SEO Strategy Consulting

The work

Every strategy consulting engagement is built around a single question: what will actually move this business in search? The answer is different for every client, but the work to get there covers the full scope of SEO — keyword research, on-page recommendations, technical audits, content strategy, link building, and reporting — prioritized to the handful of things that matter most for your business right now, not a list of best practices copy-pasted from a template.

What that looks like, concretely, is a set of deliverables you can actually use:

• Keyword research grounded in how your customers actually search — and how AI assistants are increasingly answering on their behalf.
• On-page optimization recommendations with the exact title tags, meta descriptions, headings, and copy changes — not “improve your H1s.”
• Technical recommendations written clearly enough that your developers don’t need to guess what you’re asking for.
• Content briefs your writers can run with, mapped to real search demand and real business goals.
• Regular reporting that tells you what changed, why it changed, and what we’re doing about it.

The scope shifts with your priorities, your competitive situation, and where the opportunity is. What doesn’t shift is how the work gets handed over: specific, prioritized, and clear enough to act on.

Search has changed — AI Overviews, ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity now sit alongside traditional Google results in the customer journey. That’s factored into the strategy throughout, not treated as a separate line item.

Who I work with

Small-to-mid-sized businesses, marketing teams, and agencies with some internal resources — writers, developers, designers, or outside partners — to help carry the work forward.

A few of the most common scenarios:

In-house marketing teams at established companies that have the people and budget to execute, but don’t have deep SEO specialization on staff. I slot in as the senior SEO partner — bringing the thinking, deliverables, and ongoing strategy a full-time hire would, without the cost or commitment of one.

Founders and operators running leaner teams who own the marketing function personally or with a small group. They need an experienced partner to lead the SEO thinking and produce the kind of deliverables their people — or outside contractors — can actually put into action.

Agencies and marketing partners who need an SEO specialist as part of their client work. Most often I’m introduced openly as the SEO partner and work directly alongside the agency’s client-facing team; occasionally the engagement runs behind the scenes. Either way: I do the SEO, the agency owns the client relationship.

How engagements run

Most of my strategy consulting work is retainer-based, with a smaller amount of project work for specific, defined-scope needs.

Retainers

A monthly retainer is where most of my clients land, and it’s where the work compounds. Each month typically includes a steady stream of deliverables — keyword research, on-page and technical recommendations, content briefs, and reporting — prioritized to what will move your business most that month, plus an hour-long working call to review progress, align on priorities, and map what’s next. Email support in between.

Retainer scope is sized to the situation. A larger website, a more competitive space, or a more aggressive growth timeline all mean more hours of work each month — most often in the form of more content briefs, faster technical follow-through, and deeper keyword and competitive research. Smaller engagements can be leaner and still move the needle.

Projects

Occasionally a business needs a specific, one-time piece of work rather than an ongoing partnership. Projects tend to fall into a handful of shapes:

• A technical audit of an existing website
• On-page optimization recommendations across a defined set of pages
• A content strategy or editorial plan
• Pre- or post-launch SEO for a site migration or redesign
• A competitive analysis or keyword landscape review

Projects are scoped and priced upfront based on the work involved. Some clients engage on a project first and move into a retainer afterward; others do the project and move on. Both are fine.

How I approach the work

Everything I recommend is grounded in proven SEO best practices and aligned with how search engines — traditional and AI-powered — actually want to rank and cite content. That means the work compounds over time instead of getting undone by the next algorithm update or AI model retraining.

What it doesn’t mean is chasing tactics just because they’re working this quarter. The shortcuts that spike fastest tend to collapse fastest — sometimes taking the site with them. I’d rather recommend something that still works in two years than something that peaks in six months.

And it means the content we produce tends to earn links, brand mentions, and citations on its own — because it’s genuinely useful to the people searching — rather than through outreach campaigns or link schemes that don’t age well.

What you can expect

Engagements are built to deliver in two ways: results you can measure, and a working relationship you’d actually want to repeat.

The results

• Growth in the right kind of traffic. Rankings and visibility improvements focused on the searches and AI queries that actually matter to your business — not vanity keywords that inflate reports but don’t drive revenue.
• Visibility across traditional and AI-powered search. Your brand showing up where your customers are already looking — Google, ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, AI Overviews — because the work is built for how search actually happens now.
• Conversions and revenue, not just rankings. The point isn’t traffic on a chart. It’s leads, sales, and customers coming in because the right people are finding you at the right time.

The relationship

• Clear communication, no surprises. Regular reporting you’ll actually read, direct answers to direct questions, and a working partnership where you always know where things stand.
• An advisor who’s invested in your business. I take on a small number of clients for a reason — every engagement gets real thought, real attention, and a consultant who genuinely wants the work to pay off for you.
• An SEO education that stays with your team. SEO stops being a black box. By the end of an engagement, your team understands what moved the needle, why, and how to think about it going forward.

Questions I get asked

What if I don’t have a marketing team or outside partners to execute?

Strategy without execution doesn’t move the needle, and I don’t want to waste your time or mine pretending otherwise. If there’s genuinely no one — in-house or contracted — to carry the work forward, this probably isn’t a fit. That said, “team” doesn’t have to mean staff. Freelancers, dev shops, and content partners all count. We can talk through what you have during our initial call and see if it works.

Do you ever handle implementation directly — making site changes, writing content?

I don’t make developer-level site changes or write content personally. I produce the plan and the deliverables; your team or partners handle the doing.

What does a retainer actually look like month-to-month?

Each month centers on a core deliverable, an hour-long working call to review progress and align on priorities, and email support in between. The first few months typically look like this: keyword research in month one, on-page optimization in month two, a technical audit in month three (often combined into month two for smaller sites), and content development in month four — with reporting at the end of every month. That order shifts based on what your site needs most.

How long does a typical engagement last?

Retainers have a 6-month minimum commitment up front, then shift to month-to-month after that. In practice, the large majority of clients stay on for at least a couple of years — and the longest currently active relationship is over 10 years, still technically month-to-month from the original 6-month agreement. I haven’t needed to push renewal contracts because the work compounds and the relationships tend to keep delivering.

Do you offer AEO or GEO services?

Not as a standalone service. AEO (Answer Engine Optimization) and GEO (Generative Engine Optimization) are baked into every engagement — the same strategy that earns rankings in traditional search increasingly earns brand mentions and citations in ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, and AI Overviews. As part of reporting, I track AI visibility for your brand and your top competitors, analyze which content is actually being cited in AI responses, and use those insights to inform our content strategy going forward.

How do you measure success?

Rankings and traffic are inputs, not outcomes. The real measures are the ones tied to your business — leads, signups, sales, revenue — and every reporting cycle is oriented around those. One of the first questions I ask a new client is some version of “what does success look like to you?” The answer shapes how we scope the work and what we report against.

How long until I see results?

An SEO’s favorite answer: it depends. But the drivers are actually clear: where you’re starting from, how competitive your space is, and how aggressive we’re being. I always prioritize quick wins in the first few months — the easy-to-fix technical and on-page issues that tend to move rankings and traffic within weeks, not months. Real compounding momentum usually shows up between months 6 and 12. After the first year, the earliest work keeps paying off, and the focus shifts from laying the foundation to capturing new opportunities as they emerge.

How much does this cost?

Retainers generally land between $3,000 and $6,000 per month, and project engagements between $5,000 and $12,000. The specific number comes down to three things: how big your website is, how competitive your space is, and how aggressively you want to move. We’ll figure out the right scope during our initial call.

Client work