Vander Els Partners
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Scope

What am I actually buying?

Seven parts · one retainer

Everything that produces a lead, and the report that ties it together, inside one retainer. This is not a menu. You are not picking three of six and leaving the rest, because the three you leave are usually the ones quietly deciding whether the other three work.

Below is what each one actually involves week to week, in plain terms, along with the honest limitation of each. Every one of them has one. An agency that tells you a channel has no downside has either not run it long enough to find out or is hoping you will not ask.

  1. 01Website Built on our stack, patched every week, registered in your name from day one. →
  2. 02Local SEO Technical, content and authority, measured on the same grid points every month. →
  3. 03Google Ads Waste removed first. Google bills your card. Nothing taken as a percentage of spend. →
  4. 04Google Business Profile The map pack managed, defended, and watched daily for suspension. →
  5. 05AI search Named in the assembled answer, or absent from it. There is no page two. →
  6. 06Lead tracking Calls, forms and CRM reconciled, so a missing lead leaves a mark somewhere. →
  7. 07The monthly report One document, raw exports attached, every figure traceable to its source. →
Work with us › What it costs
Website · built and kept

Who is touching my website every week?

A small business website is not a project that finishes. It is a thing that has to keep working while a plugin updates, a browser changes and someone tries the login form four thousand times overnight.

So it is priced and staffed as a year of work rather than a launch date. The build is the first fortnight of it. The other fifty weeks are the reason it is still producing work in month eleven.

One site, one year52 weeks
Routine check Patched Page added Something caught

A drawing of a year on one site. Not a client record.

Build Designed and built around the jobs you actually want more of, then hosted on a stack we run ourselves. The domain, the hosting and the code are registered in your name from day one. Yours either way
Every week Core and plugin patching, uptime checks, and a live test that the contact form still delivers to a real inbox rather than just showing a thank-you page. Checked, not assumed
Content Service pages and town pages added over time, written for the work you want and the margins you want, instead of shipping twelve pages at launch and never touching them again. Ongoing, not a launch
Speed Page weight and Core Web Vitals watched after every change, because most contractor sites get slower by accident, one plugin and one hero video at a time. Measured after edits
Security Backups, isolation and monitoring. Small business sites get broken into for their traffic, not their data, and the first symptom is usually a ranking drop nobody connects to it. Watched daily

The trade-off

We build on our stack, not yours. If you are attached to a particular platform, or you have an in-house person who wants edit access, this will create friction, and it is better said at the outset than discovered in month three.

Say it early

Local SEO · months, not days

What does local SEO actually involve?

Mostly it is unglamorous. Fixing what stops you ranking, building the pages your market is actually searching for, and then earning the authority that makes those pages hold.

Coverage, from every point in the areasame points, monthly
Top three Page one Ranking, not visible Nowhere

Rank is not one number. It is a different number from every point in your service area, and the only view that counts is the one from where the customer is standing.

One rank check run from your office will always look better than the map your customers are actually reading.

A drawing of how a grid is read. Not a client result.

Grid Rankings measured on a coverage grid across your whole service area, the same points every month, rather than one rank check run from your office where you always look good. Same points, monthly
Technical Crawl, index and internal linking work, plus removing the near-duplicate pages that make your own site compete against itself for the term you care most about. Self-competition first
Content Pages for the services and towns that carry real demand, based on what people in your metro type and ask, not a keyword list exported from a tool and pasted into headings. Demand, then pages
Authority Citations, local links, and the slow work of becoming the obvious answer in your county. There is no shortcut here that does not eventually cost you the rankings it bought. The slow part

The trade-off

This is the slowest thing we do. Meaningful movement is usually three to six months out, and anyone promising page one in thirty days is selling you paid traffic under a different name.

Paid moves first

Google Ads · your card

Where does my ad money actually go?

To Google, on your card, with the invoice in your account where you can read it without asking us for a screenshot.

Most of the work is subtraction. A campaign earns its money by what it refuses to bid on, long before it earns anything by what it bids on.

What is removed firstbefore a dollar is spent
All searches matching your services 100
Price shoppers and free-quote farming 78
DIY and how-to searches 61
Counties you do not serve 44
Jobs worth having 26

Illustrative shape. Not a client account.

Structure Campaigns built around the jobs worth having, with the price shoppers, the DIY searches and the neighboring counties you do not serve blocked out before they eat the budget. Waste out first
Every week Search terms reviewed, negatives added, and budget moved toward whatever is producing booked work rather than whatever is producing the cheapest clicks. Booked work, not clicks
Landing Ads point at pages we control and can change the same afternoon, so a weak headline is a thirty minute fix instead of a support ticket to whoever built the site. Same day changes
Billing Google bills your card directly. We never take a percentage of what you spend, so there is no version of this arrangement where we earn more by spending more of your money. 0% of spend

The trade-off

Paid is the fastest lever available and the most expensive one to leave running badly. It also stops the day you stop paying, which is exactly why it is not the whole plan.

Fast, and rented

Google Business Profile · where local pays

Why does the map matter this much?

Because for most local service searches the map pack sits above everything else on the page, and a homeowner with a wet ceiling is not scrolling past it.

On a phone that pack is close to the entire first screen. The organic result you spent a year earning is below the fold, underneath three competitors and a review count.

One phone screenlocal search

A drawing of the layout, not a live result page.

Setup Categories, services, service area and attributes set deliberately. The primary category alone decides a large share of what you are eligible to appear for, and it is routinely wrong on profiles that were set up in a hurry years ago. The category decides a lot
Ongoing Photos, posts and questions kept current, and review velocity managed so the profile reads like a business getting steady work rather than one that asked for fifteen reviews in a single week and then went silent. Steady beats spiky
Defense Competitors using keyword-stuffed business names or service areas they do not operate in get reported and tracked, because that is frequently what is sitting above you. Reported and followed up
Suspension Monitored continuously. A suspended profile is the fastest way for a local business to lose its phone, and reinstatement goes far better when it is caught in days rather than after a quiet month. Caught in days

The trade-off

This is the channel we control least. Google can change how the map behaves, or suspend a profile, with no warning and no explanation. We can respond quickly. We cannot prevent it, and we will not pretend otherwise.

Respond, not prevent

AI search · where the question goes now

Do you show up when someone asks AI?

A growing share of your customers no longer type a search and scan ten links. They ask ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity or Google's AI answer for a company, and they act on the two or three it names. If you are not one of them, you were not in the running.

These systems retrieve, they do not inventsame sources as the map
Your service pages The map profile Reviews, verbatim Third-party mentions Structured data

A drawing of retrieval. There is no page two of an answer.

The shift The answer is now assembled for your customer instead of listed for them. There is no page two to be on. You are either cited in the answer or you are absent from it. Named, or not there
What we build Generative Engine Optimization: the pages, the profile, the reviews, the third-party mentions and the structured data these systems actually pull from when they assemble an answer about your service in your area. GEO, if you have heard the term
Why it is the same work These systems retrieve, they do not invent. They read the same profile, the same reviews and the same pages that decide the map. Done properly, one program feeds both. One program, both surfaces
How you see it We run the questions your customers actually ask, across the assistants they actually use, and show you where you were named and where a competitor was named instead. In the monthly report
When the AI makes the call These systems are starting to do more than list you. They answer for the customer, and in a growing number of categories they place the first call on the customer's behalf. When that happens the AI hands one business to the customer, not ten. To be the one it names and connects, your profile, categories, hours and reviews have to give it enough to trust you with that customer. That readiness is what we build, and we make the resulting contact measurable when it lands. Be the one it hands over

The trade-off

Nobody controls this surface. There is no dashboard, no rank number you can bank, and Google decides which categories and markets the AI answers and calls in, and when. We make you eligible and ready for it; we cannot make Google turn it on in a market where it has not launched, and we will not pretend that timeline is ours. Anybody selling you guaranteed AI placement, or a switch that flips it on, is selling you something that does not exist.

Ready for it, never guaranteed

Lead tracking · the part nobody checks

How would I know if a lead went missing?

You would not, which is the entire point of this channel. A lead that never arrives leaves no gap in any report. It simply does not exist, and every dashboard involved carries on looking healthy.

The same hole swallows a patient who called about an implant consult and never got called back. So we keep two independent records and make them argue with each other once a month.

Two records, compared on purposeone month

Calls and forms

59

Tracked numbers plus the mail server log

In the CRM

56

What your team actually saw

Unaccounted

3

Finding out why is the job, not a footnote

Illustrative figures. The gap is the whole reason both records exist.

Calls Tracked numbers with recording and source attribution, so a call from the map, a call from an ad and a call from a truck magnet do not all land in the same undifferentiated pile. Source on every call
Forms Every submission logged at the mail server, separately from whatever your CRM says it received. Two independent records exist specifically so the two can be compared. Two sources, on purpose
Watchdog An external monitor checks that your lead paths are still delivering and tells us the day one stops, instead of the fault surfacing when you mention the phone has been quiet. Alerts us, not you
Reconciliation Calls, forms and CRM entries matched against each other every month. When the counts disagree, working out why is the job rather than a footnote. Where gaps show up

The trade-off

Tracking can tell you a lead arrived, where it came from and how long the phone rang before anybody picked up. It cannot make anybody pick up, and it will show you plainly on the months nobody did.

Measurable, not fixable

The monthly report · traceable

What lands in my inbox every month?

One document, sent and read in your own time, where every figure can be traced back to the system it came out of.

monthly-report.pdfevery figure, sourced
Calls · 118 call platform export
Forms · 41 mail server log
Paid · spend Google Ads export
Search · 1,304 Search Console
Map · 49 points same grid, monthly
Disagreement · 2 written up, with which one we believe

Illustrative. Your report is built from your own exports, attached to it.

One document Calls, forms, paid, search and the map in a single report, with the raw exports attached rather than summarised into a chart you have no way of checking. Exports attached
Traceable If a number appears, we can show you the export it came from. That constraint is what stops a report from slowly becoming a mood board of things that went up. Every figure, sourced
Disagreements Where two systems do not match, that goes in the report along with which one we believe and why, rather than quietly reporting whichever number reads better. Including the ugly ones
No walkthrough You get the document and read it in your own time. There is no standing meeting to sit through and nothing held back to be revealed on a screen share. Read it, or do not

The trade-off

It is a document, not a live dashboard you can refresh at midnight. We would rather hand you one set of figures a month that reconciles than a screen full of numbers that quietly do not agree with each other.

Monthly, on purpose

The bundle

Why not just buy the one I need?

It has to reconcile

Because the monthly number only reconciles if one team can see all of it.

A single job rarely arrives through a single channel. Someone sees an ad on Tuesday, searches your name on Thursday, taps the map listing, calls, does not book, then fills out a form ten days later. Split that across three vendors and every one of them reports a win, the totals add up to more leads than you actually got, and none of them can tell you what the job really cost.

There is no clever attribution model that fixes this from the outside. It gets fixed by one team holding the ad account, the site, the profile and the phone records, and being the same team that has to explain the number at the end of the month.

It also means there is nobody to blame. If search is flat and paid is expensive and the map slipped, that is all one conversation with one team, and that team is your strategist.

one homeowner, four systems
Tuesdaysaw the ad no click
Thursdaysearched your name the ad did that
Thursdaytapped the map listing profile takes credit
Calledrang out, no message invisible to the CRM
Two weeks onfilled out the form logged as a new lead
Countedonce, correctly because one team saw all five

Disclosed

What do you subcontract?

One thing

One thing, and we would rather you hear it here than find out later from an email signature.

Google Ads Campaign management is run with a specialist partner. They are better inside that platform than we are, they work in it all day, and pretending otherwise would cost you money every month for the sake of our ego. Disclosed, not hidden
How they are paid A fixed fee, paid by us out of the retainer. Never a percentage of your ad spend, by them or by us, so nobody in this arrangement gets a raise by talking you into a bigger budget. Fixed, not a percentage
Whose account Yours. The partner works inside an ad account registered in your name, not in an agency container you would have to negotiate your way out of later. Still yours
Who you talk to One number, one point of contact, one team accountable for the result. You will not be handed to somebody you have never met on the day something breaks. Same phone number
Everything else Website, local SEO, the map profile, tracking and the report are ours. If one of those is wrong there is nobody else to point at, and we will not go looking. One team

That is the whole list.

What happens next

So how does this start?

Typical timing
WITHIN 48 HOURS

A reply from Matt

From the strategist who would run your account, not a booking link.

A STRAIGHT READ

Does it fit your market?

An honest read on whether your market carries this, before either of us spends anything.

THEN WE TALK

A real conversation

No pitch deck, no booking bot, no discovery call before the real one.

Work with us › Or just email us