You do not need another agency.You need the person who does the work.
An independent SEO consultant for businesses that have outgrown guesswork and have no appetite for a retainer that explains itself once a month.
Thirty years across search, ecommerce, analytics and AI. You work directly with that experience, supported by specialists when the work needs them.
Whatever you are calling the role, this is probably it
People arrive here searching for different words. They tend to want the same thing.
Freelance, fractional, independent, contractor, interim. Underneath all of them is one requirement: senior expertise, without making a hire, and without buying an agency. That is what this is, and we use the word independent because it is the most accurate of the six.
What an agency sells you
A retainer, a team you rarely meet, a monthly report, and a scope that grows because growing it is how the model works.
Someone senior wins the account. Someone junior runs it.
What an independent consultant sells you
Judgment, applied by the person you spoke to. A bounded piece of work with a question behind it. A specialist network when the work needs one, and nobody billed to your account who is not doing something.
The person who wins the work does the work.
What measured SEO work looks like here
Three things worth showing, and one of them did not go our way.
A catalog that could not be seen
A distributor came to us with 754 of more than six thousand pages indexed by Google. Twelve and a half percent. The rest of the catalog was not ranking badly, it was ineligible to compete at all. Traffic was falling rather than flat, with impressions down 42.9% against the same months a year earlier.
Share of the site Google had indexed
Today 98.84% of that site’s URLs are indexed, and the property runs over eight million search impressions a year.
What those two percentages are out of, because they are not the same denominator. The 2022 figure is indexed pages against total pages on the site, taken from the audit. The 98.84% is indexed URLs against the URLs the site submits in its sitemap, read from Search Console. Both measure whether the catalog is eligible to compete, which is the point, and we are showing you the difference rather than hiding it inside one number.
We are also deliberately not turning the impressions into a multiple. The 2022 baseline we hold is a top-thousand-query extract rather than a whole-property total, so dividing the two would flatter us. The direction is not in question. The exact factor is not ours to claim.
Title and meta work, measured against a control
We rewrite titles and meta descriptions in batches of twenty pages, and we compare against pages we deliberately did not touch rather than against a site average.
Click-through rate change, nine weeks after applying
Then we remove the batch’s biggest page and re-run the numbers. A headline that does not survive that test is not a result. That check has killed one of our own headline numbers.
And the batch that went sideways
One batch, twenty pages
Twelve pages improved and eight declined. You get both numbers, in the report, without asking. A program that only ever reports wins is not measuring anything.
SEO and AI search are one problem, measured two ways
The structural work that makes a page rank is largely the same work that makes it quotable by an answer engine. The measurement is not the same at all, and that is where most programs come apart.
Search work is judged on impressions, position and click-through rate. AI visibility is judged on citations and on whether the brand is named in the answer. We have seen a client cited as a source while its brand went unmentioned in the same answer, which is a schema and entity problem wearing a content problem’s clothes.
We run both, and we report them separately so that neither gets judged by the wrong instrument. See answer engine optimization and generative engine optimization for the AI half.
What you will see, and when
Directional. Enough signal to steer, not enough to conclude, and we label it that way in the report.
Decision. Four clean weeks removes day-of-week bias. This is when we tell you to continue, change or stop.
AI visibility. Those effects are slower, and a 28-day read alone would mislead you.
The work inside a search program
Technical SEO is usually where we start, because nothing downstream is provable while crawling, indexing and rendering are broken.
On-page SEO takes demand you have already earned and stops leaking it. Titles and metadata rewritten in batches of twenty, against a control group, with a falsifier recorded before the work starts.
Entity and schema work decides whether a machine can tell who you are and what you sell. This is the quiet half of AI visibility, and it is usually where the gap sits.
Local SEO is a separate ranking system with its own rules, and good national rankings tell you nothing about whether anyone nearby can find you.
Auditing, architecture and migration. Replatforming is where hard-won organic traffic goes to die, and it is avoidable with a plan made before anyone builds anything.
eCommerce SEO, Most engagements start with an SEO audit, and a few need someone to hold the function outright, which is fractional digital leadership. It also includes the vertical view for manufacturers and distributors and platform-specific work on BigCommerce, WooCommerce and Commercebuild, covers category and product pages at scale, where the bottleneck is almost never writing. It is getting specifications out of manufacturers and into a structure that search engines and answer engines can both read.
Who this is not for
It is faster to say so here than on a first call.
- You want a supplier. We work alongside your team and expect access to it. If the plan is to hand it over and hear from us quarterly, we are the wrong choice.
- Nothing can be measured. No baseline we can freeze before starting, no tracked conversion, no instrument for AI visibility. We do not sell unmeasurable work.
- The scope is too small to justify the method. Fewer than about sixty pages worth optimizing and the program exhausts itself in two batches.
- You are comparing day rates. We price the engagement, not the hour. If price is the only difference between two options, the work has been treated as a commodity.
Questions we get asked
Q. Are you a freelancer or an agency?
We are a small agency, and the word we prefer is boutique, because it describes the difference that matters to you. You work with the person who does the work, supported by a network of specialists when the work needs them. There is no account manager between you and us, and nobody junior learning on your account. If you are searching for a freelance, independent or fractional SEO consultant because you want direct access to someone senior rather than a team you never meet, this is the same thing under a different name.
Q. What does a fractional SEO engagement look like?
It is senior SEO capacity without making a hire. We work inside your business on a defined rhythm, take responsibility for the search program, and your team runs alongside us rather than waiting on us. Some clients use it to cover a gap, others because the role does not justify a full-time salary. The difference from an agency retainer is that you are buying a person’s judgment and time, not a bundle of deliverables.
Q. How is this different from hiring an SEO agency?
An agency sells you a team. We sell you the work being done and understood. We still do the work, and your people watch it happen and question it, which means the capability stays with you. We also turn work down: if the scope is too small for the method or nothing can be measured, we will say so on the first call.
Q. What does a first engagement usually look like?
One bounded piece of work with a clear question behind it, scoped in weeks rather than months. It ends with something you could act on without us, and sometimes that is exactly what happens. Relationships here start as consultancy, become consulting when you want help executing, and become advisory when the earlier work has earned it.
Q. Do you do SEO and AI search separately?
No, and separating them is the most common mistake we see right now. The same structural work that makes a page rank is what makes it quotable by an answer engine, but the two are measured with completely different instruments and on different timelines. We run them as one program with two measurement systems. Judging AI visibility work by search clicks is how people conclude it failed when it did not.
Q. How long before we see anything?
We report at 14 days as directional and 28 days as a decision point, and we label them that way in the report. AI visibility work is slower, so we set a 60-day read alongside the 28-day one. Anything under the required window is labelled a trend, not a conclusion.
Q. What happens if it does not work?
We tell you. We record before starting what would prove the work failed, and regressions go into the report with everything else. On our last on-page program, 12 of 20 pages improved and 8 declined, and you are reading that here rather than finding it out later.
Q. Do we need to replace our current agency?
Usually not. We frequently work alongside an agency rather than instead of one, and the work is often the part they do not do: architecture, measurement, entity and schema work, AI visibility, or deciding what should be built before anyone builds it.
Q. How do you charge?
We price the engagement, not the hours. Most relationships start with one bounded piece of work at a fixed fee and continue monthly only if the first piece earned it. We will not quote before understanding what the problem is costing you now, because a price without that context is just a number.
Start with a conversation
Thirty minutes to work out where you actually stand, what is worth doing first, and whether it can be measured. No obligation and no pitch. If we are the wrong fit we will say so on that call, which is cheaper for both of us than finding out in month three.