An SEO consultant for B2B and service businesses

What an SEO consultant actually does

An SEO consultant works out why your site isn’t showing up on Google for the searches that matter, then fixes it. That means the technical setup, the pages themselves, and the signals that tell Google you’re a real business worth ranking.

Most SEO consulting services cover the same textbook list, and mine do too:

• Technical SEO: crawling, indexing, speed, mobile, broken redirects
• Keyword research: what your buyers type, and how often
• On-page SEO: titles, headings, copy and internal links on each page
• Content: new pages for searches you should own but don’t
• Local SEO: Google Business Profile, map pack, reviews
• Reporting: what moved, and why

Every SEO consultant will show you a list like that. The difference is what they point it at. I point it at more of the right people booking calls with you. Rankings and traffic only count once they turn into leads.

In practice, I run the project myself and stay your direct contact the whole way through. You won’t get handed to an account manager after the sales call. (I don’t have one. I checked.)

SEO consultant vs. agency vs. hiring in-house

Honestly, all three can work. It depends on how much SEO you need and who you want on the other end of the phone.

I think you should be able to talk to the person doing the work. If the person building your SEO plan has never been on a call with you, that’s information.

Where a job needs more hands, I bring in specialist writers or developers. I still run it, and you still talk to me.

How I work, from first call to first leads

1. A 30-minute call. I look at your site, your Google Business Profile and what you rank for today. You get my honest read on the spot.
2. A clear recommendation and a price. What I’d do, in what order, and what it costs. Before any work starts.
3. Foundations first. Technical problems, speed and site structure. Content on a broken site is a nice painting in a house with no floor.
4. Pages for buyer searches. Service and location pages aimed at searches with buying intent, written to turn a visitor into a booked call.
5. Local and AI search. Your Google Business Profile, plus clear answers that AI tools can quote.
6. Measure and improve. Monthly reporting on calls and inquiries, then we double down on what’s working.

There’s an unwritten rule that a monthly SEO report should say what happened that month. I didn’t write the rule. I just follow it. If a report is forty charts of “impressions” and no mention of inquiries, someone is changing the subject.

Ranking for searches that bring buyers, not browsers

Not every search is worth winning. Fifty searches a month from people ready to hire beats 5,000 from people doing homework.

So I start keyword research with your sales calls. What do your best clients say when they describe the problem? What would they type at 10 p.m. when it finally annoys them enough? Those phrases become the pages.

Then each page gets one job and one obvious next step. A page that ranks but doesn’t tell anyone how to talk to you is a billboard with no phone number.

Local SEO: your Google Business Profile is half the game

If you serve customers in a specific area, the map pack is often the faster half of SEO. People searching “commercial cleaning near me” look at three map results long before they scroll to websites.

Google says local ranking comes down to relevance, distance and prominence (Google’s own guide). You can’t move your office. You can fix the other two:

• The right primary and secondary categories
• Services, service areas and hours filled in completely
• The same name, address and phone everywhere
• A steady flow of real reviews, answered
• Location or service-area pages on your site that back it up

Getting found in AI search, too

More buyers now ask ChatGPT, Perplexity or Google’s AI Overviews before they ever click a link. Those tools still pull their answers from web pages, and they favor pages that answer clearly.

Google’s advice for its AI features is the same as for regular search: helpful pages, crawlable sites, accurate structured data (Google Search Central). So I build every page to be easy to quote:

• A direct answer near the top of each page
• Specific facts and real numbers, with their source
• Schema that matches what’s on the page
• AI crawlers allowed in robots.txt
• One consistent description of who you are, everywhere

Most of that is plain good SEO with better manners, and good manners are underrated.

How long SEO takes, honestly

Early movement within a few months. Stronger results after six. Local search can move faster, because the competition is smaller and the Google Business Profile updates quickly.

SEO compounds: each fixed page and each new one builds on the last, which is great in year two and slow in month one. Anyone promising page one in 30 days is either fibbing or targeting a keyword nobody searches.

If you need leads this month, SEO is the wrong tool. Outbound lead generation is faster to start, and the two work well together.

What an SEO consultant costs

SEO consultants usually charge in one of three ways: a monthly retainer, a fixed-price project, or an hourly rate for advice. I offer two of those:

• Monthly retainer: ongoing SEO, 3-month minimum, then month to month
• One-off SEO audit: a prioritized list of what’s holding your site back, fixed fee

What it costs depends on how much needs fixing and how competitive your searches are. I’ll tell you the number on the call, before anything starts. It won’t be on page 37 of a 38-page proposal. (I’ve read those. Somewhere around page 12 you start to miss your family.)

When you shouldn’t hire me for SEO

I’d rather tell you now than three months into a retainer:

• You need leads in the next few weeks. Start with outbound.
• Your offer isn’t proven yet. Ranking can’t fix an offer nobody buys.
• Your site can’t convert the visitors it already gets. Fix the site first, with web design, or SEO just sends more people to a closed door.

If none of those sound like you, good. You’ve got a real business and buyers already searching for it, which is more than most.