Answer Engine Optimisation (AEO)
- FAQ, HowTo & Article schema
- Question-led content structure
- Featured snippet & AI Overview capture
- Concise, chunkable answers
- Speakable markup
Your local agency recycles the same plan for every client. One senior operator owns PPC, AI search and technical SEO from a base in Bath, Somerset, from audit to invoice, with face-to-face sessions as standard, and builds the commercial edge that decides who dominates 2027.
Mid-market businesses in Bath keep encountering the same failure from local PPC agencies and SEO agencies: technically active accounts, commercially adrift results. Account managers rotate. Junior staff run the work. Nobody holds the full picture.
PPC means paid, auction-based advertising across Google Ads, Microsoft Advertising, Meta and LinkedIn, where the cost lands only on a click and is judged against profit rather than vanity metrics. The Crane Consultancy works as a senior-led PPC and SEO consultancy, not an agency, with one practitioner holding the entire Bath engagement: paid search, paid social, server-side tracking, technical SEO and the commercial logic tying them together. One test governs every decision: does this compound your profit?
Bath is the practice's home city, and that matters more than a pin on a map. This is a UNESCO World Heritage economy that runs on heritage tourism, independent retail, professional services and two universities, and it generates two quite separate kinds of demand at once: a resident or business hunting for a local supplier, and a visitor planning a trip months in advance. A Google Ads or SEO account that treats those as one audience wastes money on both.
Most agencies push both audiences through a single funnel and call the waste efficiency. The practice does the opposite, separating visitor intent from resident and B2B intent across paid search, paid social and organic so each is built to convert on its own terms. Being based in Bath also means the work is accountable in person, with the senior practitioner running your account a short walk from your door rather than a name on a contract you never meet again.
Heritage tourism runs on a booking window, not a buying moment, so a visitor researching Bath in January may not convert until spring. Accounts here are measured across that lag rather than on last-click, which otherwise starves the upper-funnel work that fills the calendar. Get the window right and the same budget books more rooms, tables and tickets; ignore it and you pay to be forgotten.
Bath is small enough that reputation travels and large enough that the auctions are genuinely contested, particularly in tourism, hospitality and professional services. That combination rewards precision over budget. The practice brings the discipline its founder built at global scale, including on the digital transformation of LUSH Cosmetics across sixteen markets, to businesses that operate within a few square miles of The Roman Baths, and it applies the same forensic approach to PPC, technical SEO and AI search whether the account spends four figures a month or six. For a Bath business the proposition is plain: senior, undivided ownership from a practitioner who lives in the market you sell to, and who treats your profit, not your impressions, as the only number that counts.
Search in 2026 is no longer a page of links and nothing more. Buyers in Bath now put their questions to Google AI Overviews, to ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Copilot, and act on a single synthesised answer. If your business is not named in that answer, a competitor is.
This is the discipline that decides whether large language models can read, trust and cite your business, and it is engineering rather than content. It divides into Answer Engine Optimisation, AEO, which wins direct answers and AI Overviews, and Generative Engine Optimisation, GEO, the entity and authority signals that earn a recommendation by name. In Bath, most sites lose on weak entity signals, broken schema and pages an AI cannot tell apart from any other.
This is built, not written. The work is a coherent entity graph, structured data, machine-readable content, an llms.txt discovery file and the Core Web Vitals and crawl hygiene underneath it, all so the model finds you, parses you and quotes you. For a Bath business, it is the difference between being the answer and being absent from it.
A first-page ranking that sells nothing is a cost, not a result. Bath technical SEO is built around revenue: site health, server-side measurement and conversion architecture that strengthen the paid-media stack rather than compete with it for credit.
In most Bath businesses the data goes half-used and the manual work goes unquestioned. The practice closes both gaps.
Good media is only as honest as the data under it, so the practice builds that data first: trustworthy measurement, profit-first dashboards, and automation that clears the manual drudgery. For a Bath operation, AI goes to work where it genuinely sharpens a decision, from Claude and Gemini to custom internal tools, and nowhere it does not.
From The Roman Baths and the Royal Crescent to the SouthGate retail quarter and two universities, Bath's heritage core and resident economy sit side by side.
The founder's visitor-economy track record includes marketing for The Roman Baths, Bath's own, brought to bear for businesses across the city.
The practice works with mid-market businesses in Bath and Somerset across the following sectors. B2B lead-generation, B2C and full omnichannel e-commerce engagements are all taken on.
Tourism, independent retail, professional services and two universities: four sectors, two buying clocks, and never one shared funnel.
Behind the practice stands a founder who architected the LUSH Cosmetics global digital transformation across sixteen markets, and the forensic discipline that programme demanded is what every Bath engagement gets, regardless of scale.
Architect of the LUSH Cosmetics global digital transformation across sixteen markets, recognised by Welocalize as Best Global Client Team. Former Paid Media Enablement and Commerce Lead at Adapt and Head of Paid Media at Navigate, leading programmes across attraction, conservation and tourism portfolios. The track record spans B2C and B2B, from global retail to lead generation and full omnichannel e-commerce.
Most recently engaged as Digital Data and Analytics lead through the Everywhen brand launch, securing data integrity across a migration spanning Towergate Insurance and forty other brands. A power user of HTML, CSS, JavaScript and GTM, now applying that technical depth to AI search optimisation: structured data, entity signals and the machine readability that decides visibility in Google AI Overviews and answer engines. Meta Certified Media Buying Professional. Google Partner. Amazon Ads Partner.
The practice is based in Bath, Somerset. Face-to-face client sessions are available here as standard.
The senior mind that wins the work is the senior mind that does the work.
The typical Bath PPC agency and SEO agency model has a structural flaw: the senior practitioner who wins the pitch is not the person who runs the account. What you signed for and what runs the account quietly become two different people.
Based in Bath, the practice combines genuine local presence with the depth of a practitioner who has run global programmes for household names. You get the relationship of a local consultant and the commercial rigour of someone who has operated at the highest level across sixteen international markets.
Four fixed commitments hold on every engagement, and together they mark the break from the usual agency arrangement.
Every ad account, tag manager, analytics property and dashboard sits under your ownership. Always. We do not gatekeep your data.
The senior named on the proposal is the senior who does the work. No handover to a junior. No silent reassignment after the contract signs.
Performance dashboards updated frequently. No vanity PDFs assembled the night before a quarterly review.
WhatsApp access to Nicholas, not a ticket queue. Ask the difficult question on a Sunday if you need to.
Nic is an expert in his field, offering insight and reporting with real value, tailored to our needs.
In the two months since starting to work with Nic, I have been so impressed by his technical understanding across analytics and digital advertising. He has completely overhauled our data so we can see in detail what is happening and make better decisions, and reviewed all of our existing campaigns, which are already performing better. I cannot recommend Nic highly enough.
Nic manages our PPC campaigns with professionalism and expertise. He takes the time to understand our business, its objectives and the challenges we face, and is proactive in identifying opportunities to maximise results and return on investment.
Nic helped fill in the missing pieces on a complex data, attribution and privacy project, unearthing a series of unknown issues in the data stack and laying out a plan to remedy them that rolled out successfully. I would recommend Nic and The Crane Consultancy for their technical expertise and thorough understanding.
I have worked with Nic for several years and his attention to detail is second to none. He is extremely knowledgeable and very attentive, offering solutions and proactive in his suggestions.
The Crane Consultancy is a consultancy, not a PPC agency, and the difference is structural: one senior practitioner owns every Bath engagement from the first audit through to ongoing optimisation. No junior account managers, no team rotations, no handover documents. You deal with the founder, Nicholas Crane, throughout.
Yes. The Crane Consultancy is based in Bath, Somerset. Face-to-face sessions are available here as standard. The practice also operates a registered office at 45 Albemarle Street, Mayfair, London W1S 4JL for engagements requiring a London room.
Most Bath PPC agencies and SEO agencies operate the same model: a senior practitioner wins the pitch, junior staff run the account. The Crane Consultancy removes that structure entirely. One senior practitioner, with a track record including the global digital transformation of LUSH Cosmetics across sixteen markets, holds every Bath engagement. The person who audits the account is the person optimising bids, reviewing technical SEO and reporting to the board every week.
The practice offers PPC consultancy across Google Ads, Microsoft Advertising, Meta, LinkedIn, YouTube and Amazon, alongside AI search optimisation, technical SEO, and a data and automation layer spanning GA4 and server-side tracking, Consent Mode v2, marketing and revenue dashboards, CRM integration, attribution modelling, conversion rate optimisation and AI-assisted workflow automation. All services are delivered by one senior practitioner to Bath businesses, anchored to a single profitability model rather than managed as separate channel siloes.
Yes, and it is core to the practice. Buyers in Bath increasingly put their questions to Google AI Overviews, ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Copilot and act on one synthesised answer. The work is the technical foundation that lets those systems read, trust and cite you: structured data and schema, a coherent entity graph, machine-readable content, an llms.txt file and fast Core Web Vitals. That discipline is AI search optimisation, made up of Answer Engine Optimisation (AEO) and Generative Engine Optimisation (GEO).
Traditional SEO earns rankings in a list of links. AI search optimisation earns visibility inside AI-generated answers, in Google AI Overviews and in large language models such as ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity. It splits into Answer Engine Optimisation (AEO), the structure that wins direct answers, and Generative Engine Optimisation (GEO), the entity and authority signals that make a model recommend you by name. For Bath businesses it is an architectural and technical exercise, not a content mill, and it sits alongside PPC and technical SEO in every engagement.
Yes. Beneath paid media and search sits the data and automation layer: GA4 and server-side tracking, Consent Mode v2, marketing and revenue dashboards, CRM integration and automation that clears manual work. Where it adds a real edge, practical AI goes to work inside the Bath business, from Claude and Gemini to bespoke internal tools. The aim never changes: better decisions, made faster, on numbers you can trust.
The practice is rooted in Bath, but works with mid-market businesses across Somerset and the surrounding cities. The same senior-led PPC, AI search and SEO consultancy applies in each of them.
The Crane Consultancy provides senior-led PPC, AI search optimisation and technical SEO consultancy to mid-market businesses in Bath, Somerset. It is a trading name of Crane Consultancy Limited, registered at Companies House under number 15526285, VAT number GB466677439, founded in 2024. The practice operates from Bath and Bristol, with a registered office at 45 Albemarle Street, Mayfair, London W1S 4JL. Bath, Bristol and London are its home cities, all served face-to-face as standard.
Every Bath engagement is held by one senior practitioner, the founder Nicholas Crane, from audit to invoice, with no account manager rotations and no junior handovers. Services include PPC across Google, Microsoft, Meta, LinkedIn, YouTube and Amazon; technical SEO; Answer Engine Optimisation (AEO) and Generative Engine Optimisation (GEO) for visibility in Google AI Overviews, ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Copilot; server-side tracking; and conversion rate optimisation. Nicholas Crane is a Google Partner, Stape Partner and Amazon Ads Partner, and led the LUSH Cosmetics global digital transformation across sixteen markets.
A proper conversation with the person who would do the work. Tell me where you are and what you're weighing up, and you'll get an honest read on what I'd change, what I'd leave alone, and where the real upside is. No pitch, no rush.
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