FAQs

Your Google Business Profile is the free listing that shows up when someone searches for your business, or for what you do, on Google and Google Maps. It is the box with your name, reviews, opening hours, photos, and directions.

For a local business, it is often the single most valuable piece of marketing you own, and it is free. When someone nearby searches “plumber in Gateshead” or “sports massage near me”, Google leans heavily on these profiles to decide who to show. If yours is missing, half-finished, or set up wrong, you are quietly handing those customers to competitors.

So yes, if you serve customers in a local area, you need one, and you need it set up properly.

SEO is the practice of making your website more visible to people searching on Google (or other search engines). For a small business, good SEO means that when someone in your area types in something you do (e.g. “florist in Newcastle” or “brand photographer Gateshead”), your website is more likely to show up. Yes — you really do need it, or your competitors will get seen first.

They overlap, but they are aiming at different things.

Regular SEO is about getting your website to show up in Google’s main results for what you do, wherever the searcher happens to be. It is the right focus if you sell online, serve customers across the country, or compete on a topic rather than a place.

Local SEO is about getting found by people near you. When someone searches “near me”, or names their town, Google shows a map with a handful of local businesses above the normal results. Local SEO is the work that gets you into that map and those listings: your Google Business Profile, your reviews, your opening hours, and location-based pages on your site.

For most small businesses with a shopfront or a service area, local SEO is where the quick wins are, because you are competing with the handful of businesses near you rather than the whole internet. Plenty of businesses benefit from both, and I will tell you honestly where your time and money are best spent.

For local SEO and Google Business Profile work, you can often see meaningful movement within 4 to 8 weeks.

For broader SEO packages, expect three to six months before rankings start shifting noticeably, and 6 to 12 months for the full impact to be visible. SEO is a compound investment — every month’s work builds on the last.

Yes. This is what my Local Visibility Care Plan is for. Instead of a one-off fix, I look after your profile every month: keeping your information accurate, posting updates, helping you stay on top of reviews, building local citations, and tracking how you rank nearby so we can keep improving it. You get a simple monthly report.

A profile is not a “set it and forget it” job. Google rewards the businesses that stay active, so steady monthly attention is what keeps you visible.

It is £149 a month, on a light 3-month minimum rather than a long contract. Most people start with a one-off setup or reset, then move onto the Care Plan to keep things healthy. See the Local SEO page for details.

Yes, and this is one of the most common things people come to me with. Suspended profiles, profiles claimed by a previous web person or marketing company, duplicate listings, or a profile you simply cannot log into anymore.

I will work through it with you, get you back in control, and put it right. Get in touch and tell me what is going on, and I will tell you honestly what is involved.

Not at all. You don’t need to touch the code. I handle all the technical bits. My goal is to give you a site that feels “under your control” without you needing to be a tech expert. I’ll train you on making simple edits if you want to, always in plain English, no jargon.

A typical small-business website takes between 4 and 8 weeks from signed contract to go-live, assuming content and brand assets are provided promptly. Larger projects with custom functionality, e-commerce, or multi-language support typically run 8 to 16 weeks.

The single biggest factor in the timeline is how quickly you can give us what we need: brand guidelines, content references, and feedback at each approval stage.

Projects that stall almost always stall on the client side, not the developer side, which is why our contract includes a 14-day onboarding window and a 5-working-day feedback turnaround. We’ll always tell you up front if your timeline expectations aren’t realistic for the scope.

Fair question. The difference is in the planning, not corner cutting.

A full bespoke website takes weeks because it is bigger, built around your exact requirements, and moves through several design and approval stages.

Website in a Day is a tighter offer: up to five professionally designed pages, with all the planning, content, and decisions sorted before build day. By the time we sit down to build, everything is ready, so my team and I can bring it together in one focused day.

It is not rushed, it is well prepared. It suits businesses who need a professional site quickly, are launching something new, or want a solid platform to show investors. If you need something larger or more custom, I will tell you honestly that the full web design service is the better fit.

A website review is a thorough “health check” of your site. I’ll examine design, usability, speed, SEO basics, mobile performance, content clarity, customer experience, and more. Then I’ll give you a simple, prioritised list of what’s working, what needs fixing, and how to move forward.

Every web development project includes: a full discovery and planning phase, bespoke home page design with two rounds of revisions, build of all agreed pages, content writing or upload for those pages, mobile and tablet optimisation, SEO foundations (sitemap, schema, analytics setup), one round of pre-launch amendments, migration to live hosting, DNS configuration, admin training if needed, and 14 days of post-launch support for any bugs or build errors.

The Proposal outlines exactly which pages and features are included in your project. Anything outside that scope is handled as a Change Request, which we quote and you approve before we start.

After signing the contract and paying the deposit, we send a structured onboarding form. You’ll need to provide: your logo and brand assets (or confirmation that you’d like brand work scoped separately), any existing copy or messaging, three to five reference websites you like (and a note on what you like about them), your competitor URLs, photos or commitments to source photography, and a single named decision-maker for approvals.

We give you a 14-day window to provide these. If you’re missing assets, tell us early, as we can often help source or recommend solutions, but late surprises push the timeline.

You’re entitled to two rounds of revisions on the home page design, and one round of amendments at the pre-launch review stage. This is deliberate: it’s enough to get the design genuinely right, but not so open-ended that the project never ends.

In our experience, two rounds with focused feedback gets to a better outcome than five rounds of small tweaks.

Any changes beyond the included rounds are handled as Change Requests and quoted before we proceed. We always invite consolidated feedback rather than a drip-feed of separate emails — it’s faster for everyone.

Yes, but they’re handled as Change Requests rather than free revisions. Once you’ve signed off the home page design, the build of the remaining pages is structured around it, so a fundamental change at that stage means rework that costs time and money.

Small adjustments are usually quick to quote and absorb; bigger changes will extend your timeline and budget.

The point of the formal sign-off step isn’t to lock you in — it’s to make sure both sides are aligned before we commit several weeks of build work to a particular direction.

We include writing or uploading content for the agreed pages in our standard project price. Whether we write from scratch or work with content you supply depends on what you’d prefer and what’s included in your Proposal.

Most clients give us a clear brief — key messages, tone, must-include points — and we draft from that, with you reviewing and editing. If you’d rather write it all yourself, that’s fine. If you’d like more in-depth copywriting (long-form pages, blog content, marketing emails), we can scope that separately.

Strong content matters as much as strong design for results.

Yes. We build on WordPress specifically because it’s a genuinely user-friendly platform for non-technical owners. At launch, we provide admin login details and a training session walking you through the day-to-day tasks: editing text, swapping images, publishing blog posts, managing forms.

Most clients find they’re confident with the basics within an hour. If you’d rather not touch it at all, our Premium Hosting tier includes one hour of content updates each month — you email us what you want changed, and we handle it.

Or we can carry out ad hoc content changes for you at our contracted rate of £80/hr.

The project moves through defined stages, each with a clear sign-off before the next begins.

Stage one: Contract signed, deposit paid, onboarding form completed within 14 days.

Stage two: We produce the home page design for your review, with two rounds of revisions (if needed).

Stage three: You formally approve the home page design by email, which authorises the build of the remaining pages.

Stage four: We build out the rest of the site and populate it with the agreed-upon content, with regular status updates.

Stage five: Pre-launch review on a private staging URL, with one round of amendments (if required).

Stage six: You approve for launch, the final invoice is settled, and we go live — migrating the site, configuring DNS, and giving you any training you need.

It depends on your needs. Wix and Squarespace are good options if you need a basic five-page website, you’re comfortable building it yourself, and you don’t expect significant growth or custom functionality. They’re cheap, fast to set up, and require no technical knowledge.

The trade-offs: limited design flexibility, performance ceilings, vendor lock-in (you can’t easily move your site elsewhere), and growing monthly fees as you add features.

For a serious business website that needs to convert visitors into customers, integrate with other systems, rank in search results, and grow with you over years, a properly built custom WordPress site delivers significantly better long-term value. We’d genuinely tell you if a website builder was the right choice for your situation.

For most business websites, yes. WordPress now powers over 40% of all websites globally, which means a vast ecosystem of themes, plugins, developers, and integrations — and importantly, that you’re never locked into a single agency. If you ever need to switch developers, any WordPress developer in the world can pick up your site.

The platform has matured significantly over the last few years, with modern build approaches, excellent performance when properly hosted, and strong security when properly maintained.

There are alternatives that suit specific use cases (e.g. Shopify for pure e-commerce, Webflow for design-led marketing sites), but for a flexible, ownable, scalable business website, WordPress remains the strongest all-round choice.

In some cases, yes — but more often than not, we recommend starting fresh.

Over the years we’ve inherited a lot of websites built on tired themes, weighed down by conflicting plugins, and held together by years of patches and workarounds. Redesigning on top of those foundations usually means inheriting the underlying problems too, which then resurface six months later.

We’d rather build something properly than stick a band-aid on a site that was never built right in the first place. If your current website is recent, well-built, and simply needs a visual refresh or some new sections, a redesign can make perfect sense. We’ll review your site honestly and tell you straight which path makes the most sense for your situation.

Yes. We build e-commerce sites on WooCommerce, the WordPress e-commerce platform that powers a significant portion of online stores globally.

For membership sites, subscription content, or gated communities, we use platforms like MemberPress, depending on the requirements. Both involve more scoping than a brochure website — we need to understand your products, payment requirements, shipping rules, member types, and integration needs — but the underlying approach is the same: bespoke design, properly built, on a platform you own.

E-commerce and membership projects are typically larger in scope and timeline than standard business sites.

If people are searching for businesses like yours in your local area but you’re not appearing in Google search results or on Google Maps, you could be missing out on potential customers.

Try searching Google for your main service, then your town or city. Can you find your business? Are your competitors showing up ahead of you?

If you’re not sure how visible your business is, we can take a look at your website and Google Business Profile, explain what’s working, what could be improved and whether local SEO could help. No confusing technical talk or unnecessary upselling, just honest advice about what your business actually needs.

Get in touch and let’s see where you stand.

It comes down to time, not ability. None of it is beyond a business owner.

There are three ways to get there, and the right one depends on how hands-on you want to be.

Do it yourself: The Toolkit walks you through the whole thing in plain English for £14.99.

Get it sorted once: My Google Business Help packages set your profile up, or fix a messy one, as a one-off job.

Have it looked after: The Local Visibility Care Plan keeps your profile active and growing month after month, for £149 a month.

Same destination, three different levels of “done for you”.

It is a 73 page, plain English guide to building a Google Business Profile that actually brings in customers, written for business owners rather than marketers.

It walks you through setting your profile up from scratch (or fixing one that is a mess), choosing the right categories, getting more reviews, and keeping it active so Google keeps showing you.

It is £14.99, and you get it as a PDF the moment you order. Yours to keep, no subscription and no tie-in. If you can follow a recipe, you can follow this.
Because it is an instant download, it is non-refundable once you have downloaded it, which is standard for digital products. If you ever have a problem with the file itself, just email me, and I will sort it straight away.

There are three one-off packages, each a fixed price with no contract:

• Get Me On Google (£349): for businesses that have never had a profile, or need one set up properly from scratch.
• Review & Optimise (£399): for businesses that already have a profile but know it is not pulling its weight.
• The Full Reset (£499): for a profile that is a bit of a mess, inherited, or has fallen into disrepair.

If you only want to know where you stand first, there is also a one-off Local SEO Audit at £150. And if you would rather have your profile looked after every month afterwards, the Local Visibility Care Plan picks up where these leave off.

My SEO services typically include:

• Keyword research (figuring out what people in your area search for),

• On-page optimisation (titles, headers, meta descriptions, content tweaks),

• Local SEO (Google Business Profile, maps, local citations) if relevant,

• Technical SEO fixes (speed, mobile performance, site structure),

• Content planning/recommendations where needed.

SEO costs in the UK vary widely. At the budget end, automated services start from around £100 a month — but they typically deliver thin or templated work. Most experienced UK providers serving small businesses sit between £300 and £1,500 a month for ongoing SEO packages, with mid-market businesses paying £1,500 to £3,000 and competitive or national campaigns starting at £3,000+ a month.

Our SEO packages start at £395 a month for Starter, £695 for Growth, and £1,195 for Pro — covering the full range of what most UK small and medium businesses need.

An SEO audit is a one-off, point-in-time review of your website’s SEO health. You get a written report telling you what’s working, what’s broken, and what needs prioritising — but no ongoing work is done. It’s ideal if you want to know where you stand, or you have an in-house team who’ll act on the findings.

An SEO package is an ongoing monthly retainer where we actively do the work — fixing issues, optimising pages, building citations, writing content, and monitoring progress. The audit is included as your starting point, and we build from there.

Honestly? Because SEO doesn’t work in two weeks, and we’d rather set realistic expectations up front than take your money and have you cancel before the work has had time to deliver. Most clients see meaningful ranking movement somewhere between three and six months in. Anything that promises faster results is either lying to you or using shortcuts that will eventually get your site penalised.

After the initial six months, the agreement continues on a rolling monthly basis with just one month’s written notice and no long-term lock-in.

Yes. You can move up a tier (Starter to Growth, or Growth to Pro) at any time, with the change taking effect from your next billing cycle. Moving down a tier is possible after your initial six-month term, with one month’s written notice.

No. Our SEO services are available regardless of where your website is hosted. That said, when we host your site we have direct access to make technical SEO changes quickly, which can speed up the work; clients on our hosting also benefit from our standard hosted-client hourly rate (£80/hour) for any out-of-package work.

For local SEO and Google Business Profile work, you can often see meaningful movement within 4 to 8 weeks. For broader SEO packages, expect three to six months before rankings start shifting noticeably, and 6 to 12 months for the full impact to be visible. SEO is a compound investment — every month’s work builds on the last.

SEO, yes, that is a core part of what I do. Every website I build comes with solid SEO foundations (clean code, fast loading, proper structure), and from there I offer ongoing SEO properly: monthly SEO packages for broader search, local SEO to get you found nearby, and the Local Visibility Care Plan to keep your Google Business Profile working month after month. So if you want someone to keep improving your visibility over time, that is very much me.

Where I draw the line is the wider marketing world. I do not manage your social media, and I am not a full-service marketing agency. Those are specialisms in their own right, and you are better served by someone who lives in them day to day. I am happy to recommend trusted people, and to work alongside whoever you choose so the search and technical side supports what they do.

I’m glad you asked — the honest answer: no. No reliable SEO provider can guarantee a #1 ranking (Google’s algorithm is complex and always changing). What I can guarantee is that I’ll do everything I can with proven methods, keep you informed, and aim for sustainable improvements. If anyone promises #1, be very cautious.

Website costs in the UK vary widely depending on what you need. A do-it-yourself site on Wix or Squarespace can cost as little as £100–300 a year. A bespoke small-business website built by a UK developer typically falls between £2,500 and £10,000, depending on the number of pages, the complexity of the design, and any custom functionality. Larger commercial websites, e-commerce platforms, and bespoke web applications start at around £10,000 and can run well into five figures.

Our own pricing is published openly on our pricing page. Every project we take on is quoted in writing via a Proposal before any work begins, so you know the full cost up front.

View website pricing here. 

A bespoke website is genuinely built around your business — your brand, your customers, your conversion goals — rather than fitted into a template designed for thousands of other businesses. That difference shows up in everything from how fast the site loads, to how distinctive it looks, to how easily you can grow it without hitting platform limits.

With a bespoke build you also own the website outright and can host it anywhere; with a hosted website builder, you’re effectively renting your site, and your data lives inside their walls. For very small businesses with simple needs, a website builder can be the right answer. For businesses serious about their online presence, the long-term return on a properly designed site is significant.

You can view hosting costs here.

Both, depending on the work. New websites are quoted as fixed-price projects based on a written Proposal and defined scope. You know the total cost before signing, and the price doesn’t change unless you request something outside the agreed scope.

Ongoing hosting is a fixed monthly fee. For one-off changes outside the original scope (new pages, new functionality, design tweaks after launch), we quote either a fixed price or work to our hourly rates: £80 per hour for hosted clients, £100 per hour for non-contracted clients, and £160 per hour for emergency or out-of-hours work (one-hour minimum). All chargeable work is quoted and approved in writing before we start.

You can view hosting costs here.

No. All prices on our website, in our Proposals, and in our Hosting Agreements are exclusive of VAT. UK VAT will be added to invoices at the prevailing rate where it applies. This is standard practice for UK business-to-business pricing and means our published numbers reflect what we actually charge for the work, not a tax-inflated headline figure. If you’re a VAT-registered business, you’ll be reclaiming it anyway. If you’re not, please factor VAT into your budgeting.

Our standard structure is 50% deposit on signing the contract, and 50% on approval of the completed website before launch. This works for the majority of small-business projects.

For larger projects, we can discuss a milestone-based schedule (for example, three or four staged payments tied to project phases).

We can offer a payment plan in some cases, so please let us know if this is something you would be interested in. 

Hosting and ongoing services are billed monthly by Direct Debit via GoCardless, which spreads the running cost predictably across the year.

No. Everything we charge for is set out in your Proposal, the Web Development Agreement, and the Hosting Agreement before you sign. There are two areas where genuine additional costs can arise, and we flag them up front: third-party costs (domain registration, premium plugin licenses, stock photography), which are passed through to you at cost and itemised, and Change Requests (work you ask for that wasn’t in the original scope), which are always quoted and approved in writing before we start. We don’t charge setup fees, surprise launch fees, or “go-live” fees. The price you sign for is the price you pay.

Three honest reasons. First, when we launch a new build we know the environment inside out — the same hosting, the same backup setup, the same monitoring — which means when something goes wrong (and occasionally it will), we can fix it fast instead of debugging someone else’s setup.

Second, our project pricing is structured assuming a hosting relationship; if we had to price a site as a one-off with no ongoing arrangement, the project cost would be meaningfully higher.

Third, the first year is when most issues surface, and we want to be the ones fixing them. After the initial 12 months, hosting continues on a rolling monthly basis with three months’ written notice to leave and no long-term lock-in.

Managed hosting means we handle the technical work of running the website so you don’t have to. That includes: keeping WordPress, plugins, and themes updated; running daily backups to two separate locations; monitoring uptime and security 24/7; renewing SSL certificates; updating PHP and server software when needed; and being the first responder when something goes wrong.

With unmanaged hosting (the cheaper option), all of this is your responsibility, and forgetting any one of them is how websites get hacked or broken. Managed hosting costs more per month but typically saves money and stress over the long term.

Standard Hosting at £50 per month covers everything your website needs to stay fast, secure, and online: premium SiteGround Cloud infrastructure, all WordPress and plugin updates, daily local and offsite backups, SSL, 24/7 monitoring, and email support with a one-working-day response time.

Premium Hosting at £140 per month includes everything in Standard, plus one hour of content updates each month (we make the changes for you), a quarterly SEO health check report, and same-working-day priority email support. Premium suits businesses that want their site actively cared for rather than just kept running.

Yes. After your initial 12-month term, you can give three months’ written notice and move your website wherever you like. We’ll provide a final downloadable backup of your site files and database within 14 days, free of charge.

If you want hands-on help — liaising with your new host, transferring DNS, briefing your new developer — we can do that at our standard hourly rate.

Any domain names we registered in your name will be transferred to you or your new registrar at no charge. We don’t lock files, hold credentials hostage, or make leaving difficult. We’d rather earn your renewal than trap it.

If you give the correct notice and your account is up to date, we provide a full backup archive of your site files and database within 14 days of termination, free of charge. You can take this archive to any WordPress-compatible host and restore it.

If we registered your domain on your behalf, we transfer it to you or your nominated registrar at no charge.

If you’d like us to assist with the migration itself (DNS configuration, transfer to the new developer, troubleshooting), that’s available at our standard hourly rate with a one-hour minimum.

If your account has unpaid invoices, the migration tools become available once those are settled.

Yes. SSL is included as standard on every site we host, on every plan. It’s installed and auto-renewed by us, so you don’t need to think about it.

SSL encrypts the connection between your visitors and your website (the padlock you see in the browser address bar), protects any form submissions, and is now a Google ranking factor — a site without it will be flagged as “Not Secure” in Chrome and most other browsers.

There’s no extra fee, and there’s no scenario where it makes sense not to have it.

Daily, in two separate places. Every site we host is backed up daily by SiteGround to local cloud storage, with 30-day retention.

We also run a separate daily backup via UpdraftPlus to remote offsite storage.

Two independent backup systems mean that if one fails or is compromised, the other remains intact. Restoring from backup is included free up to twice per calendar year — useful if a plugin update goes wrong, or if you accidentally delete something important. Additional restores are charged at our standard hourly rate.

We monitor every hosted site 24/7 at the platform level, so we usually know about an outage before you do.

For most issues — a server hiccup, a plugin conflict, a cached error — automated systems resolve the problem without anyone needing to act.

For anything that needs hands-on attention, our support responds by email within one working day on Standard hosting, or the same working day on Premium. For genuine out-of-hours emergencies (your site is down and your business is materially affected), our emergency rate of £160 per hour applies, with a one-hour minimum.

Routine matters are not treated as emergencies.

You do. On full payment of all project invoices, the following transfers to you outright: the final website as delivered, including its pages, layout, and bespoke design elements; any bespoke graphics created specifically for your site; and your own content (text, images, video), which you own from the moment you supplied it.

What we retain are our reusable code components, libraries, and methodologies — the toolkit we use across multiple projects — and any third-party assets (themes, plugins, stock photography) which remain licensed under their original terms.

In practical terms: the site is yours, you can move it, modify it, or hand it to another developer. You are not renting the website from us.

Yes — domains we register on your behalf are registered in your name and belong to you from day one. If you ever want to move the domain to a different registrar, or to a new developer, we transfer it on written request at no charge for the transfer itself (registry fees, where charged by the domain operator, are passed through at cost).

We don’t tie domains to hosting accounts or use them as leverage. Some agencies do this; we don’t.

Yes. Exaltis Solutions Ltd is a UK limited company, registered in England and Wales (Company Number 10977266), based in Gateshead. Our registered office is at The Northern Design Centre, Abbott’s Hill, Gateshead, NE8 3DF. All contracts are governed by English law, and disputes fall under the exclusive jurisdiction of the courts of England and Wales.

Our team works in UK working hours (Monday to Friday, 9am to 5pm UK time), and our hosting infrastructure is based in EU data centres for GDPR compliance.

Your website, your domain, and your content are yours regardless of what happens to us. The hosting infrastructure is provided by SiteGround, an established multinational hosting company independent of us — your site continues to live on their servers, and you can step through to a SiteGround hosting account in your own name, with our full assistance to migrate.

Your domain is registered in your name, not ours. Your daily backups are stored independently in two separate locations. You could, if you needed to, take a backup archive and move your site to any WordPress-compatible host within hours.

We are thriving, and we hope this never becomes relevant, but the scenario you’re describing is one we’ve deliberately structured against.

The technical foundations, yes — we build on EU-hosted infrastructure with SSL by default, configure cookie consent banners, and set up a privacy policy template. Full GDPR compliance, however, depends on more than technical setup: it depends on what data you collect, why, how long you keep it, who you share it with, and how you handle data subject requests.

We give you the technical building blocks; you (often with help from a solicitor or data protection consultant for larger sites) apply them to your specific business practices.

For most small businesses, the technical setup we provide, plus a properly written privacy policy covers the essentials.

Yes — our portfolio page features recent projects across a range of industries. If you’d like to discuss a specific project in more detail, or if your project is in a niche that isn’t represented in the public portfolio, get in touch and we’ll happily share relevant examples and references.

We’re based in Gateshead in the North East of England, at The Northern Design Centre, Abbott’s Hill, Gateshead, NE8 3DF.

Yes — we work with clients across the UK and have done since we started. Where possible, we like to meet new clients in person before any project begins. A web project is a relationship as much as a transaction; an hour over coffee tells us things a brief never will, and gives you the chance to know who you’re trusting with your website.

We’re happy to travel across the North East for that initial meeting.

In addition, we have clients all over the UK that we’ve worked with for years who we’ve never met in person. So, if you are further afield, please don’t let that stop you getting in touch. We can easily communicate via email and by video calls when discussion is helpful.

Yes. We work with UK businesses operating internationally, and with non-UK businesses where English-language web presence is the goal. Our contracts are governed by English law, and we invoice in pounds sterling. Time zone differences are managed via email-based communication and scheduled video calls. Our hosting infrastructure is EU-based, which suits most use cases, but we can advise on geographic considerations for sites with significant audiences outside Europe.