Collected from sales calls, audits, and the occasional dinner party once someone finds out what I do. Short answers, no hedging, sources where sources exist. If your question isn't here, ask it and it might earn a spot.
Both, in the right order. If your website doesn't convert, fix that first, because every paid click into a leaky site is just funding your competitors' education. Then, unless the house is on fire and you need leads this month, build the organic foundations while running enough paid to keep the lights bright. Paid buys the early wins; organic wins the long game. The whole logic is drawn out on the flywheel.
What each of those actually costs is laid out on the pricing page.
No, but it's mutating. Clicks per search are falling: Ahrefs found the presence of an AI Overview correlates with a 34.5% drop in clickthrough rate. But the visitors who still click convert dramatically better, 4.4x by Semrush's measure. The job hasn't died, it's changed: stop chasing raw clicks, start becoming the source the answer engines cite.
The shift it is really describing has its own page: GEO, explained.
GEO (Generative Engine Optimization) is the work of getting your business cited by AI answer engines like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google's AI Overviews, rather than just ranked in traditional search. If your customers research before they buy, and they do, then yes: an increasing share of that research now ends inside an AI answer, and you want to be the name in it. Plain-English definition in the glossary.
The long version, with the evidence, is here: GEO, explained.
Months, not weeks. Meaningful movement typically starts around month three to six, and the compounding kicks in after that. Judging organic work at week six is like judging a rental property on its first fortnight of rent: technically possible, completely uninformative. If a provider promises page one in thirty days, ask them which page one, of what, and at what cost to your future self.
If you want a realistic timeline for your situation, that is a strategic audit.
It depends on your situation, which is exactly why I wrote a whole page on it instead of a price list. The short version: below roughly $1,000 a month in management fees, nobody credible can afford to put senior attention on your account. The honest market tiers, the paid media math, and when paying more actually makes sense are all on Pricing, Explained.
Only if your audience is there with buying intent you can reach. Channels are conduits, not strategies: which ones you use is a function of who you're targeting and what you need them to do. Choosing not to be somewhere is also a strategy, and often a profitable one. Anyone who says every business needs to be on a given platform is usually selling services for that platform.
Working out which ones deserve your money is most of what I do.
Depends whether your gap is hands or head. If you know what to do and need it done, that's hands: an agency or freelancer. If work is happening but nobody senior owns the plan, that's head: a fractional CMO. If it's both, you want strategy and execution under one accountable roof. All three shapes are laid out on the services page.
You're probably watching the zero-click shift in real time. AI Overviews and answer engines resolve more queries on the results page itself, so impressions rise while clicks fall, even for stable rankings. Ahrefs documented this decoupling across hundreds of thousands of keywords. The fix isn't panic, it's measurement: track revenue per visitor and conversion rate by source, not raw traffic, and start earning citations inside the AI answers.
Diagnosing why is exactly what a strategic audit is for.
AI engines cite sources they trust, and trust is built through consensus: consistent information about you across many places, quotable self-contained content, structured data that machines can read, and third-party mentions on sites the engines already respect. It's what would happen if PR and SEO had a baby. That's the Compounding Authority phase of the flywheel, and it's most of what GEO actually is.
How answer engines actually pick their sources is covered in GEO, explained.
Four, mostly: cost per acquisition (what a customer costs you), conversion rate (whether your site does its job), the ratio of customer lifetime value to acquisition cost (whether the math works), and revenue by channel (where the money actually comes from). Impressions, followers, and traffic are supporting actors. Definitions for all of these live in the glossary.
Deciding which numbers should run your business is the strategy work.
Ask them to define success before they quote you; the wrong definition of success means you've already failed. Be suspicious of guarantees, especially ranking guarantees. Ask what they would stop doing if the data went sideways, because a provider with no exit criteria has no strategy. Understand their pricing model's incentives. And ask for a reference from a client they've had for more than two years.
If you would rather have someone in your corner while you vet them, that is the fractional CMO seat.
When the math fails after a fair test, and not before. Fair means adequate spend for the auction you're in, a time horizon matched to the channel (weeks for paid search, quarters for organic), and clean tracking so you're judging reality. What shouldn't keep a channel alive: sunk cost, habit, or the fact that a competitor is there. Channels are conduits. Loyalty belongs to the math.
Making that call with the numbers in front of you is a strategic audit.
Constantly and openly. AI is the most useful energy source this industry has seen in a decade, and pretending otherwise would be malpractice. The judgment, the strategy, and the accountability stay human; the leverage is increasingly machine.
What that means for your visibility is the subject of GEO, explained.
Honestly, I don't think so, and that's opinion rather than settled fact. Answer engines personalize hard: what comes back depends on who's asking, what they asked before, and where they're sitting. A tracker queries from one place, as one profile, and writes the result to a database. That's rank-tracker logic pointed at a system that doesn't have ranks. You get a number that's precise, repeatable, and measuring something that isn't happening to your actual customers. The useful signal is already sitting in your own analytics, and it costs nothing.
The longer version, and what to measure instead, is in GEO, explained.
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