Find out whether SEO is worth it for your business.
Tell askBizly what you sell and what you are seeing in search. You get an honest read on whether SEO will pay back, what it should cost, and what to fix first — before anyone tries to sell you a retainer.
Free to use. Ask as much as you like.
Before I suggest anything — what would a good month look like, and what can you pay for a lead?
That’s workable. Here’s how:
- Understand your business, customers and objectivesWhat you sell, who buys, and where you want to get to
- Create your growth strategyWhere the £2.5k goes, and in what order
- Fix what’s holding you backThe changes you can make yourself
- Connect you with a partnerOnly if you need a specialist
AI built on real human expertise
askBizly applies the judgement of people who have grown businesses, led marketing teams and hired agencies — more than twenty years of it. Their criteria shape what it asks and how it answers.
A growth plan built for your business
Not a template. It asks what you sell, where you want to get to and what you have to spend, then sets out what to do, in what order, and what it should cost.
Partners aligned to your objectives
If you want help executing, askBizly briefs partners against the plan you just built — and says why each one fits. It is free to you; partners pay only when an introduction becomes work.
Start here
What’s going wrong with your SEO?
Pick the search problem that sounds like yours — traffic drops, AI Overviews, local rankings or technical issues.
What good SEO looks like, and how to tell you are getting it
SEO has a bad reputation among business owners, and mostly it has earned it. The work is invisible, the reporting is easy to dress up, and the time lag between spending and seeing results gives a poor supplier months of cover.
The things that actually move search performance are unglamorous. A site that loads fast and can be crawled. Pages that answer a question somebody is genuinely searching for, in more depth than the pages currently ranking. Links from sites that have their own reason to exist. That is close to the whole list.
So the test of a good supplier is not whether they can show you rankings going up — rankings for terms nobody searches are easy to buy. It is whether they can tell you which of those three things is your bottleneck, what they are doing about it this month, and how that connects to enquiries.
askBizly will walk through your situation and tell you whether SEO is the right investment at all, what it should cost in your market, and what to fix before you take anyone on.
How it works
Work out what is holding your SEO back.
Describe the rankings, traffic or retainer you are looking at. askBizly separates technical issues from content and competition, then tells you what to do next.
Understand your business and your SEO goals
Your goals for SEO, what you’re doing now and what you’ve got to work with — in your own words, one question at a time.
Work out what’s holding your SEO back
What you tell it — and any proposal, report or figures you share — is assessed against clear SEO criteria, with what’s known kept apart from what’s assumed.
Create your SEO strategy
An action plan, a budget, a review or a brief for SEO — with its evidence, assumptions and limits shown.
Help you execute
Do it yourself, go back to your supplier with better questions, or look at SEO partners — you decide.
Fix the problem
Four ways askBizly can help with SEO
Get a plan for rankings and traffic, a realistic SEO budget, a review of your agency or proposal, or a brief for the right SEO partner.
Diagnosis
Rankings, traffic and enquiries are three different SEO problems.
A core update, a site rebuild and a competitor publishing better pages all look like “SEO isn’t working”. askBizly works out which one you actually have before you buy another retainer.
- Technical, content and authority kept apart
- Says whether SEO is worth buying at all
- What to fix this month, not a 40-page audit
Budget
Know what SEO should cost before you sign a retainer.
Credible UK SEO work sits in a fairly narrow range once you know how competitive the market is. askBizly breaks down the retainer, the one-off technical work and what that fee should actually buy.
- Local, national and ecommerce ranges kept apart
- What £500 a month can and cannot do
- Questions that expose a too-cheap proposal
Review
Check an SEO proposal or your current agency.
Share the scope, ranking report or retainer. askBizly looks at whether the keywords are worth ranking for, how success is measured, and whether the work matches the fee.
- Vanity rankings spotted before you pay for them
- Reporting judged against enquiries, not positions
- Specific questions to put to the SEO agency
Partners
A clear SEO brief, then only agencies who fit.
If you do need an SEO partner, askBizly turns your market, site and budget into a brief and looks for agencies whose records fit it. Nobody is contacted until you say so.
- You see the brief before anyone does
- You see the brief before anyone else
- No obligation to hire
SEO questions people ask first
Most credible UK SEO retainers for a small business fall between £500 and £2,500 a month, with local businesses at the lower end and competitive national or ecommerce markets at the upper end. Below roughly £400 a month there is rarely enough time in the budget to do real work. One-off technical audits are usually £750 to £2,500. askBizly will give you a range for your specific market rather than a headline figure.
Expect three to six months before you see a meaningful change in rankings and traffic, and closer to six to twelve months before that reliably turns into enquiries. Technical fixes can move things faster, sometimes within weeks, because you are removing a problem rather than building authority. Anyone promising first-page results in thirty days is either targeting terms nobody searches for or is not being straight with you.
The common causes are a Google algorithm update that changed what it rewards in your market, a technical change on your site that blocked or slowed crawling, competitors publishing better material than yours, or losing backlinks that were holding a page up. The diagnosis matters because the fixes are completely different. Describe what you have seen and when, and askBizly will help you narrow it down before you spend anything.
Yes, for queries where people still click through — local services, comparisons, and anything too specific for a one-paragraph answer. No, or less, for definitional queries Google now answers on the results page. The useful test is whether the search still produces an enquiry you can sell. askBizly will look at the terms you care about and tell you which still deserve the fight.
GEO is being cited by answer engines such as ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews, not just ranking in blue links. It uses the same site, but the pages have to be structured so they can be quoted. It is worth the extra work when buyers in your market already ask those tools. It is not a separate product you should buy on top of weak SEO. askBizly will say which side you are on.
Ask them which pages they changed this month, why, and how that connects to enquiries rather than rankings for terms nobody searches. You should have login access to Search Console and any tools they use, and you should be able to see the work rather than a slide of green arrows. If they cannot explain a drop, or they report positions without traffic, the retainer is covering activity rather than progress.
Yes. The advice is free for business owners and always will be. askBizly is paid by the partners it introduces, and only when you choose to be introduced. Nothing is sent to anyone and nobody contacts you until you say so.
Stop guessing. Start growing.
Describe the rankings or traffic you are seeing. Free, with no SEO agency contacting you unless you ask.