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 mid-market businesses across South Wales, face-to-face in Cardiff, from audit to invoice, and builds the commercial edge that decides who dominates 2027.
Mid-market businesses in Cardiff 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 Cardiff 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?
Cardiff is the capital of Wales, with a strong financial-services and media economy and the country's largest and most competitive commercial market. It is where Welsh national advertisers concentrate, which makes its auctions the most contested in the nation. Standing out in the capital takes more than simply being present in it.
Beating a market this competitive takes genuine seniority and discipline rather than a bigger budget thrown at the same auctions. Every Cardiff account is held end to end by one senior practitioner across PPC, technical SEO and tracking, so the expertise that wins the brief is the expertise that runs it week after week. In the most contested market in Wales, the depth of the person on the account is what decides the result.
Cardiff concentrates the Welsh advertisers worth competing against, which makes its auctions the most contested in the nation and the easiest place to overpay. The edge is seniority and discipline rather than budget: one practitioner holds PPC, technical SEO and tracking end to end, so the expertise that wins the brief is the expertise spending the money. In the capital, the depth of the person on the account decides who leads and who funds everyone else's clicks.
Search in 2026 is no longer a page of links and nothing more. Buyers in Cardiff 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.
Whether a model can read your business, trust it and cite it is decided by structure, not word count. The work divides in two: Answer Engine Optimisation, AEO, for the direct answer and the AI Overview, and Generative Engine Optimisation, GEO, for the authority signals behind a recommendation. Most Cardiff sites fail on the basics, with weak entities, absent schema and content that reads to a model as plain text.
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 Cardiff 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. Cardiff 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.
Most Cardiff businesses collect more data than they use and run more by hand than they should. 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 Cardiff business, practical AI earns its place only where it adds a real edge, from Claude and Gemini to bespoke internal tools, never as novelty.
From the media and broadcast cluster around Central Square and Cardiff Bay to the city-centre retail core, the capital concentrates Welsh demand tightly.
The practice works with mid-market businesses in Cardiff and South Wales across the following sectors. B2B lead-generation, B2C and full omnichannel e-commerce engagements are all taken on.
Financial services, professional services, retail and technology, where Welsh national advertisers concentrate into the most contested auctions in the country.
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 Cardiff 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 and travels to Cardiff and across South Wales for face-to-face client sessions.
The senior mind that wins the work is the senior mind that does the work.
The typical Cardiff 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. A junior sits between your budget and the expertise you contracted.
The Crane Consultancy travels to Cardiff for face-to-face sessions when the engagement calls for it. But proximity is never used as a substitute for expertise. Forensic data, disciplined capital deployment and a single undivided senior mind holding the Cardiff account are what drive results. At roughly 36 miles from the practice's base in Bath and Bristol, Cardiff sits comfortably within reach for face-to-face sessions whenever they add value.
Every engagement runs on four standing commitments, each a deliberate departure from how agencies typically operate.
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 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.
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.
The Crane Consultancy is a consultancy, not a PPC agency, and the difference is structural: one senior practitioner owns every Cardiff 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 practice travels to Cardiff and across South Wales for face-to-face client sessions. All Cardiff engagements include full remote capability as standard: direct WhatsApp access to the founder, live performance dashboards and video sessions.
Most Cardiff 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 Cardiff 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 Cardiff businesses, anchored to a single profitability model rather than managed as separate channel siloes.
Yes, and it is core to the practice. Buyers in Cardiff 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 Cardiff 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 Cardiff 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.
Cardiff sits within a wider region the practice serves both in person and remotely. If your business is closer to one of the following, the same senior-led PPC, AI search and SEO consultancy applies there too.
The Crane Consultancy provides senior-led PPC, AI search optimisation and technical SEO consultancy to mid-market businesses in Cardiff, South Wales. 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 travels to Cardiff for face-to-face sessions and delivers the rest remotely.
Every Cardiff 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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