Question 1

What exactly is in scope for the £999 build?

Accepted Answer

A complete website of up to 40 pages: positioning and message hierarchy, site structure mapped to real search demand, copywriting for the core pages, design and build, mobile and Core Web Vitals performance work, metadata and schema, enquiry forms and call booking, GA4 tracking, redirect mapping from your old URLs, launch and handover with training. One website, one domain, one language. If your page plan comes in under 40 pages you still pay £999 — the price is fixed on the package, not counted per page.

Question 2

What is explicitly excluded, and what costs extra?

Accepted Answer

Excluded from the £999: e-commerce and payment checkouts, customer logins or portals, booking systems beyond a standard calendar embed, bespoke web applications, multi-language or multi-site rollouts, custom integrations with your ERP or bespoke CRM, brand identity design from scratch, photography, video production and paid stock licences. Domain names, hosting and any third-party subscriptions are billed to you at cost, typically £10 to £30 a month. Anything outside scope is quoted in writing before it starts — there are no surprise line items.

Question 3

How long does the build take from deposit to launch?

Accepted Answer

The website is built and live in 4 weeks from the signed brief and deposit. Week one locks the commercial brief and page plan, weeks two and three cover structure, copy and build, and week four is review, redirect mapping and launch. A priority slot can cut this to 2-3 weeks. The critical path is almost always your sign-off on structure and copy, so clients who review within 48 hours land at the fast end of the range.

Question 4

How many rounds of revisions do I get during the build?

Accepted Answer

Two structured review rounds are built into the fixed price: one on the page plan and copy, one on the built site before launch. Each round is consolidated feedback from your side rather than drip-fed comments, which is what keeps the price fixed. Small corrections after launch — a wrong phone number, a tweaked paragraph — are not counted as a round and are simply fixed. If you want a third full redesign round because the direction changed, that is quoted separately rather than absorbed silently.

Question 5

Are amendments on the £100 monthly retainer really unlimited?

Accepted Answer

They are unlimited in number but reasonable in size: content edits, new or updated service pages, images swapped, articles published, prices and team changes, plus ongoing on-page SEO and conversion tweaks. Requests are worked through in a queue, normally within two to three working days. The retainer also covers uptime and page-speed monitoring, platform and security updates, and a monthly snapshot of traffic and enquiries. A new site section, a rebuild or a new bespoke feature is a project, not an amendment, and is quoted before any work happens.

Question 6

Do I have to take the £100 retainer, and can I cancel it?

Accepted Answer

The retainer is optional. You can take the build alone, own the site outright and maintain it yourself — you get documentation, training and full admin access either way. If you do take it, it runs month to month with 30 days' notice, no minimum term and no exit fee. Most clients keep it because the alternative is either an hourly change-request model or a site that quietly goes stale again.

Question 7

How and when do I pay?

Accepted Answer

£499 to book the slot and start the brief, £500 on launch, and the £100 retainer starts the month after go-live. No hourly billing and no drawdown against an estimate. If the project needs to pause on your side, the deposit stays against your slot for six months.

Question 8

Who owns the site, the content and the domain afterwards?

Accepted Answer

You do. Domain, hosting account, content, design assets and admin access are all in your name from the start, and there is nothing proprietary that locks you to me. Platform choice follows what your team can maintain, so if we part ways you keep a site another developer can pick up.

Question 9

How much does a website cost?

Accepted Answer

A full website build of up to 40 pages is a fixed £999, with an optional £100 per month retainer covering amendments, new pages, monitoring and optimisation. That is the whole price for the standard package. Custom e-commerce, bespoke applications or complex integrations are quoted separately, and you always get a written page plan and fixed quote before anything starts.

Question 10

Is this an alternative to a Fractional CMO or consultancy?

Accepted Answer

Yes. Plenty of businesses are not ready for marketing leadership but do need the website handled properly. This package is deliberately self-contained: you get a professional, search-ready site and someone maintaining it, with no obligation to buy strategy work. If you later want a plan behind it, the consultancy and Fractional CMO options are there.

Question 11

Will we lose our Google rankings?

Accepted Answer

Not if the migration is done properly. Existing URLs are crawled, mapped and redirected, content that earns traffic is carried across, and technical foundations improve rather than regress. Rankings usually improve after launch because structure and page speed get better at the same time.

Question 12

Can you work with our existing brand and platform?

Accepted Answer

Yes. If you have brand guidelines the design works inside them; if you do not, the site establishes a usable visual system. Platform choice follows what your team can maintain — there is no advantage in handing you something only I can edit.

Question 13

Do you write the content, or do we?

Accepted Answer

Either. Most clients want the core pages written for them, because that is where positioning gets decided, then take on articles and sector pages themselves afterwards with a template and a brief to work from.

Question 14

What happens after launch?

Accepted Answer

You can take full ownership with documentation and training, or keep me involved on a light retainer for conversion improvements, SEO and reporting. There is no lock-in either way.

Question 15

Do you use AI in your marketing consultancy work?

Accepted Answer

Yes — deliberately, and I help clients do the same. AI is used for research and synthesis, keyword and intent clustering, first drafts that a specialist then corrects, campaign variants and reporting commentary, all under human review with a written data and brand policy behind it. It is never used for the parts that carry commercial risk: positioning, pricing narrative, segment priorities or any claim that has to be defensible. I also work on the other half of the AI shift — making sure your business is the source ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Gemini and Perplexity cite when a buyer asks who the credible options are, because a growing share of shortlists are now formed inside an assistant rather than on a search results page.

Question 16

Why should I use you as my marketing consultant rather than an agency?

Accepted Answer

An agency sells you delivery. I sell you judgement. Before anyone writes an ad or a blog post, someone has to decide which segments you are targeting, what your proposition is, which channels deserve budget and what a qualified enquiry is actually worth. That is the work that decides whether the delivery pays for itself. I do that work first, in writing, then either brief your existing agency properly or build the plan in-house — and because I have no media to sell you, there is no incentive for me to recommend spend you do not need.

Question 17

What makes you different from other Fractional CMOs and marketing consultants?

Accepted Answer

Three things. First, a client-side operating background rather than a pure agency one: I have run marketing inside an industrial B2B manufacturer, dealing with technical buyers, distributor networks, long sales cycles and a board that wants commercial numbers rather than impressions. Second, formal grounding — Member of the Chartered Institute of Marketing (MCIM) and an MSc in Digital Marketing Management, so recommendations are based on tested frameworks rather than whatever is trending on LinkedIn. Third, I work across B2B, retail and SaaS, which means the retail pricing and merchandising discipline informs the B2B work and the SaaS retention thinking informs both.

Question 18

How much does a marketing consultant cost compared with hiring a Marketing Director?

Accepted Answer

A full-time Marketing Director in the UK typically costs £70,000-£110,000 plus employer's NI, pension, recruitment fees, holiday and the risk of a bad hire — realistically £100,000+ a year all-in before they have spent a penny on marketing. Consultancy and Fractional CMO retainers give you the same seniority for one or two days a week, at a fraction of that cost, with no notice period and no recruitment risk. For most SMEs turning over £1m-£20m that is the difference between having senior marketing judgement and having none.

Question 19

Do you work with B2B, retail and SaaS businesses?

Accepted Answer

Yes — all three, and the differences matter. B2B work centres on pipeline: proposition clarity, technical content, sales and marketing alignment, cost per qualified enquiry. Retail and ecommerce work centres on unit economics: contribution margin after ad spend, repeat purchase rate, lifetime value and the seasonality of demand. SaaS work centres on efficient acquisition and retention: activation, trial-to-paid conversion, churn and payback period. The strategic method is the same; the metrics I hold the plan to are different.

Question 20

How quickly will I see results from working with a marketing consultancy?

Accepted Answer

You get clarity in the first two to three weeks: a written diagnosis of where marketing is losing money, what to stop and a prioritised plan. Quick operational wins — tracking that actually works, tightened paid search, fixed conversion paths, a CRM that reports honestly — typically land inside 30 to 60 days. Compounding channels such as SEO and content usually show meaningful movement in three to six months, and that is exactly why the plan sequences fast wins first: they fund the patience the slower channels require.

Question 21

Will you replace my team or agency?

Accepted Answer

No. The aim is to make what you already have work harder. In most engagements your team and your agencies keep delivering; what changes is that they receive clear priorities, a proper brief and a measurement framework, and someone senior holds the whole thing to commercial outcomes. Where a supplier genuinely is not performing, I will tell you plainly and help you replace them — but replacement is a conclusion, not a starting assumption.

Question 22

How do you measure success, and how am I kept accountable to it?

Accepted Answer

Every engagement is tied to commercial metrics agreed up front: qualified enquiries, cost per qualified enquiry by channel, pipeline value, conversion rate and, where the data allows, revenue and contribution. You get a monthly review pack you can put in front of a board, showing what was done, what it produced and where the next pound of budget should go. If a channel is not paying for itself, you will hear it from me before you have to ask.

Question 23

What does the first conversation involve, and is there any commitment?

Accepted Answer

It is a one-hour call, free, with no pitch deck. We cover your growth target, how you sell today, what marketing is currently producing and where the obvious gaps are. You leave with an honest view on whether consultancy, a Fractional CMO retainer, a defined project or nothing at all is the right next step. There is no obligation, and I will say so directly if I do not think I am the right partner for your situation.

A website that sells, not a brochure that ages

How much does a website from MCG Growth Marketing cost?

An old website costs you deals you never hear about

What changes for your business

What a full website build includes

Positioning and message hierarchy

Structure and keyword mapping

Design and content build

Technical performance and accessibility

Tracking and lead capture

This is the right project if

How this works in practice

Strategy before pixels

Designed around how buyers decide

Protecting the visibility you already have

Built to be extended, not replaced again

Cradle to grave: £999 to build it, £100 a month to keep it working

Four stages, one person accountable

Cradle — scope and structure

Build — design, copy and pages

Optimise — speed, search and tracking

Grave — updates on retainer

What the fixed price does not cover

Build your quote in two minutes

The £999 build and £100 retainer, answered in detail

Marketing thinking in short form

Where this service has done the work

Logical Planning

Part 1 Claims

Cheshire Lettings

Where to go next

Frequently asked questions

Replace a stale website with one that generates enquiries