SEO Consulting services

Most people who search "hire SEO consultant" have already been burned by a retainer that produced a monthly PDF and nothing else. Here's the actual sequence I run, so you know what happens and when.

1. Discovery call (week 0). I look at your analytics, Search Console, current rankings and business model before we speak, not during. You get a shortlist of what's obviously wrong within 48 hours — no NDA needed to see that.
2. Full audit (weeks 1-2). Crawl, indexation, site architecture, content gaps, backlink profile, and — increasingly — how the site performs in AI Overviews and answer engines, since that traffic behaves differently to classic organic. You receive a prioritised document, not a 90-page scan dump.
3. Strategy & roadmap (week 2-3). Priorities ranked by effort vs impact, tied to your actual revenue model — ecommerce category pages, SaaS product-led pages, B2B lead-gen content, or local landing pages. This is the document your team or developers work from for the next 2-3 quarters.
4. Execution (ongoing). I either implement directly (CMS access, ticket queues, PR reviews with your dev team) or hand off tightly scoped briefs your team executes. Both models work; the difference is speed.
5. Technical fixes (parallel track). Crawl budget, log files, rendering, structured data, Core Web Vitals — the stuff that blocks everything else from working, run alongside content and links rather than after them.
6. Reporting & iteration (monthly). Rankings, indexation health, traffic by intent, and — where relevant — visibility in AI answers. See the measurement section below for what actually goes into that report.

"SEO consultant services" isn't one job. The playbook for a store with 40,000 SKUs is not the playbook for a SaaS product with twelve landing pages and a comparison-page problem.

As an ecommerce SEO consultant, most of my time goes into faceted navigation, category-page cannibalisation, out-of-stock handling, and product feed hygiene — the stuff that quietly kills crawl budget at scale. Kazautocert went from zero organic leads to 4-5 a day and 80% of tracked keywords in Top-10 largely because we fixed structural issues before touching content volume.

As a SaaS SEO consultant, the work skews toward product-led content, comparison and alternative pages, and increasingly making sure the product shows up correctly when someone asks ChatGPT or Perplexity "what's the best tool for X" — that's AI search visibility, not classic ranking, and it needs a different content structure (see how to rank in ChatGPT).

As a B2B SEO consultant, the constraint is usually sales-cycle-aligned content and internal politics around who owns the blog, not technical debt. LSM Express reached Top-10 for competitive courier queries in Moscow within six months by treating local + service pages as a single funnel rather than separate projects — the same logic applies to most B2B local-plus-national setups (see the local SEO service and the local SEO checklist).

Every business trying to decide whether to hire an SEO consultant, go to an agency, or hire in-house asks the same underlying question: who's actually doing the work, and how fast can it move.

None of these is objectively "best" — a freelance SEO consultant makes sense when you need senior-level decisions without agency overhead; an in-house hire makes sense once SEO work is genuinely full-time; agencies make sense when you need SEO bundled with paid, social and design under one roof.

This works well for ecommerce stores with real product data and margin to protect, SaaS companies past their first few thousand monthly visitors, B2B companies with a genuine sales funnel behind the content, and small businesses that need a small business SEO consultant who won't sell them a 40-page technical audit they'll never action.

It does not work for businesses expecting rankings without any content or dev resourcing on their side — I can write the roadmap, but somebody has to build the pages. It's also not the right fit if you want a single fixed-fee "do my SEO and disappear" arrangement with zero involvement; consulting means you're in the loop, reviewing priorities monthly, not annually.

If your actual problem is generative-engine visibility rather than classic rankings — you're invisible in AI Overviews or absent from ChatGPT and Perplexity answers — that's a related but distinct discipline. Worth reading GEO vs SEO or AEO vs SEO before you commission a project, so we scope the right one.

The same handful of failures show up on almost every audit, regardless of industry.

• Strategy without execution capacity. A roadmap sitting in a shared drive because nobody owns implementation. I flag this at the strategy stage now, not after three months of nothing shipping.
• Technical debt treated as a one-off project. Crawl and indexation issues get "fixed" once and then quietly regress after the next CMS update. A technical SEO consultant should be checking this monthly, not annually.
• Content built for keywords, not for the funnel. Pages rank, nobody converts, because they were built to hit a search volume number rather than answer a buyer's actual question.
• Link building that ignores how AI search sources citations. Directory-stuffed link profiles that did nothing for rankings in 2019 do even less for AI-answer citation today — see link building that survives AI search and the link building service for what actually still works.
• No baseline before the engagement starts. Without a documented starting position, nobody can prove impact six months later — which is exactly why step one of my process is always a proper audit, not a sales pitch.

Rankings alone are a vanity metric now — a page can rank and still get zero clicks because an AI Overview answered the query above it. So reporting covers three layers, not one.

First, classic visibility: rankings by keyword cluster, organic sessions and conversions by landing-page type, and indexation health from Search Console and log files. Second, AI-answer visibility: whether your brand and pages get cited in ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google's AI Overviews for the queries that matter — a growing share of research-stage traffic never reaches a results page at all (background in how to show up in AI Overviews). Third, business outcomes: leads, qualified demo requests, or revenue by channel, because a ranking that doesn't move a business metric isn't a result.

Reports come monthly, are short enough to read in ten minutes, and always tie back to the roadmap set at the strategy stage — so you can see exactly which priority produced which movement, rather than a wall of metrics with no causal story attached.