the company does. You have already paid for that visit by the time anybody reads it. Finishing the sentence the ad started is usually cheaper than any change to the bidding, and almost nobody does it.
The Results Page
Nobody sees your advert next to other adverts. They see it at the top of a page that also contains an answer Google wrote itself, three local businesses on a map and the results everyone still calls the real ones. Type something into the boxes on the left and the column on the right redraws, cut off in the same places a phone would cut it. The dashed line is the bottom of a phone screen. The ad in there now is a deliberately poor one, so you can watch the checks fail.
Two free slots of fifteen characters each that most accounts leave empty. They do not have to match the real address, only what is on the page.
0 of five checks clear. It is a checklist rather than a prediction: nothing can tell you in advance what an auction will do with your ad.
All of this happens in your browser. What you type is not stored, not sent and not seen by us.
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This is your organic listing. Everything above it was either bought, written by Google, or free and left unclaimed.
Had three quotes and they are wildly different. Anyone had it done recently and regretted it?
The whole of it
Google sells about twenty different things and most people arrive asking for one of them. The list below is all of it, grouped so you can see which parts belong together and which parts have nothing to do with each other beyond sharing a login. Use the buttons to cut it down to the part you came for.
Text against what somebody typed. The oldest part of Google and still the only advertising where the customer starts the conversation.
One campaign across every Google surface at once. Genuinely strong, thoroughly opaque, and something to be fed properly rather than steered.
Products with a picture and a price, ranked mostly by how good your feed is rather than by how much you bid.
YouTube, Discover and Gmail, for demand that has not turned itself into a search yet. Judged on a longer horizon than search.
Bought inside Google Ads, made like television and measured like neither. There is a YouTube page covering the channel side of it.
The badge that sits above everything else for trades and professions. Paid per lead rather than per click, and vetted before you can run.
The people who already came and left. Cheap, easy to overdo, and the first thing to check when a cost per sale looks too good.
What the account is told to chase. Change nothing else and change this, and every number on the report moves.
The half of paid search that is about refusing traffic. An hour a month here is worth more than most of the fiddling above it.
Crawling, indexing, speed, redirects and site structure. Invisible to everyone except the machine deciding whether you exist.
Writing the page that answers the search rather than the page you wanted to write. Most SEO problems are this problem wearing a technical costume.
Being quoted inside the answer Google writes for itself. A different job from ranking, with different tactics, and it is arriving faster than anyone expected.
Telling Google what a page is instead of hoping it works it out. Products, reviews, opening hours, events, FAQs, all of it.
The part that cannot be bought safely, takes the longest and still decides more than anybody selling you a monthly SEO package will admit.
Free, honest and largely unread. It is the only place Google tells you directly what it thinks of your site.
Rebuilds, replatforms and domain changes, planned properly. The most reliable way to lose a decade of work in a single weekend.
Categories, services, attributes, hours, photographs and the description. Free, enormously powerful, and usually filled in once and abandoned.
Three slots decided by proximity, prominence and relevance. Two of those three can be worked on and one of them cannot.
Asking every customer rather than hoping, answering all of them including the unfair ones, and never buying a single one.
One real page for each place you genuinely serve, written by somebody who has been there. Not fifty spun ones with the town name swapped.
The parts of the profile almost nobody uses, which is exactly why they are worth using.
Branches, service areas and franchises, kept consistent so they rank rather than quietly competing with each other.
Set up so a brochure download and a signed contract are not counted as the same event, which is how most accounts have it.
Configured so the reports answer questions rather than raise them. Almost every property we are shown is still on the defaults.
One place for every tag on the site, rather than six of them pasted into a theme by four different people over five years.
Sending closed deals back to Google so it learns what a good enquiry looks like instead of chasing whatever fills in a form.
The product feed, its titles, its attributes and its disapprovals. Everything Shopping and Performance Max do is downstream of this file.
Measurement that survives a cookie banner and the law at the same time. Done badly it quietly deletes half your data.
One page a month that somebody outside marketing will actually read, instead of a forty tab export nobody opens.
Nothing in that group. Try another button.
Most people take three or four of these rather than all of them, and a fair number take two because the rest is already covered by somebody good. The point of showing the whole list is that you can see what is missing, not that you should buy all of it.
The Google Scorecard
It is the same set of questions we work through on a first call, so you may as well have the answers before you decide whether to book one. Nothing is sent anywhere while you answer, and you see your score without handing over an email address.
Four things, weighted evenly, because a weak one drags the other three down with it. An account can be beautifully managed and still fail on all four.
Your answers stay in your browser. Nothing is stored, nothing is sent and your score never leaves this page, so copy it out below if you want to keep it.
The Vision Note
What is actually working in search, paid and AI right now, written for people who have a business to run rather than a marketing degree to finish. Sign up and the guide below comes through straight away.
Several of the twelve workflows in it are the ones this page keeps describing: turning a search terms report into a negative list in minutes rather than an afternoon, writing thirty ad variations so you can throw away twenty-eight, rewriting a whole product feed's titles into the words people actually type, and turning a month of Google data into one page somebody outside marketing will read. They work the same whether an agency runs your account or you do.
No more than twice a month, from [email protected]. Unsubscribe in one click, and your address is handled as set out in our privacy notice.
AI, on both sides of it
Most conversations about AI and marketing are about writing. The one that matters here is that Google now answers a great many questions itself, at the top of the page, using pages it trusts, and a share of those searches end without anybody clicking anything at all. That is not a reason to abandon search. It is a reason to change what you are trying to win, and to measure it differently, and to stop judging the whole channel on a single traffic line in a chart.
How we use AI across the agencyClear answers near the top of a page, real expertise with a named author behind it, structured data, and being cited elsewhere. It rewards the same things good SEO always did, only faster and less forgivingly.
Headlines, descriptions and angles generated in an afternoon rather than a fortnight. The value is in having enough to be genuinely picky, not in the machine happening to write the good one.
Thousands of titles turned from warehouse language into search language, with brand, size, colour and material in the order that wins. A person checks a sample and spot-checks the rest, because a feed full of confident nonsense is worse than the original.
We will not generate a testimonial, spin four hundred town pages or publish anything nobody has read. It is against Google's guidelines, it is the wrong thing to do, and it has a habit of collapsing about eight months later. A named person signs off everything that goes live.
What we measure
Not the bid, not the budget, not the position. What a click is worth to you. Work that out and most of the other questions answer themselves, including the uncomfortable one about whether you should be in this auction at all.
Move the sliders to something close to your own figures. It works backwards from a sale rather than forwards from a budget, which is the opposite of how almost every account is run. The number at the bottom left is the most you can pay for a click before the maths stops working, and the panel underneath tells you whether the price you are paying now fits inside it.
Move a slider and this panel says whether the arithmetic holds.
At that price a sale costs you £467 in advertising, against £360 of gross margin.
Lift the conversion rate by one point and the cost per sale becomes £350. Lift the close rate by five points and it becomes £389.
Straight arithmetic rather than a forecast. It assumes every click is equal, which none of them are, and it ignores repeat business, which for most companies is where the money actually is. The point of it is the panel in the middle, not the decimals.
If we cannot show you what a new customer costs with your own brand name taken out of it, we have not finished the report.
An illustration of the monthly page rather than a real client's numbers. The order is the argument: the thing at the top is the thing we are being paid to move.
How it runs
The first four weeks look nothing like the rest, because most of the value sits in the plumbing and the decisions rather than in the spending.
Every campaign, the search terms behind it, the conversion actions, the feed, the profile, Search Console, the analytics and whoever owns what. You get back a plain list of what is broken underneath, what is merely wasteful, and what is already working and should be left alone.
Conversions defined properly and given different values, the tag manager tidied, brand separated out, negatives applied, and access moved into your name if it is not there already. None of this is glamorous and all of it decides whether anything after it can be judged.
New ads and new pages every week, search terms read and blocked, bids and budgets moved where the evidence points, the profile or the feed kept honest. You see everything before it goes live and can veto any of it, though most people stop looking by month two.
One page, twenty minutes, in plain English. What the money bought, what it cost to win a customer who did not already know your name, where Google's figures and your own disagree and by how much, and what we are changing as a result.
Monthly is the common one. For a lot of local businesses the honest answer is a single day fixing the profile and the tracking, then a look again in three months.
Monthly is the common one, and for a shop it usually starts with the feed rather than the bidding, because everything downstream of that file is decided by it.
Monthly is the common one and it is not always the right one, and we will say so on the call rather than after the invoice.
An audit and a working session for teams who intend to keep running Google themselves.
We run it as an extension of your team, with one senior person named on the account.
A defined piece of work with a start and a finish, quoted on one page before it begins.
Everything is quoted before anything starts, so you see the scope and the number on one page and decide from there. Ad budget is separate and stays on your own card, in your own account, where you can see it. We also work quietly behind consultants and smaller agencies who want the Google half handled properly without losing the client relationship, so if that is you, say so on the call.
Before you ask
You do, throughout. The Ads account, the Analytics property, the Business Profile, Search Console and the Merchant Center all sit in your name and on your billing, and we work inside them with named access you can revoke in one click. If an agency ever asks you to run inside theirs, understand what you are agreeing to: when you leave, the conversion history, the audiences and everything the account has learned stay behind. It happens constantly and it is the single most expensive mistake on this page.
No, but the thing you are optimising for has moved. Ranking first and being seen are no longer the same, because an answer written by Google now sits where the first result used to be. What earns a place in that answer is roughly what earned a good ranking before: a clear direct answer near the top of the page, genuine expertise with a person's name attached, clean structured data and being cited by other people. What has changed is that ranking well and getting no visit is now a normal outcome, so judging the whole channel on a traffic line in a chart will lead you to the wrong decision.
Usually yes for a shop with a decent feed, and with more caution for everyone else. It is genuinely effective and it is also the least transparent thing Google has ever sold, so it needs feeding rather than steering: good assets, a clean feed, sensible exclusions and brand kept out of it where possible. The failure we see most often is a Performance Max campaign quietly harvesting people who typed the company name and reporting them as new business. Separate that out before you judge it.
Sometimes you should and often you should not, and it depends entirely on whether a competitor is bidding on it and what your organic listing looks like. What matters more is that brand and non-brand are reported separately, because mixed together they hide the only number that counts, which is what it costs to win somebody who had never heard of you. Any agency reporting one blended cost per sale is either not looking or hoping you will not.
For anyone with a location or a service area it is usually the highest return hour on this entire page, and it is free. Categories, services, hours, attributes, photographs and a steady flow of answered reviews decide a set of three slots that sit above almost everything else on a phone. Most profiles were filled in once when the business opened and never touched again, which is why a competent afternoon on one can move the needle in weeks rather than months.
Enough to get a usable number of conversions rather than enough to feel busy, which in practice means enough to produce somewhere around thirty conversions a month before anybody can sensibly optimise anything. If that is uncomfortable at your cost per click, the honest answer is to narrow the target rather than spread the money thinner: fewer searches, closer to the point of buying, in a smaller area. We would rather say that on the first call than take a retainer against a budget that cannot work.
Paid can produce enquiries in the first fortnight and cannot be judged properly until about ninety days, because the account needs enough conversions to learn from. Organic is slower and honest people say so: three to six months before movement is meaningful, longer in a competitive category, and a site migration can set it back before it moves it forward. Local sits in between, and a neglected Business Profile is often the fastest visible win of the lot. We agree at the start what we expect to see by day ninety and review it against that, out loud.
Both, and the argument for doing them together is stronger on Google than anywhere else, because they run on the same searches and answer the same questions. The search terms report from paid is the best keyword research money can buy and it takes a fortnight rather than a quarter. The pages that earn organic traffic are the pages that make paid clicks cheaper. Splitting them across two suppliers means paying twice to learn the same thing and then watching them argue about who caused the good month.
We use it and we do not publish it unread. Google's position is that it does not mind how a page was made as long as it is useful and made for people, which sounds permissive until you notice that spun, unread, mass-produced pages fail that test and get treated accordingly. Our rule is simpler than any guideline: a named person is responsible for every page that goes live, and if nobody wants to put their name to it, it does not go up.
It depends on how much of the list further up the page you want, how much fixing the foundations need, and whether there is a feed or twenty locations involved, so we quote after the first call rather than putting a package price on a website. You get the scope and the number on one page before anything starts, and it does not change without you agreeing to it.
No. The scorecard, the results page lab and the calculator all run entirely in your browser, your answers are gone the moment you close the tab, and your score is never sent to us at all. There is a button under your result that copies it out as text if you want to keep it. If you sign up for the guide further down the page, that is a separate thing and only your email address travels, to Brevo, which sends our email. It is all set out in the privacy notice.
Also worth a look
Everywhere else is where they find you before they knew they were looking.
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