SEO
SEO Consulting
Most SEO problems I am called in for are not really SEO problems. They are a site that publishes into a structure search engines cannot reward, a business that has never written down what it is actually better at, or an agency relationship where nobody senior has looked at the account in months.
Working with a consultant directly changes one thing above all: the person doing the analysis is the person you talk to. There is no translation layer between the finding and the decision, and nothing gets softened on the way to you.
Seventeen years, across fifteen countries, mostly business-to-business and mostly in categories where the buyer is technical.
What the engagement usually finds
The recurring diagnosis, in rough order of frequency.
No commercial pages. The site has a blog and a contact form and nothing in between. Buyers searching with intent land nowhere, because the page they wanted was never built.
Effort aimed at unwinnable terms. Months spent on head terms owned by companies with a hundred times the authority, while low-difficulty commercial terms sit unclaimed.
Reporting that hides the truth. Brand searches counted alongside non-brand, so a flat programme looks like growth. Separating them is often an uncomfortable half hour.
Technical faults nobody owns. Redirect chains, wrong status codes, pages canonicalising to the wrong place. Individually small, collectively decisive.
How I work
Direct, and deliberately narrow. I take a small number of engagements so the person who audited the site is the person doing the work.
Every finding comes with the evidence attached. If I say a page is broken, the report shows the request and the response. If I say a term is winnable, it shows the difficulty and who currently ranks. This matters because SEO advice is easy to assert and hard to check, and a recommendation you cannot verify is one you should not act on.
Where something is better done by your own team, I say so rather than expanding the engagement.
Measured on enquiries
Rankings are an input. Traffic is an input. The output is qualified enquiries, and the reporting is built around that.
This matters more since answers started appearing above the results. A page can hold position and lose clicks. A query can gain impressions and produce nothing. Reporting on position alone now actively conceals what is happening, which is why the first report usually separates brand from non-brand and surprises people.
What the first month covers
Week one is measurement: a full crawl, the current position for every query that matters, the brand versus non-brand split, and what the analytics are actually recording. That last check catches more problems than it should, since a surprising number of sites cannot attribute an enquiry to a page at all.
Week two is diagnosis, with the evidence attached to every finding. Week three is the plan, priced against difficulty, including an explicit list of things not worth doing. Week four starts the highest return item, which is usually either a technical fix that was blocking everything or the first commercial page the site never had.
You get the audit and the plan as documents you keep, whether or not the engagement continues.
Who this suits, and who it does not
It suits a business with something specific to sell, a decision maker who can approve changes without a committee, and a willingness to hear that some of the current activity is not working.
It suits less well a business that needs a large volume of content produced on a schedule, which is an agency job and better priced as one. It also suits poorly a situation where the site cannot be changed without a quarterly release cycle, since most of the early value comes from fixing things quickly.
Whether to talk
The first conversation is short and costs nothing. It usually covers what the site is doing now, what you have already tried, and what you are actually measuring.
A reasonable share of those end with a recommendation that is not an engagement: a technical fix your developer can do in an afternoon, or a reporting change that reveals the programme is working better than it looked. Those are useful outcomes and they are why the conversation comes before any proposal.
What the engagement includes
- A technical and structural audit. Crawl, index and status-code analysis with evidence attached to every finding, ordered by what is blocking revenue.
- Demand mapping priced against difficulty. What your buyers search, what it would take to win each cluster, and an honest recommendation about which to skip.
- Commercial page architecture. The service, product and comparison pages that intent-heavy queries expect, specified so they can be built by whoever is cheapest.
- Direct working. You work with me. No account manager, no junior executing a template, no translation between the analysis and the decision.
- Reporting on enquiries. Brand separated from non-brand, position tracked per commercial query rather than averaged, and enquiries as the headline.
How the work runs
- Audit with evidence. Every finding carries the check that produced it, so you can verify rather than trust.
- Price the demand. Map clusters to difficulty before committing, and say which ones are not worth the fight.
- Fix foundations. Clear the technical blockers before publishing anything new.
- Build the commercial layer. The pages intent-heavy queries expect, specified in enough detail to be built by anyone.
- Report honestly. Brand split out, enquiries as the headline, and the things that did not work reported alongside the things that did.
Proof
Two worked examples with numbers: industrial distribution and fleet software.
Related
Talk about your situation
The first conversation is short and mostly questions. Get in touch and tell me what you are trying to fix. Or see how this is priced.
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
What does an SEO consultant do that an agency does not?
You work with the person doing the analysis. In most agency arrangements the senior person sells the work and a junior executes a template, with an account manager in between. A consultant is a smaller amount of senior attention rather than a larger amount of junior effort, which suits a business that needs decisions more than volume.
How much does an SEO consultant cost?
It varies widely with scope and market. Rather than publish a figure that would be wrong for most enquiries, the engagement shapes and what each includes are set out on the pricing page, and a scoped quote follows a conversation about what you actually need.
How long before SEO produces results?
Technical fixes can move things within weeks. New commercial pages typically take two to four months to settle into position, longer in competitive categories. Anything promising results in thirty days is either describing a technical fix that was already overdue or is not being straight with you.
Do you work with businesses outside your country?
Yes. The work has been remote across fifteen countries for years, mostly with businesses in the United States, the United Kingdom and the United Arab Emirates. What matters is a defined point of contact who can make decisions, not a shared time zone.
What do you need from us to start?
Search Console and analytics access, someone who can approve changes to the site, and an honest account of what has already been tried. The third matters more than it sounds, since repeating work that failed for a reason nobody recorded is a common way to waste a first quarter.
Do you offer one-off audits or only ongoing work?
Both, and a one-off audit is often the better opening. It ends with a document you keep and a plan you can execute yourself or hand to someone else. Ongoing work suits a business that wants the plan executed and the measurement maintained, rather than one that mainly needs to know what is wrong.