How My SEO Consulting Works

I offer two main variations of SEO consulting:

• One-off strategy sessions
• Monthly consulting campaigns

I’ll walk through how each works.

One-Off Strategy Sessions

These make sense for business owners who:

• May not have the budget for ongoing SEO right now.
• Are willing to work on their site themselves, or they have a team that can.
• Are looking for a sit down for an action plan that is highly weighted toward max bang for the buck activities.

The idea is to develop a strong plan and execute upon it at your pace. We can schedule a follow up meeting to continue developing that strategy, with the goal of working into a monthly campaign where you can really hit that next level.

My goal is to walk through your website with you in real time, making suggestions, looking for missed opportunities, and essentially making notes of what I would do if it were my site.

I’ll come prepared with some market research. With that data weighed alongside your specific goals, we’ll think through a content plan for the next month or two. You’ll leave the meeting with a clear set of priorities.

One of the toughest parts about SEO is knowing where to start. This session aims to solve that for you.

Monthly Consulting Campaigns

This program is a great mid-point between one-off sessions and my hands-on SEO campaigns. You’ll have the benefit of me quarterbacking your SEO, but with greater involvement.

I’ll guide you on the highest value things to focus on at each stage so you aren’t watering down your efforts. We’ll continuously refine your website’s content so that we’re making the most of the traffic we earn.

Monthly meetings:

• We’ll review data about where your site ranks, traffic, and leads you’ve received so we can track progress. My goal is to make the information as clear and transparent as possible. I’ll explain what the data suggests to me, and how that informs the strategy.
• I’ll come prepared with a plan for the following 30 days, breaking down each major activity and piece of content. That will include how each contributes to the larger plan, and major things each new piece of content should have.
• I’ll offer suggestions for refinements to pages, schema data, internal linking, and the navigation.

Throughout each month:

Once you and your team draft the new material (such as blog posts) I’ll review it and offer specific advise on how to optimize it further. This will include angles where we could make it more thoughtful and best showcase your expertise.

Essentially, I’ll advise on how we can take what you wrote and make it harder-hitting.

If I think of additional ideas, or if something I notice in the data is a high-five moment, I’ll send it your way week to week. I encourage you to do the same!

SEO Timelines

SEO is a long game like social media marketing is. I generally encourage anyone considering getting serious about SEO to move forward only if they’re willing and able to invest for at least 6 months.

It’s not to say you won’t have wins before that, and wherever possible my early strategies are aimed at quick wins and lower hanging fruit.

However, SEO is all about cumulative momentum.

When the work is consistent and systematic, often by 90 days we’re seeing big movement on a variety of useful queries related to your target services. Things that had no rankings initially are often now on the map, sometimes also ranking on the first page.

A handful of target queries (or keywords, if you like) may be in the top 5, or close.

You may be noticing some additional leads at this point, but even if not, the marker is that we see enough positive movement across the board to feel confident about the next 3 months.

(At 90 days we’ll have a good sense of the trajectory, as well as how well we work together.)

By 5-7 months we really start to feel the work hit its stride. You likely rank well for a variety of queries now, and you’ve built enough traction that your site is also starting to rank for all sorts of contextually related things. My goal is that the SEO campaign is clearly paying for itself at this point.

Sometimes I work with folks for 6-12 months to accomplish some specific goals and we part ways with a handshake. Often we shift to longer term focus: gaining more topical authority, ranking for more services, and reaching bigger geographic areas. In those cases, I hope you see me as part of your team in a big picture sense.

I feel very fortunate that those kind of folks have worked with me for 10 years, in some cases.