Guides
Answers to the questions people ask us before they hire anyone. No sales pitch in them, and no assumption about which country you are in unless the piece says so.
SEO, GEO and AEO: what is the difference, and which one do I need?
SEO is appearing in a list of search results. AEO is being the answer shown above that list, in the snippet box or read out by a voice assistant. GEO is being named inside an answer an AI writes from scratch, where there is no list underneath at all. You do not choose between them: all three run on the same foundation, which is a page a machine can read, your facts written in a form a machine can parse, and other sites confirming you exist. What differs is how much of your writing can be quoted with nothing around it.
Why do the enquiries from my website go nowhere?
Usually it is when they are answered rather than how. An enquiry that arrives at nine in the evening and is read at nine the next morning has spent twelve hours sitting with a business that answered sooner. The other half is the follow-up nobody makes: most people go quiet once, and the business that asks a second time is often the one that gets the work. Neither problem is fixed by rewriting the website.
What changes about search and automation as my business grows?
The three jobs never change: be found, answer fast, follow through. What moves is the bottleneck. With one team the whole job is visibility and reply speed. With several branches or countries it becomes routing, which office and which calendar and which language, and getting quotes and invoices out without anybody typing them twice. Past that the constraint is usually that the systems do not talk to each other, and the work turns into integration, data, and sometimes an application built for the business.
How much should a restaurant website cost?
A straightforward five-page restaurant website costs roughly $800 to $2,500 to build once, or $80 to $200 a month on a setup-fee-plus-monthly arrangement. Below about $500 you are usually buying a template with your logo dropped in. Above about $5,000 you are paying for design work that a restaurant with one location rarely needs.
What a cleaning company website needs to get bookings
A cleaning company website earns bookings on four things: a quote request that asks only property type, number of bedrooms and how often; the areas you cover written out in text; real prices rather than "contact us for a quote"; and pages that work on a phone held one-handed. Everything else is decoration.
How to put your menu online without a PDF
Put the menu on a web page as ordinary text — sections as headings, each dish as a line with its price and description. Do not link to a PDF and do not upload a photograph of the printed menu. A text menu loads instantly on a phone, can be read by search engines and screen readers, and can be changed in a minute.
What contractors should show on a website to win quotes
Show finished work with before-and-after photographs, credentials and registrations written out in plain text, services split by trade, and a callback request that collects the job details. A client holding three quotes decides on evidence, and most contractors give them none.
Setup fee plus monthly, or one-off: which is better for a small business?
A one-off price is cheaper over three years and leaves hosting, updates and every change to you. A setup fee plus a monthly fee costs more in total, needs far less money on day one, and keeps somebody named responsible for the site. Choose one-off if you have somebody who will maintain it; choose monthly if you do not.
Why is my website not showing up on Google?
There are six common reasons, and they are worth checking in order: the site is not indexed at all, there is no page answering the search, the site blocks crawlers, there is no Google Business Profile, the pages are too thin to rank, or the site is simply too new. The first is the most common and takes two minutes to rule out — search Google for site:yourdomain.com and see whether anything comes back.
Is a website builder good enough for a small business?
A website builder is good enough when you have time, patience and a simple business — and it is a false economy when you do not. The subscription is rarely the real cost; the thirty to forty hours it takes you to finish the site is, and most builder sites are never finished at all. The honest split: use a builder if you enjoy it and will maintain it, pay somebody if the site is a sales channel rather than a formality.
How do you get your business recommended by ChatGPT?
Four things decide it: the AI crawlers have to be allowed to read your site, your text has to be in the HTML rather than assembled in the browser, your business facts have to be in structured data, and you have to be mentioned somewhere other than your own website. The last one carries the most weight and is the one nearly everybody skips — models answer from consensus, so a business that appears in no directory, list or forum thread is not a candidate no matter how good its own site is.
How do you set up a Google Business Profile properly?
Claim it at google.com/business, verify it, then fill in every field — category, hours, services with prices, service areas and at least ten photographs. It is free, it takes about an hour, and for a business selling locally it produces more enquiries in the first month than the website will in six. Reviews are what make it rank, so ask for them from day one.
How does a cleaning company get more customers?
In order of return: claim and fill in your Google Business Profile, reply to enquiries within the hour, publish your prices, and build a referral habit with the customers you already have. Cleaning is won on speed and predictability rather than on marketing spend — the company that answers first and tells you the price usually gets the job, even when it is not the cheapest.
Do I need a trade licence to have a website in the UAE?
Nobody needs a trade licence to register a domain or put up a website. You need one to conduct business in the UAE, and a website advertising services to UAE customers is evidence of doing exactly that. So the licence question is really about the business, not the site.
What UAE businesses need on a website for VAT and licence display
If you are VAT-registered in the UAE, say clearly whether your published prices include the 5% VAT and put your TRN on invoices. There is no general legal requirement to display a trade licence number on a website, though some regulated activities and e-commerce payment providers ask for company details.
Arabic-first or English-first for a Gulf business website?
Lead with the language your customers buy in. In Dubai and Abu Dhabi, a service business selling to residents and international customers is usually right to lead in English with a full Arabic version alongside. A business selling to Arabic-speaking nationals, to government-adjacent clients, or in Saudi Arabia, should lead in Arabic.