Start with the problem, not the service

Get More Leads

We need more leads. We are spending on marketing every month, the reports look busy, and the sales team still does not have enough of the right people to talk to.

"We need more leads" usually means one of four very different things: not enough people arrive, the ones who arrive do not enquire, the ones who enquire are wrong for you, or nobody follows them up. Each has a different fix, and choosing the wrong one costs a quarter.

Rank in Google Maps

Competitors two suburbs away show up in the map results for my own service and I do not. My profile looks complete, my site is fine, and nobody has been able to tell me what is actually wrong.

A business missing from the map results usually has one of five specific, findable problems — and one of them cannot be fixed at all. Work through them in order before you pay anyone to fix the wrong one.

Recover Lost Organic Traffic

Our organic traffic has fallen and nobody can tell me whether it was an algorithm update, something we did to the site, or a number that was never real in the first place.

A cliff on a single date, a slow bleed across months and a broken tracking tag look similar on a dashboard and have nothing else in common. Identify the shape first, then the date, then the cause.

Improve AI Search Visibility

I asked ChatGPT and Google about our category and we were not mentioned at all. When we were mentioned somewhere else, half the details were wrong and the pricing was from two years ago.

Absent from AI answers, described with facts that are years out of date, or cited without anyone ever arriving? Three different failures, three different fixes, and one measurement problem that applies to all of them.

Fix a Website That Is Not Generating Leads

People are visiting the website — the analytics says so — but the enquiry form barely produces anything. I cannot tell whether the problem is the traffic, the pages, or the form itself.

Four things can be true when a site has visitors and no enquiries: nobody useful arrives, the wrong people arrive, people arrive and leave, or the form has been quietly failing. Check the last one first. It takes twenty minutes and it is more common than anyone expects.

Improve Online Reviews

Our reviews are the first thing a customer sees and they are not doing us any favours. There are too few of them, the good ones are old, and the negative ones are the only ones with any detail in them.

Too few reviews, reviews that are all three years old, a poor average, a burst followed by silence, or negatives nobody answered. Five different problems, five different responses — and none of them involve buying, gating or writing a review.

Generate B2B Pipeline

Marketing reports more leads every quarter and sales says none of them are real. Somewhere between the form fill and the forecast the two teams stopped meaning the same thing by the word "lead", and nobody has been willing to sit down and resolve it.

Most B2B marketing teams can show leads going up and pipeline going nowhere. That gap is almost never a traffic problem. It is a definition problem, a committee problem and a lag problem, and each one has a different fix.

Reduce Cost Per Lead

Cost per lead keeps climbing and every round of optimisation buys a few weeks of relief. Before cutting bids or rewriting ads again, it is worth knowing which of five very different causes you actually have — because most of them cannot be fixed inside the ad account.

A high cost per lead has four common causes and one uncomfortable fifth: sometimes the CPL is correct and the problem is what happens after the lead arrives. Each cause has a different fix, and three of them are not inside the ad account.

Improve Lead Quality

The forms are filling in and almost none of it is worth calling back. Fixing that means deciding how much volume you are prepared to lose, because there is no qualification step that removes only the bad leads.

Every qualification step you add removes real buyers along with the wrong ones. The question is not how to improve lead quality — it is how much volume you are willing to trade, and whether you would rather do the filtering before the form or after it.

Grow Ecommerce Sales

Sales have flattened and the obvious answer is always more traffic. But revenue is traffic times conversion rate times average order value times repeat rate, and in most stores the weakest of those four is not the one everyone is buying more of.

Online revenue is traffic multiplied by conversion rate, average order value and repeat rate. Almost every store reaches for the first term first, and in most cases it is not the weakest one. This page is about working out which term is.

Grow a Multi-Location Business

Head office wants consistency and control. Each location wants to be findable and locally relevant. Most multi-location marketing fails at the seam between the two: pages that compete with each other, profiles nobody owns, and reporting that cannot separate a weak location from a weak brand.

Head office wants one brand, one message and one set of numbers. Each location needs to be findable and relevant to people a few miles away. Almost every multi-location marketing failure happens at the point where those two demands meet.

Launch a New Website

You are about to replace a site that currently earns you business, and nobody has said out loud what happens to that traffic on launch day. The risk is not that the new site looks wrong. It is that it goes live without a benchmark, a redirect map or a way back.

A new website is one of the most common causes of lost organic revenue we see. Rarely because the design is worse — almost always because the launch was run as a design deadline rather than as a migration with a sequence, a benchmark and a way back.

Get More Customers

We need more customers. We have tried spending more on marketing and it has not really moved the number of people who actually buy from us, and nobody can tell me whether that is a marketing failure or something else.

Enquiries multiplied by qualification rate, multiplied by close rate, multiplied by how many come back. Marketing owns the first term outright and influences the second. If the weak term is the third or the fourth, more marketing makes the shortfall more expensive rather than smaller.

Improve Website Conversion Rate

Our conversion rate is about one per cent and I have been told that is bad. I do not know what it should be, I do not know what is dragging it down, and every proposal I get is for a redesign we cannot afford right now.

The same page can convert at one per cent and at eight, depending entirely on who arrived and what they were promised on the way in. Before changing anything on the page, work out whether you have a traffic problem, a message-match problem, a friction problem, a trust problem or a path that is simply broken.

Increase Brand Awareness

Nobody in our market has heard of us. Our competitors get mentioned in conversations we are not part of, and when we do get a chance to pitch we spend the first ten minutes explaining who we are. We want to be better known, but I do not know how anyone proves that worked.

Knowing your name exists, retrieving it when the need arises, and choosing you over an alternative are separate states with separate costs. Most awareness budgets are aimed at the first and judged on the third. Here is what can honestly be measured, what cannot, and when awareness is the wrong goal entirely.

Improve Local Visibility

We are visible locally in some places and invisible in others and I cannot see the pattern. We show in the map sometimes, a directory I have never paid for outranks my own site, and half the people who call say they found us on a review site I do not manage.

The map pack, the localised blue links, the directories and marketplaces that outrank you for your own service, the review platforms buyers read instead of your site, and the assistants that now answer without showing a list. Being strong in one of those tells you nothing about the other four.

Build Organic Authority

We rank fine for long, specific phrases and we are nowhere on the terms our competitors own. The content is good, the site is fast, and every month we publish more and nothing moves on the searches that would actually change the business.

A site can be technically sound, well written and completely unable to compete for the searches that pay. That ceiling is not fixed by more pages. It is fixed by depth on a subject, coverage from people who are not you, and facts about your organisation that agree with each other — over a timeframe nobody enjoys hearing.

Get Cited in AI Answers

When someone asks an assistant about our category, the answer quotes figures and definitions from three other companies and links to them. We know at least as much as they do. We are simply never the thing being quoted.

Nobody controls whether a model cites anyone, and we will not pretend otherwise. What can be changed is whether you are the kind of source worth drawing on: the origin of a fact rather than a repeater of one, stating claims in a form that can be lifted cleanly, dated, maintained, and unambiguously attached to your organisation.

Rebrand a Business

We are changing our name and I have been told this could damage our search visibility. Nobody can tell me how much, what order to do things in, or which parts of this are genuinely risky and which parts are people being cautious.

Search visibility, name recognition, hundreds of listings, years of reviews and every link anyone ever built are all attached to the name you are about to change. None of that has to be lost, and most of what does get lost is lost to sequencing rather than to the rebrand itself.

Enter a New Market

We want to expand into a new market. We think there is demand, our existing customers there found us by accident, and I have three different opinions internally about whether we need a separate website, a translated one, or just another page.

A new country or a new sector fails the same way: the demand was assumed, the site absorbed the new market as an afterthought, and the copy was translated rather than written. Each of those is avoidable, and the validation that avoids them costs a fraction of the launch it prevents.

International Growth

We sell in six countries. The wrong version of the site keeps showing up in the wrong places, our English pages appear to be competing with each other, and every country manager reports numbers that head office cannot reconcile with the group view.

Past a couple of countries, the failures stop being about demand and start being about interference: English versions competing with each other, annotations that contradict themselves, prices that do not match the visitor, and reporting that averages every market into one unreadable line.

Improve Franchise Marketing

Half our franchisees ignore the brand guidelines, several run their own ads and one has built a completely separate website. We collect a marketing levy from all of them and every quarter I get asked what it bought. Nobody wants a legal fight, but nothing else has worked either.

Head office can instruct a branch. It can only persuade a franchisee, within whatever the agreement actually permits. That single difference reshapes brand standards, ad-fund spending, territory rules and what happens when someone builds their own website — and it is the difference most franchise marketing plans are missing.