Every engagement opens with an audit you have to approve
Before anything on the site changes we go through it end to end and send you a written report — the technical SEO position, the structured data, the page speed, the indexation, and the part most audits leave out: where visitors are losing interest and enquiries are going missing. It comes with a priority list, an estimate of hours against each item, and a record of where you currently rank so that everything after it can be measured against something. Then you decide what gets done. Nothing is touched until you have signed it off, and anything capable of moving an existing ranking is marked as such so you can rule it out on its own.
Nothing that ranks gets its address changed
This is how redesigns actually lose traffic. Not through worse content — through URLs that quietly moved, a slug tidied up, a page folded into another one, a category prefix removed because it looked untidy. Every one of those is survivable with a mapped 301 and fatal without one. So the rule here is simple: a ranking URL does not move, and if it truly has to, the redirect is written before the change, not after somebody notices.
The safe fixes come first, deliberately
There is always a category of work that can only help: an empty or missing XML sitemap, a robots.txt throttling crawlers, images with no alt text, missing width and height attributes making the layout jump, an analytics script loading on pages that have no use for it. None of it touches your copy, your URLs or your titles, so none of it can cost you a position. We do all of that first. It builds the evidence that the arrangement works before we go anywhere near the pages you care about.
Title tags and headings get changed one page at a time, and measured
Older sites usually carry title tags written for a version of Google that stopped existing a decade ago — long keyword lists, city names stacked at the end, the business name last. They often still rank, which makes them genuinely risky to touch: the page is performing despite the title, not because of it. So they change in small batches on lower-value pages first, with the before-and-after positions watched for a fortnight, and the ones earning your best traffic go last or not at all. Rewriting all of them in one afternoon is how a good intention becomes an incident.
Design changes happen on a copy of your site, not on the live one
You see the new version on a private staging URL, on your phone and your laptop, and it goes live when you say so. That matters more on an established site than a new one, because there is traffic arriving the whole time the work is happening. It also means design work stops being a series of small live experiments your customers get to watch, which is what "tidying things up" usually turns into when it is done directly on production.
Being findable by AI answers is a different job from ranking
When someone asks ChatGPT or Google's AI overview about your category, the answer is assembled from sources it can parse and trust — which rewards clear structured data, unambiguous facts about who you are and what you sell, and self-contained passages that can be quoted without the surrounding page. Most WordPress sites emit a generic Organization block and nothing else, so there is nothing for a model to work with. Adding proper Product, Service and FAQ markup is invisible to your existing rankings and is the highest-leverage AI-visibility work available on a site that already has authority.
Adding products, videos and case studies should not need a developer
Growing businesses add things, and on most sites each addition is a small custom build because the last one was. The fix is to make each content type a repeatable pattern — one layout for a product, one for a case study, one for a video — so the tenth is the same amount of work as the second, and your team can add it without opening a ticket. Getting there is a few hours of setup that pays for itself the first time you launch something at short notice.
What ongoing work costs
Improvement work is bought in prepaid hours, not projects: $750 for a five-hour block or $1,400 for ten, drawn down against whatever you need that month and itemised so you can see where it went. Ad hoc work outside a block is $165 an hour. If you also want the site monitored, backed up and updated between pieces of work, care plans start at $159/mo. There is no minimum term on any of it — the arrangement should survive because it is working, not because you signed something.
