The short version. The only personal information this website collects is what you type into the booking form. It goes to a spreadsheet in our Google account and to our inbox, and it is used to ring you back. We also use Google Analytics to count visits, but only if you accept it: refuse and nothing is set and nothing is sent. There are no advertising cookies on this site, we build no profiles, and we sell nothing to anybody.

Who we are

Justin Williams, trading as GRO - Get Ranked Online, is the data controller for the information described here. Get Ranked Online Ltd is being registered at Companies House; once that is done the company takes over as controller and this page will say so.

If you want to ask about anything on this page, use any of those. There is no separate data protection officer: we are small enough that the person who answers the phone is the person who deals with it.

What we collect, and why

The booking form

When you submit the form on the homepage or the contact page, we receive what you typed into it:

  • Your name
  • Your phone number and email address, if you gave them
  • Your website address, if you gave one
  • What you said you need help with, and the best time to call

Along with that, the form sends three technical details: which page you submitted from, the address of the site it was submitted from, and your browser's user agent string, which describes your browser and operating system. Those are there to make junk submissions easy to spot, not to identify you.

Why we are allowed to hold it: you asked us to contact you, so we rely on legitimate interests, and on taking steps at your request before entering into a contract. In plain terms, you asked for a call, and we cannot ring you back without your number.

We use it to reply to your enquiry and to have the conversation you asked for. We do not add you to a mailing list. If we later want to send you anything else, we will ask first.

Email and phone

If you email or ring us instead, we hold whatever you tell us, for the same reason and on the same basis.

Server logs

Our web host keeps standard server logs, which include IP addresses, for security and to keep the site running. This is ordinary technical record-keeping that every website has, we do not use it to build a picture of you, and it is not linked to anything else on this page. The legal basis is legitimate interests in keeping the site up and secure.

What we do not do

This section is short and we intend to keep it that way.

  • No cookies unless you say yes. Nothing is stored on your device until you accept the banner. Refuse and the only thing kept is the record that you refused, so we do not ask again on every page.
  • No analytics unless you say yes. Google Analytics is not loaded, and Google is not contacted at all, until you accept. This is not a tag sitting there in a disabled state: the script is never fetched.
  • No advertising pixels and no remarketing. Nothing here reports back to a social network.
  • No third-party fonts or scripts. The typefaces and icons are served from our own domain, so loading a page does not hand your IP address to anyone else.
  • We never sell, rent or trade your details, and we never will.

The links to our Instagram, X, Facebook and LinkedIn pages in the footer are ordinary links. They are not embedded widgets, so they only involve those companies if you actually click one, at which point that network's own privacy policy applies rather than ours.

Cookies and analytics

When you first arrive you are asked whether we may count your visit. Nothing is stored on your device before you answer, and the site behaves identically whichever way you answer. Accept and Reject are the same size and sit next to each other, because refusing should be no harder than agreeing.

If you accept

We load Google Analytics 4, which sets these cookies:

  • _ga and _ga_L6DBVVC5CY, which last up to two years and tell Analytics whether it has seen this browser before.

We use it to see which pages people read, how they arrived, and roughly where in the world they are. Advertising features, remarketing and personalisation are switched off in the code, so your data is not used to target ads and is not shared with Google for advertising. IP addresses are shortened before storage.

The lawful basis is your consent, which is why you are asked rather than told.

If you refuse

Google is never contacted. The Analytics script is not downloaded at all, rather than downloaded and held in a disabled state, so no request leaves your browser for it and no cookie is set.

The one thing stored either way

Your answer itself, kept in your browser's local storage under gro:consent so that you are not asked again on every page. It records the word yes or no, the date, and nothing about you. It is not a cookie, it is never sent to us or to anybody else, and clearing your browser data removes it. Storing it is strictly necessary for the consent to work, so it needs no permission of its own.

Changing your mind

Use Cookie settings at the foot of any page. It reopens the same banner, and whichever you choose replaces your earlier answer immediately. If you withdraw consent the Analytics cookies stop being used, and you can delete the ones already set through your browser settings. We also ask again from scratch every six months, because a yes given last year is not really a yes today.

Who else sees it

Two companies handle the information as our suppliers, on our instructions:

  • Google. Booking form submissions are stored in a Google spreadsheet in our own Google account and emailed to our inbox. If you accepted analytics, Google also processes the visit data described above.
  • Hostinger. Our web host, which serves the site and keeps the server logs described above.

Both may process information outside the UK, including in the United States. Where that happens it is covered by the safeguards UK law requires for international transfers, being the UK Addendum to the standard contractual clauses or the UK extension to the EU-US Data Privacy Framework.

Beyond those two, nobody. We would only ever hand your information to anyone else if the law obliged us to.

How long we keep it

  • Enquiries that do not become work: up to 12 months, then deleted. Long enough that we remember the conversation if you come back, not so long that we are sitting on a list of strangers.
  • Clients: for as long as we work together, and then six years after the last invoice, because HMRC requires business records to be kept that long.
  • Server logs: as long as our host keeps them, which is a matter of weeks.

Your rights

Under UK data protection law you can ask us to:

  • Tell you what we hold about you, and give you a copy
  • Correct anything that is wrong
  • Delete it
  • Stop using it, or restrict what we do with it
  • Hand it over in a portable format
  • Stop relying on legitimate interests, by objecting

Email info@getranked.online and say which. It is free, we will not ask you why, and we will do it within one month. In practice, deleting an enquiry takes about a minute, so it will usually be the same day.

If you are not happy

Tell us first and we will try to put it right. You also have the right to complain to the Information Commissioner's Office, the UK's data protection regulator, at any point.

Changes to this notice

If we start doing something different with your information, we will update this page and change the date at the top. If the change is significant and we hold your details, we will tell you rather than leaving you to notice.