Answer Engine Optimisation (AEO)
- FAQ, HowTo & Article schema
- Question-led content structure
- Featured snippet & AI Overview capture
- Concise, chunkable answers
- Speakable markup
Your agency manages the account but never thinks about your market. One senior operator owns PPC, AI search and technical SEO for Belfast businesses, from audit to invoice, every channel, fully remote, and builds the commercial edge that decides who dominates 2027.
Mid-market businesses in Belfast 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.
Pay-per-click (PPC) is paid, auction-based advertising across Google Ads, Microsoft Advertising, Meta and LinkedIn, where you pay only when someone clicks, measured against profit, not vanity metrics. The Crane Consultancy is a senior-led PPC and SEO consultancy, not an agency. One practitioner holds the entire Belfast engagement: paid search, paid social, server-side tracking, technical SEO and the financial logic that connects them. Every decision answers one question: does this compound your profit?
Belfast has built a serious economy around cyber-security, financial services, film production and aerospace, competing in sophisticated international markets. Its leading firms operate well beyond Northern Ireland, selling to a global, technically literate audience. The competition here is as advanced as the work.
In markets this advanced, technical depth and senior discipline outweigh where the practitioner is based by a wide margin. Belfast clients get the full discipline across PPC, technical SEO, server-side tracking and AI search delivered remotely, with direct senior access throughout, so distance never turns into a drop in quality. The expertise that wins the brief is the expertise that runs the account, week after week.
Belfast's cyber-security, fintech and aerospace firms sell into sophisticated international markets, so the competition is as advanced as the work and the account has to match it. Delivered remotely with direct senior access, it brings full discipline across PPC, technical SEO, server-side tracking and AI search, because at this level technical depth decides the result and distance is a non-issue. The expertise that wins the brief is the expertise that runs it.
Search in 2026 is no longer a page of links and nothing more. Buyers in Belfast 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.
AI search optimisation is architecture, not copywriting. It splits into Answer Engine Optimisation, AEO, which wins the direct answer and the AI Overview, and Generative Engine Optimisation, GEO, the entity and authority signals that make a model name you unprompted. Where a Belfast business loses is almost always structural: thin entity signals, broken or missing schema, and pages a model reads as undifferentiated text.
Fixing it is engineering, not content. A coherent entity graph, clean structured data, machine-readable pages, an llms.txt discovery file and fast Core Web Vitals are assembled so a model can find, parse and quote the business with confidence. In Belfast, that groundwork separates the firm AI recommends from the one it never mentions.
A first-page ranking that sells nothing is a cost, not a result. Belfast 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.
Plenty of Belfast businesses sit on more data than they act on and do more by hand than they need to. The practice closes both gaps.
Beneath the media sits the layer that makes it accountable: measurement you can trust, dashboards built on profit rather than vanity, and automation that strips out the manual work draining the week. In a Belfast business, practical AI earns its place only where it adds a real edge, from Claude and Gemini to bespoke internal tools, never as novelty.
The Titanic Quarter and the Catalyst innovation hub anchor a cyber-security and fintech cluster that sells well beyond Northern Ireland.
The practice works with mid-market businesses in Belfast and Northern Ireland across the following sectors. B2B lead-generation, B2C and full omnichannel e-commerce engagements are all taken on.
Cyber-security, financial services, film production and aerospace selling to a global, technically literate audience, where depth matters more than location.
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 Belfast 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 and Bristol, working with Belfast businesses remotely. Every engagement receives the same undivided senior attention regardless of geography.
The senior mind that wins the work is the senior mind that does the work.
The typical Belfast 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. Whoever has capacity inherits the account, while the senior who pitched moves to the next sale.
Geography is not a barrier to senior expertise. The best PPC consultancy and SEO consultancy for Belfast businesses is not necessarily the nearest: it is the one that holds the account without interruption, reviews every week with genuine seniority, and filters every decision through commercial profit rather than vanity metrics. At roughly 267 miles from the practice's base in Bath and Bristol, Belfast is served entirely remotely, which strips travel cost and scheduling friction out of the engagement without diluting senior attention.
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.
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.
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.
The Crane Consultancy is a consultancy, not a PPC agency, and the difference is structural: one senior practitioner owns every Belfast 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.
Every Belfast engagement is delivered remotely with no reduction in access or quality. Direct WhatsApp access to the founder, live performance dashboards updated frequently, and regular video sessions replace the need for physical presence. There is no account manager layer between the Belfast client and the senior practitioner.
Most Belfast agencies run one model: the senior wins the pitch, juniors run the account. The Crane Consultancy removes that layer. A single senior practitioner, whose track record includes the LUSH Cosmetics global transformation across sixteen markets, holds every engagement here, so the person who audits the account is the person bidding, checking technical SEO and reporting to the board each week.
PPC runs across Google Ads, Microsoft Advertising, Meta, LinkedIn, YouTube and Amazon, alongside AI search optimisation, technical SEO and a full data and automation layer: GA4 and server-side tracking, Consent Mode v2, marketing and revenue dashboards, CRM integration, attribution modelling, conversion rate optimisation and AI-assisted automation. One senior practitioner delivers all of it to Belfast businesses, tied to a single profitability model rather than split into channel siloes.
Yes, and it is core to the practice. Buyers in Belfast 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 Belfast businesses it is an architectural and technical exercise, not a content mill, and it sits alongside PPC and technical SEO in every engagement.
Yes. Alongside paid media and search, the practice builds the data and automation layer beneath them: GA4 and server-side tracking, Consent Mode v2, marketing and revenue dashboards, CRM integration, and workflow automation that removes manual work. Where it adds a genuine edge, practical AI is put to work inside the Belfast business, from Claude and Gemini to bespoke internal tools. The aim is the same as everything else here: better decisions, made faster, on numbers you can trust.
Belfast is served remotely, as are businesses across the rest of the country. These are some of the other locations the practice works with.
The Crane Consultancy provides senior-led PPC, AI search optimisation and technical SEO consultancy to mid-market businesses in Belfast, Northern Ireland. 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. It serves Belfast entirely remotely.
Every Belfast 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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