01 SEO · content · rebuilds
Your website should be bringing you customers.
If it isn’t, there’s a reason — and it’s findable. I’ll work out why yours isn’t earning search traffic, fix it, and show you the working.
Every figure traces to a Search Console exportFreelance, not an agency
02 Start here
Whatever state your site is in, one of these probably looks familiar
Sites don’t fail in industry-specific ways. A law firm and a garage can have the identical problem. Pick the one that sounds like yours.
Never really ranked
“The site’s been up for years. Google barely knows it exists.”
Usually nothing is broken — the site has simply drifted. Published without a plan, never revisited, never optimised. Years of small neglect compound until good content earns nothing.
A London surveying practice came to me in exactly this state: 150+ pages of expert material, six clicks a day.
Used to rank, then dropped
“Traffic fell off a cliff and nobody can tell you why.”
Sometimes it’s an algorithm update. More often it’s the site itself: a bloated theme, a botched migration, redirects quietly leaking authority. The diagnosis matters more than the treatment.
The work starts with finding out which of those it actually was — before anyone touches the site.
Talk it throughTraffic, but no enquiries
“The numbers look fine. The phone doesn’t ring.”
Ranking for the wrong things. Visitors arrive with questions you don’t sell the answer to, while the searches that would become customers go to someone else. The fix is strategic, not volume.
A Florida physical therapy clinic was fighting giants for generic terms. We found the underserved corner of their market and took page one of it.
Grew, then stalled
“It worked for a while. Now every month looks the same.”
A plateau usually means the easy demand is captured and the next tier needs deliberate work: new clusters, better pages, technical headroom. The opportunity is often already visible in your own data.
The same surveying practice had a cluster being shown to searchers constantly and collecting almost none of it — pages stranded at positions 16–30.
03 Who you’re hiring
A freelancer, not an agency — when you hire me, I do the work
I’m Mike. You get me on your account: SEO, content strategy and production, and hand-coded builds, under one roof. That matters, because most search problems live in the gaps between those three — and nobody hands your site to a junior.
I work with clients worldwide. Roughly half of it is US-based, the rest across the UK and further afield, and it is deliberately varied: a UK chartered surveying practice, a US healthcare clinic, a US automotive studio.
Search doesn’t care where I sit. What decides the work is the state your site is in — and that travels. If you sell across borders there is a real technical layer to it (hreflang, currency and country targeting, one canonical version of every page), and that is work I do rather than refer out.
- Based
- United Kingdom
- Clients
- Worldwide
- Sectors
- Deliberately varied
- Stack
- WordPress, Shopify, Astro
04 Proof
The work, in numbers
Two engagements, two different situations — one of them may resemble yours. Every figure comes straight out of Google Search Console: no estimates, and no impressions dressed up as results.
05 Why position matters
What “page two” actually means
Google will happily tell you your pages are being shown. What matters is whether anyone clicks — and clicks collapse fast as you slide down the results. Drag the slider.
Share of searchers who click, by ranking position
Positions 1–20. Page one ends at position 10.
This is why “average position 14” isn’t a middling result — it’s functionally invisible. It’s also why moving one cluster of pages from page two to page one usually outperforms any amount of new publishing.
06 The maths
What it could be worth
Rough it out with your own numbers. The two growth scenarios aren’t invented — each one is what a real engagement above actually produced.
Illustrative. Outcomes depend on your market, your site and the work — your numbers come from an audit, not a slider.
07 How the work is done
Best keywords, best research, best content — in that order
Five steps. Each one narrows what came before it, so nothing gets written until it has earned its place. Here it is on a worked example — click through.
Find every search that matters
Not the handful of phrases you assume people use — all of them. The obvious ones, the long specific ones, the questions typed as full sentences, and the ones your competitors are already being found for.
- emergency plumber near meLocal4,400/mo
- 24 hour plumberMain term1,900/mo
- burst pipe what to doQuestion720/mo
- how much does an emergency plumber costQuestion590/mo
- boiler leaking waterSpecific480/mo
- plumber out of hoursSpecific320/mo
- is a leaking tap an emergencyQuestion90/mo
and 40+ more, including every town you cover
- best running shoesMain term22,200/mo
- trail running shoesMain term8,100/mo
- running shoes for flat feetSpecific3,600/mo
- how to choose running shoesQuestion1,300/mo
- when to replace running shoesQuestion880/mo
- running shoes vs trainersQuestion390/mo
- do i need wide fit running shoesQuestion110/mo
and 50+ more, across every model and use case you stock
A single topic usually turns up forty to sixty real searches. Most businesses are aware of about five of them.
Keep only the ones worth winning
Volume on its own is a trap. Some terms bring someone ready to buy. Some bring nobody who will ever buy, but make you the obvious expert on the subject — and that is what makes the selling pages rank. And some are simply worthless however big the number looks.
Not everything has to sell. A page answering a question you will never charge for is often the one that earns the links, the trust and the rankings that the money pages then inherit.
Turn them into pages, in order
Each surviving term becomes a real page with a real title, grouped so pages support each other rather than compete. Then it is sequenced — the fastest wins first, so something moves while the bigger pieces are still being built.
- 1What does an emergency plumber cost?Fastest win — starts here
- 2Burst pipe: what to do in the first ten minutes
- 3Emergency plumbing — [your town]
- 4How to fix a dripping tap (and when to stop trying)
- 1When to replace your running shoesFastest win — starts here
- 2Running shoes for flat feet
- 3How to choose running shoes
- 4Running shoes vs trainers: what is the difference?
One topic is five to ten pages. A full site programme runs into the hundreds, worked through one area at a time so it never becomes an undifferentiated pile.
Build pages worth landing on
Written properly, then built properly: the answer up front, comparisons side by side, figures given room, questions answered where they are asked. On a shop, the products worked into the page rather than bolted on the end.
- Key takeawaysThe answer up front, for readers who will not scroll.
- Pulled-out figuresThe numbers that matter, given room to land.
- Side-by-side comparisonsThis or that, without a wall of prose.
- Callouts and warningsThe bit they must not miss, made unmissable.
Hand-coded into WordPress (usually via Elementor) or Shopify. Custom components, not a page-builder template and not another plugin slowing the site down.
Then you own the subject
This is what the authority pages were for. Cover a subject properly — the buying questions and the ones you will never charge for — and Google stops treating you as a candidate and starts treating you as the answer. Each page keeps earning, and each new one lifts the ones around it.
Every figure above is a Search Console export from a real engagement — no modelling, and no projections.
See the whole process, and what gets built
The worked example is a fictional business, so the search figures in steps one to three are illustrative. The growth figures in step five are Search Console exports from a real engagement, shared with permission and anonymised.
08 Services
What I can do for you
A fixed-price technical fix at £599, monthly plans at £1,999 and £3,999, plus day rates. No lock-in — the reporting is built to justify itself, or to tell you to stop.Compare the plans →
09 Next step
Not sure which situation is yours? That’s the audit.
Send me your site. You’ll get a straight read on it — whether or not you hire me.
- What’s actually wrong, in plain English
- What it’s worth fixing — and what isn’t
- What I’d do first, in order