Independent diagnosis before delivery
SEO consulting for decisions your team can defend
Use SEO consulting when you need an independent diagnosis, a clear priority sequence or senior oversight of an internal team or supplier. Chris and Claudia examine the technical evidence, search demand, customer journey and commercial result before recommending more activity.
Examine
Establish what the data proves and where it stops.
Decide
Set the priority, owner and decision rule.
Govern
Support delivery without hiding the rationale.
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.
Claudia adds senior SEO leadership across technical and content work, monitoring, supplier governance and internal teams. I connect that search evidence to ecommerce, product, technology, operations and the P&L. You receive both views from the founders doing the work.
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.
AI search changes the surface, not the need for evidence
Search now includes result pages, AI summaries and answer engines that extract and combine material from the web. That increases the value of clear structure, accessible pages, sound entities, relevant internal links and claims that can be checked.
AEO, GEO and LLM optimisation labels do not create a separate commercial discipline. They can describe a change in how information is retrieved and cited. They do not replace technical access, useful content, real expertise, authority or a product that deserves demand.
We examine conventional rankings and AI citations as visibility signals. Neither proves incremental revenue. The consulting work connects those signals to customer behaviour and commercial evidence without claiming that schema, an `llms.txt` file or a preferred phrase can guarantee inclusion.
The principle remains simple: make the page useful to a person and legible to the systems that retrieve it.
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. If you need sustained implementation rather than an independent advisory engagement, review the SEO agency delivery model.
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 studiesA decision, not a sales call
Tell us what remains unclear
Share the decision, the evidence you trust and the point at which views diverge. Chris and Claudia will read the context. If you need delivery capacity rather than consulting, we will direct you to the SEO agency route.
You can also book a founder conversation or review the Marketing MRI when the problem crosses channels and ownership.
31 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.