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 London, Greater London, 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 London 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 London 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?
London is the most expensive paid-media market in the country, where cost per click routinely runs at several times the national average. At those prices the distance between a well-run account and a poorly-run one is not a rounding error; it is measured in very large absolute sums, every month. London is also where the practice keeps its registered office, at 45 Albemarle Street in Mayfair, for engagements that call for a room in the capital.
The structural flaw in the agency model, a senior who wins the pitch and a junior who quietly runs the spend, becomes a direct and continuous financial drain at London prices. The practice removes that layer entirely. One senior practitioner holds the account, which means the expertise you contracted is the expertise deploying your capital into the most competitive Google Ads and paid-social auctions in Britain, with nothing delegated downward and nothing averaged across a team.
At London prices a ten percent inefficiency is not a rounding error, it is a five-figure monthly leak, and the agency model builds that leak in: a senior wins the account, a junior spends the money. The practice deploys the capital with the senior who pitched it, into the costliest auctions in Britain, where the gap between expert and average execution shows up in real money every week. A Mayfair room is available when the engagement wants one.
London rewards precision the way few markets do, because here imprecision is simply more expensive. The practice brings the commercial rigour its founder built at the highest level, including on the global transformation of LUSH Cosmetics across sixteen markets and the data integrity work behind the Everywhen launch spanning Towergate Insurance and forty other brands, to businesses competing for London audiences. It pairs that with the AI-search discipline that now decides whether a brand is named when a buyer asks ChatGPT, Gemini or Google's AI Overviews for a recommendation. For a London business the proposition is senior ownership, forensic measurement, and a practitioner who treats your margin as the only metric that survives contact with a board.
Search in 2026 no longer ends at a list of blue links. Buyers in London 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 London, most sites lose on weak entity signals, broken schema and pages an AI cannot tell apart from any other.
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 London, that groundwork separates the firm AI recommends from the one it never mentions.
Most London SEO agencies optimise for rankings. The Crane Consultancy optimises for revenue. Technical SEO, server-side tracking and conversion architecture are built to serve the paid-media stack, not compete with it.
In most London businesses the data goes half-used and the manual work goes unquestioned. The practice closes both gaps.
The same forensic mind that runs the media builds the layer beneath it: clean measurement you can trust, dashboards that report profit rather than vanity, and automation that removes the manual work quietly draining the week. Where it earns its place, practical AI is put to work inside the London business, from Claude and Gemini to bespoke internal tools, as an edge rather than novelty.
From the City and Canary Wharf to Shoreditch tech and the West End, London's submarkets price and convert so differently that one capital-wide campaign overpays in most of them.
The practice works with mid-market businesses in London and Greater London across the following sectors. B2B lead generation, B2C and full omnichannel e-commerce engagements are all taken on.
Financial services, technology, professional services and e-commerce in the most expensive auctions in the country, where execution quality is the entire margin.
The founder's track record includes the global digital transformation of LUSH Cosmetics across sixteen markets, and the same forensic discipline he brought to it is applied to every London engagement, regardless of size.
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 London, Greater London. 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 London 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.
Based in London, 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.
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 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.
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.
The Crane Consultancy is a consultancy, not a PPC agency, and the difference is structural: one senior practitioner owns every London 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 London, Greater London. 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 London 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.
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 London businesses, anchored to a single profitability model rather than managed as separate channel siloes.
Yes. This is a core part of the practice. Buyers in London increasingly ask Google AI Overviews, ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Copilot for recommendations and act on a single synthesised answer. The Crane Consultancy builds the technical foundations that let those systems read, trust and cite your business: structured data and schema, a coherent entity graph, machine-readable content, an llms.txt discovery file and fast Core Web Vitals. This is the discipline of AI search optimisation, made up of Answer Engine Optimisation (AEO) and Generative Engine Optimisation (GEO).
Traditional SEO wins rankings in a list of links; AI search optimisation wins visibility inside AI-generated answers, in Google AI Overviews and in models like ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity. It splits into Answer Engine Optimisation (AEO), which earns the direct answer, and Generative Engine Optimisation (GEO), the entity and authority signals that get you recommended by name. For London businesses it is technical architecture, not a content mill, and it runs 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 London 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 London, but works with mid-market businesses across Greater London 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 London, Greater London. 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 London 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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