Questions and answers - without the jargon.

Brand building is all the work that shapes how a business is perceived: from its name and logo, through its website and the way it talks about itself, to its Google reviews and what people see on its social media profile.

It isn't the same as advertising. Advertising brings a customer in once. A brand makes them choose you over the three businesses next door, come back and recommend you, and it also means you don't have to compete on price alone. In practice, brand building has five layers: strategy, visual identity, website, visibility in search engines and a regular presence.

When you set up a business, start with strategy, not with the logo. In this order: first decide who you work for and how you differ from your competitors. Then the name, and a check that the domain is free and nobody has registered the name as a trademark. Only after that come the logo, the website and the Google Business Profile.

The most common mistake is starting with the logo. A logo made before you know who the business is talking to almost always ends up in the bin. The second mistake is putting off the Google Business Profile: it's a free tool that, for a local business, brings in the first calls sooner than a website does.

Check three things. First, whether they ask about your business before they start talking about price. Anyone who quotes for a website in a two-minute phone call is selling a template. Second, whether they show results rather than just pretty pictures: how many customer enquiries their work brought in, not just how many clicks there were. Third, who owns the website when the work is done.

Watch out for subscriptions where the website stops working when you cancel. After three years of paying, you're left with no website and none of the Google rankings you built up. We write more about this under hosting and maintenance.

Ask for an introductory call and see what they ask you. A company that knows strategy will want to know where your current customers come from, which of them are the most profitable, what customers worry about most before buying and who your real competitors are in your city.

If you get a price list of packages straight away instead, that isn't strategy, it's sales. A good strategy ends with a document that says who you're talking to, what you don't do and why someone should choose you.

A tagline is one short sentence next to the logo that says why the business exists. It doesn't describe the service: it promises a result.

You can spot a good tagline because competitors couldn't use it without lying. Anyone can write "Professional construction services", so that isn't a tagline. "Metalwork that outlasts us by a hundred years" is.

A logo should be recognisable, legible at a small size and work in a single colour. Start by asking where it will be used: on a business card, on a van, on an embroidered T-shirt, as a profile picture.

Three practical tests: can you read it from five metres away, does it work in black and white, and with the name covered, does it still look like your industry rather than a random shape? Avoid trendy typefaces and gradients. Trends pass quickly, and a logo built on a trend looks dated within three years.

A new logo changes how you look. A rebrand changes what the business is to its customers: who it serves, which price segment it works in, what it promises.

A new mark on its own, with the same offer and the same messaging, rarely changes anything. A rebrand makes sense when the business has moved into a different segment, merged with another, is entering a new market or has a name that no longer fits what it does.

The foundation (strategy, identity, website and Google Business Profile) takes six to ten weeks. Visibility in search starts working after four to six months. Recognition in your local area takes a year or two to build.

A brand isn't a project with an end date. The first months are about building the tools; the rest is about using them consistently.

You find your target audience by analysing your last twenty jobs, not by guessing. Start with the customers you already have. List your last twenty jobs and check which were most profitable, who ordered without haggling and who recommended you to others. The pattern usually shows after a dozen or so entries.

Then describe that customer specifically: where they live, how old they are, what made them start looking, what worried them before ordering, where they searched. "Anyone who needs our services" isn't a target audience: with a description like that, you can't write a single sentence for your website.

Market research for a small business rests on four sources and doesn't require paid reports. Conversations with ten customers who bought recently: ask how they searched and what convinced them. Search engine suggestions and the questions Google itself shows for your industry. Your competitors' Google reviews: if other businesses' customers complain about delays or poor communication and you don't have that problem, you have a ready-made advantage to show. Finally, the numbers: how many potential customers live or work in your area, and how much they usually pay competitors for this kind of service.

This isn't scientific research, it's practical. The most important thing you'll learn from it is the words customers use to describe their problem, because they use the same words when they ask Google or ChatGPT.

Competitor analysis means comparing the five businesses you actually lose jobs to, on six criteria. Go through them one by one: what's on their website, which search terms they show up for in Google, how many reviews they have and what rating, how often they post on social media, which category they chose in their Google Business Profile and what their customers say in reviews.

The most important column in that table is the number of reviews. It's the most common reason a customer picks the business next door, and also the easiest gap to close.

If you win almost every job, your price is too low. If customers disappear straight after the quote, the problem usually isn't the amount but the fact that nothing before the quote justified the price: there were no photos of past work, no reviews and no explanation of exactly what's included.

Before you lower your price, try showing the value first. A designed quote with a photo of a similar job and a clear description of the scope can change the decision with the same figure at the bottom of the page.

A page is any single page of a website apart from the home page: "About us", "Services", "Contact", the description of one service, one article. Each one has its own address and its own title.

This matters in practice: Google assesses and shows individual pages, not the website as a whole. That's why one page with everything on it does worse than a separate page for each service. Customers usually don't arrive at the home page but go straight to the page that answers their question.

Plenty of people can build a professional-looking website today, so the look is the smallest problem. The difference lies in whether the website sells: whether a customer understands within three seconds what they'll get, whether they see proof in the form of photos and reviews, and whether they find it in search at all.

Look for someone who also writes the content and works on visibility, not just someone who puts together a design. A beautiful website that nobody finds costs as much as a website but works as if it didn't exist. We do both: the design and content of the website, and its visibility in Google and in AI, in other words SEO, AEO and GEO.

You can recognise a company that builds websites with SEO, AEO and GEO by its answers to three questions. Ask directly: whether writing the content is included in the price, whether the website will get structured data, and whether there will be separate pages for cities or services. If the answer is "we'll add SEO later", it usually means there won't be any. SEO bolted onto a finished website costs more and works worse than SEO built in from the start.

In 2026 you still have to ask separately about GEO, meaning visibility in the answers of ChatGPT and similar tools. Most developers don't do it at all. We write more about this under SEO, AEO and GEO.

It depends on three things: whether the design is created from scratch or from a template, whether you write the content or the developer does, and how many pages the website has. The biggest price difference doesn't come from the number of pages but from how much concept and editorial work goes into it.

When comparing offers, count the cost over three years, not just at the start: the build price plus the subscription, domain and maintenance. A website with a small monthly fee can turn out more expensive than a one-off project after three years, and on top of that it doesn't belong to you.

A simple business website takes three to four weeks. A site with service pages, content prepared for your market and local pages takes six to eight weeks. A shop takes eight weeks or more.

The most common cause of delays isn't the developer's work but waiting for materials from the client: photos, approvals, business details. If you want to cut two weeks off the project, get your photos ready early.

With us, yes: once the project is paid for, the domain, code and content belong to your business and you can move them anywhere. The monthly plan is optional and tailored to what your business needs each month.

It's worth asking every developer this question before signing a contract. With a subscription model, cancelling often means losing the website along with the Google rankings built up over years. We describe the details under hosting and maintenance.

A Facebook page isn't enough, for three reasons. It doesn't belong to you: the platform changes the rules and the reach. It doesn't appear in search results the way a website does. And you can't build pages on it for specific services or cities.

For some very small businesses, a Facebook page plus a well-run Google Business Profile is a sensible start. But once you start competing for higher-value jobs, not having a website starts to cost you.

A separate page about one service in one city, with its own address, its own title and unique content about that city.

A list of cities in the footer does nothing on its own. Google matches results to where the user is and shows businesses that have content about that place. Be careful: copying one text and swapping the city name is recognised as spam and harms the whole website. Every page like this has to have real content.

SEO is search engine optimisation: all the work that makes Google show your business when someone searches for what you sell. It has four areas: technical (speed, how the site works on a phone, indexing), content (the right words, answers to customer questions), local (city pages, Google Business Profile, reviews) and images (file names, alt text).

SEO isn't a one-off task but a way of building a website. Bolted on afterwards, it works worse and costs more. We go into more detail under SEO, AEO and GEO.

GEO, or Generative Engine Optimisation, means preparing your business so that AI-powered tools mention it: ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google's AI Overviews, the assistants on people's phones.

GEO is made up of structured data describing your business in a machine-readable format, content written as questions and answers, an llms.txt file, clear and consistent facts about your business, and matching details across your website, Google Business Profile and directories.

AEO, or Answer Engine Optimisation, is optimisation for answer engines: content prepared so that it's given as the ready answer rather than as one of ten links. It covers Google's featured snippets, the "People also ask" section, voice search (Google Assistant, Siri, Alexa) and AI assistants.

AEO and GEO overlap heavily: AEO is about being the ready answer, and GEO is about being mentioned and cited by generative models such as ChatGPT or Perplexity.

Because the way people ask has changed. Customers used to type two words and look through ten links. Today they increasingly ask a full question, for example who nearby can make something to measure and how much it costs, and get one answer naming two or three businesses.

Either you're in that answer or you don't exist. There is no second page of results. The good news is that in most local industries, competitors aren't doing GEO at all yet, so getting in now is cheap. In two years it will cost as much as classic SEO does today.

A free business profile that appears in search results and in Maps, with your name, address, phone number, opening hours, photos, services and reviews.

For a local business, it's usually the most important part of being visible: Google shows these profiles with a map at the very top of the results, above the links to websites, so on a phone they are often the first thing a customer sees. Many customers call straight from the profile without visiting the website. The three most common mistakes: a profile Google created automatically that the owner never claimed (without that, they can't edit it or reply to reviews), the wrong business category and no recent photos.

With a system, not by chance. Ask for a review within a day or two of finishing the job by sending a message with a direct link, so the customer only has to make one click. It's also worth putting a QR code on your invoices and business cards.

The goal is two to four new reviews a month, consistently. Regularity counts for more than numbers. Reply to every review, including negative ones. Never buy reviews or offer discounts for a rating: Google detects it, and the consequences hit your whole profile.

The first movement in the results usually shows after six to ten weeks, and real results after four to six months. A Google Business Profile and reviews work faster, often within a few weeks.

If someone promises you first place within a month, they're selling you advertising, not SEO. Advertising makes sense too, but it stops working the day you stop paying.

A short text file on the server that describes the website to AI systems in simple terms: who you are, what you do, where you work and which content is worth quoting.

It doesn't replace structured data or good content, but it organises information about your business in a place that models look at. It's one of the cheapest parts of GEO: adding it takes a moment, and most businesses don't have one at all.

Because organic reach mostly gets to people who already know you. Ads let you show up in front of new people based on specific criteria: people living in a given city, of a certain age, with certain interests, for example homeowners within thirty kilometres.

Posts build trust, ads bring in new people. Either one on its own works poorly: ads leading to a dead profile waste the budget, and a great profile without ads is seen by a handful of people. The key number isn't reach but the cost of a single enquiry.

For a local service business, three posts a week, kept up consistently for six months, are usually enough. A shop with products needs more, because every product is a separate piece of content.

Consistency matters more than volume. Twelve posts in January and silence until May works worse than one a week all year round.

No. It's better to run one or two channels well, where your customers actually are, than to neglect five.

For local services and crafts, Facebook, Instagram and a Google Business Profile are usually enough. TikTok makes sense when your process or product looks good in a short video. LinkedIn, when you sell to businesses. We choose channels after checking where your customers really come from. We write about this under social media management.

It depends on four things: the number of channels, how often you post, the type of material (a photo with a caption, a designed graphic, an edited video) and whether we work with your photos or add our own graphics.

Three posts a week on two channels using your photos is a completely different workload from daily short videos. That's why there's no single price list. Details under monthly content.

A click is someone opening an ad or visiting your website. An enquiry is real contact from a customer: a form sent, a phone call, an email or a message. A click tells you someone saw you; an enquiry tells you someone wants to buy.

For example: someone searches for "locksmith London", clicks on your website, looks for a few seconds and leaves. That's a click. Someone else visits, reads about the service and calls. That's an enquiry.

Clicks are measured automatically: from ads in the Meta Ads and Google Ads dashboards, from search results in Google Search Console, and website visits in an analytics tool. Enquiries have to be counted separately: forms sent, clicks on your phone number, clicks on your email address and on the chat button. The simplest extra method is to ask customers during the conversation how they heard about you.

That's why 1,000 clicks and 2 enquiries is a worse result than 200 clicks and 15 enquiries. Clicks are easy to inflate with cheap advertising. Enquiries show whether your advertising and website really bring in customers.

A sales model where you don't buy stock upfront and don't run a warehouse. The customer buys in your shop, the order goes to the supplier, and the supplier ships the product straight to the customer.

It lowers the barrier to entry but not the responsibility: to the customer, you are the seller, and your brand answers for delivery times, quality and complaints. We write more about this under online shop.

Six criteria. The margin has to cover the cost of the product, shipping, returns and advertising and still leave a profit; products that sell for very little rarely do. A supplier in Europe rather than Asia shortens delivery and cuts returns. The product should solve a specific problem rather than be a pretty gadget. It has to look good in a photo and a short video, otherwise you can't advertise it. A product people buy regularly builds repeat revenue. And finally, cosmetics, supplements, electronics and children's products come with legal requirements and certificates, which you need to check before launch.

It's better to have five to fifteen well-described products around one theme than a catalogue pulled in from a wholesaler.

Step by step: describe who the product is for and how it differs from what's already on the market; take good photos; write descriptions that answer "is this for me?"; choose a platform; set up payments, shipping and the legal documents; and then plan where your traffic will come from.

That last step is the one most often skipped. A shop doesn't sell by itself: traffic comes from search engines, social media, advertising or a mailing list. We write about this under online shop.

In most cases, Shopify: it's stable and fast, takes care of security and payments itself, and you don't have to deal with updates. WooCommerce gives more freedom and lower licence costs, but needs ongoing technical care.

A simple rule: if the shop is meant to be your main source of income, choose a solution that doesn't require you to keep an eye on the technical side all the time and that has support when something goes wrong.

Yes. A shop can be set up in several languages and currencies, with separate shipping and tax rules for each market.

One thing is key: the descriptions have to be prepared separately for each market and edited in its language, not translated word for word. Customers sense a text that doesn't fit within seconds and lose trust in the shop before they reach the basket.

With one conversation. We ask about three things: where your customers come from today, which customers you'd like more of and what gets in your way most when trying to win them. If the business is just starting out, we ask who you want to serve and who your competitors are. We review what you already have: your website, Google Business Profile, social media profiles and competitors.

That conversation produces a strategy and a concrete quote for the scope. Only then do we design anything.

It depends on your starting point, your reach and whether we take over the ongoing work. A business with no website and no brand needs something different from a business with a good website and a dead profile, and pays for something different.

We don't have ready-made packages, because they lead to clients paying for things they don't need. We prepare a quote after a conversation and a review of what you already have.

Yes. We work in Polish, English and French, and we build websites in whatever language your customers need.

We prepare the content separately for each market and edit it in that market's language, rather than translating word for word. French or English customers spot a text that doesn't fit almost immediately, and that costs you trust in the first few seconds.

No. The studio is based in Paris, but we work with clients all over the world. The whole collaboration can happen remotely, from the first conversation to handing over the website.

What matters isn't where you are but where your customers are: that decides the language of the website, the choice of keywords and the approach to local visibility.

No. Some businesses start with just a Google Business Profile and tidied-up social media, because that brings results fastest. Others have a good website and only need SEO, AEO and GEO.

We put the scope together for one business at a time. If we think you don't need something, we tell you straight: it's easier to work with a client who comes back than with one who was sold too much the first time.