Growth, engineered like a product.
Madmaxlabs runs a small client practice alongside the studio: search, paid traffic, social, and the sites they land on. This page shows the actual work: the documents you receive, what things cost, and who each service is wrong for. If you already have an agency, start at the Foothold and get a second opinion.
The platforms we run, day in and day out
Google Ads
Google Analytics
Meta
Instagram
Facebook
WordPress
WooCommerce
Shopify- Klaviyo
Next.js
Claude
Gemini- OpenAI Codex
All product names, logos, and brands are property of their respective owners and are used here for identification only.
Seven things we take on.
Each has its own page with the scope, the price and the questions people ask before they call. The chapters further down go deeper on the five most people come for.
SEO
We turn the questions your buyers already ask into pages that can be found, trusted, and acted on.
Google Ads
Before we ask Google for more traffic, we make sure the account can tell a customer from a click.
Social systems
Fewer disposable posts, more things worth pinning, forwarding, and remembering.
Automation
The lead lands once, the right people and systems know about it, and nobody has to copy it between tabs.
Local search
Make every location legible to customers and search engines, then keep the evidence consistent everywhere it matters.
Websites + systems
Fast enough to trust, clear enough to act on, and built so your team can own it after launch.
Cannabis-adjacent growth
We have run Google Ads on this market's own keywords for StandardCBD and Terplandia, and we build the search and email that grow beside them.
SEO that compounds.
We make your website the one Google shows when your customers go looking.
Rankings are an output. The work is fixing what search engines and readers actually hit: site structure, page speed, content that answers real questions, and the technical debt nobody wants to touch.
You will always know what you're paying for. Every month closes with a short note in plain English covering what changed, what it did, and what comes next. That note is as much the product as the rankings are.
Month four of a retainer · client name and numbers redacted
What changed
Fixed the crawl traps in your filtered category pages, so Google stops spending its visit on thousands of near-duplicate URLs. Rewrote the titles on the twelve pages that make you money. Redirected 14 dead product URLs that still had links pointing at them.
What it did
Impressions on the money pages went from to since the title work. Two of the redirected URLs are ranking again. The category fix shows up in crawl stats before it shows up in rankings, and right now it is in crawl stats.
What's next
The comparison page your competitors rank with and you don't. Draft lands Tuesday.
- A technical and content audit, in writing, before anything else
- A prioritized worklist, maintained monthly
- The monthly note: what changed, what it did, what's next
- Plain-English answers within a business day
Most SEO retainers land between $2,000 and $4,000 a month. Cannabis-adjacent work typically runs $2,500 to $5,000, because the ads, the search work and the store are run together.
If you need leads this month, SEO is the wrong first move; it pays back over quarters. Start with ads or the Foothold instead.
Ads that pay for themselves.
We run your Google ads so the budget buys customers instead of clicks.
Paid search is a math problem wearing a marketing costume. We build campaigns around the numbers: what a lead is worth, what a click costs, and where the budget leaks.
Landing pages and conversion tracking are part of the job. Ads without them are donations to Google.
- 01
Broad match drift
Your ad buys searches that only rhyme with your business. We prune with negative keywords, the list of searches Google is told to stop buying, every week.
- 02
Paying for your own name
Bidding on your brand when nobody else is. We carve it out and measure whether it earns anything.
- 03
Campaigns bidding against each other
The same keyword living in three campaigns, raising your own price. We consolidate.
- 04
Winners starved
The searches that actually convert, underfunded because the three leaks above ate the budget. Fixing those pays for this.
- Campaign rebuild or clean setup, with conversion tracking wired before spend
- A search-terms audit every month: keep, fix, or kill
- Landing page fixes where the click actually lands
- The same monthly note: what changed, what it did, what's next
Management runs $1,000 to $2,500 a month, plus a one-time setup around $1,500. A percentage of spend only enters the picture above $10,000 a month.
If your site can't take an order or capture a lead cleanly, ads will just measure that for you, expensively. Fix the site first; we can help with that too.
Sites and systems that think.
We build and look after the website your business runs on, including the smart parts.
This is home ground. The studio ships its own products, and the same hands build for clients: fast sites, stores that convert, and AI woven in where it does real work instead of decoration.
Everything we build ships with the numbers showing. The scores here are Lighthouse runs of our own properties, the same audit Chrome gives anyone who opens devtools.
madmaxlabs.com
ledgerly.madmaxlabs.com
orbit.madmaxlabs.com
Each number is the middle of three runs on September 23, 2026: the homepage read 86, 94 and 97, Orbit 84, 84 and 86. Orbit's image-heavy landing page is the one under 90 and gets its own review next. We print the number we got, not the one we wanted; the monthly notes run on that same rule.
- Next.js, or WordPress and WooCommerce, whichever actually fits the job
- Custom plugins that show you your own numbers
- A staging link you can click every week
- Documentation and handover; you own all of it
Projects run $6,000 to $25,000 depending on scope. Custom plugins start at $3,000. Care and visibility plans start at $500 a month.
If the goal is the cheapest possible site, a template and a weekend will serve you better, honestly. We build for businesses whose site has a job to do.
Ads and growth for the cannabis market.
We grow CBD, hemp and terpene businesses, and we run their Google Ads.
Years in this niche with our hands dirty: vapes, gummies, beverages, terpenes, and the stores that sell them, all inside US legal limits. It's a different sport. Google and Meta disapprove the ads a generic agency writes for these products, payment processors drop accounts without warning, and that agency learns all of it on your budget.
We have run Google Ads on this market's own keywords for StandardCBD and Terplandia, and we build search and email beside the ads so the business never hangs on one account. The store is built to survive a processor swap, and compliance work like age gates and claims language is designed in rather than bolted on. On WooCommerce we write the custom plugins ourselves, so you can see your own numbers instead of taking anyone's word for them, ours included.
Ad accounts disapproved or banned
Campaigns built for this market's keywords and its landing pages, as we ran them for StandardCBD and Terplandia. Search and email grow beside them, so one account never carries the business.
Payment processors drop you
Checkout built so swapping processors is a configuration change instead of a lost weekend of sales.
Age gates that kill conversion
Gates built to satisfy compliance without strangling checkout or hiding the site from Google.
Flying blind on your own store
Custom WooCommerce plugins that put margins, repeat rates, and stock in front of you.
One client's Klaviyo · flows listed from the account on 11 July 2026 · identity withheld
- Welcome discount serieson newsletter signup
- Abandoned cart remindercart left at checkout
- Browse abandonmentlooked, didn't buy
- Customer winbackcustomer gone quiet
- Thank you, new vs. returningafter every purchase
- Order fulfilledwhen the order ships
All six live right now, earning while nobody is at the desk.
- Google Ads on CBD, hemp and terpene keywords
- SEO that grows beside the ads, so one account never carries the business
- Email retention flows, built and tended in Klaviyo
- WooCommerce builds and custom plugins with real owner visibility
- Compliance-aware pages: age gates, claims language, structured data
- The same monthly note, in plain English
Retainers here typically run $2,500 to $5,000 a month. The premium is scope: the ads, the search work and the store are run together.
If your product sits outside US legal limits, we can't help. If it sits inside them, very few agencies know this ground better.
The Foothold.
$1,500 to $2,500, one time. Credited against your first retainer month if you continue.
Every engagement starts with the same product: we read your whole board. Site, traffic, funnel, the ad account if you have one, and what competitors rank for and why. You get a written assessment either way, listing what we would do in priority order, with honest effort estimates. If the answer is that you don't need us, the report says that.
Most businesses that call us already have an agency, and that is most of what the Foothold is for: an independent read of the work you're already paying for. If your agency is doing a good job, you'll finally know for certain. If they're not, you'll know exactly where it leaks. Either way the report is yours, no strings.
Foothold
The paid audit. About two weeks, a written assessment, and a priority list you can act on with or without us.
Proposal
If there's a fit, you get options in plain terms. Exact prices are discussed in a conversation, not buried on page nine of a PDF.
Ship monthly
Work lands every month with the note: what changed, what it did, what's next. Pause or cancel any month.
Work that shipped.
Built for Terplandia, which sells cannabis-derived terpenes to vape brands and manufacturers. On $20 a day, the Google Ads brought in two to three calls a day from genuine buyers.
A periodic table of strains.
Every strain in stock is a tile, filtered by type or dominant terpene.
A formulation lab inside the store.
A manufacturer sets the strains and the terpene load, and gets the volume to measure out.
Product pages a QA team can use.
Lab results and the safety data sheet sit beside the order button.
Written for buyers of this work.
Five field guides and two dispatches we would send anyone before a first call. Read them and you will know what to ask us, or any other shop.
- Field guide · October 5, 2026
Marketing CBD and hemp products when the ad platforms say no
Why perfectly legal hemp products keep getting rejected by Google, Meta, and Amazon, what each channel actually allows in mid 2026, and how CBD brands grow anyway.
- Field guide · August 12, 2026
Four ways small Google Ads accounts bleed money
A practical audit of conversion tracking, search-term drift, location waste, and landing-page mismatch, with checks an owner can run before increasing budget.
- Field guide · August 12, 2026
What a $2,000 SEO retainer should actually buy
A concrete month-by-month picture of the strategy, technical work, commercial pages, reporting, and accountability a small-business SEO retainer should produce.
- Field guide · August 12, 2026
WooCommerce or Shopify for a CBD store?
A practical platform decision for hemp and CBD operators, based on payment risk, catalog complexity, ownership, content, internal skill, and the real cost of switching later.
- Field guide · July 11, 2026
How to tell if your marketing agency is actually working
A ten-point checklist any business owner can run in an afternoon to find out whether a marketing retainer is earning its invoice. No technical skill required.
- Dispatch · September 21, 2026
What you are buying when you pay a freelancer by their passport
Freelancers in developing countries earn 60 percent less than their developed-country peers for the same tasks, and about a third of the spread in pay rates traces to the country on the passport rather than the skill. From a studio in Bengaluru that charges first-world prices, the numbers, the accounts from both sides of the invoice, and the arithmetic on what living costs can and cannot explain.
- Dispatch · September 20, 2026
We replaced a 30,000 rupee a month CRM with 469 lines of Node
How a lead gets from a form on this site to Falcon's phone with no CRM, no email service and no account anywhere. What broke first, the two rules we kept, and what it cost.
Asked by almost everyone.
We already work with an agency.
Keep them, at least for now. The Foothold works as a second opinion: an independent audit of the work you're already paying for, from people who do that work daily. If the report says your agency is doing well, that's worth knowing and worth the price. We never trash the incumbent; the audit speaks for itself. There's also a self-check you can run today, free: how to tell if your marketing agency is actually working.
What does this actually cost?
The ranges on this page are real and current: retainers mostly between $1,000 and $5,000 a month depending on the service, projects from $6,000, and the Foothold at $1,500 to $2,500. A proposal turns those into exact options after we've talked, because an honest price depends on scope, and scope is a conversation.
How do payments work?
USD invoices on standard rails, monthly for retainers and milestone-based for projects. Nothing on this site takes a card, and nobody will push a payment link at you before a proposal exists.
What if we want to stop?
Pause or cancel any month. There are no annual contracts and no exit fees, and everything we built, along with your accounts and your data, stays with you. We keep clients by being worth keeping.
Can you really market a cannabis-adjacent product?
Yes, within US legal limits, and we have for years: hemp-derived products, vapes, gummies, beverages, terpenes. That includes Google Ads, which we have run on these keywords for StandardCBD and Terplandia. Search, retention and a store that converts grow beside the ads. The channel-by-channel picture is written up in marketing CBD when the ad platforms say no.
Who actually does the work?
The same small team that builds the studio's own products. There is no account-manager relay and no outsourced content farm. You talk to the people whose hands are on your site, and we keep the roster short so that stays true.
Tell us what growth looks like.
A sentence or two about your business is enough to start. We reply the same working day, Monday to Friday. If we're not the right fit, we'll say so and point you somewhere better.
Prefer to talk first? Book a 30-minute fit call. Thirty minutes on Google Meet, Monday to Friday, to find out whether we are the right shop for the job. No deck, no pitch.
A presence that sounds like you.
We keep your business showing up on social with a voice people recognize as yours.
Most business social is content nobody asked for, posted on a schedule nobody keeps. We build a lighter system: a voice worth reading, a cadence you can actually sustain, and creative that doesn't look like a template.
We run our own accounts on the same system we sell. The art starts from real captures of the product, the captions get edited like prose, and every post is placed by hand. The workflow is documented, but client systems stay rooted in the accounts and tools they own.
$ node scripts/build-shot-card.mjs --shot play-orbit-01
- Every image starts from a real capture of the product, framed by one command. No model-rendered scenes, no stock.
- Typography is set in HTML, never drawn by a model, so a headline is never misspelled.
- Captions drafted like prose, then swept for machine tells before anything ships. Posted by hand, no scheduler.
Judge it live: x.com/MadmaxLabsSocial systems run $1,000 to $2,500 a month, depending on cadence and how much creative we originate.
If you want daily volume and trend-chasing, we're the wrong shop. This is for businesses that would rather post three good things a week than ten forgettable ones.