The questions people ask before they commit.
Pricing, timelines, contracts, what happens if it does not work. The answers below are the same ones you would get on a call, written down so you can read them without booking anything.
- Five sections
- October 2026
- Ask us directly
Engagements, contracts and money.
What does a typical engagement cost?
It depends on scope, and anyone who quotes you a number before understanding your scope is guessing. What we can tell you is how we think about it: the fee has to be small enough that a sensible return is plausible. If your average customer is worth £400 and you convert one in twenty enquiries, a retainer that needs forty new customers a month to break even is the wrong retainer.
Send us the problem and your numbers and you will get a figure with the reasoning attached, not a brochure with three tiers on it.
Do you lock people into long contracts?
No. Search and paid media work needs a few months before the data means anything, so we will tell you honestly if a one month trial cannot answer the question you are asking. But that is a reason to set expectations, not a reason to tie you in.
Our view is that if the work is good you will stay, and if it is not you should be able to leave.
Who owns the work?
You do. Ad accounts, analytics properties, domains, source files, website code, tracking configuration. All of it in your name, with you as owner and us as a user you can remove.
This matters more than people realise. Agencies that hold your ad account hold your history, and your history is most of your advantage.
What if it does not work?
Then we say so. There are businesses where paid acquisition cannot work at the current price point, and there are months where the honest answer is that a channel is not paying for itself and should be paused.
You will hear that from us before you work it out yourself. An agency that never reports bad news is not reporting.
Are you a Manchester agency or a Pakistan one?
Both, which we would rather state plainly than dress up. Rugmaz is a registered company in Pakistan and works with businesses in Manchester and across the UK. The practical effect is that you get senior attention at a price a UK agency of the same size cannot match.
If working with an offshore team is a problem for you, that is a reasonable position and we would rather you knew now.
What has actually changed.
Is SEO dead now that people ask AI instead of searching?
No, but what it optimises for has shifted. AI answer engines are retrieval systems. They pull from indexed sources, and the things that make a page retrievable, clear structure, factual specificity, a subject the page genuinely covers, are most of what made it rankable too.
What is dying is the version of SEO built on keyword volume and thin pages written to catch a phrase. That was always going to stop working.
Can you get my business mentioned in ChatGPT answers?
We can make it considerably more likely, and we will not promise more than that. There is no submission form and no ranking dial. What influences it is whether your business is described consistently and specifically across the sources these systems read, your own site, your business profile, directories, industry listings, press.
The honest framing is that this is reputation work with a technical component, not a lever anyone can pull.
What are ChatGPT Ads and should I be on them?
Advertising inside AI assistant conversations is a genuinely new placement, and it behaves differently to search ads because the surrounding context is a conversation rather than a query.
Whether you should be there depends on whether your customers are asking the kind of open question an assistant answers well. For some categories that is already most of the journey. For others it is nowhere near. We will tell you which you are before suggesting a budget.
Do you use AI to write the content?
We use AI heavily for research, structuring, variant generation and analysis, and we do not publish machine written pages under your name without a person deciding what the page should claim and checking that it is true.
The failure mode of AI content is not bad prose, it is confident nonsense. A human has to be accountable for the claims.
Builds, speed and handover.
How long does a website take?
A focused site, five to eight pages, usually four to six weeks from brief to live. Larger builds with ecommerce or integrations run longer. The variable that moves it most is not our build speed, it is how quickly content and approvals come back.
We will give you a date and tell you which parts of it depend on you.
Why do you not use page builders?
Because the bloat is structural, not incidental. A builder has to ship code for every layout it might be asked to produce, so a page with four sections carries the weight of four hundred. You feel it as a slow site, and you cannot optimise your way out of it without removing the builder.
We build the design system directly, which means the page ships what it needs. The tradeoff is that you edit content rather than rearranging layouts, which is what most people actually want anyway.
Will I be able to edit it myself?
Yes. Text, images, pages, posts, all editable in WordPress without touching code. What you will not be able to do is drag a hero section into three columns, because that is how sites drift away from their design.
You get a written handover covering how to change what, and we stay reachable after launch.
Do you do hosting and maintenance?
We will set hosting up properly and we are happy to maintain the site, but we do not resell hosting with a markup. You own the account.
Maintenance matters more than people expect. An unpatched WordPress install is the single most common way small business sites get compromised.
Reporting and attribution.
What do your reports actually show?
Enquiries, where they came from, what they cost, and which ones turned into customers where you can tell us that. Plus what we changed, what we expected it to do, and whether it did.
What they will not show is a wall of impressions and reach with no line connecting it to revenue.
Can you prove a channel caused a sale?
Rarely, and we would rather say that than pretend otherwise. Attribution has got harder, not easier. Cookie restrictions, cross device journeys and privacy changes mean every platform now reports its own version of events and each one flatters itself.
What works is watching total enquiries and total spend together, and testing by changing one input at a time. It is less precise than a dashboard implies, and it is honest.
Do you track calls and WhatsApp messages?
Yes, where you want them tracked. For a lot of local businesses the majority of enquiries never touch a form, so a setup that only counts form submissions misses most of the demand it generated.
Call tracking and messaging clicks go into the same picture as everything else.
What the first conversation looks like.
What do you need from me to quote?
What you sell, roughly what a customer is worth, where enquiries come from now, and what you have tried that did not work. If you have access to analytics or ad accounts, even better.
If you do not have those numbers, that is not a blocker. Working them out is usually the first piece of value in the engagement.
How quickly can you start?
Usually within two weeks of agreeing scope. We would rather say a date and hit it than start on Monday and stall in week three.
What if I only want one thing done?
That is fine, and often sensible. A technical audit, a tracking fix, a single landing page, one campaign rebuilt. Fixed scope, fixed fee, no retainer attached.
Plenty of businesses get more from one properly fixed problem than from a monthly plan covering six.
Where to go next.
Tell us what’s next.
Send over the problem and the numbers you have. We will tell you honestly whether we are the right people for it.