SEO CONSULTING · STRATEGY, AUDIT & DIRECTION
SEO Consulting — Strategy and Direction Before Anyone Touches Your Website
Audit · Strategy · Roadmap · Ongoing Advice
Most SEO problems are not really SEO problems. They are decisions taken in the wrong order — a blog started before anyone checked what people search for, a redesign signed off before anyone looked at which pages earn the traffic, an agency hired to do work nobody has scoped.
SEO consulting is the part that comes first. I look at your site, your data and the people you compete with, and I tell you where the growth actually is. Then I write down what to do about it, in the order that makes the most difference for the least effort.
That matters in two situations. Either you do not yet know what you should be doing, or you are about to spend real money — on an agency, a writer, a developer, a rebuild — and you want to spend it on the right thing first.
You keep everything I produce. The audit, the research, the roadmap and the measurement setup are yours, and they stay useful whether I do the work afterwards, your team does, or somebody else does.
GET YOUR FREE SEO STRATEGY REVIEW
Where your traffic actually comes from
What competitors are winning
Which pages deserve investment
What is blocking growth right now
The order to fix things in
Send me your site and I will look at it myself, then reply with what I find. No obligation.
5+
YEARS EXPERIENCE
350+
PROJECTS COMPLETED
340+
HAPPY CLIENTS
98%+
CLIENT SATISFACTION
THE BASICS
What an SEO consultant actually does
An SEO consultant is not a supplier of deliverables. The job is to work out what is true about your site and your market, decide what matters, and make sure the work that follows is the right work.
So the output is a decision, not a package. Some engagements end with a long list of technical fixes. Others end with “stop writing blog posts and fix your service pages first”. I do not know which one you need until I have looked at your site and your numbers.
Consulting also carries on after the plan is written. Plans meet reality — a developer says no, a page does not move, a competitor changes tack. Somebody senior has to keep making the call.
Diagnosis
Work out what is actually wrong before doing anything. I use your Search Console and analytics data rather than assumptions, and separate the problems costing you money from the ones that only look untidy.
Prioritisation
There is always more to do than there is time for. I rank the work by the size of the opportunity against the effort it takes, so the first month goes on the things that actually change the position.
Direction
A plan somebody can follow: what to do, who does it, in what order, and what each piece is meant to achieve. Written for your team to act on, not for another SEO to admire.
Accountability
Someone to check the work against the plan, question the numbers and say plainly when something is not working. Most SEO drifts because nobody senior is watching it week to week.
WHAT I DO
SEO consulting services
Engagements vary. Some clients want one audit and a roadmap they can run themselves. Others want a day a month for as long as the project lasts. These are the pieces I put together, in whatever combination the situation calls for.
SEO Audit & Diagnosis
Find out what is actually holding the site back.
I go through the site the way a search engine does and the way a customer does, then check both against your own data. The output is a ranked list of problems, each with a note on what it is costing you and what it takes to fix.
- Crawl and index review
- Technical and on-page issues found and ranked
- Content and keyword coverage gaps
- Backlink and authority snapshot
- Fix list ordered by impact against effort
Keyword & Market Research
Know what your market searches for, and what it is worth.
Keyword research is market research. I map the demand around what you sell, group it by what the searcher is trying to do, and work out which of it you can realistically compete for now rather than later.
- Full keyword set for your market
- Grouped by search intent
- Difficulty and realistic-to-win assessment
- Mapped to existing or new pages
- Priority terms for the first phase
Competitor Analysis
See what your competitors are winning, and why.
I look at who ranks above you, what they rank for, and what they have done to get there. Often the useful finding is a gap — a topic they all cover and you do not, or one they all ignore.
- Who your real search competitors are
- The terms they win and you do not
- Their content and site structure
- Their link and authority position
- Where the gaps are worth taking
SEO Strategy & Roadmap
One plan, in order, that your team can follow.
This is the main deliverable. It sets out what to do over the coming months, why each piece is on the list, and what has to happen first. It is written plainly, so a founder or a marketer can act on it without an SEO in the room.
- Priorities for the next quarter and beyond
- Each task with its reasoning and expected effect
- An owner and rough effort per item
- Dependencies and sequencing
- A version your team can work from
Content Strategy & Planning
Decide what to write, and what not to write.
Most content programmes fail on selection, not on writing. I decide which pages should exist, what each one is for, and which existing pages should be improved, merged or removed instead of adding more.
- Page-level content plan
- Briefs for the pages that matter most
- Existing content: keep, improve, merge or remove
- Internal linking plan
- A publishing order that builds on itself
Site Structure & Information Architecture
Organise the site so people and search engines both follow it.
How pages are grouped and linked decides a lot about what ranks. I review your URL structure, navigation and internal links, then design a structure that makes your most important pages the easiest to reach.
- Review of current structure and navigation
- Proposed page hierarchy and URLs
- Internal linking rules your team can apply
- Handling of thin or duplicated sections
- Redirect plan when pages move
Analytics & Measurement Review
Trust your numbers before you make decisions with them.
A lot of SEO reporting measures the wrong thing, or the same thing twice. I check that your Google Analytics 4 and Search Console setup records what actually matters — enquiries, sales, calls — and fix the reporting so you can see whether the plan is working.
- GA4 and Search Console configuration check
- Conversion and event tracking review
- Google Tag Manager tidy-up where needed
- A reporting view built around outcomes
- What to look at monthly, and what to ignore
Team Training & Workshops
Leave your team able to do the work without me.
If you have a marketer or a writer in-house, training them is often better value than doing the work for them. I run sessions on your own site and your own data, so it stays practical rather than theoretical.
- Sessions built around your site
- Keyword research and brief writing
- On-page and technical basics for non-specialists
- How to read the reports properly
- Written notes your team keeps
Retained / Fractional SEO Advice
A senior head on the project, without a full-time hire.
Some businesses need continuity more than they need a one-off project. On a retainer I stay across the work: review what has been done, answer questions as they come up, and adjust the plan when the situation changes.
- Regular review calls
- Feedback on work before it ships
- Ongoing prioritisation as things change
- A named person to ask
- Quarterly reset of the roadmap
White-Label Consulting for Agencies
Senior SEO thinking behind your agency’s name.
Agencies sometimes need audit and strategy depth they do not have in-house on a particular account. I work behind the scenes: you present the work as yours, and I stay out of the client relationship unless you want me in it.
- Audits and strategies under your brand
- A second opinion on a difficult account
- Support on pitches and scoping
- Training for your delivery team
- Discreet, and on your terms
WHY IT FAILS
Why SEO strategies do not work
I usually get called in after something has already gone wrong: a year of blog posts with nothing to show for it, an agency quietly dropped, a rebuild that halved the traffic. The causes repeat.
None of these are technical failures. They are failures of sequence, priority and agreement, and they are all avoidable at the start.
Tactics bought before a diagnosis
Links, blog posts, a technical sprint — bought because somebody sold them, not because anyone checked they were the constraint. If your service pages target nothing in particular, none of it helps.
Everything is priority one
A ninety-item audit with no order is not a plan. Teams do the easy items, the hard and important ones stay untouched, and six months later the position is the same.
Strategy written, never implemented
A good document that nobody owns. If the plan does not name who does each thing and what it displaces, it loses every week to whatever is more urgent.
Nobody agreed what success means
If the goal was never defined, any result can be argued either way. Rankings improved but enquiries did not. Traffic fell but revenue rose. Agree the measure before the work starts.
Advice that ignores the business model
A plan built for a high-volume ecommerce brand applied to a business that sells three contracts a year. Margin, sales cycle and delivery capacity all change what is worth chasing.
Reporting on rankings instead of revenue
Rankings are an input. They move about, they differ by user, and a page can rank better while earning less. If the report never reaches enquiries or sales, it is not telling you whether this is working.
WHO IT IS FOR
Who SEO consulting suits
Consulting suits people who have a decision to make. If you already know exactly what needs doing and only need hands, hire hands. If you are not sure, or you are about to commit a budget, this is the cheaper mistake to avoid.
Businesses with an in-house marketer
Founders doing SEO themselves
Companies about to hire an agency
Companies unhappy with an agency
Sites that have plateaued
Sites planning a redesign
Startups choosing a niche
Ecommerce brands
Service businesses
Multi-location businesses
Publishers and content sites
Agencies needing a senior second opinion
If you are not on this list, tell me anyway. Half of a first conversation is working out whether search is even the right channel for what you sell. Sometimes it is not, and I would rather say so than take the work.
MY APPROACH
How I work through a consulting engagement
The order matters more than any single step. Every engagement runs roughly like this, compressed or extended to fit the project and the budget.
01
Understand the business
First I want to know what you sell, what a customer is worth, how they decide, and what your team can realistically deliver. SEO advice that ignores margin and capacity is just noise.
02
Baseline the data
Then I look at what is actually happening: Search Console, Google Analytics 4, what ranks, what converts. I need an honest starting point, because everything claimed later gets checked against it.
03
Audit the site
A full pass over the site — technical, content, structure and links — noting each problem and how big it is. I separate what is costing you traffic now from what is merely untidy.
04
Study the competition
I look at who is winning and what they did to get there. This is where the realistic ceiling comes from: what it takes to compete for a term, and whether you can get there this year.
05
Build the roadmap
Everything gets ranked by likely return against effort, then turned into a sequence with owners attached. You get the reasoning as well as the list, so you can argue with it.
06
Agree how we measure
We decide up front what success looks like and where it will be visible. Usually that means fixing the tracking first, so the numbers we discuss in three months are real ones.
07
Review and adjust
Plans meet reality. We review what happened, keep what worked, drop what did not, and reorder the rest. On a longer engagement that review is where most of the value sits.
WHY ME
Why work with me on this
You are hiring a person rather than an account. Here is what that actually changes day to day.
You work with me directly
No account manager relaying your questions to somebody you never meet. The person who looks at your data is the person you talk to about it.
Decisions come from your data
Recommendations come from your Search Console, your analytics and your market — not from a checklist applied to every site that walks through the door.
A prioritised plan, not a list
Everything I hand over is in order, with the reasoning attached, so you can start on Monday and know why you are starting there rather than somewhere else.
You keep the deliverables
Audits, research, briefs, roadmaps and reporting views are yours to keep and reuse, whether or not we carry on working together afterwards.
Plain language throughout
I explain what I found, what I would do and what I am not sure about, without hiding behind jargon. If you cannot repeat it to your board, I have not explained it properly.
I will say when it is not worth it
If search is not where your growth is, or the plan needs a budget you do not have, I would rather say so early than take the work and disappoint you six months later.
RESULTS
What good SEO consulting changes
I will not put a percentage on your results before seeing your site. Anyone who does is guessing — they have not seen your market, your competition or your starting point.
What I can describe is the change in how decisions get made. On the left, what you end up holding. On the right, what changes in how you work afterwards.
- Clarity on where growth is realistically going to come from
- A ranked plan with the reasoning behind every item
- Keyword and competitor research you can reuse
- Content and structure decisions already made
- A measurement setup you actually trust
- A clear view of what is not worth doing
- Effort spent on pages that can actually win
- Fewer competing priorities pulling the team apart
- Decisions you can explain to whoever signs the budget
- Less money spent on things that were never going to work
- A way to tell whether the work is paying off
- Agencies and freelancers briefed properly, and held to it
How much of this shows up as traffic and revenue depends on where you start, how competitive your market is, and how much of the plan actually gets done. A solid site with one blocking problem can move quickly. A new site in a crowded market will not. I would rather tell you which of those you are before you spend anything.
TOOLING
What I use on this work
Tools do not make the decisions, but they are where the evidence comes from. These are the ones I lean on for consulting work. Your own data matters more than any third-party estimate, so Search Console and analytics come first and the rest fill in the gaps.
Google Search Console
Google Analytics 4
Semrush
Ahrefs
Screaming Frog
Looker Studio
Microsoft Clarity
Google Tag Manager
Bing Webmaster Tools
ChatGPT
FAQ
SEO consulting questions, answered
I work out what is stopping your site from growing, decide what to do about it, and put that work in order. In practice this means an audit, keyword and competitor research, and a roadmap your team can follow. The job is the diagnosis and the prioritisation — the implementation afterwards may be mine, yours, or a third party’s.
They solve different problems. An agency gives you delivery capacity across several skills at once. An in-house hire gives you somebody with the time to learn your business properly. A consultant gives you senior judgement on demand, which is usually what you want before committing to either of the other two — or to get more out of the one you already have.
An audit with the problems ranked, keyword and competitor research, a roadmap with the reasoning behind each item, and a measurement setup so you can tell whether it is working. It is written so somebody who is not an SEO can act on it, and all of it is yours to keep whether we carry on or not.
It varies, and anyone giving you an exact date is guessing. Fixing something that is actively blocking pages can show up within weeks. Earning rankings for competitive terms with new content usually takes months, and depends on how much of the plan actually gets done. What I can tell you early is which of those two situations you are in, so you can plan the budget around it.
Both are possible. On some projects I do the technical and on-page work myself. On others my job is the plan and the review, and your team or your existing suppliers carry it out. We agree which it is at the start, because it changes the scope, the timeline and the cost.
Yes, and it is a common arrangement. I set the direction and review the work; they deliver it. It works best when everybody knows I am there to make the work more effective rather than to mark anyone’s homework, so I would rather be introduced openly than brought in quietly.
More at the start than later. I need access to Search Console and analytics, a proper conversation about how the business makes money, and somebody who can answer questions about the site. After that it depends on who is implementing — if it is your team, the plan is only as good as the time you can give it.
Yes. I can produce audits and strategies under your brand, or act as a senior second opinion on an account that is not moving. I stay out of the client relationship unless you want me in the room, and how you present the work is entirely up to you.
RELATED SERVICES
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Turning the keyword and content decisions into pages that actually target something specific.
Local SEO
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AI Search / AEO / GEO
Being cited by AI answers and assistants, as well as ranking in traditional search results.
Find out where the growth actually is
Send me your website and tell me what you sell. I will look at it properly — the pages, your data if you share it, and who you are up against — and reply with where I think the opportunity is and what I would do first. If I think search is the wrong place for your budget, I will tell you that instead. No obligation either way.