This part of the site covers the marketing work that surrounds search engine optimisation and single-platform advertising: deciding what to do and where the budget goes, running paid channels as one programme, rebuilding a website without losing what it already earns, and measuring all of it properly. It is written for owners and marketing managers of UK small and medium-sized businesses who can see that something is not adding up but cannot yet say which part is at fault.
A growing business is rarely short of activity: a website, some ads, a social media account, perhaps a different supplier for each. What tends to be missing is a clear line from the money going out to the enquiries coming in. The services here draw that line, then act on what it shows.
What this section covers, and what it does not
Search engine optimisation has a section of its own, covering audits, technical fixes, local search and content, so start with my SEO services if your main concern is being found in Google. Advertising on one platform also has its own pages, for Google Ads management and for Facebook and Instagram ads. If you already know your problem sits in one of those places, go straight there.
Email, social media, content and copywriting work each have a page of their own: email marketing, social media marketing, content marketing and copywriting. Branding has its own pages too, for branding strategy and brand identity design.
Which service fits the problem you have
Start from what you can see happening rather than from the name of a service. The table matches common situations to the place I would begin.
| What you are seeing | Where I would start | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Money goes on several channels and nobody can say which of them brings in customers | A written digital marketing strategy | It sets the order of work, the budget for each channel and how each will be judged, before more is spent. |
| Google Ads and Facebook ads are run separately, and both claim credit for the same sales | Performance marketing across paid channels | One target for every paid channel stops each platform marking its own homework. |
| The website looks dated, is hard to update, or is about to be rebuilt anyway | A planned website redesign | Planned properly, a redesign keeps the pages and addresses that already bring in visits instead of discarding them. |
| GA4, Google Ads and Meta each report a different number of enquiries | A check of your conversion tracking | Until the numbers can be trusted, every budget decision rests on guesswork. |
| You work in a sector with rules on what you may claim, such as private healthcare, law or financial services | The industry pages in the list below | Those rules shape the copy, the ads and the landing pages, so they belong in the plan from the start. |
Strategy: deciding before spending
A strategy answers three questions in writing: who you are trying to reach, which channels reach them at a cost the business can carry, and how you will know whether it worked. I build it from your own figures where they exist, such as what a customer is worth over time, what has been spent so far and what it produced, and how many people already search for what you sell. Where the figures are missing, the plan says so and sets out how to collect them.
A useful plan also says what not to do. A firm selling to other businesses on a six-month sales cycle rarely needs a TikTok account, and a plumber in Croydon gains little from articles aimed at people who are not yet thinking about plumbing. A plan may recommend channels I would not run myself; its purpose is the right mix for the business, not a list of things to sell you.
Paid channels run as one programme
When Google Ads and Facebook ads are managed apart, each platform reports its own results by its own rules, and both tend to count the same customer. Add the two dashboards together and the business appears to have won more sales than it made. Performance marketing fixes the target first, usually a cost per lead or a return on ad spend the business can afford, and then judges every channel against it using one source of truth: your own record of enquiries and sales.
In practice that means one budget, moved between channels as the evidence comes in, and one report showing what each channel cost against what it produced. The pages the ads point to matter as much as the ads. A click that lands on a slow or generic page costs the same as one that lands on a page built for the offer, and it produces fewer enquiries.
Google and Meta carry most small-business budgets, but the same rules apply to Microsoft Ads, LinkedIn Ads and TikTok Ads when your audience is there. None of it can be judged without reliable measurement, which is what a free tracking audit checks first.
Websites: redesigns that keep what already works
A new website is often one of the larger marketing costs a small business takes on, and one of the riskiest for search. The damage rarely comes from the design itself. It comes from what the redesign leaves behind: pages that brought in visits are cut for the sake of a tidier menu, old addresses lead to error pages because nobody set up redirects, and the new contact form is never connected to analytics or the ad platforms.
A redesign I work on starts with an inventory of the current site: which pages bring in visits and enquiries, which other sites link to them, and what tracking is in place. That inventory shapes the structure of the new site, the redirect plan and the tracking before any design is signed off.
Measurement comes first
Every service on this page depends on numbers you can trust, so I check the measurement before judging any channel. That means testing that a real enquiry, call or sale is recorded once, in the right place, and reaches Google Ads and Meta as well as Google Analytics 4. Typical faults include a thank-you page that counts every reload as a new lead, and a phone number on the site that no system records at all.
UK cookie rules open a further gap. Under PECR, advertising cookies need the visitor’s consent, and many sites also hold back analytics until the visitor agrees. People who decline are partly or wholly missing from your reports, so the figures understate what really happened. That is a reason to set consent up properly and read the numbers with the gap in mind, not a reason to drop the cookie banner.
How a multi-channel engagement runs
- A first conversation. What you sell, who buys it, what a customer is worth to you, and what has been tried so far with what result.
- A look at the evidence. With read access to your analytics, ad accounts and Search Console, I work out what the data can and cannot tell us, starting with the tracking.
- A written plan and quote. Priorities in order, a budget and a target for each channel, and my fee in pounds for the parts you want me to carry out.
- The work, in order of payback. Usually tracking repairs first, then the changes that stop money leaking from what is already running, then new campaigns or pages.
- Regular reviews. One report across channels: what was spent, what it produced and what changes next. Budget moves towards what the evidence supports, not towards whichever platform claims the most.
Paid channels can bring in enquiries within days of going live. Whether they do so at a cost you can sustain usually becomes clear over the first few weeks of data. Strategy and website work run to the timetable agreed in the plan.
Who this work suits
It suits UK businesses that already spend on marketing, or are about to, and want one person accountable for how the pieces fit together: owner-led service firms, online shops, professional practices, and B2B companies with a sales team to keep supplied. It also suits in-house marketers who need a specialist view on one part of the picture, such as a redesign or a budget split, without handing everything to an agency.
It is a poor fit if you want a large team producing daily social posts, video and design under one roof, or a promise of a set number of leads by a set date. Nobody can honestly promise that.
Next step
If you can see the problem but not its cause, book a consultation with me and say what you sell, roughly what you spend and what is not working. I will tell you which of these services I would start with, or whether you need any of them at all. If you already know which one fits, choose it from the list below, where each page explains what is involved.