An SEO consultation is advisory work — I help you decide what to do, in what order, and why, without selling you an execution retainer. Most teams do not need another agency. They need an honest second opinion, a prioritized roadmap, and someone who will tell them when a tactic is not worth the spend. Consultations run from a single 90-minute call to a fractional advisory arrangement, and are structured to pay back in saved spend and avoided mistakes.
What an SEO consultation actually is
An SEO consultation is a structured advisory engagement focused on diagnosis, strategy, and prioritization — not on doing the work for you. You already have a website, a team, and probably an agency or in-house person running SEO tasks. What you need is someone to look at the whole picture and tell you what is working, what is wasted, and where to put the next euro.
Consultation is deliberately narrow in scope. I will not write your content, build your backlinks, or push code to your theme. That is not because those things do not matter — it is because they are better done by people who already know your product, your brand voice, and your stack. My job is to help you figure out which of those things to prioritize, and how to hold your team accountable to the right metrics.
Who SEO consultation is actually for
If you are reading this page, you probably fall into one of four groups. The consultation model works well for all of them, in slightly different ways.
Founders wearing the marketing hat
You are doing SEO on top of running the company. You need someone to tell you what to focus on this quarter and what to ignore until next year.
Marketing leads with an agency already
You want an independent second opinion — is the agency actually moving the needle, or are the reports prettier than the results?
In-house SEO teams
You know the fundamentals but need a sounding board on strategy, priorities, or the shift from classical SEO to GEO and AI visibility.
Growth teams pre-roadmap
You are about to invest six or seven figures in organic — content, PR, dev work — and want a sober strategy review before you commit budget.
What consultation is not
Clear framing prevents misaligned expectations. A consultation is different from a full-service SEO engagement in three important ways:
| Dimension | Full-service SEO | SEO consultation |
|---|---|---|
| Primary output | Executed work (content, links, technical fixes) | Decisions, strategy, roadmap, review |
| Who does the work | The agency or freelancer | Your team, with guidance from me |
| Typical engagement | Monthly retainer, multi-month contract | One-off call, fixed-scope audit, or fractional advisory |
| Where value comes from | Volume of work shipped | Avoided mistakes and sharper priorities |
| Measurement | Traffic, rankings, conversions over time | Quality of decisions, clarity of next steps |
What you actually get
Every consultation I run is structured so you walk away with something you can act on immediately. No 200-page PDFs that nobody reads. The specifics depend on the format (see below), but the common deliverables are:
Standard consultation deliverables
- Plain-English diagnosis of where your organic performance actually stands today
- Prioritized list of issues and opportunities, ranked by impact and effort
- Strategic recommendation: where to focus the next 90 days, what to defer, what to stop doing
- Agency or tooling review — am I paying for the right things at the right rates?
- GEO / AI search readiness check — is the brand visible in ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Gemini?
- Concrete next steps for your dev, content, and marketing owners
- Follow-up window (typically 2 weeks) for questions as your team implements
Engagement formats
Most clients fit one of three formats. The right one depends on how much clarity you already have and how much you need.
Single consultation call
90 minutes, focused on one or two specific questions. Best for founders or leads who know the question they want answered and just need a second brain on it.
Strategy sprint
2–3 weeks of focused work: audit, interviews with your team, prioritized 90-day roadmap, and a wrap-up call with the decision-makers. Best before a major investment.
Fractional advisory
A monthly retainer for ongoing strategic input without execution. Think of it as a fractional Head of SEO — quarterly reviews, priority calls, and an always-on sounding board.
How a consultation actually runs
The process is deliberately light on ceremony. The point is to move fast and give you something useful. A typical engagement looks like this:
- Intake (async) — you share access to Search Console, analytics, and any existing reports. I ask specific questions rather than a generic questionnaire.
- Review period — I dig into your current state for a few hours to a few days, depending on format. This happens before we talk, so the call is about conclusions, not data-gathering.
- Working session — we meet live (Zoom, Meet, Teams) to walk through findings, trade-offs, and priorities. Your team asks questions in real time.
- Written summary — you get a short, ranked document with the decisions, the reasoning, and the recommended next steps. Short enough that people actually read it.
- Follow-up window — async questions for the next two weeks as you start acting on the recommendations.
What a good consultation outcome looks like
The measure of a successful consultation is not the number of pages in the report. It is what your team does in the following quarter. Typical outcomes I aim for:
Common scenarios I am asked to weigh in on
Not exhaustive, but representative of the questions that show up most often:
- “We are about to hire an agency — can you review their pitch and proposed scope before we sign?”
- “Our rankings have been sliding for three months and the agency blames the algorithm. Are they right?”
- “Is our content strategy still relevant with AI Overviews and ChatGPT search eating our top-of-funnel?”
- “We are migrating platforms (Shopify → headless, WordPress → Webflow). What are the SEO risks and how do we de-risk them?”
- “We have 1,200 blog posts, half of which get no traffic. Should we consolidate, prune, or refresh?”
- “Our competitor launched a comparison tool and started outranking us. Do we copy, counter, or ignore?”
- “Leadership wants us to chase backlinks. I think it is a waste. Who is right for our stage?”
The pattern is consistent: someone inside the company already has a suspicion about the right answer but needs an outside voice to confirm or challenge it before they commit resources.
What I need from you
To give you real value in a consultation, I need honest inputs — not cleaned-up numbers. That typically means:
Access & inputs
- Read access to Google Search Console and Google Analytics (or your preferred analytics)
- Access to any SEO tool you already use (Ahrefs, Semrush, Screaming Frog)
- The last 1–2 quarterly reports from your agency or in-house team, if applicable
- A short list of the top three questions you want answered
- 30–60 minutes of your team’s time for honest context before the live session
Pricing and how to think about it
I price consultations on impact, not hours. A one-off call is a flat fee. A strategy sprint is a fixed scope. A fractional advisory is a monthly retainer sized to your company stage and scope of questions.
The right way to think about the cost: a consultation typically pays for itself in one of three ways — an agency retainer you renegotiate or cancel, a campaign you choose not to run, or a technical decision (migration, platform choice, redesign) that you do not get wrong. Any one of those usually justifies the engagement several times over.
For specifics on your situation, book a short intro call below — I will quote you a format and price the same day.
Want a clear, outside opinion on where your SEO actually stands?
Book a free 30-minute intro call. We will talk through your situation, I will tell you honestly whether a consultation is the right next step, and if it is not, I will point you to what is.
Book a free 30-min consultationHow consultation fits with the other things I do
Consultation is the entry point for most clients. From there, the path typically branches:
- Some teams take the roadmap and execute it themselves or with their existing agency — we are done.
- Some want me to stay involved in an advisory role, reviewing work monthly or quarterly.
- A smaller number decide their internal capacity is the bottleneck and ask for a full SEO audit or GEO engagement — work I do hands-on when it is the right fit.
The important part is that the consultation itself is not a sales funnel. You leave with a useful document either way, and you decide whether any further work makes sense for your situation.
FAQ
How is consultation different from a full SEO audit?
An audit is a diagnostic — what is the current state of the site? A consultation includes diagnosis but extends into strategy, prioritization, and decision support. For most teams a consultation is the better starting point because it is framed around decisions, not just findings. If you already have findings and just need someone to execute, that is a different engagement entirely.
Do you do execution work after a consultation?
Sometimes, but only when it is a clean fit — the scope is clear, the project is time-bound, and it genuinely needs me rather than a generalist. I deliberately do not structure consultations as a pitch for execution work. Most clients leave with a roadmap their existing team or agency executes.
How much does a consultation cost?
A single focused call runs €300–€600. A strategy sprint sits in the €1,500–€4,000 range depending on depth. Fractional advisory is a monthly retainer typically between €800 and €2,500 depending on scope and company stage. The specific number is quoted after a short intro call when I understand your situation.
Can you work with our existing agency rather than replacing them?
Yes — this is probably the most common arrangement. Many clients keep their agency for execution and bring me in for independent strategic oversight. A good agency welcomes this; it sharpens their work and aligns the scope. An agency that resists outside review is telling you something.
How quickly can we start?
A one-off call can usually happen within a week. A strategy sprint needs 1–2 weeks of lead time so I can prepare properly. Fractional advisory starts on the first of the following month once scope is agreed.
Do you consult on GEO and AI search, or only classical SEO?
Both. In 2026 it is difficult to separate them cleanly — most organic questions now involve both classical search and AI visibility. If your question is purely about GEO (ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, AI Overviews), that is inside the consultation scope. See the GEO / AI Search Optimization page for more on that side specifically.
Related guides
The companion pieces in this SEO library:
- SEO Audit in 2026 — the full diagnostic walkthrough with a prioritized fix list, not a 200-page PDF.
- Technical SEO in 2026 — crawl, Core Web Vitals (INP), rendering, schema, sitemaps, hreflang.
- On-Page SEO in 2026 — titles, headings, intent match, internal linking, image SEO, schema for LLMs.
- Off-Page SEO in 2026 — backlinks, brand mentions, digital PR, AI citations on Reddit and YouTube.
- GEO / AI Search Optimization — the page-formatting layer that turns content into AI citations.
