SEO · Standalone service
You do not need a new website to rank.
Most SEO work I do is on sites somebody else built. If what you have is structurally sound, rebuilding it is a waste of your money, and I will tell you so before you spend any.
Werehouse Media charges £495 for a one-off SEO audit and fix list, £995 for local foundations, and £1,195 for a content sprint. There are no monthly SEO retainers: the search work is either included in a build or bought once as a defined project. Expect 3 to 6 months before rankings move on anything competitive, though a corrected Google Business Profile can show in local results sooner. Every one of those prices now covers AI search as well as Google. Generative engine optimisation, sometimes called GEO or LLM SEO, means the work of getting named in answers written by ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Perplexity and Copilot. It is included rather than sold separately, because the technical half of it is the technical half of SEO. A retainer is the wrong buy if you sell one service in one town, have already had the foundations done and publish nothing, because there is not a useful day of work a month in that.
Start here
The honest
diagnosis first.
There are only four reasons a small business does not show up, and they need completely different work. Paying a retainer before you know which one you have is how people waste a year.
The most common cause by a distance. You sell six things and have one "Services" page. Fix: pages, not tweaks.
Wrong Business Profile category, thin reviews, inconsistent details. Fix: local foundations. Often the fastest win available.
Slow, unindexed, duplicated, broken canonicals, no internal links. Fix: an audit and a fix list.
Sometimes true. If it is, I will say so and tell you what it would realistically take, or that your money is better spent elsewhere.
One-off work
Buy a diagnosis, not a subscription.
Plenty of businesses need one piece of work, done properly, and then nothing for a year. That is a legitimate thing to want and I am happy to sell it.
One-off
SEO audit & fix list
From£495
A full technical, on-page and local review of what you have, delivered as a prioritised list a developer can act on, with the top five fixes explained in plain English for you.
- Crawl, indexation and Core Web Vitals
- Keyword and intent gap analysis
- Google Business Profile review
- Competitor comparison, three rivals
- Prioritised fix list with effort estimates
- A 30-minute call to walk you through it
One-off
Local foundations
From£795
The audit, plus the fixes actually done. For local service businesses this is usually the single highest-return piece of work available, and it does not recur.
- Everything in the audit
- Google Business Profile rebuilt properly
- On-page work across up to 10 pages
- LocalBusiness and Service schema
- Core citations built and corrected
- A review-request routine that people follow
- New service or town pages written (up to 3)
One-off
Content sprint
From£1,195
For businesses that rank fine for their name and nothing else. Six pages that target real demand, researched, written and published.
- Keyword and intent mapping
- Six pages written and published
- Internal linking rebuilt around them
- Schema and meta for each
- A plan you can keep running yourself
Monthly
Why there is no monthly SEO retainer.
Because I am not going to bill you every month for an outcome I cannot yet prove I deliver.
Plenty of agencies will sell you a monthly search retainer. Some of them are excellent. What they have that I do not is years of ranking data and named clients whose numbers they can show you, and that is exactly what you should be buying if a retainer is what you want.
What I can stand behind completely is the work that happens once and stays done: a site built so search engines and answer engines can read it properly, a one-off audit of a site somebody else built, and the local foundations that decide whether you show up in your own town. Those are deliverables. You can see them arrive and check they are right.
So the search work here is sold as part of a build, as a £495 audit and fix list, or as £995 local foundations. If what you actually need is a long-running content and link programme with a team behind it, say so on the call and I will tell you honestly that you want somebody else.
Buy links from a network. Publish AI filler to hit a word count. Send you a 40-page automated report nobody reads. Tie you into twelve months. Report on "impressions" when enquiries are flat. Charge a retainer to a business that does not need one. Talking someone out of a retainer they do not need is a better use of the call than selling one.
Answer engines
How do I get my business recommended by ChatGPT?
Differently to how you rank on Google, and most agencies are still selling you the Google answer. When someone asks an assistant who to use, it reads a handful of pages and writes an answer from them. You are either in that answer or you do not exist. There is no page two to be on.
This is measurable now, not a guess. A 2024 study from Princeton and IIT Delhi, published at the KDD conference, tested nine ways of changing a page and measured what each did to visibility inside generated answers.
Three things moved it 30 to 40 per cent: citing credible sources, quoting real people, and replacing vague claims with specific figures. Improving readability moved it 15 to 30 per cent, and multiplied everything else.
Two things did nothing at all: keyword density, and writing in a more confident, authoritative tone. That second one is most of what agencies sell.
The finding that matters if you are small: when everyone optimises, the gains land almost entirely on the sites that rank worst. The source sitting fifth gained 115 per cent from adding citations. The site already sitting first went backwards. Assistants read the page instead of counting who links to it, so a competitor twenty years older has no structural advantage here. That is not true anywhere else in search, and it will not stay true forever.
What this actually involves
- Checking whether the crawlers that build answers can read you at all. Blocking GPTBot costs you nothing. Blocking OAI-SearchBot or PerplexityBot removes you from the results entirely, and plenty of sites do it by accident with one line left over from a staging config.
- Getting you into Bing. ChatGPT and Copilot retrieve through it. Sites rank perfectly well on Google and are invisible in ChatGPT for no reason other than nobody ever submitted them to Bing Webmaster Tools. It is free and it takes ten minutes.
- Telling you which controls actually do what. Blocking Google-Extended does not remove you from Google's AI Overviews, whatever you have read. Those are served from the ordinary Googlebot index. Businesses block it believing they are opting out of something, and opt out of nothing.
- Rewriting the pages that matter so a machine can lift an answer out of them: the question as the heading, the answer in the first forty words, a figure and a source behind every claim.
- Making sure the business exists somewhere other than its own website. Assistants weight what independent sources say about you. If searching your name returns nothing but your own domain, no assistant will confidently recommend you, and no amount of on-page work fixes that.
- Fixing the structured data so it says the same thing your visible copy says. When those two disagree, the machine quotes the markup, which is how businesses end up with assistants confidently reciting last year's prices.
Nobody can promise you a position in a ChatGPT answer. There is no ranking to buy and no dashboard that shows one. What can be done is make you retrievable, make you quotable, and measure whether you start appearing. Anyone selling guaranteed AI rankings is selling something that does not exist. The llms.txt file everyone is talking about is worth ten minutes and no engine has confirmed it uses it, so I will add one and I will not charge you for it or pretend it is the lever.
Side by side
Which piece of work should you actually buy?
Six options, with the situations where each one is the wrong purchase. All prices are plus VAT. The monthly tiers have no minimum term.
| What it is | Cost | Best for | When it is the wrong choice |
|---|---|---|---|
| Audit & fix list One-off. Technical, on-page and local review, written as a prioritised list. |
Priced on application | A site you suspect is broken, where you or a developer can act on the list yourselves. | You want the fixes carried out too. The audit stops at the list. Paying £495 to be told, then paying again to have it done, costs you more than starting with foundations. |
| Local foundations One-off. The audit plus the fixes actually done. |
From £995 | A service business that wants the phone to ring in one or two towns, with a Business Profile nobody has touched in years. | You sell nationally or online only. Most of the value sits in map pack and citation work, and a national shop gets very little back from it. |
| Content sprint One-off. Six researched pages written and published. |
From £1,195 | A site that ranks for its own name and nothing else, in a market where people search for the service by name. | The site is slow, unindexed or duplicated. New pages on broken technical foundations sit there unread. Buy the £495 audit first. |
Read this first
When this is not for you.
I would rather lose the enquiry here than take your money for work that cannot pay you back. Four situations where you should keep it, or spend it somewhere else entirely.
SEO finds demand that already exists. It does not create it. If your product is new, or you sell to twelve buyers you know by name, the monthly search volume may be close to zero. Ask me to check the numbers before you spend anything. It takes me ten minutes and I do not charge for it.
Allow 3 to 6 months on anything competitive, longer on national terms. If you have a deadline in weeks, put the money into Google Ads instead, and use whoever runs them best. That is a better use of £795 than anything on this page.
Claim it and fill it in yourself this afternoon. It is free, it is the highest-return hour in local search, and it would be poor form to bill you £795 for a job that starts with something you can do over a cup of tea.
If the plan is to pay someone monthly and never look at the site again, this is not that. The work here changes pages, structure and content, which means decisions land on your desk too. Start with the £495 audit if you want to see how that feels before committing to a retainer.
Reporting
Three numbers,
every month.
Enquiries, where they came from, and what I did about it. If you want the full data behind it you can have it, but the note itself fits on one screen and is written for a busy person.
Some context on where this comes from. Alongside about ten years in the industry, I founded and still run my own e-commerce brand, HOMESŌKO, selling sustainable kitchenware primarily into Australia. So the SEO advice here comes from being the one paying for traffic and living with what it returns, not only from building sites for other people.
Free, no catch
Send me your website.
I will look at it properly and reply with the two or three things actually holding it back. If that is all you ever take from me, that is genuinely fine.