What the numbers did next.
Real sites and the numbers behind them. Same pattern each time: fix what is broken, then compound it. No invented testimonials: what was wrong, what we changed, and what happened after.
Histories and Castles
An independent publisher, author and online shop. They came to us to raise the quality of the site itself and then keep it there: on-page work, links earned from places with a real reason to link, and steady monthly maintenance. The twelve months of search data further down this page is theirs.
Art Building and Interiors
Branding, a new website, and the presence that goes around it. They are a recent client, so there are no twelve-month numbers to show yet and we are not going to invent any. The work now is local search: being found by the people nearby who are ready to call somebody today.
Monthly sessions
The store had effectively no organic traffic before the work started. The twelve-month total and the seven months below are the same number, 27,661, which is what tells you the earlier months were zero rather than simply quiet.
Where the traffic came from
Search and direct account for 99% of it. Paid advertising accounts for none of it, and social for 59 sessions in a year. This is demand that was earned rather than rented.
Sessions and unique visitors track almost one to one across every month, which is the signature of real readers rather than bot or referral noise. Source: Histories and Castles’ own Shopify Analytics, September 2025 to August 2026.
£500 off your website build.
GRO is a new name. The people behind it are not new to the work. So while we build our first run of case studies, we are taking £500 straight off the cost of a website build for small businesses: off the total, not off a number we quietly put up first.
- It comes off the total. You see the full price of the build in writing, then the £500 comes off it. Nothing is padded to make room for the grant.
- The work does not shrink with the price. Same build, same testing, same care as any full-price project. A portfolio is only worth having if the sites in it are, so these are the ones we most need to get right.
- Ten places, then it closes. We are capping it so every one of them gets the attention it needs. When the ten are taken, the offer goes with them.
Ten places, first come. Applies to new website builds booked before . The £500 is deducted from the quoted build cost, is not exchangeable for cash, and does not apply to monthly retainers.
The four questions this offer always gets.
What counts as a small business?
Sole traders, family firms and independents: the kind of business where the person reading this is also the person who signs it off. There is no minimum spend and no minimum size. If you are not sure whether you qualify, ask us: the answer is usually yes, and you will get it in a sentence rather than a form.
£500 off what, exactly?
Off the quoted cost of the build. We price the whole job before any work starts, not by the hour, and not with a number that moves once we have started. A website for a small business typically lands between £1,500 and £2,500 depending on how many pages it needs and what has to be built into it. You see that figure in writing first, then the £500 comes off it.
What is the catch?
We want to show the finished site. That is the whole of it: permission to put the work in our portfolio, and an honest line about working with us if you are happy at the end. And if you are not, we would rather have that than a polished quote. No exclusivity, no tie-in, no clause that lets us put the £500 back on later. You own the site, the domain and every account whatever happens.
Is there a monthly fee after it goes live?
Only if you want one. The build is a one-off cost and the site is yours once it is paid for; it does not stop working if you never speak to us again. SEO and marketing are separate monthly work on rolling terms you can end whenever you like, and taking the grant does not sign you up to any of it. The £500 applies to the build alone.
Enquiries, not impressions.
Rankings and traffic are how you get there, not what you are paying for. These are the three things we report on, and what the figures above are drawn from.
Enquiries that reached a human
Form submissions and tracked calls, with the obvious spam stripped out, counted the same way every month. A number is only worth reporting if it can be compared with last month's.
The searches that end in money
Position on the terms a buyer actually types, not the ones that are easiest to win. A term nobody purchases on is a vanity metric with a graph attached to it.
What the site does with a visit
Load time and conversion rate read together. Traffic that arrives and leaves before the page has finished painting has cost you money rather than made it.
Nothing above is a projection: where we do not have a number, it has been left out rather than estimated.
Four things, in the order you need them.
Everything above came out of these four, in the order a customer meets them. This is the sequence, not a menu, and you can join at whichever step you are actually at.
1 · Branding
Decide once what you look like and sound like, and write it down. Logo, colour, type and tone, applied the same way everywhere you appear.
How it works
2 · Website design and build
Fast, secure hosting, your own domain and business email, forms that reach you in seconds, and a site built for your brand and built to convert.
How it works
3 · SEO
Get ranked, get found. Keyword research and the implementation that follows it, so the people already searching for what you do arrive at you.
How it works
4 · Marketing
A website on its own is invisible. Social, local registers, partners, reviews and email, so people who were not searching find out you exist.
How it worksLet's find out what is in your way.
Fifteen minutes on the phone with the person who would actually do the work. You will come away knowing what is standing between you and the phone ringing, whether or not you use us.
Book my free 15-minute call