The practice
I work directly with a small number of businesses. This is what I take on, what it costs, and what I don’t do.
Almost always structural rather than competitive. Search engines rank what they can read and resolve into a coherent business; if your pages carry no structured data, inconsistent contact details, and no clear entity, you are hard to rank whatever you spend. That is a technical gap, not a marketing one.
That instinct is worth trusting — the people deciding whether to call you are looking at it too, and most of them decide before they contact you. A site that undersells a serious business is not a cosmetic problem; it is the first thing your buyer weighs.
Advertising creates attention. What happens next decides whether it converts: most buyers check you out before they act, often weeks later. If what they find is thin or contradicts the ad, the spend has bought a visit to a place that loses them. The ads are rarely the broken part.
Because AI systems can only recommend what they can read. Without structured data, consistent entity signals, and a machine-readable description of what you do, you are invisible to them — however good the business is. I can measure this and make you readable. Nobody can guarantee what an AI says.
Yes, and it is the most common one I find. When no one can say which server, domain, or account owns which part of your presence, you cannot secure it, move it, or fix it quickly. The first deliverable of any engagement is a map of what actually exists.
Usually nobody, which is why it drifts. A digital presence needs an owner the way a building needs a facilities manager — someone accountable for uptime, security, updates, and improvement. That is what an operating relationship is, and it is the part most agencies do not sell.
You can stop after any of them, and take everything with you. Most people start with the Check because it is the only honest way to quote the rest.
What people actually find when they look you up — search results, AI answers, your identity across every surface, and what you do and don’t own. Findings in plain language, with the evidence attached.
The digital foundation, on infrastructure in your name: site, domain, business email, analytics, structured data, and the documentation that makes it operable by someone other than me.
Somebody is responsible. Uptime, security, backups, renewals, and the changes you ask for — plus a monthly report in plain language of what happened and what I did about it.
Making the business easier to find, understand and choose: search visibility, structured content, the surfaces buyers check before they call. Measured, and reported the same way.
These are starting points, not a price list. Every engagement is still scoped from what the Check finds — but you should be able to tell before you call whether we are in the same range.
Also available, outside the ladder: architecture review and second opinions (fractional CTO), and speaking or writing on machine legibility and entity architecture.
What happens after you say yes →
What that standard looks like. Real businesses, live today, built and still operated under the process above.
Every engagement starts with the Check. You get the findings whether or not you build with me, and the fee comes off the build if you proceed.
I work on the structural layer: infrastructure, entity structure, data flow, automation. Presentation matters, but it is not what is broken in most of the businesses that call me.
Your domain, your infrastructure, your data, your code — in your name, not mine. Not a promise in a contract: a handover pack you can ask for at any time and check for yourself. See below.
Every decision recorded, every system reproducible by someone who is not me. A system only one person understands is a liability, even when that person is the one you hired.
A digital presence is never finished. Launch is the beginning of the work, not the end of it — which is why the operating relationship matters more than the build.
When something breaks once, it becomes an automated check that runs before every release. That is how the same mistake stops being possible instead of just being fixed.
Every provider says it. Ask them for this list. It is the difference between a sentence in a contract and something you can check.
If you ever leave, nothing has to be rebuilt and nothing has to be asked for politely. That is not generosity — it is what owning your own business online should have meant all along.
No ads, no media buying, no ad-account management. I build authority; I don’t rent attention.
Specialist craft. I bring partners in for it rather than pretend it’s the same discipline as mine.
Nobody can promise algorithmic outcomes. Anyone who does is selling you something other than what they say.
I can measure whether you appear in AI answers and make you readable to the systems that generate them. What they choose to say is not mine to guarantee — and the honest version of that sentence is the whole difference.
I am accountable for what people find and whether every enquiry reaches you. Whether they buy is your business, your market, and your sales — and I won’t price it as if it were mine.
I take a small number of engagements at a time. That’s a deliberate constraint, not a sales tactic — the work only holds up at that scale.
Client work starts with a conversation — no commitment, no pitch. If it turns out I'm not the right fit, I'll say so.