SEO consulting is advice for people who already do the SEO work, or pay someone else to. You might have an in-house marketer, a content team, a developer or an agency on a retainer. I work alongside them: setting priorities, checking plans before they ship, answering the questions they are stuck on and saying plainly what I would stop doing. The work stays with your team; the judgement is what you buy.
If you would rather have one fixed piece of analysis, a full SEO audit with a written action plan is the better fit. Consulting is for what comes after the plan, when decisions keep arriving and nobody in the building has the experience to make them with confidence.
When advice is worth more than extra hands
A stalled SEO programme is rarely short of effort. It is usually short of direction. A team publishes two articles a week that target terms the site can never win. A developer ships a template change that quietly removes the internal links to every product page. An agency reports on rankings for phrases no customer types, while enquiries from search fall month on month.
None of those problems is fixed by adding another pair of hands. They are fixed by someone who can look at the site, the data and the plan together and say which three things matter this quarter and which twenty can wait. That takes senior attention, not a full-time role.
Who it suits, and who it does not
Consulting tends to work for:
- in-house marketing teams at UK businesses where SEO is one job among many and nobody owns it fully;
- businesses paying an SEO agency who want an independent view of the work, the reporting and the bill;
- product and development teams who need SEO sign-off on releases, redesigns or a platform change;
- agencies that are strong on paid media or design and want a specialist to call on for their clients’ organic search questions.
It is a poor fit when nobody has time to carry out the advice. Recommendations that sit in a shared drive change nothing, and a small business with no one to act on them is usually better served by having the technical work done for them. It is also more than you need if you are only starting to learn how search works; my SEO guide for UK small businesses is free and covers the basics in order.
What SEO consulting covers
Strategy and priorities
I help you decide what to work on and in what order, based on where search demand is, what the site can realistically compete for and what each page is meant to do for the business. Where the groundwork is missing, that usually means keyword research mapped to one page per term before anyone writes another word.
A second opinion on agency or in-house work
I read the monthly reports, the content plans and the technical recommendations and tell you which parts are sound and which are busywork. I ask for read-only access to Google Search Console and analytics, so nothing changes without your say.
Reviews before changes go live
Redesigns, new navigation, a move to Shopify or a headless build: these are the moments a site most often loses its search traffic. I review specifications and staging sites before release, and for anything bigger than a template change I would plan it as a proper website migration, with redirects mapped and checked.
Problem-solving when something breaks
Traffic drops after a Google core update, pages that fall out of the index, two pages competing for the same query: I look at the evidence, separate cause from coincidence and tell your team what to change first.
Coaching the people doing the work
Short working sessions with your writers, marketers or developers, built around your own site rather than generic training slides. The aim is that they need me less over time.
How an engagement runs
- A free first call. You tell me what the team is doing, what is not working and who would act on the advice. I tell you honestly whether consulting is the right shape for it.
- Access and a baseline review. Read-only access to Search Console, GA4 and any SEO tools you already pay for, then a review of the site and the current plan so my advice starts from the evidence.
- A short priority list. The few changes I would make first, why, and who on your side should own each one.
- Regular sessions. Calls at a frequency agreed before work starts, plus questions by email in between, to review progress and deal with new decisions as they come up.
- A check on outcomes, not activity. At agreed review points we look at enquiries and sales from organic search, not just rankings, and reset the priorities.
Fractional SEO for larger teams
Some organisations need more than occasional advice but not a full-time head of SEO. A fractional arrangement means I take on that role for an agreed share of each month: owning the roadmap, briefing the agency and developers, joining planning meetings and reporting to leadership in terms they care about.
It suits businesses with a large or complex site, several people touching it and nobody accountable for organic search. It also works as a bridge while you recruit a permanent head of SEO.
Problems I am asked about most often
- Pages competing with each other. Keyword cannibalisation is common on sites that have published for years without a map of which page owns which term.
- Content that does not match intent. Long guides written for terms where people want a price or a local provider. Understanding search intent usually changes the plan more than any other single idea.
- Reports that measure the wrong thing. Rankings and impressions rise while leads stay flat, because nobody has connected organic visits to enquiries.
- Agency work nobody can evaluate. Link building, monthly blog posts and technical fixes billed without a clear reason or a way to see the effect.
What you receive
- A written priority list after the baseline review, updated at each agreed review point.
- Notes after every session: what we decided, who owns it and by when.
- Answers to questions between sessions, with the response time agreed before work starts.
- Written sign-off or concerns on releases, briefs and agency proposals you send me.
Fees and next step
Each consulting engagement is quoted individually in pounds after a free first call or a free SEO audit, and the scope and fee are agreed in writing before work starts. Before we agree anything, I will tell you if a one-off audit or a smaller piece of work would do the job instead.
If you are comparing options, my article on choosing an agency or consultant lists the questions worth asking anyone you are considering, including me. When you are ready, book a free first call and tell me what your team is working on.