What an SEO consultant does, in practice
Most businesses do not lack SEO activity. They lack confidence that the activity is the right activity. Monthly reports arrive, blog posts go live and links are built, yet enquiries stay flat and nobody can say clearly why. A consultant's job is to cut through that: diagnose what is actually holding the site back, decide what to do first, and say plainly what to stop.
The questions Australian owners and marketing managers bring to us are usually specific:
- Our traffic dropped after a Google update. What changed, and is it fixable?
- We are rebuilding the website. How do we avoid losing the rankings we have?
- Our agency wants a 12-month renewal. Is the work worth it?
- We want to sell into New Zealand or the US. How should the site be structured?
- Competitors appear in AI answers and we do not. What can we realistically do?
A good consultant answers those questions with evidence, explains the reasoning so your team can apply it, and puts the answer in writing where it matters.
Consultant, freelancer or agency: which do you need?
The labels overlap, and plenty of providers use all three. What matters is the role you need filled.
| SEO consultant | Freelance SEO specialist | SEO agency | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Main role | Strategy, priorities, review and decisions | Hands-on execution of defined tasks | Planning and execution across disciplines |
| Who does the work | Mostly your team, developer or agency | The freelancer | The agency team |
| Best when | You have capacity but need direction or an independent view | You know what needs doing and need extra hands | You want one party to own the whole program |
| Watch out for | Advice that never gets implemented | Narrow focus, single point of failure | Junior staff on your account, long lock-in terms |
Moments when senior advice saves the most
SEO advice pays for itself fastest around decisions that are expensive to reverse:
- A website rebuild or platform change. Moving to a new CMS, to Shopify or to a new domain is where established sites most often lose rankings. Redirect maps, URL decisions and pre-launch checks prevent most of the damage. Our website redesign page explains the risks in more detail.
- A sudden drop in traffic. Separating a tracking fault, a technical error, a Google update and normal seasonality takes experience. The wrong diagnosis leads to months of wasted effort.
- Choosing or reviewing an agency. Before signing a long contract, an independent view of the proposal and the agency's past output is cheap insurance.
- Merging brands or websites. After an acquisition or rebrand, consolidating sites badly can wipe out years of authority.
- New markets. Structure decisions for other countries are hard to undo later.
How our SEO consulting works
All advice comes directly from the founder. We do not pass your account to a junior team, which is also why we work with a limited number of businesses at a time.
A focused review
One defined question, a thorough investigation and a clear written answer with prioritised recommendations. Often the evidence base is an SEO audit against our 10-point website score, from technical foundation and indexing through to AI visibility.
Ongoing advisory
Regular sessions with your marketing lead or team: reviewing plans and drafts, setting priorities for the next period and answering questions as they come up. This suits in-house teams that want a senior sparring partner rather than another supplier.
Migration and launch oversight
Working alongside your developer or web agency on URL structure, redirects, pre-launch checks and monitoring in the weeks after go-live.
Agency review
We assess your agency's strategy, reports and output and help you ask better questions. We do not use a review to pitch for the work; if that ever became relevant, we would say so openly.
We are based in the Netherlands, so sessions sit in your early morning or late afternoon, and written work is often waiting when you start the day. Each engagement has a fixed scope; how we work explains the process.
AI SEO consulting
A growing share of research now starts with AI answers: Google's AI Overviews, ChatGPT, Perplexity, Copilot and Gemini. Businesses ask us how to be cited in those answers, and the honest reply has two parts.
First, most of what earns citations is good SEO done properly: pages that answer questions directly, clear facts about who you are and what you offer, consistent information across the web, and genuine authority in your field. Second, the field moves quickly and nobody controls these systems, so anyone promising a set position in AI answers is guessing. Our consulting focuses on what you can control: content structure, entity clarity, technical access for crawlers and how your brand is described elsewhere. The full approach is on our AI SEO page.
Consulting for dentists, law firms and other regulated professions
Regulated professions need SEO advice that understands their constraints. A tactic that works for a retailer can create a compliance problem for a dental practice or a law firm.
- Dental practices. Advertising by registered health practitioners is regulated through AHPRA and the Dental Board of Australia, including restrictions on testimonials and on claims that create unreasonable expectations. That affects reviews on your site, before-and-after photos and how treatments are described. See our dental SEO page.
- Law firms. Lawyers' advertising is governed by state and territory professional rules, and some states restrict how personal injury services may be advertised. Practice-area content must also be accurate for the right jurisdiction. See our law firm SEO page.
- Medical, allied health and financial services. Similar care applies wherever claims, testimonials or advice are regulated.
We do not give legal or regulatory advice. We build the SEO plan around your obligations and leave the final sign-off to your compliance lead.
How to judge an SEO expert in Australia
There is no licence or regulated qualification for SEO in Australia, and Google does not certify SEO consultants. Its certifications cover products such as Google Ads and Google Analytics, not organic search. Course certificates show someone has studied; they say little about judgement.
Better signals are ones you can test yourself:
- Clear reasoning in a first conversation. Can they explain why, not just what?
- Honesty about uncertainty. No one can honestly promise you position one, and a good consultant says so.
- Transparency about methods. No "secret" techniques, no cheap link packages, no refusal to explain what was done.
- Your ownership. Your Google Search Console, Analytics and Business Profile stay in your name, with access granted to them, not the other way round.
- Their own work. Whether their own websites practise what they recommend. We build and run our own brands and test methods there before advising clients.
What you need on your side, and what drives cost
Consulting works when someone can act on it. That might be an in-house marketer, a developer who can implement technical changes, a writer, or an agency that is open to direction. If nobody has the time, a hands-on SEO agency engagement is usually the better route, and we will tell you so.
Cost depends on the size and complexity of your site, the number of markets, how much analysis a question needs and whether you want a one-off review or ongoing advice. We do not publish prices. The first step is a paid strategy session: a 50-minute conversation with the founder about your ambition, your market and whether we fit, at A$425 excl. GST. It is an introductory conversation, not an audit or a written plan. If we take the work on, a proposal with a fixed scope and fixed price follows.