The Digital Back OfficeA website that helps customers hire you.

The Digital Back Office is a website studio that builds custom business websites and then runs them: hosting, software updates, security, Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Answer Engine Optimization (AEO), content edits, and a one-page monthly report. It was founded by Courtney and works remotely with US-based small businesses. There are two services — a Build for the site itself and Care for the monthly running of it — and Care runs on published monthly tiers from $199/mo. The build is free on any Care plan with a 12-month minimum. The name is the whole idea: the unglamorous back-office work a website needs every month, done by someone who isn't you.

A managed website is a site where someone is monitoring it every month — hosting, software updates, security patches, content edits, uptime monitoring, and search performance, all handled by the same operator who built it. You get a one-page monthly report instead of a to-do list. "Up" and "working" are different sentences, and a managed website covers both.

Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) makes your site readable and quotable by AI assistants — ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Google's AI Overviews — the way Search Engine Optimization (SEO) makes it findable on Google. A growing share of customers now ask an AI for a recommendation instead of searching. Structured data, clear answers, clean markup, and an /llms.txt file are the core of the work, and it ships with every build.

SEO optimizes a site to be discovered in a list of search results. AEO optimizes a site to be cited inside an AI assistant's answer. SEO gets you on the page; AEO gets you in the answer. The underlying on-page work — schema.org markup, page speed, clear factual sentences — supports both, but they are different jobs and most sites have done one and ignored the other. The Digital Back Office ships both.

The build is free on any Care plan with a 12-month minimum — there is no separate charge for the build itself. Care (managed hosting plus monthly maintenance and optimization) runs on published monthly tiers starting at $199/mo, is otherwise month-to-month, and you can switch tiers at any time — the three packages are laid out on the pricing page. The 12-month minimum applies only when you take the free build. Back-office and automation work is different: it depends entirely on what your week looks like, so it starts with a short audit and gets scoped and quoted from what that finds.

Simple builds can go live in a couple of days. Most small business builds take one to three weeks from kickoff. Complex sites with custom integrations take longer. Care starts the day the build starts — not the day the site launches — so the SEO/AEO work is already in motion when the site goes live.

Small businesses with real services, real customers, and real revenue — service businesses, local trades, retail, gift and lifestyle brands, professional services. We don't build for crypto projects, mass-produced dropshipping, or anything we wouldn't put our name next to. We're selective by design because Care is monthly and we plan to be there a while.

Squarespace, Wix, and the rest are DIY website builders. You log in and assemble it. Your time is the labor. We build a custom Next.js site for you, run it on infrastructure you don't have to think about, and handle the maintenance and search work every month. If you'd rather spend Saturday running your business than dragging blocks around in a builder, the math works out.

Yes, completely. The domain is registered in your name, the content is yours, and you can request a full export of the codebase anytime. We're staff, not landlords. Any vendor that holds your domain or your site hostage on cancellation is telling you exactly what kind of operator they are.

You take everything. We hand over a full export of the site and content within 30 days, your domain was always yours, and we'll quote migration help if you want it. The runbook's last page is literally instructions for leaving. Care is monthly — there's no long-term contract holding you in place.

Sometimes. We'll audit it first. Some sites are worth rescuing, some are cheaper to rebuild from scratch, and we'll tell you which one yours is — with numbers — before you spend anything. WordPress sites with twelve plugins and three years of deferred updates are usually a rebuild. Modern static sites are usually a takeover.

Indexing status from Google Search Console, traffic and query data, what changed on the site that month, citation patterns in AI assistants where measurable, and what's planned next. One page, plain English, no vanity charts. If you've ever paid for SEO and received a PDF you didn't read, this is the opposite of that.

No, and run from anyone who does. Google's algorithm isn't for sale, and AI citation is decided by retrieval systems no vendor controls. What we guarantee is the work: clean builds, real optimization, honest reporting. Our own sites' numbers — public, on our small business website examples page — are the best evidence the work works.

In the back office, yes. Automation handles drafts, audits, and scheduling at scale, which is how we manage many sites well and keep the monthly price reasonable. A human reviews everything before it ships to your site. You're hiring judgment; the automation just carries boxes.

We work with US-based small businesses everywhere — the work is fully remote. Time zones don't matter; replies do.