The library
Answers
Real questions people have asked, answered plainly. Every one is useful whether or not you ever hire us, and each says when it was last checked. If yours is not here, ask it.
22 answers
Starting out
If you are not yet sure what you need, or whether this is for you.
- “Do I really have to write a blog every week?”No. For most local service businesses a weekly blog produces almost nothing, and the guilt it creates does more damage than the missing posts. What brings enquiries is a proper page for each thing you do, in each place you do it, kept accurate. Write those first.
- “Why does ChatGPT recommend my competitor and not me?”Usually because they are easier to describe, not because they are better. Assistants repeat businesses whose facts are stated plainly in text and agree with each other. Reviews and years in business count for far less than owners expect. There is no submission form and nobody can sell you a place.
- “How long does it take to show up on Google?”Being listed takes days. Being chosen takes months. A new site is usually indexed within a week, but ranking for the terms that bring you work commonly takes three to six months of steady effort, and competitive terms take longer.
- “Is SEO worth it for a business like mine?”Almost always, if your clients find you by searching. That one thing decides it, not your size or your sector. The real question is usually whether you do it yourself or pay somebody, and what your empty capacity is worth tells you which.
- “Is this SEO email a scam?”Some are. Some are not. There is one test that separates them: did they look at your website? A real email names something specific on your pages. A fake one describes critical errors in general terms because nobody opened your site. Google does not cold email anyone about rankings..
- “Why does my website get visitors but no enquiries?”Because being found and being chosen are different jobs, and the second one usually fails quietly. The common causes are a site that never says what things cost, an enquiry path that asks too much too early, and no evidence that anybody else has trusted you.
- “Why did the phones stop ringing?”Check the phone and the contact form before you check Google. When calls stop suddenly, the cause is more often something in the way people reach you than a drop in search position. Those checks take fifteen minutes and cost nothing. Only then look at rankings.
- “Why is a competitor with terrible reviews above me on Google Maps?”Because Maps is answering the question near me, not the question who is best. Three things outweigh your reviews: how close you are to whoever is searching, which primary category you chose, and whether your competitor put service words in their business name. Only two of those are yours to fix.
Working it out
How the work is done, and what you could do yourself instead.
- “Can I audit my own website?”Yes. Everything in a professional SEO audit can be done by hand with free tools, and this page lists all eleven checks in the order More Than Normal runs them. It takes roughly nine to fourteen hours the first time. Whether that is a good use of your week is a different question.
- “Can I see something you’ve built?”The Pickle Jar Therapy, a private practice in Canterbury that our founder Alex Harvey co-directs. We built its website and still run its search. In the first 30 days of the new site, clicks from Google rose from 14 to 33, and twice as many of its pages were being found, with every figure dated and sourced.
- “Can you do the SEO for my existing website?”Yes, on any website. If we did not build it, we start with the £450 SEO audit, because it tells us what your platform will let us change and whether the site is sound enough to invest in. Ongoing search then starts from £550 a month on a site we did not build.
- “Do I have to write the content myself?”No. The writing is included in the £3,500 and is not quoted separately, because a website is mostly words and handing that part back to you is handing back the job. What we need from you is the facts and a factual check, not prose.
- “Do I need a new website, or can mine be fixed?”Usually it can be fixed. A new website is worth paying for only when the structure itself is the limit: pages that cannot be made fast, pages whose key facts a machine cannot reliably pick up, or pages you cannot add to without hiring a developer every time. The £450 SEO audit decides which, in writing.
- “How do you decide what pages my site needs?”By finding out what people actually type when they want what you sell, and who currently answers them. That research comes before any writing or design, because the pages a business needs are rarely the pages it would have listed from memory.
- “How much of my time will this take?”Around six to ten hours spread over six to eight weeks, and most of it lands in the first fortnight. The thing that stretches a build is not how much work you do, it is how long decisions sit waiting. That is the one part we cannot do for you.
- “Who would I actually be dealing with?”A senior engineer, named at the start, who leads your project from the first conversation to launch. The person setting the search strategy is the person writing the copy and building the pages, and the person who answers when you ask about it a year later.
Costs and commitments
What things cost, what is included, and what you are tied to.
- “I need a website. Where do I start?”Here. A new website starts at £3,500 and takes six to eight weeks, with the research and the writing included rather than quoted separately. You do not need an SEO audit first if you have already decided you want a new site. You own everything from the day it is settled.
- “What happens after I get in touch?”A reply, then a fifteen minute call if you want one, then a written answer about what you need. Nobody rings you unexpectedly, there is no discovery process to sit through, and the call can end with us saying you do not need anything.
- “What if I don't like the design?”Then we change it, and the order the work happens in makes that cheap. Words are agreed before anything is drawn, so by the time you see a design the substance is already settled and what is left to disagree about is how it looks.
- “What if it turns out not to be worth doing?”Then More Than Normal tells you, in writing, and you keep the report. The SEO audit is a paid diagnosis and it is allowed to end with the finding that you should spend nothing. That happens often enough to say so plainly here rather than after you have paid.
- “What do I get for my £450?”A written report on how findable your business is in search, around five thousand words, delivered in five working days. It examines eleven areas of your search performance, ranks every finding by what it is worth commercially, and tells you what to fix first, including the things you can do yourself for nothing.
- “Why would I pay monthly once the site is built?”The audit is a snapshot and the build fixes what it found. Neither tells you what happens next. The monthly work is the loop after that: we re-run the audit, read your analytics and check what the assistants now say, then realign the site and the content against real data rather than guesses.
If the question you have is not here, it is worth asking. That is how most of these got written.
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