Questions & answers
Straight answers, including the awkward ones
19 questions covering cost, timescales, ownership and the SEO claims you should be suspicious of. If yours is not here, ask us and we will add it.
Cost and commercials
Real ranges, not "it depends".
A focused marketing site with a handful of templates starts from £4,500. A larger site with a custom content model and dozens of pages usually sits between £9,000 and £25,000. Web applications with accounts, billing or complex integrations are quoted after a paid discovery phase. You get a fixed price before any build starts.
A focused single-platform app typically runs £15,000 to £30,000. Cross-platform covering iOS and Android usually £22,000 to £45,000 depending on backend work. Apps with payments, live data or offline sync sit at the upper end.
Because a fixed price produced without understanding your process is a guess, and someone always pays for a bad guess — usually you, in change requests. Discovery costs £1,500 to £4,000, produces a written specification and architecture outline, and is yours to keep even if you take it to another agency.
Not for retainers. Marketing and support work runs on a rolling monthly basis after an initial three-month period, which exists only because shorter than that cannot produce reliable data. Project work is governed by the agreed scope rather than a minimum term.
No. Card processing is billed directly by your acquirer and advertising spend goes directly to the platform. We charge for our work, not a percentage of money passing through.
Process and delivery
How a project actually runs.
A marketing site is normally four to seven weeks from signed scope to launch. Larger platforms run eight to sixteen weeks. Mobile apps take twelve to twenty weeks plus store review. The biggest variable is how quickly content and feedback come back from your side, which is why we agree a review rhythm in week one.
Provide content or approve the copy we write, give consolidated feedback on a weekly cycle, and nominate one person who can make decisions. Projects overrun far more often through slow approvals than through slow development.
Every week, on a staging URL you can click through on your own devices. Not a status report — something working. It is the only dependable way to catch a misunderstanding while it is still cheap to fix.
Thirty days of included fixes for anything that is not working as scoped. After that, an optional care plan covering updates, monitoring, backups and a defined response time. You are not obliged to take it, and we will hand over documentation either way.
Ownership and technical
What you get to keep.
Yes, outright, on final payment — repository, deployment configuration, database and documentation. We build on mainstream technology specifically so another team could take the project over.
WordPress is often the pragmatic choice when your team publishes frequently and needs full editorial control without a developer. A custom Next.js build wins when you need speed, application logic, or tight control over technical SEO. We recommend based on your situation, including when that means the cheaper option.
Only if the migration is handled badly. Rankings are lost when URLs change without redirects, metadata is not carried over, or the new site is slower. Our default is to preserve every already-indexed URL exactly as it is — same path, same trailing slash, served 200 with no redirect at all. That is strictly safer than redirecting, because a URL that already ranks has nothing to gain from being moved.
Yes, and it often works well. We adopt your conventions, branching model and review process rather than imposing ours. We can also do a paid code audit first if you want an independent read on the state of an existing codebase.
SEO and AI
Where most of the bad advice in this industry lives.
No, and neither can anyone else honestly — Google’s ranking systems are not under any agency’s control. What we commit to is the work: audit findings fixed, pages built, structured data implemented, and transparent reporting on what moved. Treat a ranking guarantee as a reason to walk away.
No — this is a common and expensive misunderstanding. Nofollow on external links is sensible. Applying it to internal links actively harms you: PageRank stops flowing to your own service pages, and the share allocated to a nofollowed link is discarded rather than redistributed. Internal links should be followed and organised into topic clusters. That is what keeps authority circulating inside your site.
Not for being AI-generated — Google judges content on quality and usefulness, not production method. What does get penalised is scaled content abuse: publishing large volumes of unreviewed, low-value pages primarily to manipulate rankings. Our recommendation is AI-assisted drafting with genuine expert review, a named author, and fewer but better posts.
No. Google does not infer whether content is AI-written from publish timestamps — there is no such signal. Randomising publish times addresses a detection mechanism that does not exist. What actually matters is whether the content is accurate, original and genuinely useful, and whether a credible named author stands behind it.
Answer Engine Optimisation means being cited by AI assistants rather than only ranking in classic results. The practical work overlaps almost entirely with good SEO: server-rendered HTML that crawlers can read without executing JavaScript, clear structured data, consistent entity information, and being referenced on reputable third-party sites. Worth doing — and largely the same discipline under a newer name.
Because most AI crawlers — GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, CCBot — fetch raw HTML and do not execute JavaScript. A client-rendered single-page app is close to invisible to them. Any site that cares about being cited by AI assistants needs its content present in the initial HTML response.
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