Frequently Asked Questions

I am primarily a one woman show but I work with coaches, contractors and community to get the work done.

Yes, I’m proudly based in southeast London. That said, I work with clients all over the UK and beyond. Location has never been a barrier – English just needs to be your website audience’s primary language.

Absolutely, and I’d love to hear more. I speak about SEO for small businesses, visibility, showing up online with your personality, and running a business with ADHD. Head over to my Speaking page to find out more and get in touch.

Yes, I’ve worked with every major website platform and a few obscure ones besides. I’m platform agnostic because good SEO principles apply everywhere, the implementation just looks slightly different depending on where your website lives. If you’re not sure whether your platform is one I can work with, just ask.

Before, ideally! Updating your website can affect your rankings if you’re not careful but if you’ve already rebranded, don’t panic. There’s plenty you can do to protect and recover your rankings. I wrote a full guide on how to protect your search engine rankings when updating your website which is worth reading whether you’re planning a rebrand or have just done one.

Not at all. In fact, getting your SEO foundations right early means you’re not playing catch-up later. The main thing is that you have a proven business model (you’ve made sales, and you’re clear on what you sell and who you sell it to). SEO works best when your offers are clear and you know they sell. If you’re clear on that, come look at ways to work with me.

One thing worth knowing: I work with a small number of clients at a time as part of how I look after myself and my work. That means there’s sometimes a wait to work with me. The sooner you get in touch, the sooner we can get you on the list. Get in touch to book a free call here.

When you update your website, a few things need to happen to protect your rankings. Make sure you check out my guide on how to protect your search engine rankings when updating your website which walks you through it step by step.

You need a live website, a clear idea of what you sell and who you sell it to, and ideally at least one service you’ve already sold. SEO works best when your offers are clear and proven because it amplifies what’s already working, it can’t create something from nothing. If you’re still figuring out your offers, come back when you’ve made a few sales and know what you’re selling. If you’re ready, book a call here and we’ll take it from there.

If you’ve booked Kickstart, you get two calls with me – one once I’ve completed the work to walk you through what I’ve done, and another after 30 days post-delivery to address any questions.

If you’ve booked Shine (done for you), you can email me any time in addition to our monthly strategy calls. 

Honestly, it depends! I know that’s the annoying answer but it’s true. A few factors are involved – how competitive your industry is, where you’re starting from, the demand for your services, world events, the news, and seasonal changes too. Most of my clients start to see movement in their website clicks and enquiries within a few weeks of implementing a solid strategy. The important thing is that once it starts working, you’ll feel motivated to keep working on it. Take a look around my website and you’ll see results from happy clients!

Google needs to be able to find you & your website, understand what you’re talking about, and decide it’s worth showing to people. That means having the right keywords in the right places, a well-structured website, good quality content, and links from other credible websites pointing to yours. It’s a beautiful combination of best practices. You can start with my SEO for beginners guide here.

The honest answer is that the best platform is the one you’ll actually use and keep updated because a neglected website on a super snazzy platform will always lose to one on something simpler.

That said, here’s my take:

• WordPress gives you the most control and is what I’d recommend if you’re serious about SEO long term. With a plugin like Yoast or AIOSEO you can control everything you need to. It does have a steeper learning curve though.
• Squarespace and Wix have improved enormously in recent years and are perfectly capable of ranking well. If you’re already on one of them and your website is working for you, there’s no urgent reason to move. I’ve had clients ranking really well on both!

What I’d avoid is making a platform decision based on SEO alone. Moving platforms is disruptive, time consuming and can tank your rankings if it’s not done carefully (here’s a blog to help you with that).

If you’re thinking about moving platforms, book a call with me first and we can talk it through.

I get it – you’ve worked hard on beautiful branding and an incredible aesthetic and yet no one is enquiring. Unfortunately your website is an empty art gallery with no visitors. The thing is, SEO for small businesses isn’t just about having a nice website. It’s about having the right keywords, the right content, the right links, and the right technical foundations. Your competitor has probably just done more of the SEO work but don’t worry, that’s fixable. Book a free call and let’s look at it together.

One of the first things you probably learned with SEO (after understanding what it was) is to put your keywords everywhere to tell search engines what you do. Thing is, that advice is really outdated now and Google is not impressed. What matters is using your service keywords naturally, in the right places, on the right pages, with content that’s useful. Then once you get the traffic, you might not get the bookings because that’s also a piece of the puzzle – the difference between ranking and converting. Your page might rank but still not be turning visitors into clients. Read my guide to improving your website SEO.

OK first of all, do not panic. Rankings often fluctuate and a small drop isn’t always cause for alarm. If it’s significant, it could be a Google algorithm update, a technical issue, a competitor stepping up their game, or something that’s changed on your site. Read my SEO for beginners guide for a good starting point on what to look at.

You’ve got a few options: update and improve it, consolidate it with a similar post, redirect it to a more relevant page, or retire it entirely. Old content that doesn’t rank and isn’t getting traffic can actually drag your site down. Quality beats quantity every time. If you’re not sure what to do with yours, my Kickstart plan is a great place to start, we’ll look at your existing content as part of the audit and create a plan of action for you to boost along with blog templates and checklists to use.

I like to say that social media is the flyer for the gig, and your website is the gig itself. Whilst social media doesn’t directly impact your Google rankings, it helps you indirectly. It gets you in front of more people, which can lead to more traffic. It also helps build brand awareness so that when people do find you on Google, they already recognise your name and they’re more likely to say ‘oh yes I’ve been meaning to contact her!”. Read my guide on how to use social media for SEO.

You don’t have to be for your SEO to work but it depends on your industry and where your audience might be hanging out on whether you need to be. SEO for small businesses works completely independently of social media HOWEVER if you are a visual business (like many of my clients in the art / wedding worlds) they can work well together and indeed repurpose off each other. Here’s a blog on how you can repurpose your blog once you’ve hit publish.

A backlink is a link from another website to yours and Google treats them as votes of confidence because people do. The more relevant and credible websites linking to you, the more Google trusts your site. So yes, you need them, but quality matters far more than quantity. One link from a respected industry press feature is worth more than 50 from random free directories that have nothing to do with your services (I’m looking at you SEO spammers in your inbox). Read my guide to what link building is.

A sitemap is a map of your website that you can use to tell Google and other search engines about your website. Most website platforms generate one automatically and it can be found usually by going to your domain /sitemap.xml or /sitemap_index.xml. I’ve got a great free guide to tell Google you exist (download it here) to walk through the whole process.

You need to submit your sitemap every time you make changes to your website. I do this weekly for all my Shine clients and my own websites, to prompt Google to recrawl. Set a reminder in your calendar to do this. Download my free guide to tell Google you exist to walk through the whole process.

Oh if only! We want Google to index our website pages and blogs (which is why we start with sharing our sitemap with it) but pages and blogs don’t always get indexed automatically because Google has to find them first, decide they’re worth indexing, and then process them. It takes time. If a page isn’t indexed, it won’t show up in search results at all. You can check and request indexing manually in Google Search Console but that doesn’t always fix it. As part of working with me, I examine why Google won’t index certain pages and blogs and tell you how to fix them (or fix them for you, depending on the package you choose!)

If you’re a visual business (like many of the clients I work with) then you need to work on your images to get them found and bring in website clicks. That means using descriptive file names, adding alt text that describes the image, compressing them so they don’t slow your site down, and making sure they’re relevant to the page they’re on. Read my guide on how to get your images found on Google.

I’m going to put aside the ethical argument for now and head straight to — is AI doing the job you want it to do for you? I find that clients find AI tools useful but they have to be trained with YOUR voice. Using AI as a starting point to write content is fine but publishing unedited AI content is not because yes, people and therefore Google can tell. AI-generated content tends to be generic, over-structured, and full of tells (groups of three, em dashes everywhere, phrases like “quietly” — I don’t know many people doing anything quietly tbh!). The key is using AI as a tool and then rewriting heavily in your own voice. Your personality is your biggest SEO asset and people and Google will reward you if you are sharing content that is useful and human.

AI tools like ChatGPT, Claude and Perplexity scrape and pull information from websites to answer questions, it cannot think for itself. If your website is optimised for the right keywords, written with plenty of context and value, and structured in such a way that’s easy for AI to read and cite, you can appear in AI-generated answers. Good SEO is still the foundation and whichever SEO package you choose to work with me, I’ll give you guidance on this.

Yes! Service businesses that work remotely without face to face contact, or who work from home can and should have a Google Business profile. You can set it up as a service area business without displaying your home address. Get more local business SEO tips here in my guide.

Yes! Hiding your address doesn’t remove you from local search results. As long as you add the areas you serve in your Google Business profile, you’ll still have a chance to appear for searches in your service area. However this is not the only factor that counts, so take a look at my guide on how to improve your local SEO here.

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