SEO consulting from a practitioner, not an agency
SEO consulting for companies that have tried the normal route
Working commercially in digital since 1995. I began practising SEO before Google. I learned the craft before it became a settled job title. That work continues within a wider commercial digital career.
I have not sold algorithm-penalty recovery as a service. My operating principle is to build for users and make the site technically legible to search engines. That is more useful to a business than a claim that one practitioner is immune to algorithm changes.
If you are looking for SEO services from someone who has never been involved in the problem, that is what I bring.
The work history is range, not status
Mercedes-Benz, Barclays, Commerzbank, Booking.com, B&Q, TomTom, Native Instruments, the Theo Paphitis Retail Group, Game, Eaton Electric, and an advisory role with the UK Government. Each came with a different commercial context, a different technical infrastructure, a different set of internal political constraints, and a different definition of what success actually looked like once you got past the brief.
What that list represents is range across different commercial situations. 31 years across digital since 1995. No two businesses required the same approach.
Alongside the client work I have 5 company exits. Building and selling companies has shaped how I examine product, customers, operations and commercial risk. It does not guarantee an outcome for another business.
What separates this from conventional SEO services
I think in systems. Not as a posture or a brand claim. As a genuine description of how my mind works when I look at a business. When I walk into a commercial situation, my instinct is not to ask what is wrong with the SEO in isolation. It is to ask why the revenue is behaving this way, which channel is lying about its contribution, which metric is being optimised at the expense of a different metric nobody is watching, and what the whole picture looks like if you strip out the vanity reporting.
I can read a codebase
I can code. That changes the nature of the work in ways that practitioners at my level usually cannot offer. I can trace a technical SEO issue to its actual root rather than its surface symptom and sit with an engineering team and communicate in terms they take seriously rather than terms they politely tolerate. It materially shortens the distance between strategic recommendation and technical implementation.
I cannot be given a technical explanation that does not hold up
Working commercially in digital since 1995. I can inspect a technical explanation against the implementation. That matters when the technical constraint stands between a recommendation and a result.
SEO sits inside a commercial system
Channels and teams do not operate in isolation. SEO makes sense when you can see the commercial system it sits inside. That is why I work as a Chief Systems Operator rather than selling a channel-only service.
The penalty recovery question
Penalty recovery is a distinct service. I would rather identify the commercial and technical constraints before a business becomes dependent on repeated recovery projects.
What the SEO consulting work looks like in practice
Work for a global home improvement business in ecommerce illustrates the operating level. Before the first meeting with its digital leadership, I had already processed crawl and search-visibility data across two major European markets. One market had 1,006 internal 4xx errors compared with one in the other. It also had no AI Overview citations compared with 67 in the stronger market, while search visibility had only partially recovered from its earlier peak.
That is a specific, evidenced and commercially serious problem. Board-visible technical SEO issues on a global ecommerce business’s primary revenue-generating domains are not academic. I did not arrive with a slide deck and a generic framework. I arrived with a diagnosis rooted in the actual data for its sites.
That is the operating level. Data first. Evidence first. Commercial framing from the outset. Not a keyword research document. Not a content calendar. Not a monthly reporting cadence designed to justify a retainer. A precise read on what is happening in the site, why it is costing your business money, and what the sequence of fixes should be.
SEO in 2025 and beyond: structure, not tricks
Search is changing. Google is still dominant, but AI platforms now cite web content directly. If your content is not structured for extraction, you become invisible to ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, and the next wave of AI search.
Semrush studied 300,000 URLs cited by AI platforms. The pattern is clear: content with strong section structure is 22.91% more likely to be cited. Content with clear summaries is 32.83% more likely. Content with stronger E-E-A-T signals shows 30.64% correlation with AI citations.
This is not a new game. It is the same game. Build content that is genuinely useful, structure it so that both humans and machines can extract value from it, and back it with real expertise rather than manufactured authority signals. The companies that have been doing this well for the last decade are the ones that AI platforms are citing now. The ones that were gaming keyword density and link networks are not.
The principle I have followed since 2003 holds: build for users, not for tolerance. That principle now applies to a broader set of platforms than Google alone.
SEO consulting and website audits
SEO consulting work frequently begins with a technical audit. We provide website audit services across eight dimensions: technical, SEO, performance, conversion, ecommerce, accessibility, security, and content. Each audit is practitioner-led, not AI-generated.
But the audit is one layer. The commercial examination that sits around it is what makes the difference. An SEO audit will tell you that your crawl budget is being wasted on faceted navigation. It will not tell you that the reason nobody fixed it is because the development team reports to a CTO who does not consider SEO a priority, and the marketing team that cares about it has no authority to get engineering time.
The Marketing MRI is the engagement that examines both the technical surface and the organisational system underneath it. SEO is one domain within that examination. The result is a diagnosis you can actually act on.
Who this SEO consulting is for
If you are comparing providers, use our five questions for choosing an SEO consultant before assessing a proposal.
Ecommerce companies spending serious money on SEO and not getting the commercial return. You have an agency. They send reports. Traffic moves. Revenue does not follow in the way it should.
SaaS companies where organic is supposed to be a primary acquisition channel and the numbers are not supporting the thesis. The content programme is running. The rankings are not compounding.
PE portfolio companies where the marketing function needs to demonstrate commercial contribution before a transaction. The SEO estate is an asset. It needs to be valued and optimised as one.
Companies that have changed SEO agencies more than once in three years and the performance curve looks the same. The problem is not the agency. It is the system the agency sits inside.
Companies where the CTO and CMO disagree about the importance of technical SEO and someone needs to bridge that gap with evidence both sides will accept.
What examination has produced
2,300%
Keleya
organic growth. CAC from €32 to €8.56.
Top 3
Native Instruments
for 90% of commercial keywords.
3,500%
Veranda Resort
organic growth. $175M exit.
Past results do not guarantee future outcomes. Every engagement is individual.
See the case studies31 years across digital since 1995. Examine the constraint before changing tactics.
If your SEO investment is generating activity but not generating commercial confidence, the issue is probably not tactical. Start with an examination of the system. If the problem turns out to be purely technical, a specialist will cost less and we will tell you so.