What AI can actually do

Strip away the hype, and language models are good at four things:

• Reading and understanding: an email, an inquiry, a review, a contract.
• Sorting things out: who’s writing, what they want, how urgent it is.
• Summarizing: a long conversation in five lines, a hundred reviews boiled down to the main complaints.
• Drafting: a reply to a customer, a sales proposal, a product description.

All of these are tasks with lots of repetitive text. That’s where AI pays for itself fastest.

Five tasks to start with

1. Answering common questions. Prices, timelines, locations, shipping terms. The assistant answers around the clock from your knowledge base and passes tricky questions to a manager.
2. Sorting incoming inquiries and emails. AI reads the message, figures out the request and how urgent it is, and logs it in your CRM. The manager gets a ready-made record instead of a raw email.
3. Call transcription. A transcript of the call, a short summary, and a check against your call script. Whoever runs the team sees how the reps talk to customers without listening to hours of recordings.
4. Document drafts. Proposals, emails, and contracts based on your templates. All a person has to do is review and send.
5. Catalog copy. Product descriptions for your website and marketplaces, written from the specs. People review them instead of writing them from scratch.

What AI shouldn’t do

AI has a weak spot: it answers confidently even when it doesn’t know the answer. So some tasks are better left to people:

• Decisions about money: discounts, refunds, payment approvals.
• Promises to customers that nobody has checked: deadlines, prices, guarantees.
• Answers that aren’t based on your data: if the answer isn’t in the knowledge base, the assistant should say “Let me check with a manager,” not make something up.

A well-configured assistant isn’t a replacement for an employee. It’s a filter: it handles the repetitive work and passes everything that needs a decision to people.

Customer data and choosing a model

AI models differ in where they process your data. Some providers can keep it within a specific country or region, which is convenient when your data has to stay there. Others sometimes write complex text better, but you shouldn’t send your customers’ personal data to them without preparing it first.

A practical rule: if a task involves names, phone numbers, or other customer data, either use a model whose data handling meets the privacy rules you’re bound by, or strip that data out before sending it. For tasks without personal data, like product descriptions, you can choose on quality alone.

How to implement AI without the risk

Start small and measure the results:

1. Pick one task with lots of repetitive text and a clear outcome.
2. Build a knowledge base: prices, terms, common questions, document templates.
3. Launch the assistant in suggestion mode: it drafts the reply, a person sends it.
4. After a couple of weeks, count how much time it saved and how many replies had to be fixed.
5. If it all looks good, let the assistant reply on its own and keep people on the tricky cases.

This takes longer than “hooking AI up to everything at once,” but you’ll know for sure that it’s bringing value, not mistakes.

How we use AI ourselves

AI is part of our work every day. It builds custom website concepts for hundreds of companies: it analyzes their current site, writes the storyline, and assembles the page, and then a person reviews the result. Another one of our tools finds jobs on freelance marketplaces, and a single button press launches an AI agent that prepares a draft solution.

So we bring AI into other businesses the same way we work with it ourselves: where it saves hours, and with a human check wherever a mistake would be costly. If you want to find out where AI would pay off for you, tell us about your processes and we’ll go through them for free.

Learn more about the service: AI assistants.

Below we cover when a standard system is enough, when it’s worth building your own, what drives the cost, and how to switch without losing a single lead.

What is a CRM, in plain English?

Picture a salesperson’s notebook with every client, every conversation, and every promise written down: “call back Thursday,” “send the invoice,” “confirm the measurements.” Now picture that notebook shared by the whole team, reminding everyone of their tasks on its own and showing the boss how much money is in the pipeline right now. That’s a CRM.

Without one, inquiries live in individual employees’ messaging apps and inboxes. That works as long as one person remembers everything. Once inquiries pile up or that person goes on vacation, clients start slipping through the cracks.

When an off-the-shelf CRM is enough

An off-the-shelf CRM is a good choice when your process is standard: an inquiry comes in, a salesperson calls, sends a proposal, and the client pays. There are plenty of these systems, like HubSpot, Pipedrive, and Salesforce, and they come with mobile apps, phone and email integrations, and pipeline templates.

Go with an off-the-shelf CRM if:

• you have only a few deal stages, and they look like the standard ones;
• a handful of people handle sales, not a whole department;
• you need lead tracking, reminders, and simple reports, with no custom calculations;
• you’re willing to adapt your process to the system, not the system to your process.

If our review shows that an off-the-shelf CRM is right for you, we’ll tell you so. There’s no point building your own just for the sake of it.

When you need a custom CRM

A custom CRM pays off when the off-the-shelf one starts getting in the way. The signs are usually the same:

• your team keeps a spreadsheet next to the CRM because the CRM doesn’t have the fields they need;
• your process is unusual: calling through a contact list, a custom quote for every client, several rounds of approval;
• the data needs to connect to your internal records, website, inventory, or accounting software like QuickBooks or Xero, and there are no ready-made integrations;
• half of the CRM’s features go unused, while you pay for every user every month.

A custom CRM contains only your process: the stages, fields, and reports you actually need. There’s nothing to work around, and new features get added as the company grows.

What drives the cost of a custom CRM

Our custom CRMs start at $590. Four things affect the final price:

1. Process. How many stages a deal has, how many employee roles there are, and what permissions each one has.
2. Lead sources. Website, Telegram, email, phone calls: each source is connected separately.
3. Reports. A simple summary for a period, or detailed analytics by salesperson, source, and revenue.
4. Integrations. Phone system, QuickBooks or Xero, bank, inventory, email campaigns.

That’s why an exact price is only possible after reviewing your process. We do that review for free and give you the price before any contract.

Often the first version covers the essentials: all leads in one place, a pipeline, and reminders. Reports, integrations, and small conveniences get added along the way, once it’s clear what the team really needs.

How to switch to a new CRM without chaos

The switch goes more smoothly when you do it step by step:

1. Describe the process as it works today, not as it should work in an ideal world.
2. Move clients and deals over from spreadsheets and the old system.
3. Connect your lead sources so that nothing bypasses the CRM.
4. Launch with one department or one salesperson and collect feedback.
5. Move everyone over and retire the old spreadsheets, so you don’t end up with two sources of truth.

The main rule: from day one, every new lead goes into the CRM and nowhere else. Otherwise people will keep working the old way.

How we use our own custom CRM

We run our own work in a CRM we built ourselves: inquiries, outreach calls and their outcomes, negotiations, projects, and revenue tracking. It’s built around our process, works in the browser and on a phone, and client replies show up as notifications in Telegram. So we know which details actually save time and which ones just look nice in a sales pitch.

If you’re wondering whether you need a custom CRM, tell us about your process. We’ll review it for free and tell you honestly what fits: an off-the-shelf system or a custom one.

Learn more about the service: CRM built around your process.

Here’s what a business bot can do, when you actually need one, and what drives the cost.

What a bot can do for your customers

A customer-facing bot works around the clock and never gets tired of the same questions:

• Takes inquiries: asks a few questions and hands a complete inquiry to a manager.
• Books appointments: shows open time slots and sends a reminder the day before.
• Answers common questions: prices, locations, hours, shipping terms.
• Shows a catalog: products with prices, a cart, and checkout without leaving Telegram.
• Sends status updates: order received, packed, shipped.

Connect an AI assistant to the bot, and it can also answer free-form questions from your knowledge base, while handing the complex cases to a person.

What a bot can do for your team

An internal bot replaces the chaos of work group chats:

• Notifications: a new inquiry, a payment, or a shipment goes straight to the right person, with “Take it” and “Done” buttons.
• Tasks: a list for the day for couriers and technicians, marked done right in the bot.
• Approvals: an invoice comes to the manager with an “Approve” button.
• Reports: every morning, a summary of yesterday: inquiries, sales, cash.

We work this way ourselves: a bot sends us new jobs from freelance marketplaces, and notifications about website inquiries and client replies arrive in Telegram. It saves more time than you’d think.

Bot, website, or app?

Bots and websites often work together: inquiries from both the site and the bot land in one CRM, and the manager sees them all in one place.

What drives the cost of a bot

The price doesn’t depend on the fact that it’s a bot. It depends on what the bot does:

1. Scenarios. A single “send an inquiry” scenario is quick. Bookings, a catalog, a customer account: each scenario adds work.
2. Catalog and payments. Products, a cart, invoices, and payment links.
3. Connections to other systems. CRM, internal records, website, schedule, inventory.
4. AI. Free-form answers from a knowledge base are a separate piece of work.

A simple lead-capture bot starts at $190 with us. To give you an exact price, we start with a free review: what the bot needs to do and what it connects to. You get the price before any contract.

How to get people to actually use your bot

• One job at launch. Nobody understands a bot that does everything. Start with the main scenario.
• Buttons instead of typing. Tapping is easier than writing.
• A real person close by. If the bot doesn’t understand a question, it should bring in a manager right away.
• Inquiries go into the CRM. If inquiries from the bot stay only in the chat, they get lost just like direct messages do.

If you want to know whether your business needs a bot and what it should look like, tell us what you’re trying to do and we’ll review it for free.

Learn more about the service: Telegram bots.

What is an interactive website?

An interactive website responds to what a person does: scrolling, moving the cursor, tapping, clicking. There are different levels:

• Basic: buttons react on hover, sections fade in as you scroll.
• Mid-level: a calculator or configurator where you change the inputs and see the result right away, like pricing a cleaning job or picking a color for a piece of furniture.
• The most noticeable: a 3D scene.

A 3D scene is a three-dimensional model that runs right in the browser, with no video and no plugins. You can rotate it and zoom in, and, most importantly, tie it to scrolling: as you move down the page, something happens in the scene. Under the hood it’s WebGL, but that’s not what matters to you. What matters is what happens in the scene and what it says about your business.

The core rule: 3D tells the story of your business

The test is simple: you should be able to sum up the scene in one sentence about your business. If that sentence doesn’t come together, you don’t need the scene, no matter how good it looks.

Interactive website examples from our work

• Motor oil store. Scrolling revs an engine on a giant tachometer. As the RPMs climb, the oil product lines change along the dial, and at redline the rev limiter kicks in: a flash and tire smoke across the whole screen. A product range that would be a plain list in a catalog turns into one story.
• Forged wheel manufacturer. Scrolling walks through how a single wheel gets made: a billet goes through the press, lathe turning, CNC milling, and paint, and at the end it becomes a wheel. People see with their own eyes where the price of a forged wheel comes from.
• Cleaning company. A cutaway apartment starts out dirty. Scrolling kicks off a deep clean that follows the company’s own checklist: a wave of clean moves from room to room while the items on the list get checked off one by one. Clients see what’s included before they ever get in touch.
• Movie theater. A projector beam follows the cursor and reveals the poster for a new release on the screen. From the first seconds, the site feels like the auditorium right before the show.

Each of these scenes shows the company’s actual work, not an abstraction. A scene like that works like a salesperson, not like wallpaper.

What doesn’t sell

• A logo or company name in 3D. The lettering spins and shines, and the viewer’s reaction is always the same: “Okay, it’s a logo. So what?”
• Atmospheric effects. A patch of light from a window, haze, floating particles. Pretty, but they say nothing about what you do.
• Abstract shapes that would fit any site on the internet.

When 3D gets in the way

There are three typical cases where a scene works against sales.

An online store catalog

People come to an online store to find a product, compare prices, and buy. Any scene standing between them and the catalog is an obstacle. On a project for a curtain store, the first version opened with an interactive 3D window. It looked great, but as you scrolled, it wasn’t clear what the store actually sold. We replaced the scene with a regular first screen: an interior photo, a headline, two buttons. In a store, 3D belongs in specific spots: showing a product from every side or building it in a configurator.

A first screen you can’t read in 2 seconds

In the first few seconds, people decide whether to stay or leave. In that time they need to understand who the company is, what it offers, and where to click. If the headline only appears after an intro animation and the scene covers the button, 3D is working against you. The rule is simple: the first-screen text is visible immediately, and the scene sits next to it or starts further down.

When the scene hides what matters

Prices, contact details, and the inquiry button shouldn’t have to wait for a long animation to finish. If people have to scroll through the whole story to find your phone number, some of them won’t make it. Let the story play out, but keep the essentials within reach: in the header or in a sticky button.

How to build an interactive website without losing speed

Here’s how to add animation to a website without it getting in the way:

• Text in HTML, 3D after. The headline, description, and buttons are regular markup that shows up right away. The scene loads after the first screen has already rendered. If the 3D never loads at all, people can still read everything.
• A lighter version for phones. Less detail in the model, simpler lighting and shadows, lower resolution. On low-end devices, the scene can be replaced with an image or a short video.
• Respect for the Reduce Motion setting. Motion on screen makes some people feel sick, so they turn this setting on in their phone or computer. The site should notice it and show calm, static states instead of animation.
• Lightweight models and textures. Models get simplified, textures get compressed, and anything the scene doesn’t need gets cut.
• Motion with a purpose. Things move when they explain something: a number appears, a product comes together. Everything else stays put.

Simple effects, like sections fading in, are done in CSS. Scroll-driven storytelling and 3D are done in JavaScript: WebGL renders the scene, and a separate library ties it to scrolling.

We test every scene on an ordinary phone over a mobile connection first, not on a powerful computer. If it stutters on the phone, we simplify it until the motion is smooth.

3D doesn’t hurt SEO if the text is in the HTML

Google reads the text on the page, not the picture inside the scene. As far as search is concerned, anything drawn in 3D doesn’t exist. So the substance of the page (headings, service descriptions, prices, contact details) lives in regular markup, and the 3D goes on top. That way the scene doesn’t get in the way of SEO. A site with 3D has the same keyword set, the same page structure, and the same title and description tags as any other site.

The only thing that can hurt is speed. If a page loads slowly, people head back to the search results, and Google takes page experience, speed included, into account. So the rules in the previous section matter for SEO, too. We explain how Google evaluates a site in our article SEO in plain English.

Does your website need 3D?

Answer four questions:

1. Can your business be shown as an object or a process? A product, a production line, a space, the stages of a service. If so, you have something to build a scene from.
2. Is your customer comparing options or buying in a hurry? 3D helps when people compare and decide. When they need to find a product fast and check out, a scene gets in the way.
3. Do you have something to show? Photos, drawings, facts. Without real material, a scene turns into an abstraction.
4. What does the person do after the scene? If there’s no answer, the scene has nowhere to lead.

If the answer to the first three is “yes” and you have an answer to the fourth, 3D will most likely help you sell. If not, the better choice is a regular fast website with good photos.

What we need from you

• The story of your business. How your work gets done: what the product is made of, what stages the service has, what the client gets at the end. That’s exactly where we look for the plot of the scene. For the movie theater, for example, the projector beam came from the brand story on the theater’s own website.
• Real materials. Photos of your products and past work, a vector logo, brand colors. If you have drawings or 3D models of your products, the scene will be more accurate.
• Facts. Prices, specs, stages that can be shown. Every number in the scene will be yours. We don’t make anything up.
• A goal. What people should do after the scene: send an inquiry, call, choose a product.

We show you a homepage concept with a 3D scene before any contract is signed, for free: you see your business in 3D before you pay. More of our projects are in the Work section, and our page on websites with 3D and animation explains how we build them.

Learn more about the service: Websites with 3D and animation.

The name comes from where it sits in the journey: it’s the page a person lands on after clicking an ad, a link in an email or a social media post. Landing page or lander, it’s the same thing.

What a landing page is, in plain English

Picture a salesperson who has five minutes with a customer. They don’t recount the company’s history or walk the customer through the whole warehouse. They say what they’re offering and why it’s useful, show proof, name the price and ask: “Shall we go ahead?” A landing page is the same conversation, written down as a page.

That’s why people read it from top to bottom, like a story. Each section answers the question the visitor has just started asking: what is this, is it right for me, why should I trust you, how much does it cost, how do I order. If a question goes unanswered, the person leaves to find the answer on another site.

At the same time, a landing page is a full-fledged website: it has an address, it opens in a browser, and people find it through a link. It’s just a website with one page. The term is also used for a single page inside a bigger site when it was built for one ad campaign. And it can be very short: three or four sections for a promotion or a consultation booking.

Landing page vs. multi-page website

The main difference is the job. A landing page sells one service or one product, or signs people up for one event. A multi-page website does many jobs at once: it covers all your services, shows a catalog, answers questions from search and builds trust in the company.

When a landing page pays off: examples

A landing page doesn’t bring in visitors on its own. It pays off when you have a way to send people to it, and your offer can be explained on one page. These are the landing pages that most often justify themselves:

• One service with clear demand. Gutter installation, upholstery cleaning, washing machine repair. The person is looking for something specific and wants to understand the price and terms quickly.
• Google Ads. The visitor clicked an ad with a specific promise and expects to see exactly that, not a homepage with ten sections.
• Testing a new idea. Before building a big site for a new line of business, you can check on one page whether anyone will submit a request at all.
• An event or a launch. A conference, enrollment in a course, a new location opening. The offer has a date, and after it the page is no longer needed.
• A seasonal offer. Booking a tire change before the season turns, air conditioner installation ahead of summer.

When you need a full website

A landing page is a poor fit if you want customers from Google search. Search engines show a specific page for a specific search. One page can answer one group of related searches well, but not all of them at once. “Flat roof repair”, “metal roofing” and “attic insulation” are three different topics, and each needs its own page.

A real example is the keyword map behind this site, meaning the list of searches it’s built around (we built it on Russian-language search data). Landing page design alone produced 511 searches. Corporate websites, online stores, SEO, search ads and maps listings each got their own groups too. If all of that lived on one page, it would lose on every topic to pages fully dedicated to it. That’s why every service here has its own page.

You need a full website if:

• you have several services or a product catalog, and people search for each one in their own words;
• you’re betting on search traffic and are prepared to wait months for results;
• the product is complex or expensive, and people research it for a long time before buying: case studies, documents, terms;
• you sell on commercial searches where people compare the whole offer: range, prices, delivery, payment, contacts. A one-pager has little to show here.

A common working option is a multi-page website where each service page is built on landing page logic. That page sells to ad traffic and pulls in its own group of searches. If you’re choosing between ads and search, see PPC or SEO.

Which sections a good landing page needs

The order of the sections follows the visitor’s questions. The exact set varies by industry, but the foundation is the same.

The first screen

The first screen decides whether people keep reading. It should make clear what you offer, who it’s for, where you work and what to do next. A headline like “Cleaning for every need” says nothing. “Post-renovation apartment cleaning in Denver” filters out the wrong people right away and hooks the right ones.

The image should show the actual work, not an abstraction. In our project for a motor oil store, a 3D tachometer revs up as you scroll, and in the one for a forging company, an ingot turns into a wheel. You can see these scenes in our Work section.

The offer

The offer is your specific proposition: what the person gets, on what terms and why they should reach out now. It often sits right on the first screen, but it needs to be thought through on its own: the whole page rests on it.

Compare “Apartment cleaning” with “Post-renovation cleaning: we bring our own equipment and supplies, and you pay after you’ve checked the work.” The second one can be checked and compared with other offers; the first can’t.

Proof

Photos of your work, real reviews, certifications, a guarantee written into the contract, video from your shop floor, numbers from your business. All of this answers the question “why should I trust you?” There’s one rule: only the truth. Made-up reviews and stock photos of a “team” are spotted instantly and damage trust in the whole page.

Price

If there’s no price, the person has to call and ask, and many would rather just close the tab. Show an exact price, a range or a starting price, and explain what it depends on. A calculator or a quiz works well: the visitor answers a few questions and gets an estimate. A page built around those questions is often called a quiz funnel.

The request form

A form with two fields, name and phone number, plus buttons for messaging apps. Say what happens after someone submits it: who will get in touch and when. Repeat the button several times down the page so nobody has to scroll back up. Before the form, a section that answers common doubts helps: timing, guarantee, payment.

Every lead should be counted as a conversion in GA4. Otherwise you won’t know which ads bring in customers and which just spend money.

Landing pages for Google Ads

In Google Ads, the landing page is the page your ad leads to. It can be a standalone one-pager or a service page on a bigger site. For ads, the label doesn’t matter; three things do.

1. The page delivers on the ad’s promise. If the ad says “in-home upholstery cleaning”, the person should immediately see upholstery cleaning, not a homepage with a list of twenty services.
2. The page loads fast on a phone. You pay for the click the moment it happens. If the page loads slowly and the person closes it, the money is already gone.
3. The page has conversion tracking: form submissions, phone clicks, taps to message you. Without it, Google Ads can’t tell a click that brought a lead from an empty one, and it can’t learn from your leads.

Google Ads also rates landing page experience as part of your ad quality, so a relevant, fast page helps you in the auction as well. How to build a campaign around a page like this, we covered in detail in How to set up Google Ads.

How to make a landing page: the process

You can build a one-page site yourself on a website builder like Wix or Squarespace, or hire a designer and a developer. The order is the same either way.

1. Decide on the one action the visitor should take, and describe who they are: what they’re looking for and what they’re unsure about.
2. Gather your materials: the offer, prices, photos of your work, reviews, answers to common questions. Write the copy before the design: design shapes the message, not the other way around.
3. Lay out the sections in order on paper or in a simple wireframe.
4. Design for phones first, then for desktop.
5. Set up GA4 and conversion tracking, send a test lead and make sure it arrived and the conversion registered.
6. Launch your ads and watch where people leave the page. Session recordings and scroll maps in tools like Microsoft Clarity or Hotjar show exactly that.

A website builder is great for testing an idea quickly. Once the page starts making money, people usually run into the template look, speed issues and limits on customization. That’s when the site moves to custom code.

How much a landing page costs

The price depends on the scope: how many sections, who writes the copy, and whether you need a photo shoot, a calculator or a quiz, a 3D scene or a CRM integration. Our current prices for landing pages and multi-page websites are on the pricing page. Set up GA4 with conversions on launch day: without it, you can’t tell whether the page is paying off.

We show you a homepage concept before you sign a contract, free of charge. On a landing page, that’s the only page, so you see what it will look like in advance. More about the service on our landing page design page.

If you’re not sure one page is enough, start with where your visitors will come from. From ads, for one service? A landing page will do. From search, across several lines of business? Plan a site where every service has its own selling page from the start.

Learn more about the service: Landing page design.

What Google Ads is, in plain English

Google Ads is Google’s advertising platform. It shows your ads in Google search, above and below the regular results, and on the Google Display Network: websites and apps that make money by showing ads. For a business, it’s a way to be in front of someone at the exact moment they’re looking for what you sell.

Search ads like these are often called PPC, short for pay-per-click, and they respond to what a person is searching for right now. Google also offers more automated options, such as Performance Max, where Google builds the ads and picks the placements for you. This guide is about a regular Search campaign, where you control the settings yourself. How PPC differs from SEO and which one to start with, we covered in PPC or SEO.

How Google Ads works

You choose keywords, such as “in-home refrigerator repair”, write an ad and decide how much you’re willing to pay per click, or let an automated bid strategy set the bids. When someone types a similar search, Google runs an auction in a fraction of a second among everyone who wants to show up for it.

The highest bidder doesn’t automatically win. Google looks at the bid and the quality together: how relevant the ad is to the search, how likely people are to click it and how useful the landing page is. That’s why a precise ad with a lower bid can rank above a vague one with a higher bid. And you usually don’t pay your full bid, just what it takes to hold your position.

In most cases, you pay for clicks, not for impressions.

Preparation: skip it and no setup will save you

Ads without a proper landing page and lead tracking burn money no matter how well they’re configured.

The landing page

The ad should lead to a page that answers exactly what the person searched for. Searched for in-home refrigerator repair? They land on a page about refrigerator repair, not on a homepage listing every service you offer. The page should load fast on a phone, show a price or at least a starting price, and give people an easy way to reach you: a form, a phone number, a messaging app.

Google Ads also rates landing page experience as part of your ad quality, so a good page helps you in the auction too. If you don’t have a page like that, start there. What it should include, we covered in What is a landing page.

GA4, key events and conversions

Google Analytics 4 (GA4) is Google’s free analytics tool. You add a tag to your site, and it records where visitors came from and what they did. The action you count as a result, such as a form submission, a click on your phone number, a tap to message you or a completed quiz, gets marked as a key event. That’s GA4’s name for a conversion.

When that action happens after an ad click, Google Ads counts a conversion. You can import key events from GA4 into Google Ads or install the Google Ads conversion tag directly; either way, link your GA4 property to your Google Ads account. Conversion rate is the share of clicks that end in a conversion: if 100 clicks produce 3 leads, your conversion rate is 3%.

Without conversion tracking, you can’t judge your leads: Google sees clicks but doesn’t know which ones brought in customers. So before launch, install the tag, set up conversions and send a test lead. The conversion should register. GA4 tracks some events automatically, but check them anyway: an automatic form event doesn’t always mean a lead actually reached you. If most customers call, set up call tracking. Google Ads can track calls from your ads, and call tracking services swap the phone number on your site to show which ad led to each call.

How much you can pay for a lead

Work this out before launch, or you’ll have nothing to compare the results against. Say each sale leaves you $600, and one in three people who submit a request ends up buying. Then a lead has to cost less than $200, or your ads lose money. That $200 is your maximum cost per lead.

How to set up Google Ads, step by step

Step 1. Goal, location and schedule

Start with one campaign for one job: for example, leads for one service in one city. Target the area where you actually work, and in the location options choose people who are in or regularly in that area, not just people who show interest in it. Set an ad schedule for the hours when someone can respond. If a manager handles leads from 9 to 6, clicks at night turn into calls nobody answers.

When you create a campaign, Google will likely steer you toward Performance Max. It combines what used to take separate campaigns: Search, Display, YouTube, Gmail, Maps and Shopping, all run by Google’s automation. For a first campaign, we choose Search: you see which searches you pay for and can fix things quickly. Whatever the options are called this year, the principle holds: one campaign, one goal you can see in your reports.

Step 2. Keywords, match types and negative keywords

Keywords are the searches you want your ads to show for. Find them in Google Keyword Planner, which is free inside your Google Ads account: it shows how people actually search for your service, roughly how often and what advertisers bid. Pick phrases with buying intent: “hire”, “cost”, “near me”, “same day”, “emergency”, a neighborhood name. Save searches like “how to fix it yourself” for articles on your site.

Group keywords by meaning. One ad group holds searches that one ad and one page can answer. How to collect and clean up keywords, we covered in detail in our guide to keyword research.

Match types control how closely a search has to match your keyword:

• Broad match, written with no symbols: Google can show your ad for any search it considers related, even without your words in it.
• Phrase match, written "in quotes": the search has to include the meaning of your phrase and may add words around it.
• Exact match, written [in brackets]: the search has to mean the same thing as your keyword.

Negative keywords are words you don’t want to show up for. Common ones: “DIY”, “jobs”, “training”, “download”. A real example: when we researched keywords for this site (for its Russian-language version), the most frequent junk words included “official”, “login”, “free”, “account” and “promo code”. People searching with those words want to sign in somewhere or get something for free, not hire someone. In ads, every one of those clicks would be money thrown away.

Unlike regular keywords, negative keywords don’t cover close variants, so add plurals and misspellings yourself. Negatives have match types too: you can block a single word anywhere in the search or only an exact phrase. Keep them in shared negative keyword lists to apply them to several campaigns at once.

Step 3. Ads

The ad promises exactly what the person will see on the page. The headline repeats the core of the search; the description explains why they should click on you: price, timing, terms, guarantee. Add assets, which used to be called extensions: sitelinks to sections of your site, callouts, your address, phone number and hours. An ad with assets takes up more space in the results and answers questions before the click.

The standard format on Search is the responsive search ad. You write up to 15 headlines and up to 4 descriptions, and Google tests combinations and shows the ones that work best. Write them so any combination still makes sense, and pin a headline to a position if it always has to show, like the one with your service name.

Only say “cheapest” or “#1 in town” if you can prove it. Google’s policies don’t allow misleading claims, and in the US the FTC expects advertisers to be able to back up what they say. For the Display Network you’ll need images, and real photos of your work are more convincing than stock.

If you sell products from a catalog, you’ll need a product feed: a file listing your items, each with a title, price, image and link. You upload it to Google Merchant Center, and Shopping and Performance Max campaigns build ads for each item from it.

Step 4. Search and Display

On Search, your ad is seen by someone looking for the service right now. Demand is hot, clicks usually cost more, and leads are closer to buying.

The Google Display Network is made up of sites and apps where Google shows ads to people who recently searched for something similar or fit your audience by interests. Clicks there are usually cheaper, but at that moment the person is reading the news or playing a game, not choosing a contractor. Some clicks are accidental, especially in mobile apps.

We keep Search and Display in separate campaigns: they have different audiences, click costs and conversion rates, and in a combined campaign Display can easily eat the budget meant for Search. A new Search campaign includes the Display Network by default, so uncheck that box. Search partners, other sites that show Google search results, can stay on, but review their results separately. Start with Search and add Display once Search brings in leads. Sites and apps that send clicks without leads show up in the placement report, and you can exclude them.

Step 5. Broad match: turn it on carefully

With broad match and Google’s AI features, the system chooses which searches to show your ad for based on your keywords, ads and landing page. They find searches you’d never think of, but they find junk just as easily.

Google recommends pairing broad match with Smart Bidding, and it can work once conversion tracking is solid and there’s data to learn from. At the start, we use phrase and exact match only and add broad match when Search needs more volume. If a campaign type gives you less control over matching, as Performance Max does, rely on negative keywords and exclusions.

Your main control tool is the search terms report. It shows which searches actually triggered your ads and got clicks. Google doesn’t list every single search, but you’ll see enough to spot junk. During the first days, open it daily and move the junk into negative keywords.

Step 6. Bid strategy, CPA and budget

A bid strategy is the rule Google follows when spending your money. The automated ones come in two kinds.

• For clicks. Google tries to get as many clicks as possible within your budget. It fits the start, while you have few conversions.
• For conversions. Google looks for people who are more likely to submit a lead, based on your conversion tracking. You can add a target CPA, the average cost per conversion you’re aiming for.

CPA, or cost per acquisition, is what one lead costs you. With a target CPA, Google sets bids to hit that average. On Search you still pay per click; the strategy only decides whom to bid on and how much. It sounds perfect, but there’s a catch: conversions have to happen often enough, or the strategy has nothing to learn from. And if you set the target too low, Google will barely show your ads.

Now the budget. In Google Ads, you set an average daily budget. On a given day Google may spend up to twice that, but over a month you won’t be charged more than your daily budget times 30.4, the average number of days in a month.

An example with made-up numbers: say your budget is $3,000 a month, and a click in your industry costs about $5. That’s roughly 600 clicks. If one in twenty visitors submits a request, you get about 30 leads at $100 each. With the $200 ceiling from the example above, the ads pay off. Your numbers will be different: Keyword Planner gives you a rough forecast, and the first two weeks show the truth.

Step 7. Launch and the first two weeks

At some point Google will likely ask you to complete advertiser verification: confirm who you are and which business you represent. Ads also go through a policy review before they start showing. After that, two weeks will tell you whether the campaign works.

• Check the search terms report every day and add negative keywords.
• Reconcile your leads. The conversions in your reports should match the leads that actually reached you. And mark who bought: a lead isn’t a customer yet.
• Don’t keep changing the bid strategy. Automated strategies need time to learn, and major changes restart the learning period.
• At the end of week two, work out cost per lead by ad group. Pause or rework whatever costs more than your ceiling. Add budget where leads are cheaper.

Mistakes that eat your budget

• No conversion tracking. Google optimizes blind, and you judge the ads by clicks.
• Ads lead to the homepage. Someone searched for a specific service, landed on a general page and left.
• No negative keywords and no eye on broad match. The budget goes to “free”, “jobs” and searches meant for someone else.
• Search and Display lumped together. You can’t tell what brings in leads and what just spends money.
• Too wide an area, too many hours. Ads run nationwide when you work in one city, or at night when nobody can take a request.
• A broken form. The ads work, but leads never arrive.

When it’s easier to hand setup to a specialist

Honestly, a simple Search campaign is something you can set up yourself. One service, one city, clear keywords and the willingness to open reports a couple of times a week: with this guide, you’ll manage.

It’s easier to hand it off if:

• you have many services or locations, and each needs its own ad groups and pages;
• you run an online store with a catalog and product feeds;
• your industry is competitive, clicks are expensive, and a mistake costs real money;
• you don’t have time to look at the account every week;
• you’ve already burned through a budget and never found out why.

Whoever you work with, keep the Google Ads account and the GA4 property under your own Google account, and give the specialist user access. That way the campaign history and the data stay with you. And ask for reports in cost per lead, not in clicks and impressions.

That’s how we run Google Ads: Search and Display kept separate, GA4 and conversion tracking set up before launch, reporting in cost per lead. More about the service on our Google Ads management page.

Learn more about the service: Google Ads setup and management.

Below are honest pros and cons of each path, a look at Google Business Profile, how to move off a website builder, and what you can do on your own to get started.

Where to get a website made: three paths

Here are the three paths side by side. There’s no single right path for everyone: it comes down to your goals and budget.

Website builders: making a website yourself

Wix, Squarespace, and similar builders work like a set of ready-made blocks. You pick a header, a services section, a contact form, then swap in your own text and photos. You don’t need a developer, and you can put together a simple site or landing page over a weekend.

Pros:

• Fast: you can show a first version within a couple of days.
• Little money upfront: you pay for a subscription, not for development.
• You edit everything yourself, without a contractor.

Cons:

• Templates: the same blocks are used on countless other sites, and yours is easy to mistake for the next one.
• SEO limits: part of the code and markup stays under the platform’s control, so you can’t set up everything SEO needs.
• Speed: builders load a lot of code just in case, and these sites often open slowly on mobile data.
• The subscription: the site lives as long as you keep paying, and you often can’t move it to your own hosting as is.
• A ceiling on features: a custom 3D scene, a calculator for your specific service, or a CRM integration is hard or impossible to build.

A builder is a good way to test an idea, launch a page for a promotion, or start selling before you have a development budget. It’s a perfectly fine first step, as long as you remember that you’ll outgrow it eventually.

Freelancers: cheaper than an agency, but it all hinges on one person

Pros:

• Cheaper than an agency.
• You can find a strong specialist with a good portfolio.
• You talk to them directly, with no account managers in between.

Cons:

• One person is rarely equally strong at design, development, copywriting, and marketing.
• They can disappear: they get sick, take on a bigger project, stop answering.
• Skill levels vary wildly, and it’s hard to check in advance.
• Support after launch often isn’t part of the deal.

How to reduce the risk: a contract with milestones and payment by milestone, the domain and hosting in your name, access to the code and admin panel in your hands, and Google Analytics and Search Console under your own account. Open portfolio projects as live links, and do it on your phone, instead of looking at screenshots in a slide deck.

Agencies: more expensive, but accountable for results

Pros:

• The whole journey in one place: getting to know your business, a structure based on search demand, design, development, copy, analytics, launch, and marketing.
• A contract and a clear process: you know what you’ll get and when.
• The site is built for SEO and ads from the start, not reworked later.

Cons:

• More expensive than a builder or a freelancer.
• Slower: there’s a discovery stage before design, and revisions take time.
• At a big agency, there’s often an account manager between you and the people doing the work, and details get lost along the way.

We show you a homepage concept before any contract is signed, for free. You see what your site will look like before you pay.

Whoever you choose, ask four questions before you sign. Who exactly will build the site, and who will you be talking to? What’s included in the price: copy, photos, analytics setup, moving the old site? Who will own the domain, the hosting, and the logins? What happens after launch if something breaks? Specific answers tell you as much about a contractor as their portfolio does.

Google Business Profile or your own website

When people ask whether Google can make them a website, they usually mean one of two things.

A free Google Business Profile. Google used to build a simple free website from your profile, but it shut that feature down in 2024. The profile itself is still free: it shows your services, prices, photos, contact details, and reviews in Google Search and Maps. But the layout is the same for everyone, there’s little room to explain why customers should pick you, and there are no separate pages for different services and searches. You can’t add your own design, a calculator, or 3D.

The profile is a solid place to start, and you need one no matter what: it’s how people find you on Google Maps. Your own website doesn’t replace it; it complements it. We explain how to grow your profile on our Google Business Profile page.

Your own website that shows up in Google Search. To get there, you add the site to Google Search Console, verify ownership, and make sure the right pages get indexed. Google Analytics 4 goes in on day one, so you can see where visitors come from and what they do on the site.

When it’s time to leave your website builder

Signs your site has outgrown the builder:

• you need to rank for lots of searches, and each service needs its own well-built page;
• the site loads slowly on phones, and phones are exactly where your customers come from;
• the site looks like your competitors’ sites, built from the same blocks;
• you need something the builder can’t do: a 3D scene, a calculator, a customer account, a CRM integration;
• a year of the subscription plus paid add-ons now costs as much as proper development.

Moving off Wix or Squarespace: what to keep

A common question is how to move a site from Wix or Squarespace to your own hosting. Moving it exactly as is isn’t always possible, and there’s no need to: a move is a chance to make the site faster and easier to use. The main thing is not to lose what already brings in search traffic and leads.

• Page URLs. The safest option is to keep the old ones. If a URL changes, set up a permanent 301 redirect from the old address to the new one. Otherwise Google loses the page along with its rankings.
• The text that brings people in. Search Console shows which pages get clicks from search. Their text and headings move over without unnecessary edits.
• Title and description. They move together with the text.
• Analytics. Keep the same Google Analytics property so your history carries over, along with all your conversions. Your Search Console access stays in place, too.
• Forms. Inquiries should go wherever they went before: email, CRM, messenger. After the move, every form gets checked with a test submission.
• Domain. It should be registered in your name, not the contractor’s.

For the first few weeks after the move, keep an eye on Search Console for errors and pages that dropped out of search.

What you can do on your own to get started

Whichever path you choose, nobody can do this part for you:

1. A goal. The one action a visitor should take: call, send an inquiry, book, buy. Everything on the site works toward that action.
2. A structure. A list of pages: home, a page for each service, pricing, past work, contact. Use Google Keyword Planner to see what customers call your services. We cover how in our article on keyword research.
3. Copy. Write the way you’d explain things to a customer on the phone: what you do, what it costs, how long it takes, why they can trust you, how to order.
4. Photos. Only real ones: your work, your production, your team, your space. Stock photos of people in suits don’t convince anyone.
5. Website design examples. Save three to five sites you like and write down what exactly you like about them: the colors, the presentation, the way prices are shown. Our projects are in the Work section.

What every business website needs

The path can be anything, but the must-haves are the same:

• A clear first screen. Who you are, what you offer, and where to click. People should get it in a couple of seconds.
• Prices. At least a “starting at” figure. A page with no prices scares people off.
• Past work. Photos and examples, with an explanation of what was done.
• Contact details on every page. Phone, messenger, form. An inquiry should be one step away.
• Business details and address. Both people and Google need them: they show there’s a real company behind the site.
• A privacy policy and consent to data processing. If your site has a form, privacy law in many countries requires them.
• Google Analytics with conversions. Without it, you won’t know where your inquiries come from or which pages are working.

What a website costs with us

A landing page with us starts at $490, a corporate website at $590, and an online store at $990. We give you an exact price after reviewing the project: it depends on the number of pages, the complexity of the 3D scene, and any extra features. We write the copy ourselves, and it’s included in the price. We show you a homepage concept before any contract, for free. And the site itself is built for SEO from day one: keyword research, page structure, speed, Google Analytics with conversions.

Learn more about the service: Website development.

What PPC advertising is, in plain English

Search ads respond to context: what surrounds a person at the moment they see the ad. That’s their search, the topic of the page they’re reading, their recent interests. You’re not shouting at everyone. You’re answering people who are already looking for your service or were recently thinking about it.

In Google, these ads run through Google Ads. So are Google Ads and PPC the same thing? Almost: PPC is a type of advertising, and Google Ads is the platform that serves it.

You usually pay for clicks, not impressions: you’re charged when someone actually visits your site. Google can also optimize for conversions, meaning leads, instead of clicks.

How PPC works

1. You choose the searches you want to show up for and write your ads.
2. Someone types a search, and in a fraction of a second Google runs an auction among the advertisers competing for it.
3. Your position depends on your bid and your ad’s quality: how well it fits the search and how likely people are to click it.
4. The person clicks and lands on your site, and the cost of the click is charged to your account.

We walk through setup step by step, with negative keywords, bid strategies and budget, in How to set up Google Ads.

What PPC ads look like in Google

In search, an ad looks like a regular result: a headline, a short text, your site’s address. What sets it apart is the “Sponsored” label. Often you’ll also see links to sections of the site, a phone number, an address and hours, sometimes prices and images. Ads appear above and below the regular results.

On the Google Display Network, an ad is a block with an image and text on websites and in apps. People see it not while searching but later: someone searched for gutter installation, and a day later they’re reading the news and see an installer’s ad. It’s still context, just based on recent searches and interests instead of the current search.

How Google Ads differs from SEO

Both bring people from Google, but they work differently. Ads are like renting a spot in the results: you pay as long as you stay. SEO is like building your own place: slow and with no guarantees, but what you build stays.

Speed

Google Ads starts bringing in visitors as soon as your ads pass review. SEO is slower: Google has to find your pages, index them and figure out how useful they are to people. Noticeable shifts take months, and that’s an honest timeline, not a contractor dragging their feet.

Cost per lead over time

With ads, each new lead costs roughly what the last one did. If new competitors enter your market, leads get more expensive: it’s an auction. With SEO, you pay for the work on your site, not for each visitor. While there’s no traffic, a lead comes out expensive. Once the site gains search traffic, the same spending is spread over more leads, and each one costs less.

The channels also differ in whom they catch. Ads pay off with people ready to buy now. SEO also catches people who are still figuring things out. An example from the keyword research for the Russian-language version of this site: the Russian query for “what is PPC advertising” gets about 1,300 searches a month, while the one for ordering PPC services gets about 120. Ads on the first query would hardly pay off, but an article on your site can capture that demand, and some readers will come back later for the service.

What’s left after you stop

Turn off the ads, and leads stop the same day. Stop working on SEO, and rankings hold for a while, then slip gradually as competitors improve their sites. The pages, the content and the structure stay yours and keep working.

What SEO involves and why it’s never fast, we covered in SEO explained.

PPC vs. social media ads: what’s the difference

Search ads respond to demand: the person is looking for the service or was recently. Social media ads create demand. They’re shown to people who fit a profile, such as age, location and interests, even if they aren’t looking for anything right now.

That’s why they’re used differently. Search ads are great for services people look for out of necessity: the car broke down, you need a lawyer, it’s time to renovate. Social ads suit things people buy after seeing them in their feed: clothing, decor, entertainment, plus new products people don’t know about yet and so don’t search for.

So is Google Ads search advertising or targeted advertising? Mostly search. The Display Network and YouTube do offer interest-based audiences that resemble social targeting, but they rely on what people have searched for and browsed. We don’t run social media ads ourselves; our marketing work is Google only. But it’s important to understand the difference so you don’t compare channels by cost per click: they do different jobs.

Google Ads or Google Business Profile: which is better

Both help you show up in Google, but they’re built for different situations.

Google Business Profile is your free listing on Google Maps and in search: address, hours, photos, prices, reviews. It’s made for local businesses. A complete profile can show up in map results without any ad spend, and you can link it to Google Ads so your ads show your address. There’s little to configure, but you also have less say over which searches you show up for.

Google Ads is a full advertising account. You choose the searches and the negative keywords, write the ads, set the bid strategy and see a report for every search. It takes more effort to learn, but you’re in control.

What to choose:

• A place people visit at an address: a café, a salon, an auto repair shop, a neighborhood store. People choose by the listing: rating, reviews, photos, directions. Start with your Business Profile.
• You have a website and several services, leads come in online or by phone, and you serve a city or the whole country. You need Google Ads.
• Often, both work best. Fill out your Business Profile in any case; it’s free. And Google Ads brings people looking for a specific service to your site.

How we work with Business Profiles and local ads is covered on our Google Business Profile page.

Where to start: a quick guide

The honest takeaway

Our working plan for getting started:

1. Google Ads on Search. It brings in leads now and shows which searches actually sell. The search terms report is a ready-made brief for SEO: which pages to build first.
2. SEO in parallel. Site structure, keyword research, content, speed. Results take months and nobody can guarantee rankings, but over time search makes you less dependent on your ad budget.
3. Google Business Profile for businesses with an address. A complete profile with photos, prices and replies to reviews works like a second website: people use it to decide where to go.
4. GA4 with conversions everywhere. Without it, you can’t compare channels: you see how much you spent, but not what a lead from each channel costs.

Which mix fits you depends on your industry, location and budget. We start with a review: we look at demand in Keyword Planner, the search results for your keywords and what you already have. Then we suggest what to launch now and what to prepare for later, and set up GA4 so you can see where every lead came from.

Learn more about the service: Marketing your business in Google.

Below, we’ll walk through how that list is collected, cleaned up and turned into a site structure. Our example is the keyword map behind this very site, with real numbers. PR Studio started as a Russian-language site, so the map was built on Russian search data; we’ve translated the queries.

What keyword research is, in plain English

It’s a map of demand. It shows not what you call your services, but what your customers call them. The owner writes “web resource development” on the site, while people type “website development” and “website design”. If no page on the site answers in their words, Google has nothing to show them.

One row of the map looks like this: the search, its volume, the intent and the page. For example, in our map “website development” gets 1,546 searches a month, the person wants to hire someone, and the search leads to our website development page. Hundreds or thousands of rows like that make up the map.

You don’t need it only for SEO. Your Google Ads campaigns are built from it too, and the junk you find while cleaning it becomes negative keywords that protect your ad budget.

Where keywords come from

There are four sources. Each one gives you something the others don’t.

Google Keyword Planner

A free tool inside your Google Ads account. Enter a word or your website, and it suggests related searches with their average monthly volume and bid estimates. It’s the main source of both keywords and search volume. You can choose a location and look at monthly trends to spot seasonality.

Google autocomplete

The suggestions that drop down under the search bar as you type. They show how people really phrase their searches: in what order they put the words, what details they add, what questions they ask. The “People also ask” box and the related searches at the bottom of the results page are worth a look too.

Competitors’ websites

Search for your main keywords and see what pages the top 10 sites have. Which services get their own pages, what they write about in their blogs. The point isn’t to copy them but to spot topics you missed. For this site, we went through the top 10 results for our ten main searches by hand.

Google Search Console, if your site is already live

The Performance report in Search Console shows the searches your site already appears for, at what average position and how many clicks it got. These are the most valuable keywords. Google already considers you a relevant answer, and often improving the page is enough to move up.

How to do keyword research for a website

There are five steps. The first two give you raw material; the other three turn it into a working document.

Step 1. Write down your seed keywords

Start with what you sell, in your customers’ words rather than your price list’s: “website development”, “website redesign”, “Google Ads setup”. Add synonyms and everyday names. For this site, the seed list included every service in the menu plus “website for…” for each industry we work with.

Step 2. Expand the list

Run each seed keyword through Keyword Planner and autocomplete. One phrase turns into hundreds: with modifiers, questions, cities. At this step you don’t throw anything away; you only collect.

Step 3. Check search volume: the phrase, not the whole topic

Keyword Planner shows the average monthly searches for each phrase and its close variants, and lists the longer versions separately: “free website design”, “website design course” and so on. It’s tempting to add it all up into one big number for the topic. Don’t: most of that tail will never bring you a client.

What matters is how many people search for the phrase itself. Depending on how much your account spends on ads, Keyword Planner may show ranges, such as 1K–10K, instead of exact numbers. That’s still enough to compare phrases and decide what deserves its own page.

The gap can be huge. In the data for this site, the topic total for “website creation” was 111,614 searches a month, while the exact phrase got 1,130. Everything else was tails like “free website creation” and “website creation courses”. Those won’t bring a studio any clients.

Step 4. Clean out junk and build negative keywords

Next, remove everything that won’t bring you a customer:

• “free”, “yourself”, “DIY”, “website builder”: the person wants to do it on their own;
• “courses”, “training”, “jobs”: they’re looking for education or work;
• other companies’ brand names: the person is looking for a specific company;
• navigational searches like “account” and “login”: the person is heading to a specific site.

The words you throw out don’t go to waste. They become your negative keyword list for Google Ads: your ads won’t show to people searching for “free” or “courses”, and your budget won’t leak away.

This is also where you merge duplicates. “Website design cost” and “cost of website design” are the same demand. If you keep both rows, you count it twice.

Step 5. Sort searches by intent

Intent is what the person wants. Commercial searches come from people ready to buy or hire: “website development”, “google ads management”, anything with “cost”, “price” or “hire”. Informational searches come from people who want to understand something: “what is”, “how to”, “explained”. Some are mixed: people search for “website redesign” both to find a contractor and to learn what it means.

The easiest way to check intent is to look at the results. If the top 10 is service pages with prices, the search is commercial. If it’s articles, it’s informational. Commercial searches go to service pages; informational ones go to the blog.

Clustering: one cluster, one page

A cluster is a group of searches answered by one page. “Website development” and “website creation” sound different, but the person wants the same thing. So both lead to one page, Website Development.

You can tell that searches belong to one cluster by their meaning and by the results. If Google shows mostly the same pages for two searches, it treats them as one question. You should answer them with one page too.

Hence the rule: one cluster, one page, and every page has its own cluster. Break it, and you get cannibalization.

What keyword cannibalization is

It’s when two pages on the same site compete for the same search. Google can’t decide which one to show, so it alternates between them. Rankings jump around, and both pages rank lower than one strong page would. The fix: keep one page and merge the other into it, or rework it for a different search.

Example: the keyword map for this site

We built the map for the site you’re reading on September 29, 2026, from search volume data and search suggestions for Russian-language queries. Here’s what came out of it:

• after cleanup, about 16,000 searches remained;
• duplicates were merged, and the junk went into negative keywords: “free”, “yourself”, “website builder”, “courses”, “jobs”, other brands;
• searches with city names (about 1,700 of them) were set aside: we work remotely with clients anywhere, so we don’t need a page for every city;
• the clusters spread across roughly 32 pages: the homepage, services, industries, pricing and blog articles.

A few searches from the map, translated from Russian, and the pages they lead to:

The most useful part of the map is the decisions it leads to. Here are four of them.

1. A page about moving a site off Tilda isn’t needed. Tilda is a website builder that’s popular in Russia. Demand was close to zero and informational: people ask how to move their Tilda site to hosting, not who can do it for them. The topic went into the article on how to build a website for your business.
2. A separate “website development and promotion” page isn’t needed. That search has the same intent as the homepage. A second page with the same meaning would steal rankings from the homepage. That’s cannibalization.
3. Pages for narrow niches aren’t needed. “Website for a movie theater” and similar phrases get 0–3 searches a month. Projects like that are shown in our Work section, not on separate pages nobody would find.
4. A “how much does a website cost” article isn’t needed. Its searches return the same results as the pricing page’s searches, so the two pages would split rankings. That topic lives on the pricing page.

Low volume isn’t a death sentence, though. “Website redesign” gets only 60 searches a month, but the top results are small studios, not industry giants. A page like that is easier to win than “website development”.

How a keyword map becomes a site structure and Google Ads campaigns

Once the clusters are ready, the site structure nearly writes itself. Each cluster gets a page, and each page gets a URL, an H1, a title tag and meta description for the search results, a main keyword and a list of secondary ones. Commercial clusters become service pages; informational ones become blog articles. The map also suggests the links between them: an article answers a question and points to where you can order the service.

Your Google Ads campaigns come from the same file. For this site, we prepared a separate list for ads right away: only commercial and mixed searches with at least three exact-phrase searches a month, grouped by the pages the ads will lead to. Informational searches didn’t make the cut: someone searching for “what is a landing page” isn’t buying anything yet. The negative keywords from cleanup go into the campaign from day one. How to turn this into ads, we covered in How to set up Google Ads.

How often to update your keyword map

Keyword research isn’t a one-time job. Demand changes: new terms appear, many topics are seasonal, and you add new services.

• Every few months, check the map against Search Console: it shows new searches your site already appears for.
• Added a service or moved into a new region? Research keywords for it and give it its own page.
• If demand is seasonal, look at the monthly trends in Keyword Planner and get pages ready ahead of the peak.
• Before launching ads or a redesign, refresh the search volumes: numbers from a year ago can be noticeably off.

Building the keyword map is half the job. Then come the pages, the content, the technical fixes and rank tracking. That’s what SEO is made of, and we start every site with keyword research.

Learn more about the service: SEO.

Below, we’ll break down what that work consists of, why it isn’t fast and how to check that your contractor is doing real work rather than writing reports. We’re talking about Google here: that’s the search engine we optimize for.

What SEO is, in plain English

SEO stands for search engine optimization.

Think of Google as an information desk. For any question it has thousands of possible answers, and it wants to put the one that will leave the person satisfied at the top. SEO is the work of making your site that answer, and making sure Google understands that it is.

This work has two sides:

• The crawler has to understand the site: what pages it has, what each one is about, and that the site is fast, working properly and free of duplicates.
• The person has to leave satisfied: they found the answer, the price and a way to get in touch, instead of going back to search for something else.

The result of SEO is a spot in the regular results, without the “Sponsored” label. Google Ads is a separate channel: it works from day one, but you pay for every click. How the two channels differ and which to start with, we covered in PPC or SEO.

How SEO is actually done

There’s no secret button. There are seven areas of work, and you can see the result of almost every one of them on your own site.

Keyword research

A list of the searches people use to find you, with search volume and a page for each group. Everything else starts here. How it’s collected and cleaned up, we covered in detail in our guide to keyword research.

Site structure

Every group of searches needs its own page. If you have five services and a single “Services” page, Google has nothing to show for four of them.

An example from this site’s keyword map, which we built on Russian-language search data: redesign came to 32 searches with about 200 searches a month combined, such as “website redesign”, “order a website redesign”, “when do you need a website redesign” and “website redesign cost”. In every case the person is solving the same problem, so all of these searches share one page. And since some of them ask about price and about when a redesign is needed, the page has to cover both: prices and the signs that it’s time.

Technical health

The site has to load fast on a phone. The pages you want in search have to get indexed, while admin pages and duplicates shouldn’t. This also covers URLs, the sitemap, the robots.txt file, redirects, broken links and errors in Search Console. It usually starts with an SEO audit, which shows what to fix first.

Content and headings

Every page needs a clear heading, a title tag and meta description for the search results, and text that answers the person’s question. Not an “SEO text” with the keyword in every other line: keyword stuffing is spelled out in Google’s spam policies and can get a site pushed down.

Trust signals

Google wants to send people to businesses they can trust. Its guidance for site owners puts trust at the center of what it calls E-E-A-T: experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness. On a business site, trust is something you can see: prices, contact details, an address and business details, several ways to get in touch, payment and delivery terms, real photos and reviews. When people are about to spend money, these details matter as much as the text.

User experience

Google wants people to find what they were looking for on the page they click. If your site answers the question and the person doesn’t head back to search, that works in your favor. This is where SEO meets design: a clear first screen, fast loading, a contact button in plain sight.

Links

Links from other sites still count, but the ones that work are the ones that exist for a reason: industry directories, partners, publications. Buying links in bulk is risky: link schemes violate Google’s spam policies. Google’s Penguin update went after exactly this back in 2012, and that logic is now part of Google’s core algorithm.

Why results take months

Google needs time to recrawl the pages you’ve changed, reindex them and gather data on how people interact with them. And the work itself goes in order: first keyword research and structure, then technical fixes, then content and new pages. That’s why the first noticeable changes usually show up in 3–6 months.

The exact timeline depends on a few things:

• Competition. Broad, popular searches are usually held by big, established players. A narrow search in your area is much easier to climb for.
• The site’s history. A brand-new site has no track record: no links, no search data, nothing Google can lean on. Building that takes time.
• Starting condition. If the site is technically broken, the first months go into repairs.
• Speed of implementation. Recommendations in a report don’t move rankings. If changes take months to make, the timeline grows with them.

And once more, honestly: nobody can guarantee rankings. The algorithm belongs to Google, and it changes regularly. You can be accountable for the work, not for a spot in the results.

How to check your SEO progress in Google

A contractor who actually works, rather than writes reports, can always show you three things. And you can check all three yourself.

Rankings across your keyword map

Rankings should be tracked not for five convenient keywords but for the whole list, tied to pages. Look at the trend: how many searches were in the top 10 at the start and how many are there now. And check search volume: a high ranking for a search nobody types is worth nothing. Search Console shows average positions for real searches, and those don’t depend on your contractor’s reports.

Traffic and leads in GA4

Rankings are an intermediate result. What matters is how many people came from search and how many of them submitted a request, called or messaged you. For that, you set up key events, GA4’s name for conversions. If there are none, nobody knows whether SEO is working.

GA4 also shows which pages people land on and where they leave. If there’s plenty of search traffic and no leads, the problem isn’t SEO anymore. It’s the page itself: the offer, the price or the form.

A list of completed work

Every month, you should get a list of specific work with links: which pages were created, what was fixed, what content was written. You can open and check all of it. “Work was done to improve rankings” with no details isn’t a report.

GA4 and Search Console should be set up in your name, not your contractor’s. That way your site’s history stays with you even if you switch providers.

Red flags

If a contractor’s proposal includes anything from this list, be careful:

• “Guaranteed top 10 in a month.” Google decides the results. A guarantee like that means either a scam or searches nobody makes.
• “Permanent links”, “bulk directory submissions”. Batches of bought links lead straight to a penalty.
• Rankings for searches with zero volume. A nice-looking report, zero customers.
• Only the contractor has access. GA4 and Search Console are on their account, and all you get is their version of events.
• Text written for robots. A keyword in every other sentence and hidden text lead to demotion today, not growth.
• A report with no list of work. “Optimization performed”, “user signals improved”, and not a single link.

When SEO won’t help

SEO isn’t for everyone, and it’s more honest to say so up front.

• Nobody searches for what you sell. If the product is new and people don’t know about it yet, there’s nobody to search for it on Google. Check in Keyword Planner how many times a month people search for what you sell. If it’s close to zero, you need ads and brand awareness first.
• You need leads tomorrow. SEO takes months to build up. If you need money this month, start with Google Ads and run SEO in parallel.
• The site isn’t ready for visitors. If it has no prices, no clear offer and no easy form, SEO will bring people who leave empty-handed. Website first, traffic second.
• Customers come from the street and from Google Maps. For a neighborhood coffee shop or a tire shop at the edge of town, it makes more sense to start with a Google Business Profile and improve the site later.

What you can do yourself

Even without a contractor, you can cover the basics on your own:

1. Add your site to Google Search Console and set up GA4 under your own account. Set up key events: form submissions, calls, clicks to message you.
2. Check the page indexing report in Search Console to see which pages are in Google and whether there are errors.
3. Check the title tags and meta descriptions of your main pages: Google often uses them for your title link and snippet in the results, though it may rewrite them.
4. Put prices, contact details, business details and real photos of your work on the site.
5. Open the site on your phone over mobile data and check that it loads fast and that you can call with one tap.
6. Fill out your Google Business Profile and ask happy customers to leave a review.
7. Look in Keyword Planner at how people describe your services, and compare that with your headings.

Everything more complex takes time and experience: a keyword map with thousands of searches, a structure built around it, technical work, content for every page. That’s how our SEO service works: every month you see rankings across your keyword map, leads from GA4 and a list of completed work with links.

Learn more about the service: SEO.