What a website actually costs, and what you are paying for
Nobody publishes a price, which makes it hard to tell a fair quote from a bad one. This is the structure behind the number, what moves it, and which parts are worth paying for.
Straight answers about getting found online
A new post every week.
The first five minutes after a lead comes in
Most of what decides whether an inquiry turns into work happens before you have said a word to anybody. This is the part of lead generation nobody sets up, and it costs more than any ad.
Local Services Ads, and whether your trade can even get them
The listings above the ads with the green check are not something you can just switch on. Here is what Google Guaranteed actually is, what the screening involves, and why plenty of trades cannot get it at all.
Google Ads or SEO, and why the answer is usually both for a while
One of them rents you the top of the page today and stops the day you stop paying. The other takes months and then keeps working. This is how to sequence them when you cannot afford to do everything at once.
Where your Google Ads budget actually goes
Most wasted ad spend is not bad ads. It is paying full price for searches that were never going to become a customer. Here is what those searches look like and how the money comes back.
What actually counts as SEO on your own website
Your Google Business Profile can be complete and the website behind it can still be invisible. This is the slower half of SEO, the part that happens on the pages themselves.
Signs your website is quietly losing you customers
A website does not have to be broken to be losing you work. Here is how to actually check yours, in the few minutes most owners have never spent on it.
What a website actually does for a small business
Plenty of businesses run fine on word of mouth without one. This is about what changes once you have a website, and the parts people spend money on that do not matter.
How small businesses actually scale with ads
Ads are not a switch you flip. This walks through what has to be working before you spend a dollar, whether you are chasing leads or orders, and why the first month almost always costs more per sale than the third.
Your Google Business Profile is doing more work than your website
For most local businesses the map listing decides who calls, not the website. This covers what actually sits in that panel and why the parts most owners skip are the ones that move you up.