Frequently asked questions

The first measurable improvements usually appear in weeks four to eight. Real ranking movement on competitive terms takes three to six months. Compound returns take twelve to eighteen months. Anyone who tells you they’ll get you to position one in thirty days is selling something that won’t work or won’t last.

No, and you shouldn’t trust anyone who does. Search results depend on hundreds of factors, many of which are out of any agency’s hands. What we can guarantee is the work, the methodology, and the reporting. We’ll tell you upfront what we think is realistic for your sector and your starting point.

Never. Buying links is against Google’s guidelines and is the fastest way to get a site demoted or penalised. We do real digital PR, real outreach, and real partnership work. Slower, but it sticks.

SEO is the discipline of earning organic search rankings. It compounds over time and is much more cost-effective in the long run. PPC is paid search advertising. It produces leads now, while SEO is building. Most clients need both, balanced properly to suit the budget and the urgency.

AI is changing how search results look. Google’s AI Overviews are eating into the first-position click-through rate. But the underlying need has not gone away. Customers still need to find businesses, and businesses still need to be findable. The mechanics will keep evolving. The principle will not.

Only if you’ve been gaming the system. The big algorithm updates over the last few years have rewarded sites that genuinely answer customer questions and punished sites that produced thin or AI-spun content. If your strategy is to be the genuine best answer, the updates work in your favour.

Yes. We do plenty of SEO retainers where we sit alongside an in-house or third-party development team. We brief, they implement, we measure. It works well as long as the development team is responsive.

UK-based, in fully managed data centres with the security accreditations you’d expect. We don’t host on shared budget infrastructure abroad.

Our monitoring picks up downtime within minutes and alerts the team automatically. For most issues we’re working on a fix before you’ve noticed. We have a 99.9% uptime SLA, with proper credits if we miss it.

Daily backups, kept off-site for thirty days. Weekly backups, kept for twelve months. Restoration is included in the support agreement. We’ve never had a client lose a site permanently.

We can, but for most clients we recommend Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace and we’ll set you up cleanly with whichever you choose. Both are more reliable for email than any web host’s bundled service.

Yes, included in the setup fee. Most migrations take a working day. We schedule them outside busy hours to avoid disruption.

Web Application Firewall on every site, brute-force protection, rate limiting, two-factor authentication on all admin accounts, automatic patching for critical vulnerabilities, daily backups, off-site copies. We monitor in real time and we respond fast.

Yes. We’ll audit the code first, fix anything that’s actively risky, and then bring it onto our infrastructure.

Software patching, security monitoring, daily backups, performance checks, content update hours, monthly check-in, quarterly strategy review, direct access to the team. Pricing depends on site size and the number of monthly hours.

Major redesigns, new feature builds, anything that materially changes the scope of the site. Those get quoted separately and support clients enjoy a discount.

Yes, up to three months. After that they reset. We’d rather you used them than hoarded them.

No. You speak to the team that built or now manages your site. No tickets, no scripts, no off-shore tier-one queue.

We aim to acknowledge any support request inside two working hours, with a fix or a clear plan inside one working day. For genuine emergencies, we monitor twenty-four hours a day and respond out of hours.

Yes, up or down, with a month’s notice. We’d rather have you on the right tier than the most expensive one.

You take everything with you. Code, content, hosting, domain, analytics. We hand over a clean export and we wish you well.

Twenty-five years in 2026. Independent, founder-led, profitable, and not for sale.

Bridgnorth, Shropshire. We work with clients across the UK and occasionally overseas. Some clients we see every quarter. Some we’ve never met in person.

A small senior team. Designers, developers, SEO specialists, content writers and a project manager. Everyone is at least ten years’ experience. There are no junior account managers and no offshored work.

No core delivery work. Everything is done by the named team you’d meet at the start. We occasionally bring in specialist freelancers for niche work, named upfront, briefed by us, and quality-controlled by us.

Yes. We’re patrons of the Shropshire Chamber of Commerce, members of the Black Country Chamber of Commerce, and involvement with Shropshire Investors in Community. Our accreditations are listed on the dedicated accreditations page.

Because in the late nineties everyone was clicking, and the founder thought “Clickingmad” sounded better than “Click Marketing Limited”. You’d be surprised how much marketing strategy comes down to that.

Enough to buy meaningful data, which for most UK service businesses means a starting budget of at least £500 to £1,000 a month in media spend, plus management. Below that, campaigns take months to learn anything. We will tell you honestly if your budget is better spent elsewhere.

A fixed monthly fee, agreed in writing. It does not grow with your spend, because a percentage fee rewards the agency for spending your money rather than for spending it well.

Leads can arrive on day one, which is the point of paid search. Efficient leads take longer: expect four to eight weeks of tuning before cost per lead settles at its realistic level.

Yes. Search catches people already looking, and paid social interrupts people who fit your customer profile. Which mix suits you depends on what you sell and how people buy it, and we will say plainly which we would start with.

Yes. Weekly plain English reporting: what was spent, what it produced, what changed and why. You own the ad accounts, so nothing is hidden and nothing is hostage if you leave.

No, and neither replaces the other. PPC is the tap you can turn on today and off tomorrow. SEO is the asset that compounds. Most clients need both, weighted to suit budget and urgency.

Usually because the ads pointed at pages that could not convert, or the account was structured to spend rather than to learn. We audit what happened before spending a pound more, and the audit tells us both.

The Equality Act 2010 requires service providers to make reasonable adjustments for disabled people, and courts treat the WCAG guidelines as the benchmark. If you serve EU customers, the European Accessibility Act now applies to you as well, with active enforcement. So in practice, yes.

The international standard for web accessibility, at the level regulators and courts point to, covering everything from colour contrast and keyboard navigation to forms a screen reader can complete.

An audit. Automated tools alone catch perhaps a third of real issues, so a proper audit combines them with manual and assistive technology testing. You get a scored report with the failures in priority order and a realistic cost to fix them.

No. Accessible sites can look like anything. The standard constrains contrast, focus states and structure, not creativity, and most fixes are invisible to visitors who do not need them.

Around one in five UK visitors has a disability that affects how they use the web. A site they cannot use is a fifth of your market quietly leaving, before any legal risk is counted.

Yes. We audit and remediate sites built elsewhere, and we will tell you honestly when remediation is the answer and when rebuilding is cheaper than patching.