Marketing

Partly, and we’d rather be precise about the limits than pretend there’s a Search Console for this. There isn’t.

We use three methods together. We run dedicated AI visibility tooling that checks whether a brand is mentioned across the major assistants for a defined set of prompts. We also test manually – running the questions a real customer would ask and recording what comes back, which catches nuance that automated checks flatten. And we track referral traffic in analytics from assistant domains, which tells you when a citation has converted into an actual visit.

Each has gaps. Model outputs vary between runs and between users, so a single check is a snapshot rather than a measurement. Referral data undercounts badly, because plenty of people read an answer, form a view and never click. And none of it gives you the share-of-voice precision you’re used to from rank tracking.

What it does give you is direction: whether you’re present or absent for the questions that matter, whether that’s improving, and how you’re characterised when you do appear – which is often more revealing than whether you appear at all.

What this means for you: Pick ten questions a prospective customer would ask an assistant before choosing a provider, and check what it says about you today. It takes twenty minutes and is usually more informative than a rankings report.

Both. We’re not just idea people or just doers. We handle the full journey. Starting with an integrated campaign strategy, then bringing it to life through creative execution, content marketing, SEO, paid media and ongoing optimisation. 

That means no handoffs, no misalignment, and no gaps. You get one team that understands how every channel works together to drive results.

What this means for you: Splitting strategy and execution across two suppliers can work, but someone has to own the join between them. If that someone is you, budget the time.

The mechanism is Google Consent Mode. Before a visitor has made any choice, every storage category is set to denied by default – analytics, advertising, personalisation and the rest. Nothing that requires consent fires.

When the visitor responds to the consent banner, their choices are passed through to Google Tag Manager as consent updates, and only the categories they’ve agreed to are granted. Crucially it works in both directions: if someone withdraws consent, that’s passed back too, rather than quietly continuing to track them.

This matters more in financial services than in most sectors, because you’re a more attractive target for complaints and your regulator takes a dim view of firms that are casual about customer data.

What this means for you: Test your own site in a private browsing window and check what fires before you click anything. A surprising number of sites with a consent banner are still loading tracking before consent – which is the specific thing the banner was supposed to prevent.

You need to define 'working' before you can answer that question – and many businesses don't do this clearly enough upfront. Clicks and impressions aren't a measure of commercial performance. Neither is follower count. The metrics that matter are the ones connected to business outcomes: qualified leads, cost-per-acquisition, pipeline value generated, conversion rate, and ultimately revenue attributable to the campaign.

Attribution is genuinely complicated in B2B or longer sales cycle businesses. Someone might see a paid ad, read three pieces of content over six weeks, attend a webinar, and then respond to a sales email. Attributing the eventual sale to the original ad is reductive. Multi-touch attribution models try to solve this but require good tracking infrastructure to work properly.

The most reliable approach is to set clear targets at the start of each campaign – a specific number of qualified leads, a target cost-per-lead, a pipeline value threshold – and review against those targets regularly. Where performance is below target, the question should be why and what changes would address it, not whether to keep going regardless or stop entirely.

What this means for you: Before any campaign starts, write down the specific numbers that would constitute success. Share those with the agency. Review them monthly. If the agency's reporting doesn't map to those numbers and instead focuses on engagement metrics and reach, ask them to build a supplementary report that shows performance against the commercial targets.

Compliance isn’t a barrier to creativity, it’s part of the brief. We’ve been navigating FCA regulations and Consumer Duty for over two decades, so we know how to create campaigns that are engaging, impactful and fully compliant. 

From clear messaging to risk warnings and fair treatment, we build compliance into every stage – strategy, creative, and delivery – so you can market with confidence.

What this means for you: Build compliance review into the campaign timeline from the start. Treating it as a final gate before launch is what causes dates to slip.

We track what matters. From the start, we’ll agree on the KPIs that align with your business goals. Whether that’s lead generation, brand awareness, conversions or customer acquisition cost. 

Then we monitor performance in real time, provide clear reporting, and use insights to optimise as we go. You’ll always know what’s working, what’s not, and what we’re doing about it.

What this means for you: Agree the KPIs before work starts rather than at the first review. Measurement designed after the fact almost always flatters the work.

There are two separate costs here: the agency management fee and the actual media spend (the money that goes to Google, Meta, or whoever you're advertising with). These are often bundled together in a quote, which can make it harder to see what you're paying for.

Agency management fees for paid search typically run 10-20% of media spend, or a flat monthly fee if the spend is low or predictable. Expect to pay £800-£2,000+ per month in management fees for a competent independent agency or specialist; larger shops may charge more. On top of that, your media budget needs to be sufficient for the platform to gather meaningful data – broadly, under £1,500 per month in Google Ads spend is often too little to run effective campaigns in competitive markets.

Social advertising (Meta, LinkedIn, etc.) has similar structures. LinkedIn tends to require higher minimum spend to be effective and works better for B2B than B2C.

What this means for you: When getting quotes, ask agencies to separate the management fee from the media budget in their proposal. Also ask what minimum media spend they'd recommend given your market – that's often a more revealing question than the management fee itself.

The honest answer is that they work differently and shouldn't really be framed as a choice. Paid advertising produces results quickly and stops the moment you stop paying. SEO builds slowly and has compounding returns over time. Neither is inherently superior – they serve different purposes.

If you need leads or customers in the next three months, paid is the faster route. If you're playing a longer game and want to reduce your dependence on paid spend over time, SEO is the investment. Most businesses benefit from some of both, but the balance depends on where you are, what you can afford, and how patient you can be.

For businesses new to digital marketing, paid advertising often makes sense to start with – partly because it generates faster signal about what messaging and offers resonate, and partly because it doesn't require the content infrastructure that SEO demands to work properly.

What this means for you: Decide on a timescale and a goal. If the goal is awareness and long-term lead generation over 18 months, weight towards SEO with some paid support. If the goal is leads this quarter while a longer-term content strategy is built out, lead with paid. Don't let the either/or framing push you into an all-or-nothing decision.

In-house tends to work better when the volume of activity justifies a dedicated hire, when you're in a sector where deep market knowledge matters for targeting, or when the pace of change is fast enough that an external team would struggle to keep up. An in-house PPC specialist knows your product, your customers, and your business rhythm in a way an agency account manager managing ten other clients often doesn't.

Agencies tend to work better when you need breadth rather than depth – when you want someone managing paid search, paid social, and campaign strategy across multiple channels – or when you don't have the volume of work to justify a full hire. They also bring external benchmarks: they see what's working across multiple clients and sectors, which can inform your strategy in ways an in-house team can't.

The hybrid model – an in-house marketing manager with strategic oversight, an agency handling the hands-on channel management – is increasingly common for mid-size businesses and often works well.

What this means for you: If you're spending more than £6,000-£8,000 per month in media, model the cost of a specialist hire versus agency fees. At that level, the economics often favour bringing at least some capability in-house, even if you maintain an agency relationship for oversight or specific channels.

It means your message doesn’t just live in one place, it works across the entire customer journey. We map out where your audience is, what they need to hear, and when, then deploy the right mix of channels – whether that’s paid social, SEO, email, content or creative campaigns. 

Everything is connected, so your brand shows up consistently, and your budget works harder. The result? Better engagement, stronger conversion, and measurable ROI.

What this means for you: Integration is mostly about planning, not channel count. If your channels are briefed separately, you’re likely paying to reach the same audience several times over.

Anyone who gives you a specific number without knowing your market, margins, average deal value, sales cycle, and current conversion rates should be treated with scepticism. ROI from digital marketing varies enormously across sectors – comparing a financial services firm with a six-month sales cycle to an e-commerce retailer selling £30 products is meaningless.

What a well-run campaign should do is produce measurable, improving results over time. In paid search, you'd expect to see cost-per-acquisition declining as the campaign matures, bids and audiences are refined, and low-performing terms are paused. In SEO, you'd expect to see organic search visibility increasing over months, not weeks. The trajectory matters more than any single month's numbers.

For regulated financial services, the picture is complicated by the fact that you can't always link a piece of content or a campaign directly to a sale. Brand-building activity – thought leadership, organic content, PR – has real commercial value but it often doesn't show up in a simple ROI attribution model. That's a genuine limitation of measurement, not evidence that the activity isn't working.

What this means for you: Define what 'working' looks like before you start, not after. That means agreeing on specific metrics – qualified leads, cost-per-lead, organic traffic growth, share of voice – and reviewing them regularly. The clearer the performance framework upfront, the easier the conversation when it comes to judging whether what you're doing is worthwhile.

A retainer is an ongoing arrangement where you pay a fixed monthly fee for a defined scope of work. A project is a defined piece of work with a start, end, and specific output. Both have their place.

Retainers make sense for campaign work that has an ongoing nature: paid search management, content production, SEO, social media. These benefit from consistent attention, institutional knowledge, and the kind of optimisation that compounds over time. Switching agencies or approaches frequently resets the learning curve and tends to produce worse results.

Project-based work makes sense for campaign work that has a clear deliverable and end point: producing a specific campaign asset, running a one-off paid campaign for a product launch, building a campaign landing page. You don't need an ongoing relationship to get those done.

The risk with retainers is that they can become comfortable for both sides without either party scrutinising whether the value is there. A retainer that's been running for two years without a proper review is often worth pausing to assess. The agency should be proactively demonstrating value; if you're not sure what you're getting from a retainer, ask for a line-item account of where the time went last quarter.

What this means for you: For any retainer, agree upfront on what success looks like, when you'll review it, and what would trigger a conversation about changing the scope or ending the arrangement. That isn't adversarial – it's just sensible commercial management, and a good agency should be comfortable having that conversation.

We provide managed cloud hosting built on Cloudways, in tiers scaled to the site rather than a single package everyone gets pushed into. Packages start from £70 per month, and scale from there according to what the site needs – traffic volumes, complexity, the resilience you require, and any regulatory obligations that apply to you.

Security is included as standard rather than sold separately: web application firewall, DDoS protection, SSL, and bot blocking on every tier, with automated monitoring, malware detection and vulnerability scanning on higher ones. Performance comes from Cloudflare Enterprise CDN, included across all tiers, plus caching and server resources sized to the site.

For sites with unpredictable demand – a campaign spike, a product launch, seasonal peaks – auto-scaling is available, so infrastructure follows actual load rather than being permanently sized for the worst day of the year.

We’d generally recommend against buying the cheapest tier that technically works. The entry package suits brochure sites and campaign microsites; a financial services site where downtime has commercial and regulatory consequences should sit higher up the range, and we’ll tell you which and why rather than leaving you to guess.

What this means for you: Ask any host what happens when your site is attacked or goes down, and whether fixing it is included or billed as extra. That distinction matters far more than the headline monthly price.

There are a handful of reasons SEO underperforms, and they're often compounding. Technical issues – slow load speeds, crawling errors, poor mobile experience – prevent pages from being indexed or ranking even when the content is good. Content that's written for internal audiences rather than search audiences doesn't attract the traffic you want. And links – the external references from other credible sites that signal authority to search engines – take time to build and can't be shortcut.

Another common issue is competing for search terms you have no realistic chance of winning. A new or mid-sized financial services firm targeting 'financial advice UK' or 'best ISA rates' is fighting major comparison sites and national brands for terms where they have no authority advantage. That's not a fixable SEO problem – it's a targeting problem.

What actually works is less glamorous than most agencies want to admit: regular, useful content that answers the questions your specific audience is searching for, a technically sound site, and a patient approach to building credibility over time. There's no shortcut that consistently produces durable results.

What this means for you: Start with a keyword audit that looks at search volume alongside competition. Focus on terms where there's genuine intent from your target audience and where you have a realistic chance of ranking given your current authority. That's a narrower target list than you might expect, but it's a more honest basis for an SEO strategy.

It will reduce your observed numbers, and you should expect that. Some proportion of visitors decline analytics cookies, and those sessions won’t be measured the way they were before.

What it doesn’t do is make measurement useless. Consent Mode passes anonymous signals even when consent is declined, which lets Google model the gap rather than simply losing it. Trends, relative performance and channel comparisons stay usable, because the under-measurement is reasonably consistent.

The bigger risk is comparing periods across a consent change and treating the drop as a performance problem. It isn’t – it’s a measurement change, and it needs annotating rather than explaining away.

What this means for you: Mark the date your consent setup changed in your analytics annotations. It will save an awkward conversation about a traffic decline that never happened.